Rousseau and Revolution

Introduction 9
interpretation of Rousseau. Just about any anti-revolutionary or conservative
thinker will tend to repeat Edmund Burke’s claim that the revolution
and the Terror was the legitimate and necessary child of Rousseau whereas
the positive readings of the revolution and/or Rousseau have either
affi rmed or denied the authorship, making the latter, one could argue, the
more interesting interpretation because it has something to investigate and
debate, not just something to proof and criticize.
It could be argued that only a paradoxical political philosophy can have
such a central and thorough-going role in a political revolution as had
Rousseau’s philosophy in the French revolution, given that, as Swenson puts
it, ‘a radical transformation of ideas, the revolution needed to negate its own
origins even as it constructed its legitimacy on their basis’ (Swenson, 2000,
16). It should be added that a long tradition in the reception of Rousseau,
going from Ernst Cassirer to Robert Derathé and fi nally Blaise Bachofen,
rejects this paradoxality and emphasizes the coherence of Rousseau’s philosophy
(with Bachofen’s words (Bachofen, 2002, 19), Rousseau’s coherence
is a ‘systematism without system’ 1 ). On the other hand, this very connection
is a topic in the history of Western political thought, and that in a highly
polemical way. As Bourg points out in the beginning of his article, the struggle
about Rousseau’s infl uence has been a part of the cold war.
To put it in other words (in order to resume): Robert Derathé, in the
avertissement to Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and the political science of his times) mentions ‘this treatise
[The Social Contract] which hitherto has caused more polemics than
patient investigations’ (Derathé, 1988, 2). Now, what one might do is to
make a ‘patiente recherche’ about the ‘polémique’. This ‘polémique’,
however, is of double kind. On the one hand, there is the ‘polémique’ about
Rousseau’s ideas, that is, a polemic about whether Rousseau was right or
wrong, but in which the positions changed, according as Rousseau was considered
to be liberal, socialist or something else. Nygaard shows in his article
how this discussion was developed in Denmark in the nineteenth
century. On the other hand, there is the ‘polémique’ about Rousseau’s infl uence,
a polemic displayed between liberals, conservatives and socialists
mainly in the twentieth century.
Revolution and History
The word revolution in its political context used to refer to the revolving
cycle of regime types but in the decades surrounding the French Revolution –
and accelerating within the revolution – it came increasingly to mean not the