Rousseau and Revolution

10 Rousseau and Revolution
eternal and inevitable return of old but the creation ex nihilo of the new
(Koselleck, 2006, 240–51). Experience gave way to expectation as the guiding
principle of politics, revolution and history (and progress among others)
emerged as the concepts we recognize them to be today: concepts tied to
expectations and projections of the future. The period of Rousseau was one
of impending change. Robespierre stated: ‘The theory of revolutionary government
is as new as the revolution which brought it into being. It should not
be sought in the books of political writers, who did not foresee that revolution’
(Robespierre, 2007, 99). Still, it does seem fair to say that most seemed
to sense the old world, the old regime, crumble without being fully able to
determine the new.
One might, like Bachofen, claim that Rousseau mistrusted revolutions
(Bachofen, Chapter 1). However, one cannot say that he was indifferent to
revolutions. On the other hand, the topic of revolution plays a central role
in his philosophy, even though this philosophy was developed before the
age that is normally called the Age of Revolution, and in which modern
democracy developed through a series of democratic revolutions. This is
without doubt one of the main reasons why his philosophy became so infl uential
in the following two and half centuries.
When the past is losing its legitimatory potential and the future is invested
with longings and utopias, the question of political action, of creation,
destruction, revolution and of order take fi rst place. This is the theme in
Christiane Mossin’s article dealing with radical institutional creation and
constitutionalization within Rousseau’s thought (Mossin, Chapter 8). Mossin
shows how Rousseau revealed ‘the limitations of political intentionality by pointing
to the powerful as well as the impotent aspects of laws and institutions in
terms of their ability to direct and control social dynamics’. This makes it
possible for Mossin to conclude that Rousseau operates with a complex perspective
‘between order and disorder, consisting either in a legal order
undermined by confl icting customs or in a cultural order where laws have
crumbled.’ Every order has change written in its constitutional structure,
and every societal change has institutions and orders presupposed and working
within its movements. Questions of continuity and discontinuity press
themselves upon the agenda once the societal forces seem uncontainable
within the order that be. Will it be a gradual change maintaining the contours
of the existing order, or will it make a clear break and discard all standing
structures? The articles in this book take different approaches to
Rousseau’s view on this.
A revolution may seem like a hurricane or fl ood to the participants and
spectators: An unleashing of uncontrollable forces diffi cult, if not impossible