Rousseau and Revolution

Introduction 11
to predict. Antoine Hatzenberger draws out interesting parallels between
natural disasters and political revolutions and looks at various aspects of
Rousseau’s analysis of the idea of revolution (Hatzenberger, Chapter 9). He
states that Rousseau ‘could only guess at the revolutions to come, and
although he gave no guaranty whatsoever about the precise destiny of any
particular revolution – but who can? – at the very least he stated their inherent
necessity’ (ibid.). Hatzenberger demonstrates how Rousseau’s concept
of revolution is a mixed metaphor of both natural forces and human liberty
(not unlike, though that is not Hatzenberger’s point, Machiavelli’s conceptualization
of virtú and fortuna). Like the remarks on the conceptual history
of revolution above, Hatzenberger shows how the previous natural philosophical
connotations of ‘revolutions of the earth’ reverberate in Rousseau’s
political terminology.
There is no politics without language: ‘New nations could not declare
independence, legislators could not promulgate laws, courts could not sentence
criminals, leaders could not instruct partisans, citizens could not protest’.
But this is not all: ‘Neither could we criticize, plead, promise, argue,
exhort, demand, negotiate, bargain, compromise, counsel, brief, debrief,
advise, or consent’ (Farr, 1988, 15). Rousseau was immensely aware of the
oratorical element of politics and public life and, as Masano Yamashita
shows, tied the disappearance of the classical fi gure of the orator to the loss
of democratic practices and moral standards (Yamashita, Chapter 10). Bringing
the Essay on the Origin of Languages into the collection of core texts of
Rousseau’s politics, Yamashita is able to show how the question of the power
of the spoken word is a key concern of Rousseau and how he laments the
degeneration of the public agora into the meaningless chatter of the salon.
The period conscious of its refi ned speech and known thereafter as the
birthplace of the modern public sphere is to Rousseau a loss of democratic
speech. The birth of the public sphere was to Rousseau the death of the true
public speaker, and Yamashita shows how he came to this conclusion by
engaging with aesthetico-political theories of language and what promises
he saw for a renewed possibility of republicanism and public speech.
The republic or republicanism is also the theme of our fi nal contribution
by James Swenson, and as evident in both Hatzenberger and Yamashita, he
demonstrates how Rousseau uses conceptualizations now distinguished as
‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, a distinction already evident in the decades after
Rousseau as in Benjamin Constant’s barely camoufl aged critique of Rousseau
in his opposition between an ancient, republic and activist liberty and a modern,
commercial, individualist liberty (Swenson, Chapter 11). Swenson discusses
the revolutionary use of selected parts of Rousseau’s thinking and