Rousseau and Revolution

20 Rousseau and Revolution
longer having any Law except the will of the Master, nor the Master any
other rule except his passions, the notions of good and the principles of
justice vanish once again. Here everything is brought back to the sole
Law of the strongest, and consequently to a new state of Nature. [ . . . ]
Besides, [ . . . ] the Contract of Government is so completely dissolved by
Despotism, that the Despot is Master only as long as he is the strongest,
and as soon as he can be driven out, he cannot protest against violence.
The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a Sultan is as Lawful
an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and
goods of his Subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows
him. Everything thus occurs according to the Natural order; and
whatever the outcome of the short and frequent revolutions may be, no
one can complain of another’s injustice, but only of his own imprudence
or his misfortune. (Rousseau, 1992a, 65)
It is interesting to note that in this text, Rousseau combines two political
traditions and two vocabularies in a novel way. From Locke, Rousseau borrows
the idea that despotism is a disguised form of the ‘state of nature’ and
that the overthrow of the despot is no less legitimate than the exercise of
power by the despot: both cases involve an act of war against an enemy. The
revolt against the despot is a kind of a defensive war of the people against an
enemy who started the war. But to this description of the revolutionary phenomenon
borrowed from Locke, Rousseau inserts into his text a quite different
perspective, one which reveals another infl uence: that of Montesquieu.
The very vocabulary used by Rousseau testifi es to this. He speaks of ‘the
uprising that ends with strangling or dethroning a Sultan.’ The term ‘sultan’
refers to the traditional representation of despotism as the absolute
exercise of power in Eastern empires (notably the Ottoman Empire). The
act of ‘strangling or dethroning a Sultan’ is not mentioned by Montesquieu
to describe a defensive act against oppression. It is not an act of liberation.
It is, rather, a violent and anarchic means for replacing one illegitimate or
usurped power by another illegitimate or usurped power. The overthrow of
the sultan is not therefore described as an act leading to the restoration of
the rule of law, but as sheer brute force, which substitutes one act of usurpation
for another.
This changes completely what it means to overthrow a despot. Rousseau
states it clearly in the passage from the Discourse on Inequality previously
cited: ‘Force alone maintained [the sultan], force alone overthrows him’.
Thus, we do not have on one side an authority based on force and on the
other an act which reestablishes the rule of law, but rather two acts both of