Rousseau and Revolution

22 Rousseau and Revolution
etymological sense of someone who recreates a state of war (bellum) within
the civil order. Insurrection against the despot is thus an act of reestablishing
the rule of law, more precisely, an act of vigilante justice. Locke is very
clear about this in several passages from the Second Treatise (Locke, 1988,
§204, §209 and §226). He shows at the beginning of this book that, in the
state of nature, private individuals have a right to engage in violence as private
individuals. In the state of nature, such an act of violence is an implementation
of the natural law against the criminal (ibid., §10–13 and §20–1).
In other words, for Locke there exists, even in the state of nature, an ability
to judge according to the law and to enforce laws, an ability shared by all
men. This is the ability which they then reclaim in situations of tyranny. All
men, or at least most of them, are good judges of the lawful and the unlawful.
They can thus take the place of judges and the place of positive laws
once civil society is ‘dissolved’. This is just what happens in a revolution
against tyranny. One may suppose, says Locke, that men do not foolishly
take up arms against the sovereign. If they do, it is in judging according to
their conscience and in the name of a demand for justice. Here, the
anthropo logical optimism of Locke is very well illustrated: good people are
in the majority; criminals are the exception. Thus when the people rise up,
there is good reason to believe that they are acting in a responsible way and
in the light of justice (ibid., §223, §225 and §230).
It is obvious that Rousseau does not share this analysis of revolution and
this is so for several reasons. To be sure, those who revolt and bring down a
tyrant, if they were forced to defend themselves against an oppressive power,
have not necessarily committed a condemnable act. But nothing guarantees
that this legitimate defense will result in the establishment of a more
legitimate authority. Nothing guarantees that a revolt has as its goal the
establishment of the rule of law and political liberty. Nothing prevents one
from thinking that this uprising will merely result in the replacement of
one oppression by another. Rousseau says it explicitly several times. In The
Letters Written from the Mountain, he writes that ‘in the majority of States
intestine troubles come from a brutalized and stupid populace, [ . . . ]
stirred up in secret by skillful troublemakers, invested with some authority
that they want to extend’ (Rousseau, 2001, 299). In The Social Contract he
uses history to support this idea, notably seventeenth-century English history.
He twice evokes Oliver Cromwell to this end. In the chapter on ‘civil
religion’ he compares Cromwell to Catiline and describes him as ‘an ambitious
man’ and ‘a hypocrite’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book IV, chapter 8) who
manipulated the naïve masses. In another chapter, criticizing Cromwell, he
associates him with the Duke of Beaufort, one of the leaders of the Fronde