Rousseau and Revolution

24 Rousseau and Revolution
be, the problem is to recognize the will of that nascent people. One can
notice, on that point, a certain closeness between Rousseau and Hobbes.
Hobbes writes that it is impossible to know the will of the people as long as
the sovereign didn’t formally call the people together. He concludes that
the sovereign is the people, since he’s the only one who can decide who the
people is and when the people talks (Hobbes, 2002, chapter VI, §1 and
chapter X, §8). Rousseau certainly does not make the same conclusion. But
he is sensible to the problem that Hobbes brings up. How can one be sure
that a populace, a disorganized mass, expresses the will of the body politic?
For Rousseau, an informal populace cannot claim that it is the people:
Any assembly of the People not convoked by the magistrates appointed to
that end and according to the described forms must be held to be illegitimate
and everything done at it to be null; because the order to assemble
must itself emanate from the law. [ . . . ] One cannot be too careful about
observing all the formalities required to distinguish a regular and legitimate
act from a seditious tumult, and the will of an entire people from
the clamors of a faction. (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapters 13 and 18)
There is no people, in the political meaning, without some kind of institutional
form that gives him the status of a body politic. That institution may
certainly be different from a strictly political institution. For example,
Rousseau thinks that Moses gave to the Hebrews, through religious institutions
and laws, a general will, and transformed a wandering populace into a
body politic. The idea of a pre-political institution of the people is undoubtedly
problematic. Nevertheless, it is certain that the existence of a body
poli tic can in no way be the result of a spontaneous and informal process.
This fi rst sense of the word institution is strongly connected with the
institution in the second sense, that is to say, education. In both cases, the
diffi culty is to convert a sum of particular wills into a general will. There is
no freedom without education towards freedom and this education is rare
and diffi cult. In other words, the free people is not – or is not only – a
people who frees itself from subjugation by a violent act. The free people is
the one who is morally capable of freedom, who is educated towards freedom.
Here is precisely the issue neglected by Locke: the moral precondition
for freedom, or in other words, the idea that freedom is not the universal
object of desire among men, but to the contrary, the desire for freedom is
most diffi cult and most rare.
Rousseau opposes Locke on this point not only in his political writings, but
also in his pedagogical ones and in his refl ection on the theologico-political