Rousseau and Revolution

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 25
question. The criticism of Locke is the same each time: Locke presupposes
that man is most often and spontaneously a rational being. He thinks that
freedom and reason materialize spontaneously in humanity if only the obstacles
which prevent their development are removed. Locke underestimates
the anthropological stakes of education. Education, that is to say, the cultivation
of morals, can, so to speak, change human nature. Depending on
whether it is more or less well carried out, it can be a training for servitude
or an education in freedom. Now, moral education is most often an apprenticeship
for servitude. In his Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau writes:
‘Certain it is that in the long run peoples are what government makes them
be. Warriors, citizens, men, when it wants; mob and rabbles when it pleases’
(Rousseau, 1997f, 13). This explains why the true condition of humanity is
most often an accommodation to servitude: a ‘voluntary servitude,’ to use
the expression of La Boétie, an author who, I think, greatly infl uenced
Rousseau (Bachofen, 2002, 20 and 228–30). This idea may certainly seem
paradoxical, given that Rousseau writes that freedom and human nature
are consubstantial. But Rousseau in no way believes that humans, in fact,
always love and really desire freedom, are aware of its demands, and are
ready to pay its price. All humans are potentially free, but all humans are not
actually free: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ (Rousseau,
1997e, Book I, chapter 1). These chains are not in essence physical and
external; they are moral and internal.
Democracy is not possible if people are not educated to freedom. In the
text on Poland, addressing the issue of freeing the serfs and their integration
into the sovereign body politic, Rousseau shows the diffi culties of this
enterprise:
I am sensible to the diffi culty of the project of emancipating your peoples.
[ . . . ] Freedom is hearty fare, but hard to digest; it takes very healthy
stomachs to tolerate it. I laugh at those degraded peoples who, letting
plotters rouse them to riots, dare to speak of freedom without so much as
an idea of it, and, their hearts full of the vices of slaves, imagine that all it
takes to be free is to be unruly. Proud and holy freedom! If these poor
people only knew you, if they only realized at what price you are won and
preserved, if they were only sensible to how much your laws are more
austere than the tyrant’s yoke is hard; their weak souls, the slaves of passions
that should be stifl ed, would fear you a hundred times more than
servitude. [ . . . ] To emancipate the peoples of Poland is a grand and fi ne
undertaking, but bold, dangerous, and not to be attempted thoughtlessly.
Among the precautions to be taken, there is one that is indispensable