Rousseau and Revolution

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 27
concern is political freedom. Modern peoples attending merely to their
private affairs only pay attention to public matters in an episodic way. This
is both the sign and the cause of their political immaturity. It is unlikely for
them to institute, even by way of revolt, a true democracy. We can thus
understand the very harsh judgement levelled against the English who
‘think they are free,’ but ‘who are slaves’ and ‘are nothing.’ Even the ‘citizens’
of Geneva who complain about abuses of the Little Council are,
Rousseau writes, ‘completely absorbed in their domestic occupations and
always cool about the rest,’ they ‘consider the public interest only when
their own is being attacked. [ . . . ] Always distracted, always deceived, always
fi xed on other objects, they let themselves be led astray about the most
important one of all, and always go looking for the remedy for lack of having
known how to prevent the ill’ (Rousseau, 2001, 293).
Here, once again, Rousseau’s logic is very close to that of La Boétie, who
refuses to explain tyranny by bad luck, fate or the power of the tyrant.
Tyranny always results from laziness, blindness or the moral corruption of
the people. To bring down the tyrant, according to La Boétie, only one
thing is necessary: that the people want their own freedom: ‘Be resolved to
serve no more and you will be free.’ This seems to be such a small thing. But
if tyranny is so common, it may well be that the authentic desire for freedom
is much more diffi cult and much more unusual than we might think,
especially if we have not suffi ciently refl ected on the conditions of freedom
in the strong sense.
Can Modern Peoples Actually Attain Freedom?
Should we then consider Rousseau as being resigned to the inevitability of
voluntary servitude and of seeing no political future for the great European
peoples? I would claim that here, once again, the answer is complicated.
Rousseau defi nitely does not share Locke’s anthropological optimism. He
does not agree with Locke’s belief in what Rousseau calls in Book IX of The
Confessions and in his writings about Saint-Pierre’s projects ‘perfected reason’
[‘la raison perfectionnée’], that is, confi dence in the spontaneous
progress of humankind toward rationality. This idea was adopted by many
of Rousseau’s contemporaries and illustrated in an exemplary way at the
end of the eighteenth century by Condorcet. But it is also not correct to say
that Rousseau is absolutely pessimistic. If he were absolutely pessimistic, he
would have formulated a philosophy of history. He would claim to be thoroughly
knowledgeable about the possibilities of modern humanity and