Rousseau and Revolution

28 Rousseau and Revolution
would declare that it had become structurally incapable of freedom. To
attribute such a philosophy of history to Rousseau is a retrospective interpretation.
It is to make him say more than he really did. For Rousseau,
contingency and unpredictability must be given their full due in history. He
does not believe in any kind of determinism and especially not in sociological
determinisms. In Émile he writes: ‘we know not what nature allows us
to be’ (Rousseau, 1993b, Book I, 33), and in The Social Contract :
The people assembled, it will be said! What a chimera! It is a chimera
today, but it was not so two thousand years ago: Have men changed in
nature? The bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than
we think: It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that constrict
them. Base souls do not believe in great men: vile slaves smile mockingly
at the word freedom. (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapter 12)
If human ‘nature’ has remained the same from the time of the Roman
republic to the modern era, this is because in both epochs human nature
harbors misrecognized moral and political resources. Rousseau says as
much in his text on Poland: ‘When reading ancient history, one believes
oneself transported into another universe and among other beings. What
have Frenchmen, Englishmen, Russians, in common with the Romans and
the Greeks? Almost nothing but their shape. The strong souls of the Romans
and the Greeks appear to them to be exaggerations of history.’ But he adds:
‘Yet they did exist, and they were humans like ourselves; what keeps us from
being men like them? Our prejudices, our base philosophy and the passions
of petty self-interest, concentrated together in all hearts by inept institutions
in which genius never had any share’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 79–80). 5
That modern peoples do not, for the most part, know freedom is not due
to some kind of inevitability. It is rather because of a dominant philosophical
and cultural tendency, of ‘prejudices’ which portray as a necessity that
which only results from a lack of genius and imagination. Rousseau thus
reacts against the idea that political freedom, in the strong sense in which
he understands it, has become outdated and is an anachronism to be relegated
to ancient history. In this sense, he is opposed to yet another aspect
of Locke’s thought, one which will be important for later thinkers like
Benjamin Constant and Isaiah Berlin. He opposes the idea that democracy
is indeed the destiny of modern peoples, but in a residual, minimalist form,
that of representative democracy in which the people are most often halfasleep.
He thus does not claim that modern peoples would be condemned
to servitude. Evidence of this is found in the interest which he shows in the