Rousseau and Revolution

Chapter 2
The General Will and National
Consciousness: Radical Requirements of
Democratic Legitimacy in the Writing of
Rousseau and Fanon
Jane Anna Gordon
Introduction
Rousseau’s concept of the general will has been attacked as totalizing,
romantic and repressive and as turning on a capacity for clear and transparent
willing that regular citizens do not, in fact, possess. Still, its vision of
political legitimacy has captured the imagination of many readers by suggesting
the radical requirements of modern, legitimate, democratic life.
Several genealogical lines have been drawn from Rousseau’s classic formulation
of the general will to fi gures that both embrace and reject such relations
of indebtedness. And yet, as I hope the following discussion convincingly
demonstrates, it is in conversation with Frantz Fanon that the irredeemably
political dimensions of Rousseau’s writings, their revolutionary import, are
best revived. At the core of Frantz Fanon’s work is a theory of political transformation
of how colonized people, through revolutionary action saturated
with tragedy, error and reversals, remake themselves into self-governing citizens.
In contrast, one has to piece together how, in the work of Rousseau,
one would move from the dire conclusions of the Second Discourse to the
fragile alternative outlined in the Social Contract. Rousseau was consistently
ambivalent about unfolding futures, always sensing that currents that undercut
the shared conditions of political life were stronger than their antidotes.
Fanon, by contrast, would never qualify his insistence upon the need for
people to act with agency in history.
Rousseau on Method
Rousseau’s life as the man who was canonized began with his controversial
refl ections on the possibility of work in the arts and sciences contributing to