Rousseau and Revolution

General Will and National Consciousness 33
we are therefore required a different kind of exercise, one in which we
imagine how we became what we are through postulating the absence of
our conditions of possibility. This meant, for Rousseau, imagining a world
without sociality, of pre- or asocial creatures that, with nothing but sporadic
contact with other human beings, easily drew on their natural physical
strength to meet their minimal needs. In Rousseau’s account, it was only as
the world became more populated and human contact more regular that
human beings developed abilities upon which we now rely. Centrally, with
sustained engagement, we began immediately to make comparisons (now
not the straightforward one that human beings tended to be superior to
non-human animals) about the relative endowments of different people.
This capacity was a foundation both for the kinds of abstract thinking
involved in understanding the connections between particular interests and
needs and more general categories that Rousseau thought were necessary to
political life and also to our ability to distance ourselves from the feelings of
suffering of others that once arrested us.
Rousseau was keenly aware of the ways in which our guiding interests
shaped what we were or were not able to see in the world around us. He was
particularly struck by the travel writings of European explorers of his own
day, writings that were treated by many distinguished philosophers as legitimate
empirical data on African, Asian and New World peoples. Such travellers,
Rousseau insisted, seemed incapable of perceiving human difference:
For three or four hundred years since the inhabitants of Europe have
inundated the other parts of the world, and continually published new
collections of voyages and reports, I am persuaded that we know no other
men except the Europeans [ . . . ] In vain do individuals come and go; it
seems that Philosophy does not travel. (Ibid., 84)
Philosophy with a capital ‘P ’ was the kind that he (and Hobbes) criticized in
his First Discourse. Unlike philosophy or critical refl ection, its sources and products
were vanity and vice, the rationalization of political worlds that were fundamentally
illegitimate. Rousseau noted the role of Christian missionaries in
this work. In particular, he suggested that their skills were not the same as
those necessary to undertake work in the human sciences. The former seemed
able to articulate the worthiness of potential converts only by likening them to
one, undifferentiated European notion of human character. Rousseau wrote:
[T]o preach the Gospel usefully, zeal alone is necessary and God gives the
rest; but to study men, talents are necessary that God is not obligated to
give anyone [ . . . ] [t]hese People [ . . . ] have known how to perceive, at