Rousseau and Revolution

34 Rousseau and Revolution
the other end of the world, only what it was up to them to notice without
leaving their street; and that those true features that distinguish Nations
and strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. (Ibid., 85)
Rousseau concluded that although Europeans had set themselves up as the
world’s judges, in the kind of role that Fred Dallmayr insists that those
undertaking work in comparative political theory avoid, their understanding
of the peoples that they relegated to lower order species was at best
superfi cial projection (Dallmayr, 2004). They had missed a unique opportunity
to engage in human study and failed to employ what Claude Lévi-Strauss
called ‘the methodological rule for all ethnology’ that he thought Rousseau
had presciently described thus: ‘When one wishes to study men, one has to
look close by; but in order to study man, one has to learn to cast one’s eyes
far off; fi rst one has to observe the differences in order to discover the properties’
(Lévi-Strauss, 1966, 305 and Rousseau, 1988).
Their aims had not been actually to learn about the people about whom
they felt compelled to write, but instead to aggrandize themselves and offer
rationalizations for such illegitimate self-enrichment:
[W]e know nothing of the Peoples of the East Indies, who have been frequented
solely by Europeans more desirous to fi ll their purses than their
heads. All of Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as distinctive in character
as in color, are still to be examined; the whole earth is covered by
Nations of which we know only the names – yet we dabble in judging the
human race. (Rousseau, 1992a, 85–6)
For Rousseau, the endeavours in which we are involved set the terms of the
worlds that we encounter. One cannot assume that research and writing
about human beings is more than a refracted mirror of the perceptions
that will best enable us to realize our aspirations.
On Illegitimacy and Its Alternatives
In his Social Contract, Rousseau had described both conquest and enslavement
as impossible to articulate in terms of political right. The former
could create a subjugated multitude or an aggregate but neither an association,
polity, nor people. Both turned on the so-called right of the strongest
or the claim that any individual or people who overcame others did so legitimately.
Rousseau contended that force could elicit little more than acts of