Rousseau and Revolution

40 Rousseau and Revolution
to assure that it would take the form of legitimate authority rather than
abusive wealth. With the latter, Rousseau noted, where wealth dominated,
power and authority would separate – to obtain wealth and authority would
become two separate tasks with the implication that apparent power was
with elected offi cials while real power was with the rich who could buy their
authority. Such practices could only lead to disappointment that would
spread languor throughout the island. The greatest asset of the Corsicans
was that unlike most of their modern European counterparts they remained
capable of freedom rather than merely obedience. But the cultivation of a
viable political economy would determine whether this could be mobilized
in pursuit of a general will or whether a will of some would illegitimately
prevail claiming the legacy of the fi ght for the island’s post-colonial
condition.
Devouring Methods and Sociogeny
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, among many other things, is a meditation
on method, in particular, a dialectical refl ection on how one studies and
understands health and sickness in black encounters with whites in an antiblack
world. Fanon, like Rousseau, was concerned about the ways in which
the legitimacy of certain kinds of facts could block the larger project of
understanding human beings. In Fanon’s case, the status of these facts was
linked to a naturalistic framework that biologized racism, suggesting that a
sense of black inferiority was lying dormant within black bodies, activated,
not created, by colonization. He wrote, ‘Beside phylogeny and ontogeny
stands sociogeny [ . . . ] But society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot
escape human infl uences. Man is what brings society into being’ (Fanon,
1967, 11). The turn to ‘facts’ in reductionistic approaches to the social sciences
was, Fanon suggested, an effort to belie precisely this, to render us
mere mechanisms without the agency that could introduce either contingency
or meaning into the social world. He explicitly rejects this central
tenet, that ‘lead[s] only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing,
absolutely nothing – and that he must put an end to the narcissism on
which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other “animals”’
(ibid., 22). Fanon refuses to so surrender, ‘grasping [his] narcissism
with both hands [ . . . ] [he] turn[s] [his] back on the degradation of those
who would make man a mere mechanism’ (ibid., 23). He emphasizes,
‘What matters for us is not to collect facts and behavior, but to fi nd their
meaning’ (ibid., 168). In the absence of such meaning, one participates in