POLITICS JUNE 22, 2012
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He was a man who claimed to have abandoned all five of his children, as newborns, at the door of an orphanage. He broke with nearly every friend he ever made, including some who sacrificed dearly for him, denouncing them in the most hateful and vitriolic terms. He wrote that law-breakers deserved to be treated as rebels and traitors. He referred to his first and most important lover as “Mama.” All in all, the Geneva-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose three-hundredth birthday falls on June 28, was a hard man to admire.
Yet in the 234 years since his death, many critics have gone much further than just pointing to Rousseau’s personal flaws. They have held him responsible for the principal ills of modernity. Writers from Edmund Burke (who failed to find “a single good action” in Rousseau’s life) to the Israeli scholar Jacob Talmon, blamed him for the violence of the French Revolution. Talmon then gave him much of the credit for modern totalitarianism as well. Feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards have charged him with inspiring modern forms of misogyny that imprison women in cages of domesticity. Rousseau has been excoriated for undermining Christianity, for destroying traditional morality, for inventing xenophobic nationalism, and even for starting a quarter-millennium’s worth of noxious child-rearing fads. He remains prominent enough today for the high priestess of reactionary hackdom, Ann Coulter, to denounce him at length in her most recent screed, Demonic. For Coulter, Rousseau was an evildoer of almost Obamaesque proportions: “a paranoid hypochondriac who denied divine revelation and original sin” and inspired “all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century.”
All in all, it is quite a heavy indictment to press against a man who never held political office, who lived in obscurity until his late thirties, and who spent much of his remaining time on earth in various forms of uncomfortable exile, or even on the run from the law. And most of it is simply ridiculous. As with any truly great writer, it is foolish to judge Rousseau by the instances where people tried to follow his advice literally, still less by the harmful things done in his name (by which standard Jesus Christ does not exactly come off unblemished.) Rousseau’s influence on modern culture has been far too vast and multifaceted to squeeze into reductive categories of “positive” and “negative” and even his most misguided prescriptions often came accompanied by profound and poetic insights. And his influence came in a remarkable range of fields: not just in political philosophy and literature, but in what we now call anthropology, education, psychology, religion, and also in the performance of a very new sort of public role, that of the celebrity intellectual. Rousseau was one of a very small number of writers who embodied something fundamental about the modern Western world, in all its promise and in all its peril. His anniversary is not simply an occasion for recognizing his achievements, but for looking deeply into ourselves.
HIS LIFE STORY remains well known, in large part because he told it himself, in the first great modern autobiography, The Confessions. Born the son of a poor Swiss watchmaker, he had little formal education, and, according to some biographers, may have suffered from dyslexia. Running away from home as a teenager, he spent years on the margins of society, taken in for a time by Françoise-Louise de Warens, thirteen years his senior (“Mama”). He dreamed of a career in music, and invented an unwieldy system of musical notation, peddling it so fervently that despite his considerable personal charm, many dismissed him as a crank. It was through music, though, that he made friends with some of the most important of the Parisian philosophes, the guiding spirits of what we now call the Enlightenment. Finally, in 1749, he got his big break, when he won an essay contest sponsored by the learned Academy of Dijon, on the question of whether the restoration of the arts and sciences had improved moral behavior. Daringly, he answered the question in the negative, and overwhelmed the judges with his eloquence. Over the next three decades he wrote a stream of major works. But he refused to pay court to wealthy, noble patrons, as most other writers of the day did, and lived in ostentatiously humble circumstances with an uneducated seamstress, the mother of his abandoned children. In the early 1760’s, his unorthodox religious views led both France and Geneva to ban his books, and to force him into flight and exile. In his later years, his behavior turned increasingly erratic, even clinically paranoid. “The ceilings above me have eyes, the walls which surround me have ears,” he wrote in the second installment of the Confessions.He denounced former friends for conspiring to destroy him, and, having finally returned to France, died there in 1778.
Rousseau today is best known for his political works—especially the 1762 Social Contract, which has given him his reputation, in some circles, as a proto-totalitarian. It contains some apparently chilling passages. “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be forced to do so by the body as a whole, which means nothing other than that it will force him to be free.” But to Rousseau, “obeying the general will” did not mean following every dictate of the government, but something more like accepting general constitutional principles (although those who remained defiant could still be treated as rebels and traitors). The book is best understood as a meditation on how to establish a free and just state, not as a blueprint for a regimented utopia. And it contains an astonishing evocation of how a decent civil society can elevate human life:
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a remarkable change in man, substituting justice for instinct in his behavior, and giving his actions the morality they had previously lacked. It is only then […] that man, who had until then considered only himself, is forced to act according to other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations […] his mental faculties are trained and developed, his ideas enlarged, his sentiments ennobled, his whole soul elevated…
Yes, such language could inspire a disastrously exaggerated faith in the redemptive power of politics. But it could equally inspire a just, humane, and progressive politics in a world that sorely needed it.
Rousseau’s political thought was remarkable enough, but it formed only a part of a much broader set of reflections on the human condition. In his 1754 Second Discourse he offered nothing less than a conjectural deep history of the human species, tracing how competition, jealousy, exploitation and suffering had arisen hand-in-hand with civilization. Brutally mocked at the time for its portrayal of humans in an animalistic “state of nature”—one satirical stage play depicted the author snuffling across the boards on all fours—it has stimulated anthropological thought ever since. Rousseau’s 1762 Emile, meanwhile, offered a detailed program for educating healthy, moral young men (and, very secondarily, young women). The book met with enormous success, which generation after generation of early childhood gurus have striven to imitate. According to some observers (including Pamela Druckerman in the recent Bringing Up Bébé), French parents still swear by Rousseau above all else.
Emile highlighted Rousseau’s concern with another feature of the human condition: individual psychology, and how it is molded by childhood experience. At the time, few people in the Western world saw childhood shaping the mature individual in the way we today take for granted. Children were more often perceived as imperfect adults. Rousseau insisted that personality developed organically, with early experiences profoundly determining later life. And in The Confessions he demonstrated the point through an examination of his own idiosyncratic life story. He called this work, with some justice, “an enterprise without precedent […] Let the trumpet of Judgment Day sound when it wishes. I will appear before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand.” In one famous passage, he recounted an early spanking he had received, and commented: “Who would believe that this boyhood punishment, received by a child of eight from a woman of thirty, determined my tastes, my desires, and my passions for the rest of my life?” While The Confessions played fast and loose with some aspects of Rousseau’s life, the frank revelations of discreditable episodes (including the abandonment of his children), and the emphasis on his most intimate feelings, and psychological development, made the book a model for subsequent autobiographies.
Rousseau’s concern with personal authenticity also led him to embrace a radically new vision of what it meant to be an author. Most of his fellow philosophes published their books anonymously. They treated attribution of authorship as a game, and saw no necessary connection between an author’s personality and writings. Rousseau, by contrast, insisted that his name appear in full on every title page, and presented his writing as a direct emanation of his own unique psyche. If we today find this a commonplace way of approaching literature, it is due in large part to Rousseau himself. Readers, meanwhile, responded to the innovation with an innovation of their own, treating Rousseau as their own intimate friend, especially after the publication of his massively-successful epistolary novel Julie in 1761. They sent him thousands of letters, expressing their gratitude and describing their own depth of feeling. “Never have I wept such delicious tears,” one of them told him. “The reading created such a powerful effect on me that I believe I would gladly have died during that supreme moment.” Others called him “friend Jean-Jacques,” and promised to live strictly according to the precepts he set down. He had become the first celebrity intellectual. Rousseau himself, however, found this form of fame oppressive. He could not appreciate the irony that the public had effectively invented an inauthentic, commodified version of the century’s great apostle of authenticity. The stress that resulted lubricated his long slide into madness.
This story points to one of the real weaknesses in Rousseau’s thought and work. In a century where cold rationalism generally came leavened with irony and wit, he was almost entirely humorless, and tremendously moralistic. These qualities could serve him well when posing as the prophetic scourge of a corrupt modernity. They did not detract from his eloquent rhapsodies about the glories of nature (the Romantic manner of communing with nature owed much to Rousseau), or from the advocacy of a purified, “natural” religion that had only a distant relation to Christianity. But they made Julie something that readers today generally find unreadable: hundreds and hundreds of pages of unadulterated, indigestibly virtuous sentiment. And they rendered his judgments of his myriad enemies—including ex-friends like Denis Diderot and David Hume—chilling, harsh, and merciless.
Arguably, these qualities, more than any of the overt political prescriptions, constitute Rousseau’s most truly harmful legacy. On the one hand, they left a deep impression on generations of revolutionaries in France and elsewhere, steeling them to purge opponents without pity in the name of creating stern Republics of Virtue. Maximilien Robespierre, himself an exceptionally humorless man, felt a deep personal bond with Rousseau. And they also shaped Rousseau’s unfortunately influential attitudes towards women. While his writings on the subject were more nuanced and complex than an early generation of feminist scholars gave him credit for, he was hardly a man to savor the game of seduction, or to engage in battles of wits with elegant ladies in aristocratic drawing rooms. He saw the two sexes as fundamentally, physically opposed, and believed that undue mixing between them would corrupt and adulterate both. “There are no good morals for women outside of withdrawn and domestic life,” he concluded. “The peaceful care of the family and the home are their lot.” He would have been utterly horrified by the irony that the rhetoric of liberation he did so much to invent (“Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains”) would inspire later generations of women to demand equality with men.
But there is at least one modern irony that Rousseau might well have appreciated. He loathed cosmopolitanism, and believed in the deliberate cultivation of national identity. In one of his lesser political works, he lamented the fact that “today, no matter what people may say, there are no longer any Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same manners […] all talk of the public welfare, and think only of themselves.” It would doubtless strike him as appropriate that in the month that marks the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, we are seeing see the crisis, and quite possibly the collapse, of the boldest experiment in European integration ever undertaken.
David A. Bell is a contributing editor for The New Republic and also teaches French history at Princeton.
14 comments
Here we have another superb piece by the incomparable David Bell. Thank you much, David!
- liberalref
June 22, 2012 at 5:05pm
This is an eloquent and judicious peace on Rousseau. I've too often heard him dismissed as a proto-totalitarian and I'm glad that David Bell puts that in perspective. Rousseau should not be held responsible for Jacobin excesses like those of Robespierre, and too often is. That said, Bell acknowledges those parts of Rousseau's life and work that are uninspiring, or chilling (such as that infamous declaration that opponents of the General Will should be 'forced to be free'), though in my opinion R. grounded coercion on the steadiest ground possible--in defense of the common interest. As Bell points out, for all his eloquence and his contributions, Rousseau was a contradictory, moralistic, and deeply paranoid man.
- Lpro
June 23, 2012 at 12:37am
"Arguably, these qualities, more than any of the overt political prescriptions, constitute Rousseau’s most truly harmful legacy. On the one hand, they left a deep impression on generations of revolutionaries in France and elsewhere, steeling them to purge opponents without pity in the name of creating stern Republics of Virtue. Maximilien Robespierre, himself an exceptionally humorless man, felt a deep personal bond with Rousseau." It's been shown that Robespierre interpreted Rousseau in ways that suited his own blood thirsty ambitions. Rousseau is less guilty of what was done "in his name" than are thinkers like Marx.
- arnon1
June 23, 2012 at 10:41am
David Bell narrows too much the nature of Rousseau's "General Will." This is more than certain broad constitutional principles undergirding a society to which all either formally or tacitly consent. The General Will refers to actual day-by-day direct democratically formulated (by the entire Community) policies, where all "will together." No individual can assert any individual right or objection against the outcome of Community Will, which is "Sovereign." To do so would be do rebel against Freedom itself, since freedom is acting in accordance with what is best for one, and only the General Will can articulate what is best for the community, in which the individual is only a cell. Hence, the concept of "being forced to be free" if one is in conflict with the General Will. Quite apart from a number of Rousseau's other contributions to social and political thought, both positive and negative--to child-rearing, education, naturalist romanticism, gender relations--this idea of the "Legislator," some super-human founds society and who "knows all the passions of men but feels none," and the Sovereign General Will, that Community legislative process and outcome, outside of and against which which individual freedom is nonsense, is what causes J. L. Talmon correctly to point to Rousseau as the source point of modern "democratic totalitarianism."
- orray2
June 23, 2012 at 10:47am
Accessible piece for the general reader, not deeply versed in Rousseau, of which group I'm one. So one notes and misses a necessary lack of depth in this nice, skipping-stones on-water surveying of some of Rousseau's thought. While reading the small part on the general will, I had the same thought as Orray 2 but nearly not as so well put together and thought through. Bell, I was thinking, is under-representing the meaning of the general will, that it is an idea broader than an array of certain constitutional principles. The general will, a somewhat mystical thing, can never be wrong. Some questions that arise for me from Bell's description include, which constitutional principles does he refer to, and how does he fit together his conception of Rousseau's general will as an array of those principles and our modern understanding of constitutional principles geared to protecting individual liberty and privacy, puttting a barrier between the state and the individual, in that protecting civil rights and liberties and protecting minority rights against the claims of the majority, such claims sometimes made coequal with Rousseau's general will.
- basman
June 23, 2012 at 12:24pm
p.s. I think it would make for a terrific piece hereof or Bell or another to take a representative passage from the Social Contract setting out the idea of the General Will, assert a theory of it, like broad constitutional principles and argue for it. And then let the thread begin.
- basman
June 23, 2012 at 1:29pm
orray2 "David Bell narrows too much the nature of Rousseau's "General Will." This is more than certain broad constitutional principles undergirding a society to which all either formally or tacitly consent. The General Will refers to actual day-by-day direct democratically formulated (by the entire Community) policies, where all "will together." No individual can assert any individual right or objection against the outcome of Community Will,...." This is a misreading of Rousseau. The "general will" like the ""noble savage" is an abstract concept not to be taken literally. The notion of a general will is postulated a posteriori. It argues that any society must have come together by common consent, though we are never there to witness such an event. What this means exactly is unclear and there has been disagreement: the social philosopher Jacob Talmon argued that the GW (general will) leads to totalitarianism others have argued that it could lead to constitutional government with the GW as a kind of constructional convention. Neither image or formulation (the totalitarian system and constitutional government) captures the tension inherent in the concept of the GW.
- arnon1
June 23, 2012 at 3:43pm
Think it's tough to relate the GW to modern political structures. Comes across as manipulative, like the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is a practical element in R's GW. R's point is that identity is rooted in childhood, and more broadly, culture, typically national culture (as opposed to Nationalism per se). GW is thus tribal, not within the context of modern constitutionalism or totalitarianism. The noble savage is not an individual in the wild, pre-contract--but a tribal being. The GW is the mores and customs of the tribe, not an arbitrary dictat. This provides the utilitarian framework which allows freedom. This is opposed to the legalisms of the state, and of course, the church, which are essentially the framework for the chains of the ruling class. This is delightful, but uselessly Romantic given the layer upon layer of artificialities we face in the modern world. Like most Romanticism, it is a yearning for a prelapsarian past.
- Vogelfam
June 23, 2012 at 5:29pm
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsosphy: ...Rousseau's account of the general will is marked by unclarities and ambiguities that have attracted the interest of commentators since its first publication. The principal tension is between a democratic conception, where the general will is simply what the citizens of the state have decided together in their sovereign assembly, and an alternative interpretation where the general will is the transcendent incarnation of the citizens' common interest that exists in abstraction from what any of them actually wants. Both views find some support in Rousseau's texts, and both have been influential. Contemporary epistemic conceptions of democracy often make reference to Rousseau's discussion in Book 2 chapter 3 of of The Social Contract. These accounts typically take Condorcet's jury theorem as a starting point, where democratic procedures are conceived of as a method for discovering the truth about the public interest; they then interpret the general will as a deliberative means of seeking outcomes that satisfy the preferences of individuals and render the authority of the state legitimate. The tension between the “democratic” and the “transcendental” conceptions can be reduced if we take Rousseau to be arguing for the view that, under the right conditions and subject to the right procedures, citizen legislators will be led to converge on on laws that correspond to their common interest; however, where those conditions and procedures are absent, the state necessarily lacks legitimacy. On such a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an a posteriori philosophical anarchism. Such a view holds that it is possible, in principle, for a state to exercise legitimate authority over its citizens, but all actual states—and indeed all states that we are likely to see in the modern era—will fail to meet the conditions for legitimacy. Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly general it must come from all and apply to all. This thought has both substantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau argues that the law must be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannot name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within the state. Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens, though guided by a consideration of what is in their own private interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest impartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive. For this to be true, however, it has to be the case that the situation of citizens is substantially similar to one another. In a state where citizens enjoy a wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a great deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree of economic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impact of the laws will be the same for everyone. In such cases it will often not be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the general will merely by imagining the impact of general and universal laws on his or her own case... Two comments on this, there obviously could be more: 1. The notion that all laws must be of general application is a simplistic conception of the rule of law. Put at its broadest, thr slightest sophistication of rule of law understanding recognizes the need for differential legislation and attendant legislative classification. The burden is to have legitimate basis for differentiation, on the premise of treating like cases alike and different cases differently, that are rationally or compellingly, depending on the nature of the classification, related to the law's legitimate purpose. 2. The second last paragraph sounds like an arguable precursor to Rawls's idea of what minimum conditions people would choose behind their veil of ignorance.
- basman
June 23, 2012 at 6:12pm
My impression is that what Rousseau mean's by the General Will is different from our idea of constitutionalism. American constitutionalism is both a philosophical and procedural arrangement. The Framers by leaving the Bill of Rights out of the original Constitution were relying almost exclusively on procedure to establish the legitimacy of the rule of law. The Bill of Rights was only added later as a compromise and as we have seen, far from consensually held, the meaning of the Bill of Rights is a matter of great contention (Obama's hit list and such). I have always thought Rousseau's idea of the General Will is a tremendous weakness of the Social Contract which is otherwise a great, if flawed, book. The idea of freedom through constraint, (but not in the religious sense) is a seminal contribution to modern thought; one which we generally do not subscribe to the United States (but something we might benefit from). The weakness of the General Will as a concept is that Rousseau basically assumes away the problem of getting to consensus. In society there will always be a certain lack of intelligence on the part of the public (after all, half the population has an IQ of less than 100). Therefore, there is a certain inability of the people to know their own good. The idea of the General Will assumes that people (and their leader, The Legislator) will spontaneously and unerringly be able to figure out what is good for them and I think that's a bit of a stretch.
- poldpf
June 24, 2012 at 9:59am
General Will: I knew him in the Air Force. Forceful, determined guy. Pushy. All seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say), the transition of humanity from noble savagery to noble citizenry does not eliminate violence and other forms of law-breaking (which Rousseau himself observed). So the idea of a general will is negated before it's even delineated. What's the use of having common ideals when individuals are constantly corrupting them? As Bell notes in his fine article, Rousseau was humorless. Jean-Jaques would have been better served if he had not taken himself and the human race so seriously (alas, most philosophers do). Maybe a lighter touch in his philosophizing would have delayed the onset of his madness.
- magboy47.
June 24, 2012 at 5:53pm
The idea of the general will is an abstract construct the meaning of which as above variously shown is unclear. So what sense can one make of your comment ...the transition of humanity from noble savagery to noble citizenry does not eliminate violence and other forms of law-breaking (which Rousseau himself observed). So the idea of a general will is negated before it's even delineated....? Which is to ask, trying to understand your point, how does the permanence of human violence "negate" the idea of a general will? I can't connect your dots.
- basman
June 24, 2012 at 6:23pm
basman, The general will is an idea in the heads of people only--maybe in Rousseau's head only. If it's not implemented, because of human weakness, what good is it as an idea? Americans don't have a general will, even as an idea. As Jon Stewart said, "Republicans love their country--they just hate half the people in it." How can a people even have an unconscious idea of a general will, if more than half the people hate, probably, more than half of the other people? If a people can't even begin to put the general will into PRACTICE, the idea itself is worthless, not even worth discussing, negated. I'm a pragmatist. To me, abstract social ideas are a waste of time. Many have been tried to put into practice, and almost all of them have failed. As we see today, the abstract ideas of America's founders are just about gone. It's amazing that they've held on this long--probably because we've been physically isolated from the rest if the world. But globalization is fast eating away at our originalist, isolationalist ideals. The problem starts with the more than 2 billion brain cells in each human--and multiply that by over 7 billion humans. Society is basically a mess that's held together mostly by the simple faith that we humans will survive--not by any particular theory or idea. And you can thank globalization for that--something Rousseu had an inkling of when he talked about the nastiness of Europeanization in his day.
- magboy47.
June 24, 2012 at 8:43pm
rest of the world, not rest if the world
- magboy47.
June 24, 2012 at 8:45pm