Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Sovereign Intimacy
Peg Birmingham
Despite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s reputation as one of the central political thinkers of the modern age, Arendt does not treat him as such. Strikingly, he is completely absent in her seminal text, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and he warrants only a brief mention in her early essays on modern political thought gathered together in German with the title Fragwurdige Traditionsbestande im Politischen Denken der Gegenwart (What Remains of the Tradition in Political Thought Today).1 In the foreword to the four essays that comprise this book written in the years between 1951 and 1956 (the years immediately following the publication of Origins), Arendt states that her reflections on history, tradition, authority, and freedom are unified around the modern break in tradition. As the title indicates, the essays also reflect on the remains of tradition in contemporary political thought, a thought that is at once marked by the collapse of tradition, even as it is haunted by it. Rousseau is discussed briefly in the essay on freedom in the context of free will, but is otherwise absent. Only in The Human Condition, in the context of the social takeover of the political, does Arendt take up Rousseau’s thought, viewing him not as a political thinker, but instead as the modern philosopher of intimacy whose thought is in open opposition to the social. Surprisingly, in her subsequent book, On Revolution, Arendt seems to change her mind about Rousseau, arguing that the French Revolution failed insofar as it turned from the political to the social question, a failure she lays at Rousseau’s feet.
Why did Arendt change her mind about Rousseau? Why does her relatively uncritical view of Rousseau in The Human Condition become a highly critical analysis of his role in the French Revolution? More precisely, how does Arendt view the relation between intimacy and the social question such that for her intimacy finds itself aligned with the social and against the political? Finally, why does Arendt understand Rousseau’s sovereign general will as falling under the rubric of the social, and therefore contributing to the political failure of the French Revolution?
Before taking up these questions, it is important to note that Arendt distinguishes the private, the social, and the economic. All too often her readers collapse the three terms, making it seem as if Arendt understands the social and the economic spheres as private spheres that ought to remain private. On this reading, Rousseau’s concern with intimacy is a straightforward concern with the private, which then finds itself complicit with the social when the latter brings private matters into the public space, thereby destroying the political. However, Arendt does not argue that the political is always destroyed when private concerns come to dominate it. For example, the bourgeois takeover of the public space, discussed extensively in Origins in the chapter, “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie,” is not the same as the transformation of the public into the social as Arendt describes it in The Human Condition. The economic takeover remains political, while the social transformation destroys the political altogether. Thus, Arendt remains an admirer, even if a strong critic, of Hobbes, who is for her the political philosopher of imperialism, while retaining no such admiration for Rousseau.
I want to stay with Arendt’s analysis of the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie for a moment as it illuminates her nuanced views of the relation between the private and the public. She opens the second book of Origins, “Imperialism,” with a consideration of this emancipation, which she considers to be “the central inner-European event of the imperialist period.”2 Pointing out that the bourgeoisie was central to the formation of the nation-state, nevertheless, she argues that prior to the rise of imperialism, it was content to have “economic preeminence” without political rule: “Only when the nation state proved unfit to be the framework for the further growth of capitalist economy did the latent fight between state and society become openly a struggle for power.”3 The struggle for power did not transform the state into society, but instead, the imperialist economic forces took over the state to achieve its political ends:
Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the more lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action.4
Here Arendt is clear: economic imperialism is a political takeover, and this because it is rooted in a certain conception of power: “Power for the sake of power.” Recognizing that expanding capitalist production violated the concept of limited nationalism, including limited territory, “if it [the bourgeoisie] did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.” Again, emancipated from the private, the bourgeoisie set out to develop a new conception of the political, especially political power. What had been private self-interests of the economic class became political interests in a global, economically expansive politics. As just mentioned, Hobbes is the political philosopher of this emancipation.
The transformation of the political into the social is an entirely different matter. The social is neither private nor political, but instead a destruction of both in favor of a “public” space whose paramount concerns are conformity and normalization. The realm of the social excludes political action in favor of the unanimity of behavior among its members. Moreover, it destroys the traditional notion of a worldly private space that protects and shelters for those aspects of existence that cannot bear the light of the public. Arendt characterizes the trad itional notion of the private as a “non-privative space” connected to the political through the domain of the law, which gives the private space a worldly appearance. With the rise of the social, this “non-privative space” of the private is destroyed and a new conception of the private as the intimate emerges. Its thinker is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who Arendt describes as the “articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of intimacy.”5 For Rousseau, the private sphere of intimacy is in opposition to the social; its task is to shelter the intimacy of the individual heart from the demands of social conformity: “The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be located with the same certainty as the public space.”6 Still further, the private intimacy of the heart bears no relation to the notion of a worldly yet private sphere that offers shelter for various activities of human existence. On the contrary, Arendt points out that for Rousseau, “both the intimate and the social were . . . subjective modes of human existence.”7
On Arendt’s reading, Rousseau sets as his task “a rebellion against the oppression of the state but against society’s unbearable perversion of the heart and its intrusion upon an innermost region in man which until than had needed no special protection.”8 Arendt is not dismissive of this rebellion. In fact, she claims it was “authentic,” a legitimate response to the loss of the political space and society’s subsequent oppressive demand for conformity. The rebellion gave rise to the “modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life.”9 Still further, Rousseau’s rebellion, and those who participated in it, produced an “astonishing flowering of poetry and music . . . accompanied by the rise of the novel.”10
Arendt’s positive review of Nathalie Sarraute’s novels gives a glimpse of what she finds promising and authentic in Rousseau’s rebellion of the heart and the flourishing of the arts that followed:
Sarraute has cracked open the “smooth and hard” surface of these traditional characters (“nothing but well-made dolls”) in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments which, though hardly perceptible in the macrocosm of the outward world, are like the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self.11
Sarraute, she points out, takes the reader behind the closed curtains, behind the lies and deceptions of society, into “a morass where every step makes you sink deeper into perdition.”12 Sarruate’s novels, therefore, seem to carry out Rousseau’s rebellion against a deceitful and hypocritical society, exposing the inner life of the self as it explodes into scenes that expose the “life-beat of a hell in which we are condemned to going ‘eternally round and round,’ where all appearances are penetrated but no firm ground is ever reached.”13 Unlike Sarraute, however, who understands that the interiority of the heart is nothing other than the ceaseless tumult of its moods and sentiments, Rousseau claims to have found an autonomous realm of the heart beyond the tumult—a silence, as it were—that provides firm ground not only for the self-intimacy of the amour-de-soi-meme (self-love) but also for the ground of the political. Worse, for Arendt, he locates this firm ground in one of these sentiments, namely, pity.
The problem for Arendt is that pity, like all sentiments, is boundless. Insofar as for her the space of the political is by definition a space of limit and boundaries,14 this sentiment actually destroys the political, which is Arendt’s claim in her analysis of the role of pity in the French Revolution. At the same time, the sentiment of pity is self-disclosive rather than world-disclosive, the latter being the mark of all properly political affects. While Rousseau seems to claim that the sentiment of pity provides a relation to others through pity at the other’s suffering, in fact, on his own account, pity discloses the self as independent and autonomous, free from the plurality that for Arendt is the condition for the public space. In Emile, Rousseau is explicit that the sentiment of pity provoked by the suffering others is a self-sentiment: “I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am more interested in him for love of myself, and the reason for the precept is in nature itself, which inspires in me the desire of my well-being in whatever place I feel my existence.”15 Rousseau’s three maxims of pity underscore pity’s role as a self-feeling rather than a feeling of the other: (1) pity is only felt for those who are worse off than oneself; (2) pity is felt only for suffering from which one does not feel exempt; and (3) pity is measured by the suffering that the self attributes to another. In all three maxims, the sentiment of pity is tied to self-feeling. Emile feels a sense of well-being when encountering someone unhappier; a similar “self-feeling” is at work when he feels pity for those whose misfortunes might also befall him. The third maxim follows from th is: the suffering of the other is measured by the self’s imagined suffering and not by the other who is actually suffering. In other words, pity is oddly self-pity, a pity for the self who imagines how it would feel if it experienced suffering similar to the other’s suffering; at the same time, pity provides a sense of well-being vis-à-vis the suffering other. Indeed, Rousseau’s point in exposing Emile to the suffering of others is to increase his own amour-de-soi-meme.
Rousseau refers to pity in the Second Discourse as a “virtue all the more universal and useful to man as it precedes the exercise of all reflection in him, and so Natural that even the Beast sometimes shows evident signs of it.”16 Rousseau goes on to argue that the force of natural pity is the voice of conscience: “There is in the depths of souls, then, an innate principle of justice and virtue according to which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our actions and those of others as good or bad. It is to this principle that I give the name conscience.”17 Conscience is the natural, pre-reflective voice of pity. More importantly for the later discussion of the sovereign general will, reason, that is, the ability to adopt the deliberative general standpoint, has its roots in the sentiment of pity and in the natural voice of conscience.
At the same time, the sentiment of pity supports Rousseau’s first principle of the heart: the desire for self-preservation and a sense of well-being. Insofar as self-preservation is something human beings share with other animals, Rousseau argues that our sense of “well-being” is the natural sentiment of our freedom, which, he argues, is a higher good than life itself.18 Arendt agrees with Leo Strauss’s assertion that Rousseau can be called the “first philosopher of freedom,” insofar as for Rousseau the individual free will is a good in itself: freedom is the fundamental good, and it is that which defines the nature of the human being in its independence from other human beings.19 With philosophical origins in Augustine, Rousseau shifts the location of freedom from a public space of action to the interiority of the self. As Arendt puts it, “Because of the philosophic shift from action to will-power, from freedom as a state of being manifest in action to the liberum arbitrium, the ideal of freedom ceased to be virtuosity . . . and became sovereignty, the ideal of freedom became sovereignty, the ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them.”20 Rousseau, according to Arendt, “has remained the most consistent representative of the theory of sovereignty, which he derived directly from the will, so that he could conceive of political power in the strict image of individual will-power.”21 As we have seen, Rousseau’s notion of willpower is rooted in the sentiment of pity, located in the intimacy of the heart. In other words, Rousseau’s models his notion of sovereignty on the sphere of intimacy. Following Arendt, it is not too much to claim that when Rousseau brings intimacy into the public space, it becomes sovereign intimacy. Again, insofar as pity is the sentiment that reveals the interior sense of independence, it is unavoidable that pity becomes the sentiment of sovereignty: boundless, limitless, and therefore tyrannical.
Arendt cites Rousseau directly on the consequences of this “extreme individualism,” wherein Rousseau held that in an ideal state in which factions were to be avoided, “the citizens had no communications with one another” and “each citizen should think only his own thoughts,”22 arguing that “this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.”23 The equation of free will and sovereignty leads either to the denial of freedom or to the willful domination of one group over another in the name of freedom. In both cases, violence is inseparable from sovereignty because “of the fact of human non-sovereignty,” the latter understood by Arendt as the human capacity of acting in concert with others:
Under human conditions, which are determined by the fact that not man but men live on the earth, freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the “general will” of an organized group.24
To go further, the sovereign and powerful will of the nation is the generalized version of the unified subjective will. Here, Rousseau again follows Augustine who discovers in the Confessions that his inability to convert is tied to a will divided against itself. This is his dilemma: “I will and I cannot.”25 A powerful will is therefore possible only if the will is one with itself. In On Revolution, Arendt points out that “the will if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible, a divided will would be inconceivable: there is no possible mediating between wills as there is between opinions.”26 Thus, she argues, Rousseau’s sovereign general will replaces a political notion of consent (with its connotations of deliberation and plurality of opinion) with the notion of a will “which essentially excludes all processes of exchange of opinions and an eventual agreement between them.”27
As we saw at the outset of this chapter, on Arendt’s reading, Rousseau’s discovery of the realm of the heart’s intimacy emerges out of a rebellion against the social. Arendt points out that Rousseau’s rebellion took “took place before the principle of equality . . . had the time to assert itself in either the social or the political realms.”28 Her suggestion is that Rousseau bases his understanding of political equality on the model of the social, “for society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest.”29 As we have seen, this is also true of Rousseau’s sovereign general will, which brooks no difference or distinction among the citizens, instead insisting on the unanimity of consent. Moreover, she points out that society “expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”30 Hence, it is no surprise on Arendt’s reading that the education of Emile, Rousseau’s model citizen, concludes with an explicit mention of Emile’s docility. Returning to his teacher with news of the impending birth of his child, Emile assures the former “master” that he will remain true to his education in educating the newborn: “Advise us and govern us. We shall be docile . . . . Guide me so that I can imitate you.”31 An education in freedom understood as an interior sense of independence, fostered through a sentiment of pity at the suffering of others that gives an enhanced sense of individual well-being, produces the docile and conforming citizen, who out of the intimacy of his heart obeys the sovereign general will.
By way of conclusion, it seems to me that if Arendt had followed more closely those moments in her reading of Rousseau wherein she shows the inseparable connection between the intimacy of the heart, rooted in the sentiment of pity, and Rousseau’s notion of the general will, she would have been on much firmer ground in her analysis of the role of the social in On Revolution. Rather than locating the social question in the sentiment of pity and the “unifying cry for bread,” her all too brief analysis in The Human Condition of Rousseau and his rebellion of the heart suggests that the social question is instead tied to a sentiment of pity inseparably connected to a notion of free will that, in turn, serves as the model for Rousseau’s sovereign general will with its demand for the uniform conformity of its members. The inseparable connection between the intimate sense of pity and freedom perverts the political question into the social, not the cry for bread. Her continual slippage in her analysis of the social question between the sentiment of pity and the outrage on the streets of Paris against the material conditions of poverty suggests that she is implicitly aware of the difference. Outrage is for her a properly political affect, one that that she addresses in several places in her work.
As an example, I conclude with her reading of Bertolt Brecht, who provides her with the term “dark times” as a description of a world no longer illuminated by the light of the public:
I borrow the term from Brecht’s “To Posterity,” which mentions the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair “when there was only wrong and no outrage,” the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse.32
“Outrage,” “legitimate hatred,” and “well-founded wrath” ought to be the proper political responses by those living in a world awash in hunger, massacres, and deep, pervasive inequality. Given Arendt’s claims regarding the political importance of outrage and anger as proper affective responses to worldly injustices, her discussion of les enragés who appear on the streets of Paris during the French Revolution is surprising, to say the least. As I have shown, Arendt’s reading of Rousseau’s rebellion of the heart shows the intimate connection between pity and free will, on the one hand, and sovereignty, on the other. On Arendt’s own reading, sovereign intimacy perverts the political into the social, not the outraged cry for bread that unites political actors in political solidarity. As I showed briefly at the outset of this chapter, Arendt distinguishes between the social and the economic, the latter for her taking the form of the political and thereby inviting political resistance against it. In other words, Arendt’s critique of Rousseau is well-founded when it remains in the intimacy of the heart, but needs to be completely rewritten from her own embrace of legitimate political anger when she finds herself among the outraged on the streets of Paris.33
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Fragwurdige Traditionsbestande im Politischen Denken der Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1957).
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 123.
3 Ibid., 123.
4 Ibid., 125.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 38–39.
6 Ibid., 39.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Hannah Arendt, “Review of Nathalie Sarraute, Golden Fruits,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 215.
12 Ibid., 216.
13 Ibid.
14 See, for example, Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993). Arendt states, “Philosophy may conceive of the earth as the homeland of mankind and of one unwritten law, eternal and valid for all. Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; it laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality” (81–82).
15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Harold Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 225.
16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (London: Cambridge University Press), 152.
17 Ibid., 177.
18 This is the basis of Rousseau’s disagreement with Locke on the proper ends of government. For Locke, the right to self-preservation carries with it the right to appropriate in order to preserve. I have the right not only to self-preservation but also to the means of self-preservation, which is cultivated through one’s labor, namely, property. Therefore, the end of government for Locke is to protect private property. Rousseau disagrees. Because freedom is a higher good than life, the end of government is to protect the freedom of the individual (which will also include his or her self-preservation).
19 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 278.
20 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 163.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 163.
23 Ibid., 164.
24 Ibid., 164–65.
25 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. John Ryan (New York: Image Books, 1960), 196.
26 Hannah Arendt, On Re volution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 76.
27 Ibid.
28 Arendt, Human Condition, 39.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 40.
31 Rousseau, Emile, 480.
32 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, viii.
33 For a longer discussion of Arendt’s affirmation of outrage or anger as a properly political affect, please see my article, “Recovering the Sensus Communis: Arendt’s Phenomenology of Political Affects,” in Phenomenology and the Political, ed. S. Wester Gurley and Geoff Pfeifer (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 3–18.