My thanks to Ann Wochiler for her letters and for providing me with copies of several documents from Robert Wokler’s papers; to Norman Geras for bibliographical assistance; and to Chris Bertram, Joshua Cherniss, Bryan Garsten, Ryan Hanley, Raj Patel, Jennifer Pitts and Josephine Quinn for their comments on a draft of this introduction.
1. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1985), vol. 2, p. 643.
2. Many of the relevant texts in this debate are now easily available in the second volume of R. Masters and C. Kelly (eds.), The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover, N.H., 1992). (The editors offer their own brief, Straussian reply to Wokler’s argument on p. 200, n. 3.)
3. ‘La Querelle des Bouffons and the Italian Liberation of France: A Study of Revolutionary Foreplay’, in C. Duckworth and H. Le Grand (eds.), ‘Studies in the Eighteenth Century’, vol. 6 (Papers presented at the Sixth David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Melbourne 1983), special issue, Eighteenth-Century Life 11, n. s., 1 (February 1987): 94–116.
4. ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in P. Jones (ed.), Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 145–68.
5. To take perhaps the most extreme instance of this phenomenon, an ambitious series of interlocking arguments about the French Revolution, Saint-Simon, ‘ideology’, the ‘passage from political to social science’, the Abbé Sieyès, Jacobinism, Hegel and the origins of the modern nation-state appeared in various combinations and permutations across a number of works, spread over two decades, without ever being set down in any obviously definitive version. ‘Saint- Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987); ‘Hegel’s Rousseau: The General Will and Civil Society’, in S.-E. Liedman (ed.), ‘Deutscher Idealismus’, special issue, Arachne 8 (1993): 7–45; ‘Regressing towards Post-Modernity’, in L. Clark and G. Lafrance (eds.), Rousseau and Criticism / Rousseau et la critique, Pensée Libre no. 5 (Ottawa, 1995), pp. 263–72; ‘The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel’s Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 35 (Spring–Summer 1997): 71–89; ‘Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror’, Political Theory 26.1 (February 1998): 33–55; ‘The Enlightenment Project as Betrayed by Modernity’, History of European Ideas 24.4–5 (1998): 301–13; ‘The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity’, in J. Heilbron, L. Magnusson, and B. Wittrock (eds.), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 20, 1996 (Dordrecht, 1998), pp. 35–76; ‘The Enlightenment, the Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity’, in both N. Geras and R. Wokler (eds.), The Enlightenment and Modernity (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 161–83, and in Discussion Paper Series 46 (Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study, 1999); ‘From the Moral and Political Sciences to the Sciences of Society by Way of the French Revolution’, in B. S. Byrd, J. Hruschka and J. C. Joerden (eds.), ‘The Origin and Development of the Moral Sciences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century’, special issue, Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik / Annual Review of Law and Ethics 8 (2000): 33–45; ‘Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau’, in both R. Grant and P. Stewart (eds.), Rousseau and the Ancients / Rousseau et les anciens, Pensée Libre no. 8 (Montreal, 2001), pp. 418–43, and in P. Riley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge, 2001); ‘Repatriating Modernity’s Alleged Debts to the Enlightenment: French Revolutionary Social Science and the Genesis of the Nation-State’, in P. Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question (London, 2002), pp. 62–80; ‘Political Modernity’s Critical Juncture in the Course of the French Revolution’, in N. Witoszek and L. Trägårdh (eds.), Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden (New York, 2002), pp. 202–18; and ‘Ideology and the Origins of Social Science’, in M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 688–709.
6. Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, ed. H. Hardy (Princeton, 2006); Wokler, ‘A Guide to Isaiah Berlin’s Political Ideas in the Romantic Age’, History of Political Thought 29.2 (Summer 2008): 344–69.
7. ‘The Enlightenment, the Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity’, in Geras and Wokler, The Enlightenment and Modernity, p. 179.
8. M. Hobson, J. T. A. Leigh and Wokler (eds.), Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century: Essays in Memory of R. A. Leigh, (Oxford, 1992); J. Mali and Wokler (eds.), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 2003); Wokler (ed.), Rousseau and Liberty (Manchester, 1995); C. Fox, R. Porter and Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, (Berkeley, 1995); Geras and Wokler (eds.), The Enlightenment and Modernity; Goldie and Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought. For my own thoughts on this last volume, see Christopher Brooke, ‘Light from the Fens?’, New Left Review 2.44 (March–April 2007): 151–60.
9. Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (London, 1983); The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–1762 (London, 1991); The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (London, 1997).
10. John Plamenatz, Man and Society: Political and Social Theories from Machiavelli to Marx, 3 vols., a new edition, rev. by M. E. Plamenatz and R. Wokler (London, 1992); Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh vols. 47–49 (Oxford, 1988–89); Political Writings, by Diderot, ed. and trans. J. Hope Mason and R. Wokler (Cambridge, 1992).
11. Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001), p. viii.
12. ‘The Influence of Diderot on the Political Theory of Rousseau’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1975): 55–111.
1. I am much indebted to David Adams, Dennis Austin, Marjorie Gray, George Kerferd, Gill Sainsbury, Hillel Steiner and Ann Wochiler for their guidance and assistance in the preparation of this text.
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Paris, 1962), p. 145.
3. Lévi-Strauss, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de l’homme’, in Samuel Baud-Bovy et al. (eds.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Neuchâtel, 1962). More recent and extensive accounts of Rousseau’s anthropology can be found in Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971); Victor Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris, 1974); and Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976).
4. Robert Ardrey, The Social Contract (London, 1970), p. 96.
5. See, for instance, Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (London, 1967), pp. 13–14, 78–79.
6. See especially Ardrey, African Genesis (London, 1961), pp. 148, 150, 154–55; The Territorial Imperative, pp. 21, 30, 289; and The Hunting Hypothesis (London, 1976), p. 190.
7. See Ardrey, The Social Contract, p. 96. The enthusiasm Ardrey shows for Rousseau in this work apparently owes much to the influence of Roger Masters (see ibid., p. 99), the distinguished author of The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, 1968).
8. Though Lévi-Strauss is mentioned in a parenthetical aside in Ardrey’s latest book, The Hunting Hypothesis, p. 59.
9. See The Petty Papers, ed. the Marquis of Landsdowne (London, 1927), vol. 2, p. 27.
10. See Perrault et al., Suite des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris, 1676), p. 126.
11. For general introductions to Enlightenment anthropology, both physical and cultural, see especially Carminella Biondi, Mon frère, tu es mon esclave! (Pisa, 1973); Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières; Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), chs. 11–14; John Greene, The Death of Adam (Ames, Iowa, 1959); Georges Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, l’homme au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1972); Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968), ch. 2; Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage [(Cambridge, 1976)]; Franck Tinland, L’Homme sauvage (Paris, 1968); and Herbert Wendt, In Search of Adam (Boston, 1956), chs. 1–5. A fairly representative sample of the wide range of contemporary views about the relation between nature and culture in anthropological theory may be drawn from the following works: Montague Ashley Montagu (ed.), Culture: Man’s Adaptive Dimension (Oxford, 1968); Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving (New Haven, 1962); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London, 1975); Serge Moscovici, La société contre nature (Paris, 1972); Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (London, 1972); and Leslie White, The Evolution of Culture (New York, 1959).
12. For a splendid treatment of these contrasts, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh, 1973).
13. See the passage from the fifth volume (1755) of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1749–1804) reproduced in the Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, ed. Jean Piveteau (Paris, 1954), p. 359a.
14. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–[95]), vol. 3, p. 208, n. 10 [DI 204 n. 10].
15. Ibid., p. 134 [DI 134].
16. See ibid., pp. 140–41 and p. 208, n. 10 [DI 139–40 and 204 n. 10].
17. See ibid., p. 139 [DI 138–39].
18. ‘Orang-utan’ is originally a Malay term meaning ‘man of the woods’, and it is now applied exclusively to one species of anthropoid ape (Pongo pygmaeus) found in Borneo and Sumatra only. In European letters, however, the word was first employed (by Nicolaas Tulp in his Observationum medicarum of 1641) in connection with the African chimpanzee, and until about the end of the eighteenth century these two species, and many other great apes, both real and fictitious, as well, were regularly assimilated under the generic name ‘orang-utan’. Some of the confusions about the identification of this creature in the Enlightenment are discussed in my ‘Tyson and Buffon on the Orang-utan’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 155 (1976): 2301–19. For Rousseau’s comments on the orang-utan in his ‘Lettre à Philopolis’ (Bonnet), see OC, vol. 3, pp. 234–35 [DI 227].
19. Each of these figures is cited in a long passage from the Histoire générale des voyages (Paris, 1746–89), vol. 5 (1748), pp. 87–89, that Rousseau quotes almost in full in note 10 of the Discours sur l’inégalité.
20. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 209–11, n. 10 [DI 205–08 n. 10].
21. See ibid., p. 211 [DI 208 n. 10].
22. If anything, the black man was for Rousseau more like the natural savage than was the white man (see ibid., p. 137, note [DI 136]). In ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro’, Journal of Negro History 21 (1936): 294–303, Mercer Cook makes the interesting point, too seldom remembered, that Thomas Day’s poem The Dying Negro was dedicated to Rousseau (in the 3rd ed. of 1775). For Buffon’s reflections on skin colour and degeneration, see especially his Histoire naturelle, vol. 3 (1749), pp. 502–03; the Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, pp. 354b–55a; and the commentary on this subject of Phillip Sloan, ‘The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle’, in Harold Pagliaro (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 3, (Cleveland, 1973), pp. 293–321.
23. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 208, n. 10 [DI 204 n. 10].
24. Rousseau to Hume, 29 March 1766, in R. A. Leigh (ed), Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–[1998]), vol. 29, no. 5129, p. 66. The suggestion that apes or monkeys remain silent for good reasons of their own, especially to avoid work and enslavement, appeared at least as early as 1623 in Richard Jobson’s The Golden Trade.
25. See especially Arnout Vosmaer, ‘Description de l’Orang-Outang’ (Amsterdam, 1778), pp. 12–13; Buffon, ‘Addition à l’article des Orangs-outangs’, Histoire naturelle, suppl. vol. 7 (1789), pp. 15–16; and Petrus Camper, ‘De l’orang-outang, et de quelques autres espèces de singes’, in his Oeuvres (Paris, 1803), vol. 1, pp. 46–51.
26. Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 12, appendix 286, pp. 301–06 [‘Rousseau, hitherto . . . Citizen of Geneva, but from now on, ORANG-UTAN’].
27. Particularly as Sir Oran Haut-ton in Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt of 1817.
28. See Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 244. With regard to the idea of evolution in the Enlightenment, see also Peter Bowler, ‘Evolutionism in the Enlightenment’, History of Science 12 (1974): 159–83; William Bynum, ‘The Great Chain of Being after Forty Years: An Appraisal’, History of Science 13 (1975): 1–28; Bentley Glass et al. (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin, 1745–1859, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1968), chs. 2–9; Emile Guyénot, Les sciences de la vie aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: L’idée d’évolution (Paris, 1941); and Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1963).
29. Speculation about the possible lineages of man and the taxonomic classification of hominoid fossils are today in a state of perhaps greater flux than ever before. For one of the more recent surveys of the subject, see Paleoanthropology: Morphology and Paleocology, ed. Russell Tuttle (The Hague, 1975).
30. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 211, n. 10 [DI 208 n. 10].
31. In his Philosophy of Natural History (Edinburgh, 1790–99), vol. 1, p. 521, Smellie maintained that ‘Man, in his lowest condition, is evidently linked, both in the form of his body and the capacity of his mind, to the large and small orang-outang’. This contention may be contrasted, for instance, with that of Jean-Baptiste Audebert, who, in his Histoire naturelle des singes et des makis (Paris, 1799–1800), asserted that the orang-utan was not a type of man, or ‘une espèce demi-humaine’ [‘a half-human species’], but rather an animal which ‘dans l’ordre naturel, se place immédiatement après l’homme’ [‘in the natural order, stands immediately after man’] (pp. 12–13). By the early nineteenth century the gulf between orang-utans and men once again appeared so wide that some commentators found sufficient room between them to introduce the Negro as an intermediate species—a thesis challenged by Friedrich Tiedemann in his ‘On the Brain of the Negro, Compared with That of the European and the Orang-Outang’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 2 (1836): 497–527.
32. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 147 and pp. 216–17, n. 12 [DI 145 and 213–16 n. 12]. The orang-utan’s general promiscuity, however, was so widely taken for granted in the eighteenth century that some critics, such as Jefferson, for example (in his Notes on the State of Virginia of 1785), even assumed that the creature was more sexually attracted to Negro women than to females of its own species.
33. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 160 and p. 199, n. 5 [DI 157 and 193–94 n. 5].
34. Cf. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 159–60 [DI 156–57] and Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (London, 1869), vol. 1, p. 91.
35. Cf. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 140 [DI 139]; John MacKinnon, ‘The Behaviour and Ecology of Wild Orang-utans’, Animal Behaviour 22 (1974): 51, 65–67; MacKinnon, In Search of the Red Ape (London, 1974), p. 64; and Peter Rodman, ‘Population Composition and Adaptive Organisation among Orang-utans of the Kutai Reserve’, in Richard Michael and John Crook (eds.), Comparative Ecology and Behaviour of Primates (London, 1973), pp. 187, 195–97, 206. MacKinnon’s general conclusion (In Search of the Red Ape, p. 64) is that the orang-utan appears to be ‘a solitary nomad’. According to Rodman (p. 197), ‘The dispersion of orang-utan populations and the simplicity of social relations within them are both striking and disappointing when compared with the complexity of social structures found among other primates’.
36. See The Territorial Imperative, pp. 3, 116, 223, 252–53 and Ardrey, The Social Contract, pp. 40, 67, 88.
37. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 135 [DI 134–35]. There are useful accounts of primitive man’s forms of nourishment, according to the anthropological theory of Rousseau, in Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, pp. 122–25, and Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique, pp. 245–56.
38. The Hunting Hypothesis, p. 104.
39. See Ardrey, The Social Contract, p. 275 and The Hunting Hypothesis, p. 33. Cf. African Genesis, pp. 149–50. Ardrey’s reflections on chimpanzees in captivity seem to me particularly odd in the light of his cautionary remarks elsewhere (see The Territorial Imperative, p. 215) against our making inferences about natural behaviour from the conduct of animals in zoos. In fact, however, there has been evidence, most of it in the past ten years or so, that wild chimpanzees hunt and kill other mammals, including baboons and red colobus monkeys. The fullest treatments of this subject can be found in Jane van Lawick-Goodall, ‘The Behaviour of Free-living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve’, Animal Behaviour Monographs 1 (1968): 161–311 and Geza Teleki, The Predatory Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees (Lewisburg, Pa., 1973). In The Hunting Hypothesis (see pp. 35–36) Ardrey comments upon some of this evidence, which he admits came as a surprise to him, and he also stresses the importance of a brief report on chimpanzee cannibalism, regarded by its author, though (J. D. Bygott, in Nature 18 [August 1972]), as either ‘aberrant behavior’ or an unusual ‘adaptive response to social or ecological pressures’. The evidence of chimpanzee predation is, I think, quite inconclusive as well. First, the sightings are still relatively scanty and are mainly from the Gombe Stream Reserve where it may well be, as Teleki suggests, that the recent liquidation of most large terrestrial carnivores has left an unoccupied niche only latterly filled by chimpanzees. Second, both van Lawick-Goodall and Teleki maintain that the hunting activities of chimps provide no more than infrequent supplements to basically vegetarian diets, so that, as Ardrey himself acknowledges, their kills seem to be unrelated to any need for food. Third, they are predators of a highly extraordinary kind, since they more commonly tolerate and intermingle with their prey, young baboons and chimpanzees even often grooming one another. At any rate there is, to my knowledge, no evidence as yet of predation among the other great apes, including the orang-utan—except, of course, in zoos.
40. See, for instance, the remarks of Ashley Montagu in his introduction to the facsimile reprint of Orang-Outang (London, 1966), p. 12.
41. See the following passage from Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, article ‘Luxe’, in his Oeuvres complètes (Kehl, 1784–89), vol. 41, p. 506, n. 3: ‘Tout ennemi du luxe doit croire avec Rousseau que l’état de bonheur & de vertu pour l’homme est celui, non de sauvage, mais d’orang-outang’ [‘Every enemy of luxury should believe with Rousseau that the state of happiness and virtue for man is not the state of the savage, but that of the orang-utan’]. This statement does not figure in any of the editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique published in Voltaire’s lifetime, nor in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie frequently incorporated in expanded versions of the Dictionnaire. It ought strictly to have been printed in his Mélanges, but several publishers of his works have included it in the format first presented in the Kehl edition. Jeroom Vercruysse, the distinguished Voltaire scholar, has even suggested to me that the passage may not have been drafted by Voltaire himself, though in the absence of any manuscript evidence my guess is that it is one of his own compositions. See also Voltaire’s letter to Rousseau of 30 August 1755 (Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 3, no. 317, pp. 156–62) on his receipt of the copy of the Discours sur l’inégalité which Rousseau had sent him.
42. Thus Aristotle, for instance, remarked in his Politics (book 1, ch. 2) that human language was distinct from the mere animal emission of sounds, because instead of signifying pleasures and pains it served to declare what was just and unjust. And Hobbes in his Leviathan (ch. 14) observed that ‘To make Covenants with bruit Beasts, is impossible’.
43. Diderot, Suite du rêve de d’Alembert, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux (Paris, 1875–77), vol. 2, p. 190 [‘Speak, and I will baptize you’]. Jacques Scherer has employed this quotation in the very title of his general study of Diderot’s manner of thought and style of literary expression, Le Cardinal et l’orang-outang: Essai sur les inversions et les distances dans la pensée de Diderot (Paris, 1972). About the passage itself, he writes (p. 39), ‘Eclairante et fulgurante parole, qui désigne un seuil, une accession à l’humanité, une solennisation de l’émergence de l’humain par le langage’ [‘Illuminating and striking speech, which designates a threshold, an attainment of humanity, a solemnization of the emergence of the human through language’]. The Rêve de d’Alembert, first published after Diderot’s death, dates from 1769.
44. See especially David Premack, Intelligence in Ape and Man (Hillsdale, N.J., 1976), pp. 14–15. Excellent critical accounts of some of the recent experiments in teaching languages to chimpanzees are provided by Roger Brown in ‘The First Sentences of Child and Chimpanzee’, in Brown, Psycholinguistics: Selected Papers (New York, 1970), pp. 208–31, as well as in the same author’s A First Language (London, 1973), pp. 32–51. Despite their differences, both Brown and Premack, I believe, stand quite apart from Ardrey (see The Hunting Hypothesis, pp. 33–34) and Eugene Linden (see his Apes, Men and Language [New York, 1975], pp. 70–76, 187–88, 215–16), who make much bolder claims about the linguistic capacities of apes and the relation between animal and human systems of communication in general.
45. Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), in his Sämmtliche Werke (Berlin, 1877–1913), vol. 5, pp. 44–45 [‘Apes always ape but they have never imitated’].
46. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 210, n. 10 [DI 207 n. 10].
47. See ibid., pp. 146–47 [DI 144–46].
48. Cf. Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746), parts 1.ii.4, §§ 35 and 38, 2.i.1, § 6, and 2.i.9, §§ 82–83, in the Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris, 1947–51), vol. 1, pp. 19, 61, 83; and Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, OC, vol. 3, pp. 146–51 [DI 144–49]. I have considered the relation between Rousseau’s linguistic philosophy and that of Condillac at length in my Rousseau’s ‘Discours sur l’inégalité’ and Its Sources, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (forthcoming, 1978). [This project was not completed, but the issues are discussed in the third chapter of Robert Wokler, Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language (New York, 1987).] On this subject see also Jacques Derrida, ‘La linguistique de Rousseau’, Revue internationale de philosophie 82 (1967): 448–52, and Jean Starobinski, ‘Rousseau et l’origine des langues’, in Starobinski, Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1971), pp. 360–64.
49. See Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 125, 132 [DI 126–27, 132], and his draft version of the Contrat social dating from about 1756 (Manuscrit de Genève I.2), in OC, vol. 3, p. 284 [GM 155]. According to the philosophers of natural law—particularly Grotius and Pufendorf—whom Rousseau challenged in his political writings, individuals in the state of nature must generally have been marked by a desiderium or an appetitus societatis.
50. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 162, 168–69 [DI 159, 164–66], and the Essai sur l’origine des langues (probably dating largely from around 1760), ed. Charles Porset, 2nd ed. (Bordeaux, 1970), ch. 9, p. 113 [OC, vol. 5, p. 402; EOL 274].
51. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 169–70 [DI 166–67].
52. See ibid., p. 164 [DI 161]; the ‘Dernière réponse’ (1752) to Charles Borde’s first Discours sur les avantages des sciences et des arts (1751), in OC, vol. 3, p. 80 [LR 70–71]; and the preface to Narcisse (1753), in OC, vol. 2, pp. 969–70, note [PN 101–02, note].
53. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 167 [DI 163–64].
54. See ibid., p. 171 [DI 167].
55. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, chs. 10 and 11, pp. 129, 131, 135 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 407, 408, 409; EOL 279, 280, 281]. An illuminating treatment of these passages is provided by Derrida in his De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), pp. 318–22. This work also contains an important chapter on Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological linguistics in relation to the ideas of Rousseau on that subject.
56. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 19, pp. 189–91 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 425–26; EOL 296–9].
57. See ibid., ch. 20, pp. 197–201 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 428–29; EOL 298–99].
58. Ibid., chs. 10 and 20, pp. 131 and 197–99 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 407–08 and 428–29; EOL 279–80, 298–99]. I have discussed these themes more fully in my ‘Rameau, Rousseau, and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 117 (1974): 220–38, and in ‘Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution’, in Robert Brissenden and J. Christopher Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 4 (Canberra, [1979, pp. 251–83]).
59. See, for instance, Diderot’s Suite de l’apologie de l’abbé de Prades (1752), in his Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 467. For Rousseau’s use of the expression Peuples policés, see his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1751), in OC, vol. 3, p. 7 [DSA 7].
60. Rousseau, Confessions (drafted mainly in the mid to late 1760s), in OC, vol. 1, p. 404 [C 377: ‘no people would ever be other than the nature of their government made them’]. Cf. his preface to Narcisse, in OC, vol. 2, p. 969 [PN 101], and his Discours sur l’économie politique (1755), in OC, vol. 3, p. 251 [PE 12].
61. Rousseau, Contrat social (1762) III.9, in OC, vol. 3, p. 420, note [SC 105: ‘Such was their ignorance that they called humanity what was a beginning of servitude’]. The quotation is from Tacitus, Agricola, 21.
62. Edward Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 168, 560.
63. See, for example, Rousseau, Contrat social II.12, in OC, vol. 3, p. 394 [SC 81: ‘the force of habit’].
64. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 212–13, n. 10 [DI 209–11, n. 10: [‘the ruck of Philophasters’ at p. 210]. See also the section of the fifth book of Emile (1762) which Rousseau entitled ‘Des Voyages’ (OC, vol. 4, p. 826). For accounts of his intellectual debt to the travel literature on exotic nations available in the eighteenth century, see especially Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1913), pp. 341–65, and Georges Pire, ‘Rousseau et les relations de voyages’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 56 (1956): 355–78. The best general study of the significance which was attached in the Enlightenment to such expeditions is provided by Duchet in her Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières, pp. 25–226.
65. See, for instance, Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, pp. 18–22; Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (eds.), Evolution and Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), chs. 4 and 5; and Tiger and Fox, The Imperial Animal, pp. 37–38.
66. This proposition has been advanced by Konrad Lorenz, among others, in his On Aggression (London, 1967), p. 224.
67. See Roger Masters, ‘Genes, Language, and Evolution’, Semiotica 2 (1970): 304–13.
68. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 171 [DI 167].
69. Masters, ‘Genes, Language, and Evolution’, p. 309.
70. In Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (see especially pp. 22–33, 84–87, 194, 315–16), Starobinski provides an eloquent interpretation of almost the whole of Rousseau’s thought in the light of his explicit and implied views on the nature of transparency and obfuscation in human affairs.
71. Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in OC, vol. 3, p. 7 [DSA 6: ‘the Sciences, Letters, Arts . . . spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden’]. A perceptive treatment of this passage in the context of Rousseau’s general contempt for the amour-propre of intellectuals is supplied by Judith Shklar in her Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 109–12.
72. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 138 [DI 138: ‘the state of reflection is a state against Nature . . . the man who meditates is a depraved animal’]. These lines contrast sharply with the following statement made by Diderot in his article ‘Droit naturel’ for the fifth volume (1755) of the Encyclopédie (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 14, p. 301): ‘Celui qui ne veut pas raisonner, renonçant à la qualité d’homme, doit être traité comme un être dénaturé’ [‘Whoever declines to seek that truth forfeits his status as a man and should be treated by the rest of his kind as a wild beast’, as trans. in R. Wokler and J. Hope Mason (eds.), Political Writings, by Diderot (Cambridge, p. 19)].
73. Geertz, ‘The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Lévi-Strauss’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 355.
74. Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962), pp. 326–27 [‘particular humanities into a general one’]. The quotation is from Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 8, p. 89 [OC, vol. 5, p. 394; EOL 266–67: ‘in order to study man one has to learn to cast one’s glance afar’].
75. Confessions, p. 3 [‘exactly according to nature and in all its truth’].
76. Manuscrit de Genève I.2, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 286, 287, 288 [GM 157, 158, 159: ‘But where is the man who can thus separate himself from himself? We conceive of the general society in terms of our particular societies . . . although there is no natural and general society among men’].
77. La Pensée sauvage, pp. 326, 327 [‘the idea of a general humanity, to which ethnographic reducation leads’]. In an article entitled ‘The Social Anthropology of Rousseau’s Emile’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1974): 137–81, Godelieve Mercken-Spaas labours under what I take to be a misapprehension that Rousseau offered an account of the universal attributes of man which is similar, even ‘identical’, to that of Lévi-Strauss. The passages from Emile which she cites refer to generic (and sentimental) constants of human nature that Rousseau supposed were always masked and distorted by culture, whereas Lévi-Strauss regards cultural systems as symbolic manifestations of our uniform mental categories.
78. [Marshall] Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology (London, 1977), p. 15.
79. Ardrey, The Social Contract, p. 101.
80. Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in OC, vol. 3, p. 20 [DSA 18: ‘herds of cattle’], and Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 183, 182, 154 [DI 178, 177, 152: ‘Beasts that are slaves of instinct’; ‘Animals born free and abhorring captivity’; ‘the mournful lowing of Cattle entering a Slaughter-House’].
81. Rousseau referred explicitly to documented evidence of human encounters with vampires in his Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont (1763), vol. 4, p. 987, and in the first draft of Emile, that is, the Manuscrit Favre, probably dating from 1758–59 (see La ‘Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard’ de Rousseau, ed. Pierre-Maurice Masson [Fribourg and Paris, 1914], pp. 331, n. 3, and 332). In the Manuscrit Favre, in OC, vol. 4, p. 231, he also commented upon ‘les monstres de l’imagination’ [‘the monsters of the imagination’] conceived by tormented and degraded men who lead ‘une vie molle et sedentaire’ [‘a soft and sedentary life’]. For his accounts of the demonic nature of religion in general, and of priests that savour the deaths of the individuals they tend in particular, see especially his letter to Voltaire of 18 August 1756, Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4, no. 424, p. 40; the Manuscrit Favre, in OC, vol. 4, pp. 227–28; and La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), in OC, vol. 2, part 6, letter 11, pp. 717–18. I am most grateful to Christopher Frayling, a leading authority on eighteenth-century vampirism, for his permission to incorporate here a few sentences from our unpublished paper on orang-utans and vampires in Rousseau’s anthropology, presented at the XVth International Congress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, August 1977 [later published as ‘From the Orang-utan to the Vampire: Towards an Anthropology of Rousseau’ in R. A. Leigh (ed.), Rousseau after Two Hundred Years (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 109–29].
82. Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, p. 145 [‘i.e. to use the diversity of species as conceptual support for social differentiation’, as trans. in Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston, 1962), p. 101]. See also his ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de l’homme’, pp. 243–44.
83. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 154 [DI 152].
84. See ibid., pp. 136–37, 141, and p. 219, n. 15 [DI 135–37, 140 and 217–18 n. 15].
85. See ibid., p. 142 [DI 141].
86. See ibid, pp. 131, 141, 157–58 [DI 131, 140, 154–56].
87. See Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 256.
88. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 134, 137 and pp. 196–98, n. 3 [DI 134, 137 and 190–92, n. 3]. In his treatment of these passages Goldschmidt (see Anthropologie et politique, pp. 240–45) contends—mistakenly, I believe—that Rousseau’s account of bipedal man precluded the possibility of human evolution in his philosophy.
89. Over the past several years allometry has become a very fashionable subject of speculation in genetic theory. One of the best introductions to the idea is provided by Bernhard Rensch in his Evolution above the Species Level (London, 1959), pp. 133–69.
90. See, for instance, Ralph Holloway Jr., ‘Cranial Capacity and the Evolution of the Human Brain’, in Montagu, Culture: Man’s Adaptive Dimension, pp. 178, 183.
91. Foster to Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, 19 May 1785, quoted in Hugh Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge, 1970), p. 250 [‘But isn’t it true that all birds hold their heads upright; in particular the most stupid ones’].
92. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 142 [DI 141: ‘[T]his distinctive and almost unlimited faculty, is the source of all of man’s miseries . . . it is the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days . . . it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causing his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues to bloom, eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant.’]. See also Rousseau’s letter to Voltaire of 18 August 1756, Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4, [no. 424,] p. 39, and note h, ibid., p. 65.
93. The term was not only ‘brought into vogue’ by Rousseau, as John Pass-more reports in The Perfectibility of Man (London, 1970), p. 179, for, aside from a hint that it may have been employed in conversation by Turgot from around 1750, there is no recorded instance of its use at all, in any European language, prior to that of the Discours sur l’inégalité. As Starobinski has established (see vol. 3, pp. 1317–18), its appearance in the issue of Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire of 15 February 1755 implies little more than that Grimm was likely to have had an advance viewing of the manuscript of the Discours, already in the hands of its publisher the previous autumn. Starobinski notes, moreover, that the term was not incorporated in the fourth (1762) edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, though it appears in the fifth edition (of 1798–99), and he traces its first mention in a work of reference to the Dictionnaire de Trévoux of 1771.
94. Starobinski, Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, p. 24 [‘the form of an accelerated fall into corruption . . . Rousseau takes the religious myth and sets it in historical time’].
95. See, for instance, Rousseau, Contrat social II.8, in OC, vol. 3, p. 385 [SC 72–73].
96. Frances Power Cobbe, The Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself, 3rd ed. (London, 1894), vol. 2, p. 244, quoted in Brian Harrison, ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England’, English Historical Review 88 (1973): 804.
1. Commentaries on the themes just intimated in this paragraph can be found in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge, 2002); Denys Hay, Europe, the Emergence of an Idea, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1968); Federico Chabod, Storia dell’idea d’Europa (Rome, 1959); Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London, 1995); Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson (eds.), The Question of Europe (London, 1997); Alan Milward et al., The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London, 1992).
2. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Le mot civilisation’, originally published in Le Temps de la réflexion in 1983, reprinted in his collection of essays, Le remède dans le mal (Paris, 1989).
3. James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell (London, 1642), sect. 1, p. 8.
4. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1796), ed. G. A. Bonnard (London, 1966), p. 135. For just that reason Howell had encouraged travellers to seek only the company of natives of the countries they visited, since ‘the greatest bane of English Gentlemen abroad’, he remarked (Instructions, sect. 3, p. 32), ‘is too much frequency and communication with their own Countrey-men’.
5. Among the best treatments of the history and itineraries of the Grand Tour known to me are Charles Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Instruction in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, 1978); Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London, 1985); Michèle Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour: Constructing the English Gentleman in Eighteenth-Century France’, History of Education 21 (1992): 241–57; Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 2000), and Ladies of the Grand Tour (London, 2001); Ray William Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas (New York, 1968). On the history of travel and tourism in general, see especially Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2002), and Daniel Roche, Humeurs vagabondes, De la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris, 2003). My greatest debt is to Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London, 1969).
6. See Denis Diderot, Mémoires pour Catherine II, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris, 1966), p. 118.
7. Among the most classic treatments of this subject remain Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1913), and Geoffrey Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature (New York, 1969).
8. In contrasting the objectives of grand tourists from those of earlier voyagers and travellers, I of course do not mean to obscure the distinctions made by other commentators—for instance James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)’, in Hulme and Youngs (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, pp. 37–52—between tourism in the Age of Enlightenment and more widespread forms of tourism that developed later, still less mass tourism such as came to be possible, and prevalent, in the twentieth century. But to my mind the ideological roots of modern tourism, however much more popular, democratic and vulgar it may appear, ought properly to be traced to the Grand Tour. Karl Baedeker’s much appreciated nineteenth-century guidebooks for travellers were direct descendants of the classic treatment of the subject in the Age of the Enlightenment, Thomas Nugent’s The Grand Tour, first published in 1749.
9. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934–50), 3.10 and 5.121.
10. See Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (London, 1760).
11. See E. S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), c. 17 November 1643, 2.85–90.
12. See W. S. Lewis (ed.), Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols. (New Haven, 1937–83), 13.167–68, letter to Richard West, c. 15 May 1739; Arthur Young, Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, & 1789, 2nd ed. (London, 1794), 1.10.
13. Lewis (ed.), Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 14.143, letter to Gray, 19 November 1765.
14. See Howell, Instructions, sect. 11, p. 139. Gibbon, by contrast, found himself at a disadvantage throughout his tour of Italy on account of his having scant mastery of Italian despite his perfect command of French.
15. See Président de Brosses, Lettres familières d’Italie (1740; Brussels, 1995), pref. H. Juin de Brosses to M. de Neuilly, 24 November 1739, p. 148; H. Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), ed. H. Barrows (Ann Arbor, 1967), 1 November 1784, pp. 30–32; and James Edward Smith, A Sketch of a Tour on the Continent, in the Years 1786 and 1787, 3 vols. (London, 1793), 3.124.
16. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 21, para. 8.
17. See J. W. von Goethe, Italienische Reise, ed. Herbert von Einem and Erich Trunz (Hamburg, 1957), remarks of 3 March, 13 March and 19 March 1787, pp. 189–90, 204–06 and 213–14.
18. de Brosses, Lettres familières d’Italie, de Brosses to M. de Neuilly, undated, pp. 167–68.
19. See Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 134.
20. See Lionel Cust and Sidney Coluin, History of the Society of Dilettanti (London, 1898).
21. On the subject of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel to Greece by scholars as distinct from tourists—that is, by professionals rather than amateurs—see especially David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, 1984), and Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers, ch. 4: ‘Greece and the Levant—the Archaeological Appropriation of the Historical Frontier’, pp. 113–49.
22. See Richard Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor, and Greece: or, an Account of a Tour made at the Expense of the Society of Dilettanti, 2 vols. (London, 1817).
23. See Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, 6 vols. (London, 1810–23).
24. See Howell, Instructions, sect. 7, pp. 86–101.
25. See Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), ed. K. Vörlander, J. Kopper and R. Malter (Hamburg, 1980), Bk. I, § 29, p. 69n.
26. For another point of view with regard to these developments, informed by an outsider’s grasp of European history at least as deep and rich as that of anyone I know or have read whose outlook is embraced by it alone, see J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Deconstructing Europe’, in Gowan and Anderson (eds.), The Question of Europe, pp. 297–317. For their forbearance and advice on particular themes I am grateful to Diogo Curto and Anthony Molho. For providing images of each of the plates illustrated here I am much indebted to Helen Chillman, Librarian of the Visual Resources Collection of Yale University’s Art and Architecture Library, and I am also grateful to the Lord Chamberlain for his permission to reproduce Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi.
1. Pamphlets about Rousseau’s connection with the Revolution, and with the debates regarding the convocation of the Estates General that preceded it, actually began to appear as early as the winter of 1788, but the first major work devoted to the subject was Mercier’s De J. J. Rousseau, considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la Révolution (1791).
2. The Lettre appeared on or around 22 November 1753 (see R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, (Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–[98]), vol. 2, p. 233 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 289–330; LFM]).
3. Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–[95]), vol. 1, p. 384 [C 358: ‘It was the time of the great quarrel between the courts and the clergy. The courts had just been dissolved; the excitement was at its height; there was every danger of an approaching revolt. My pamphlet appeared, and immediately all other quarrels were forgotten; no one could think of anything except the threat to French music. The only revolt now was against me, and such was the outburst that the nation has never quite recovered from it. . . . Whoever reads that this pamphlet probably prevented a revolution in France will think that he is dreaming. Yet it is an actual fact’]. The events to which Rousseau refers in this passage are not really those which directly followed the exile and dispersion of the magistrates of the Paris Parlement, for that prolonged state of affairs, dating from 9 May 1753 to 1 September 1754, caused no particular crisis around 22 November 1753. In fact the survival in Paris of the Grand’Chambre or Central Court of the Parlement after May 1753 provided the King with the pretence that the Parlement had suffered no dissolution at all, and it was only on 8 November 1753, when the Crown issued lettres de cachet to the councillors of the Grand’Chambre itself that the ‘fermentation’ of which Rousseau speaks began in earnest. For several months after the exile of the Parlement the King had encountered increasing resistance to his will on the part of the Grand’Chambre (and also several lower courts then still in session), but his dissolution of this assembly was immediately understood as an attempt to suppress the Parlement itself and was thus regarded as a critical escalation of the dispute. On 11 November a new court of justice, the Chambre royale, was established to replace the Parlement, but the Châtelet—that is, the tribunal of the prévôt de Paris—promptly refused to recognize its authority, and the King replied by suspending this body as well. Other tribunals (for instance the Cour des aides) quickly followed suit in resisting the Chambre royale, so that by the time the Lettre sur la musique françoise appeared the capital of France was in very serious political disarray. For an account of these developments see especially Edmond-Jean-François Barbier’s Chronique de la régence et du règne de Louis XV, ed. A. de la Villegille, 8 vols. (Paris, 1857), vol. 5, pp. 431–55; the Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson, ed. J. B. Rathery, 9 vols. (Paris, 1859–67), vol. 8, pp. 155–92; and Ernest Glasson’s Le parlement de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1901), vol. 2, pp. 195–205.
4. D’Alembert, for instance, produced his De la liberté de la musique in 1760; John Gregory came to Rousseau’s defence in his Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World in 1765; and in 1780 there appeared both Jean-Benjamin de La Borde’s censorious account of the Lettre in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne as well as an even more vituperative collection of replies to La Borde on Rousseau’s behalf by Mme. de la Tour de Franqueville (see the Collection complète des Oeuvres de Rousseau, ed. Paul Moultou and Pierre-Alexandre Du Peyrou, 17 vols. [Geneva, 1782 (1780)–89], vol. 15, pp. 487–543 and pp. 560–609). In 1753 and 1754 alone at least thirty-two replies to Rousseau’s text were published (see Louisette Richebourg [Reichenburg], Contribution à l’histoire de la ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ (Paris and Philadelphia, 1937), pp. 38–84). See also Théophile Dufour, Recherches bibliographiques sur les oeuvres imprimées de Rousseau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 36–42; Servando Sacaluga, ‘Diderot, Rousseau, et la querelle musicale de 1752’, Diderot Studies 10 (1968): 133–73; and the list from the second (Paris, 1757) edition of the Histoire du Théâtre de l’Académie royale de musique en France by Louis Travenol and Jacques Bernard Durey de Noinville, reprinted in La Querelle des Bouffons, ed. Denise Launay, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1973), vol. 3, pp. 2285–93 (henceforth cited as La Querelle).
5. See Cazotte’s Observations sur la Lettre de Rousseau (probably published in December 1753), in La Querelle, vol. 2, pp. 844–45.
6. See La Querelle, vol. 3, pp. 2025–174.
7. See Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1783–88), vol. 7, p. 269.
8. See Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 384–85 [C 358–59], and the Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 2, pp. 234, 237, 324, 325, 330.
9. See his Journal et mèmoires, vol. 8, p. 179.
10. See Palissot’s letter to Jacob Vernes of 28 December 1753, in the Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 2, p. 234.
11. See his Journal et mémoires, vol. 8, p. 184.
12. See Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, ed. Maurice Tourneux, 16 vols. (Paris, 1877–82), vol. 1 [2], pp. 258–59.
13. Ibid., pp. 313–14 [‘It is difficult to predict how this quarrel will conclude and the public is much more intrigued by it than by the Chambre royale and its goings-on. . . . One must wait for minds to calm down, and for us to recover from the fervour and the passion that M. Rousseau has excited with his Letter’].
14. Lady Sydney Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France, 2 tomes in 1 vol. (London, 1817), tome 2, vii, pp. 127–28 [p. 211 of volume]. Cf. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, p. 384 [C 358].
15. A splendid—albeit brief—account of the parallels between the historical interpretations of Rousseau’s influence upon the musical revolution of 1752–54, on the one hand, and the political revolution of 1789, on the other, is supplied by Charles B. Paul in his ‘Music and Ideology: Rameau, Rousseau, and 1789’, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 395–410.
16. See, for instance, Robert A. Nisbet, ‘Rousseau and Totalitarianism’, Journal of Politics 5 (1943): 93–114.
17. Jean Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Les Jugements allemands sur la musique française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1940), p. 202.
18. See Noël Boyer, La Guerre des bouffons et la musique française (Paris, 1945), pp. 11, 164, 166.
19. See Rousseau, Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 707 [OC, vol. 5, p. 305; LFM 155].
20. Ibid., p. 708 [OC, vol. 5, p. 305; LFM 155: ‘in a word, the whole ensemble must convey only one melody to the ear and only one idea to the mind. This unity of melody seems to me an indispensable rule and no less important in Music than the unity of action in a Tragedy, for it is founded on the same principle and directed toward the same object’]. See also, pp. 712, 719 and 729–30 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 307, 310, 313–14; LFM 156, 158, 161–62].
21. Ibid., p. 676 [OC, vol. 5, p. 292; LFM 144: ‘it is from melody alone that the particular character of a National Music must be derived; all the more so as, its character being produced principally by the language, song strictly speaking should be affected by its greatest influence’]. See also, p. 681 [OC, vol. 5, p. 294; LFM 145–46].
22. See ibid., pp. 676–77 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 292–93; LFM 144–45].
23. Ibid., pp. 678–80 [OC, vol. 5, p. 293; LFM 145: ‘The impossibility of inventing pleasant songs would oblige Composers to turn all their attention to the side of harmony, and, lacking real beauties, they would introduce conventional beauties, which would have almost no merit but the difficulty overcome. Instead of a good Music, they would devise a learned Music; to substitute for song they would multiply accompaniments. . . . In order to take away insipidness, they would augment the confusion; they would believe they were making Music, and they would be making only noise. . . . Wherever they saw notes they would find song, seeing that in effect their song would be only notes. Voces, praetereàque nihil’].
24. It was one of Rousseau’s central postulates in this work (see ibid., pp. 743–49 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 319–21; LFM 166–68]) that French composers of opera since Lully had come to develop a theatrical technique of declamatory recitative and a drawling and monotonous form of aria, both of which were inappropriate to any kind of musical performance.
25. Ibid., p. 764 [OC, vol. 5, p. 328; LFM 174: ‘the French do not at all have a Music and cannot have any; or that if ever they have any, it will be so much the worse for them’].
26. See ibid., p. 689 [OC, vol. 5, p. 297; LFM 148]. In the Essai sur l’origine des langues (see the passage from the seventh chapter cited below), however, Rousseau later drew a somewhat different dichotomy between the musical attributes of the two languages, there asserting that Italian was just like French and all other modern European languages in the sense that it lacked determinate musical accents which would give its words an exact and constant tone and character when sung. And while Italian speech might lend itself to music more readily than other tongues, it was not in fact, he maintained, a musical language. Even in the Lettre, moreover, Rousseau acknowledged that Italian composers still sometimes employed the gothic harmonies which had been the most characteristic style of the baroque idiom in both France and Italy before the period beginning around the turn of the eighteenth century when Corelli, Bononcini, Vinci and Pergolesi (see La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 717, note [OC, vol. 5, p. 308, n. 2; LFM 157, n. 2]) had introduced compositions of a truly musical kind. These cumbersome harmonies, according to Rousseau, remained prevalent in French music, and (ibid., p. 718 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 309]) ‘depuis même que les Italiens ont rendu l’harmonie plus pure, plus simple, & donné tous leurs soins à la perfection de la mélodie, je ne nie pas qu’il ne soit encore demeuré parmi eux quelques légéres traces des fugues & desseins gothiques, & quelques fois de doubles & triples mélodies’ [LFM 158: ‘Even though the Italians made harmony purer, simpler, and gave all their attention to the perfection of melody, I do not deny that there still remains among them some slight traces of fugues and gothic designs, and sometimes of double and triple melodies.’]. It would be a mistake, however, Rousseau concluded in the Lettre (p. 764, note [OC, vol. 5, p. 328, note]), for French composers to imitate their Italian colleagues: ‘J’aimerois mieux que nous gardassions notre maussade & ridicule chant, que d’associer encore plus ridiculement la mélodie Italienne à la langue Françoise’ [LFM 174, note: ‘I would prefer that we keep our glum and ridiculous song than combine, still more ridiculously, Italian melody with the French language’].
27. In his Lettre (see especially, p. 722; [OC, vol. 5, p. 311; LFM 159]) Rousseau refers directly to La Serva padrona by Pergolesi, an excellent example of Opera buffa, first produced in Naples in 1733 and already staged in Paris at the Comédie Italienne in 1746, whose renewed performance at the Opéra by the company of Eustachio Bambini was much acclaimed and in fact constituted the musical inauguration of the Querelle. Rousseau also calls attention in the text to Grimm’s Petit prophète de Boehmischbroda (see Lettre, p. 749 [OC, vol. 5, p. 321; LFM 168]), which was the most important literary contribution to the Querelle before his own. But in addition to these citations the Lettre contains many other passages that deal specifically with the music around which the controversy was shaped. It includes comments upon at least four more operas (Il Maestro di musica and Il Tracollo which were principally by Pergolesi, and La Bohémienne [La Zingara] and La Femme orgueilleuse [La Donna superba] by Rinaldo di Capua) which were staged by ‘Les Bouffons’: it mentions three further composers (Leo, Niccolò Jommelli and Gioacchino Cocchi) and one librettist (Metastasio) whose intermezzi were performed during their season in Paris; and it refers to a whole host of still other composers (e.g. Nicola Antonio Porpora, Baldassare Galuppi, Davide Pérez and Domenico Terradellas) whose music had been made to serve as overtures or pasticci or who, more indirectly still, had just helped to inspire the contemporary style of opera buffa (see Lettre, pp. 699–705 and 710–11 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 301–04 and 306–07; LFM 152–54]). Rousseau’s profound knowledge of this usually slight form of opera stemmed from the fascination which he felt for it during his stay in Venice in 1743–44 (see note 29). While the ‘Bouffon’ season was in progress he prepared a collection of Italian songs under the title ‘Canzoni di batello’ as well as an edition of La Serva padrona; and his own opera, Le Devin du village, moreover, itself first staged during that season, was described by some of his critics (notably Fréron) as substantially plagiarized from the music which he had heard in Italy before. This charge, it should be noted here, was first made with regard to Le Devin in 1753 (see the Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 2, pp. 329 and 333), that is, two years before Rameau made the same claim about Rousseau’s earlier operatic ballet, Les Muses galantes (see ibid., pp. 338–40).
28. At length in the fourth chapter of my Oxford University D.Phil dissertation entitled ‘The Social Thought of Rousseau: An Historical Interpretation of His Early Writings’ [later published by Garland in Wokler, Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language (New York, 1987)].
29. See Rousseau, ‘Unité de mélodie’, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768 [1767]; repr., Hildesheim and New York, 1969), p. 536 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 1143–146; DM 476–79]. In the Lettre (see La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 699–701 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 301–02; LFM 152–53]) Rousseau had already recalled an experience in Venice which confirmed the superiority of French over Italian song, at least to his own satisfaction. In his Confessions, moreover, he later devoted a few pages to the delights of Venetian song, for which, he claimed (Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, p. 314), ‘j’eus bientot . . . la passion qu’elle inspire à ceux qui sont faits pour en juger’ [C 294: ‘I soon contracted the passion which it inspires in all those born to understand it’], despite his having come to Venice with a characteristically French prejudice against Italian music.
30. Rousseau, ‘Unité de mélodie’, in Dictionnaire de musique, p. 538 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 1144–45; DM 478: ‘In order to prove that the energy of Music comes wholly from the Harmony . . . [M. Rameau] has not seen that he proved wholly the contrary of what he wanted to prove: for in all the examples he gives, the Accompaniment of the Bass serves merely to determine the Song. . . . Harmony acts merely by determining the Melody to be this or that sort, and it is purely as Melody that the Interval has different expressions according to the place of the Mode where it is employed’]. See also the Lettre à M. Burney sur la musique, in Collection complète des oeuvres de Rousseau, vol. 8, p. 551 [OC, vol. 5, 433–39].
31. There is, to be sure, no direct reference to the Querelle in the Observations. Thus one reviewer of Rameau’s work remarked (in the journal Annonces, affiches et avis divers, reprinted in Jean Philippe Rameau, Complete Theoretical Writings, ed. Erwin R. Jacobi, 6 vols. [n.p., 1967–72], vol. 6, p. 307) that while all the defenders of French music had waited impatiently for Rameau to produce a decisive reply to Rousseau’s Lettre, and while his energetic rejoinder did in fact ensure that ‘notre Musique . . . est vengée’, it was still the case that ‘il s’explique . . . indirectement dans ses Observations’ [‘our music . . . is vindicated’; ‘he explains the matter . . . indirectly in these Observations’]. Yet despite this lacuna the second half of the text is devoted almost entirely to a critique of the mistakes that Rousseau had committed in the Lettre. For accounts of the reception of the Observations in 1754–55, see Rameau, Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, pp. lxviii–lxxiv, and vol. 6, pp. 305–26.
32. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 316 [‘a feeling that will strike every unbiased man who might wish to indulge in the pure effects of Nature’].
33. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 213 [‘A partisan of Melody who signs up against the perfection of Harmony in general is missing an opportunity’].
34. This change in Rousseau’s views from the time that he prepared his articles on music for the Encyclopédie to the time that he completed the Lettre can be traced through his Lettre à M. Grimm sur ‘Omphale’ of 1752 via a manuscript (Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel, Ms R 69) which he probably drafted around 1750 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 261–74; LG]. I have tried to plot the course of that development in the thesis cited in note 28 above.
35. See Rousseau, ‘Accompagnement’, in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (Paris, 1751–80), vol. 1, p. 77 [AE 203].
36. Rousseau, Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 751 [OC, vol. 5, p. 322; LFM 168: ‘the most perfect model of true French recitative’]. Rousseau’s remarks upon the celebrated monologue ‘Enfin il est en ma puissance’ of the heroine in Act II of Armide appear on pp. 751–53. In his Nouveau systême de musique théorique of 1726 (see the Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 2, pp. 51 and 90–100) Rameau himself had dealt at length with this passage, claiming that it illustrated ‘la plus parfaite distribution qu’on puisse imaginer’ [‘the most perfect example imaginable’] of his own rules of harmonic modulation. Rousseau’s critique of the monologue in the Lettre was thus prefaced with the charge that the acclamation by Rameau ‘devient une véritable satyre’ [‘becomes a veritable satire’], while Rameau, for his part, retorted (in 1760 in his Code de musique pratique, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 4, p. 193, note) that ‘il faut être bien peu sensible aux effets de l’harmonie . . . pour avoir osé critiquer ce Monologue’ [one must be quite insensitive to the effects of harmony . . . to have presumed to criticize this Monologue’].
37. See especially Rameau’s Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, pp. 260, 271–72, 316, 317, and his Erreurs sur la musique, ibid., vol. 5, pp. 220, 229.
38. Ibid., p. 219 [‘as long as Melody alone is considered the principal moving force of Music’s effects there will not be great progress in this Art’, as trans. in Masters and Kelly (eds.), The Collected Works of Rousseau, vol. 7, p. 231].
39. Ibid., p. 214 [‘a chimera . . . the effect of which has only weak appeal in Music without the help of harmony’]. For his part, Fréron, in a critique of the Lettre published anonymously in Geneva in 1754, charged (see his Lettres sur la musique françoise, in La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 786) that the notion of the unity of melody was a commonplace derived initially from Horace.
40. With regard to the Traité de l’harmonie, see especially Rameau’s Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 1, p. 31 and pp. 168–69; with regard to the Génération harmonique, see, for example, ibid., vol. 3, p. 45. Beginning at approximately this point in the text I have drawn and developed a number of passages from my article on ‘Rameau, Rousseau, and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 117 (1974): 179–238. I am grateful to the late editor of Studies on Voltaire [Theodore Besterman] for permitting me to reproduce some extracts from that essay.
41. The principle that harmony gives rise to melody is, in my view, central to all of Rameau’s writings about music. It should be noted, however, that his conception of harmonic structure was established from his account of the resonance of one note alone, and not, as some commentators have supposed, from the divisions of the octave (see, for instance, the Traité de l’harmonie, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 1, p. 40). Perhaps the best general interpretations of Rameau’s theory of harmony are provided by Matthew Shirlaw in The Theory of Harmony, 2nd ed. (DeKalb, 1955), pp. 63–285, and Jacques Chailley in his ‘Rameau et la théorie musicale’, Revue musicale 260 (1965): 65–95. Much the finest account of Rameau’s theory in its application to his own music is provided by Paul-Marie Masson in his splendid L’Opéra de Rameau (Paris, 1930), pp. 464–98.
42. Rameau, Démonstration, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, pp. 157–58 [‘It is to Music that nature seems, to us, to assign the Physical principle of the purely Mathematical first concepts around which all the Sciences turn, I mean, the ratios, Harmonics, Arithmetic & Geometry, from which follow the progressions of the same kind, & which manifest themselves the first moment a sounding body resonates’]. Rameau might have drawn some inspiration for this passage from the first proposition, entitled ‘Il n’y a quasi nul art, nulle science, ou profession, à qui l’harmonie . . . ne puisse seruir’ [‘There is almost no art, no science, or profession, which harmony . . . could not serve’], in the eighth book of the third volume of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (first pub. Paris, 1636). That work and—even more—Giofesso Zarlino’s Istitutioni harmoniche of 1558 constitute the principal modern sources from which Rameau developed his harmonic theory.
43. In his Génération harmonique of 1737 and again in his Nouvelles Réflexions sur le principe sonore of 1760, for instance (see his Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, p. 38, and vol. 4, pp. 213 and 255–58), Rameau commented favourably upon the application of the laws of harmony, by Pythagoras, both to music on the one hand and to planetary motion on the other. It is true, however, that in his Observations (see ibid., vol. 3, pp. 274–77) he also objected to a number of ideas pertaining to the divisions of the octave which had been attributed to Pythagoras.
44. Rameau, Observations, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, pp. 264–65 [‘Let us not neglect . . . anymore this mother of the Sciences & the Arts, let us examine her well & try from now on to let ourselves be led only by her. The principle in question is not only involved in all the aesthetic Arts . . . it is also the principle of all the calculative Sciences: this cannot be denied without denying at the same time that these Sciences are founded on the proportions and progressions that Nature announces through the Phenomenon of the sounding Body, with circumstances so pronounced that it is impossible to deny the evidence: & how could anyone deny it! since if there are no proportions, then there is no Geometry’]. These remarks may have been inspired, in part, by the following passage from Jean Adam Serre’s Essais sur les principes de l’harmonie (Paris, 1753), p. 28: ‘Dans l’ordre réel des choses, l’Harmonie, Fille de la Nature même, est la Mere de tous les Sons que peut employer la Mélodie’ [‘In the real order of things, Harmony, the Daughter of Nature herself, is the Mother of all the Sounds that Melody can employ’].
45. Rameau, Réponse à MM. les éditeurs de l’Encyclopédie, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, pp. 355–56 [‘This is the predominant power of geometrical proportion in Music’; ‘as it is, we say, in Architecture, & as it should be, if I am not wrong, in many other Sciences’]. The Réponse first appeared in 1757, following the publication, in the foreword to vol. 6 of the Encyclopédie, of a defence of Rousseau against Rameau’s charges by the editors. See also Rameau’s Génération harmonique, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, pp. 29 and 53.
46. See, for instance, the passage from his Observations (in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, p. 316) discussed above.
47. See his remarks, for example, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, p. 324.
48. See ibid., pp. 305–07. Cf. the Lettre sur la musique françoise, in La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 754–55 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 323–24; LFM 169–70].
49. Rameau, Observations, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, p. 305. Much of this text, Rameau himself admitted (ibid., p. 301), was conceived to render Lully ‘la justice qui lui est duë’ after Rousseau’s unwarranted attack.
50. Rousseau, Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 744–45 [OC, vol. 5, p. 319; LFM 166: ‘extravagant squawking’].
51. See Rousseau, Lettre, pp. 746–48 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 320–21; LFM 167].
52. See Rameau, Erreurs sur la musique, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, p. 210. In Rousseau’s view the fundamental components of every kind of music included not only harmony and melody but measure as well, and it was in fact the case, he claimed in the Lettre (La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 675 [OC, vol. 5, p. 292]), that ‘le chant tire son principal caractére de la mesure’ [LFM 144: ‘song derives its principal character from the meter’]. Measure provided the structure of song, he continued (see ibid., p. 680), bearing the same relation to melody as syntax does to speech; while earlier, in his article ‘Mesure’ for the tenth volume of the Encyclopédie, he had even suggested that harmony and melody stood together as the intoned substance of music, whereas measure constituted its form. This perspective was to have some bearing upon his argument in the Essai sur l’origine des langues considered here, and of course it also figures clearly in his proposition of the Lettre that the measured speech of the Italian language made it more suitable to musical expression than was French.
53. See Rameau, Erreurs, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, p. 212.
54. See Rameau, Observations, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, pp. 328–29. Rameau noticed a discrepancy between Rousseau’s complaint made in the Lettre (see La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 715) that French choirs only made noise and his previous contention (‘Choeur’, Encyclopédie, vol. 3 [1753], p. 362) that ‘un beau choeur est le chef-d’oeuvre d’un habile compositeur. Les François passent pour réussir mieux dans cette partie qu’aucune autre nation de l’ Europe’ [AE 213: ‘a beautiful chorus is the masterpiece of a skillful composer. The French pass for succeeding better in this part than any other nation in Europe’]. By pointing to this contrast Rameau showed his own awareness of the fact that Rousseau’s hostility to French music was absent from his initial contributions to the Encyclopédie, though Rameau’s attention to the article ‘Choeur’ might in fact have been drawn at first not so much by the observations of Rousseau as by the following remark of Cahusac which was added to Rousseau’s text: ‘M. Rameau a poussé cette partie aussi loin qu’il semble qu’elle puisse l’être: presque tous ses choeurs sont beaux, & il en a beaucoup qui sont sublimes’ [‘M. Rameau has pushed this part as far as it seems it can be pushed: almost all of his choruses are beautiful, & there are many that are sublime’].
55. This opera, Platée, first staged at Versailles in 1745, became particularly popular after a performance at the Paris Opéra on 21 February 1754 which effectively marked the end of the season of ‘Les Bouffons’. In 1745 Rameau had also produced a comic operatic ballet, La Princesse de Navarre, and around 1760 he was later to compose another lyrical comic opera, Les Paladins.
56. See Rousseau, Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 751–52, and notes 36 and 49 above [OC, vol. 5, pp. 322–23; LFM 168–69].
57. See ibid., pp. 726–31 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 312–14; LFM 160–62].
58. See, for instance, the following passage from Rousseau’s article ‘Système’ in the Dictionnaire de musique, p. 474 [also OC, vol. 5, p. 1082]: ‘Jusqu’à notre siecle l’Harmonie, née successivement & comme par hasard, n’a eu que des règles éparses, établies par l’oreille, confirmées par l’usage, & qui paroissoient absolument arbitraires. M. Rameau est le premier qui, par le Systême de la Basse-fondamentale, a donné des principes à ces règles . . . ce Dictionnaire a été composé . . . [sur son Systême]’ [‘Until our century, Harmony, born gradually and as by chance, had only scattered rules, established by the ear, confirmed by use, and which seemed absolutely arbitrary. M. Rameau is the first who, by the System of the Fundamental Bass, gave principles to these rules . . . this Dictionary has been assembled . . . (according to his System)’, as trans. in Masters and Kelly (eds.), The Collected Works of Rousseau, vol. 7, p. 58]. It should be noted here that this tribute to Rameau appears in roughly the same form in the fourth supplementary volume to the Encyclopédie already published in 1767, though there had been no mention of Rameau in Rousseau’s initial article ‘Système’ for the fifteenth volume of the Encyclopédie printed in 1765. Most of Rousseau’s essay in the Dictionnaire—the longest in the entire work—is nevertheless devoted to the musical theory of Tartini rather than to that of Rameau.
59. See the foreword of Rousseau’s Examen de deux principes, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, p. 266. The first edition of the published text appeared in 1781 in two distinct versions, both sharing the same Genevan publishers, printers and presses. The Examen has not yet been published in the edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes which I have consulted here, and my references therefore pertain to that version of the first edition which is reproduced in Rameau’s Complete Theoretical Writings [published later in OC, vol. 5, pp. 347–70; ETP].
60. Rousseau, Examen, in Rameau, Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, pp. 275 and 277 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 357 and 358–59; ETP 277, 279: ‘In order to compare melody to harmony M. Rameau begins by stripping the first of everything that, belonging to it, cannot be suited to the other. He does not consider melody as a song, but as a filling out; he says that this filling out arises from harmony, and he is right . . . [But] the accents of the voice pass all the way to the soul; for they are the natural expression of the passions, and by depicting them they arouse them. It is by means of them that music becomes oratorical, eloquent, imitative, they form its language. . . . Melody is in music what design is in Painting, harmony produces merely the effect of colours. It is by means of the song, not by means of the chords, that sounds have expression, fire, life; it is the song alone that gives them the moral effects that produce all of Music’s energy’]. The claim that harmony is secondary to melody had already appeared as a central theme of Rousseau’s Lettre, and it was to be reiterated often in his later works as well, particularly in the nineteenth chapter of the Essai sur l’origine des langues; in the articles ‘Harmonie’, ‘Mélodie’, and ‘Unité de mélodie’ in the Dictionnaire de musique; and in the Observations sur l’ ‘Alceste’ de Gluck (probably drafted around the beginning of 1775). Rousseau’s analogy in this passage between melody and harmony in music, on the one hand, and design and colour in painting, on the other, was developed much further in the Essai sur l’origine des langues (see especially chs. 13 and 16). The connection, in general, between music and painting as artistic forms of expression, and the possibility, in particular, of translating notes of the scale into the medium of prismatic colours, had captured the interest of many thinkers in the eighteenth century after the publication, in the Mercure de France of November 1725 (see pp. 2552–77), of the Jesuit Father Louis-Bertrand Castel’s ‘Clavecin pour les yeux, avec l’art de Peindre les sons’. In his Erreurs sur la musique (see the Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, pp. 220–22) Rameau had commented upon the analogy in one of his many demonstrations that harmony exercised a more profound effect upon the soul than did melody, which, without a harmonic structure, was in this context only like a confused succession of colours that passed before the eyes of viewers too quickly to be understood. For his part, Rousseau—who was also familiar with Castel’s ocular harpsichord—accepted the opposite position that it was melody and design which gave artistic expression its true force.
61. See Rousseau, Examen, in Rameau, Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, p. 279 [also OC, vol. 5, pp. 360–61; ETP 281].
62. Ibid., pp. 271–72 [OC, vol. 5, 353–54; ETP 274–75: ‘But if the lengthy routine of our harmonic successions guides the trained man and the professional Composer, what was the guide of those ignorant people who have never heard harmony in those songs which nature dictated long before the invention of the art? Did they therefore have a feeling for harmony anterior to experience, and if someone made them hear the Fundamental Bass of the tune they had composed, it is to be thought that any of them would recognize his guide there, and that he would find the slightest relation between that bass and that tune? . . . The Greeks recognized as consonances only those that we call perfect consonances; they rejected from among that class thirds and sixths. . . . Consider now what notions of harmony one could have and what harmonic modes one could establish by banishing thirds and sixths from among the class of consonances!’]. With two very minor modifications the second part of this passage was later incorporated by Rousseau in his Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset, 2nd ed. (Bordeaux, 1970), ch. 18, p. 183 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 423–24; EOL 294]. See also the Examen, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, p. 272–73; the Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 14, p. 157 [OC, vol. 5, p. 415; EOL 286]; and the article ‘Harmonie’, Dictionnaire de musique, p. 241 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 850–51]. In the article ‘Harmonie’ Rousseau remarked that ‘de tous les peuples de la terre . . . les Européens sont les seuls qui aient une harmonie, des Accords, & qui trouvent ce mélange agréable’ [DM 412–13: ‘of all the peoples of the earth . . . the Europeans are the only ones who have a Harmony, Chords, and who find this mixture pleasant’]. In the appendix to his Dictionnaire de musique, moreover, he incorporated some examples of ancient musical notation as evidence of the variety of tonal systems which had been devised by men in different cultures. Drawing upon a number of authorities (see the article ‘Musique’, Dictionnaire de musique, p. 314 [OC, vol. 5, p. 924; DM 444–46]) he also provided illustrations of Persian and American Indian tunes, and the few bars of the ‘Air Chinois’ which he drew from Father Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de la Chine (4 vols. [Paris, 1735]—see vol. 3, p. 267) were eventually to figure in the scores of Weber’s overture to Turandot and Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Weber. According to Rameau, on the other hand, Greek and Chinese music were in some sense unnatural and defective (see especially his Nouvelles Réflexions sur le principe sonore, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 4, pp. 216–17). At the same time Rameau believed the scales of Greek and Chinese music resembled ours in principle, and in his Observations (in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, p. 277), for instance, he contended that ‘nos Modernes ont . . . eû tort de conclure, sur la fausseté du systême de Pytagore, que les Anciens ne pratiquoient pas l’harmonie’ [‘our Moderns . . . were wrong to conclude, from the falsity of Pythagoras’s system, that the Ancients did not practice harmony’], maintaining (see, for example, ibid., pp. 286–87) that the ancient Greek tetrachord was constructed upon the same principle of the resonating ‘corps sonore’ which provided the harmonic pattern of the octave scale. Rousseau never shared this view, and he later argued (see the article ‘Tétracorde’ in his Dictionnaire de musique, p. 512 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 1116–20]) that the tetrachord had not been based upon a principle of harmony at all, but was instead a pattern of both speech and song which the Greeks had adopted in order to express the sonorous inflexions of their language.
63. In his articles ‘Fondamental’ and ‘Gamme’ for the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie (published in 1757) d’Alembert later objected to Rameau’s attempts to endow his speculations with ‘un faux air scientifique’ [‘a false air of science’] as if they were geometrical proofs, and in his capacity as a professional geometer himself he protested ‘contre cet abus ridicule de la Géométrie dans la Musique’ [‘against that ludicrous misuse of Geometry in Music’] (‘Fondamental’, Encyclopédie, vol. 7, p. 62). See also ‘Gamme’, ibid., p. 465. These attacks inaugurated a controversy between d’Alembert and Rameau—during which some fourteen essays were published by the two men—that lasted into the 1760s, almost up to the time of Rameau’s death.
64. See Rousseau, Examen, in Rameau’s Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, pp. 283 and 285 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 364 and 365–66; ETP 283 and 285].
65. I have dealt with these matters in some detail in the works cited in note 28 above. See also my ‘Rameau, Rousseau, and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’ (note 40 above); Marie-Élisabeth Duchez, ‘Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues’, Revue de musicologie 60 (1974): 33–86; and Porset, ‘L’ “inquiétante étrangeté” de l’Essai sur l’origine des langues: Rousseau et ses exégètes’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 154 (1976): 1715–58.
66. This is almost sheer conjecture—based principally upon Rousseau’s intimation in his Confessions (see OC, vol. 1, p. 560 [C 518]) that the work was finished by the autumn of 1761, from which I surmise that most of the text was written around that period or shortly before—apart, of course, from those passages we know he drafted in 1754 and 1755. A similar conclusion follows from the dating of a fragment about the art of writing (Neuchâtel Ms R 19—see OC, vol. 2, pp. 1249–52 and 1934) which contains an oblique reference to the Essai. I know of no evidence at all to suggest that Rousseau drafted any part of the Essai in the years between 1755 and 1760, and there is at least one reference (to an idea in d’Alembert’s De la liberté de la musique in ch. 20) which probably dates from 1760.
67. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 1, p. 27 and ch. 12, p. 139 [OC, vol. 5, p. 675; EOL 248].
68. See ibid., p. 141 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 410–11]. Commenting upon a passage from the first book of Strabo’s Geographica (for which his immediate source was almost certainly Father Bernard Lamy’s La Rhetorique ou l’art de parler—see the fourth edition [Paris, 1701], vol. 1, xix, p. 108), Rousseau added here that ‘Dire et chanter . . . ne furent d’abord que la même chose’ [EOL 282: ‘To say and to sing . . . were initially but the same thing’]. The propositions that music and language have a common source, and that poetic speech was developed before prose, can both be found in several classical writings. They also figure prominently in the linguistic theories of the three perhaps best-known authorities on this subject in the eighteenth century, that is, Vico, Monboddo and Herder. But there is no evidence that Rousseau ever saw the work of Vico—despite academic controversy on this matter—and though Monboddo and Herder were both well acquainted with the Discours sur l’inégalité neither made any reference at all to the Essai.
69. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 14, p. 161 [OC, vol. 5, p. 417; EOL 288]. For Rameau’s distinction between sounds and noise see especially his Génération harmonique, in Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 3, p. 29, and his Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie, ibid., pp. 172–74. By the time Rousseau prepared his article ‘Bruit’ for the Dictionnaire de musique he was no longer in agreement with Rameau on this point, remarking (p. 60 [OC, vol. 5, p. 671]) that we might conjecture that ‘le Bruit n’est point d’une autre nature que le Son; qu’il n’est lui-même que la somme d’une multitude confuse de Sons divers, qui se font entendre à la fois & contrarient, en quelque sorte, mutuellement leurs ondulations’ [that ‘Noise is not of a different Nature than Sound; that it is itself nothing but the sum of a confused multitude of various Sounds, which make themselves heard at the same time and counteract, in some way, each others’ undulations’].
70. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 2, p. 43 [OC, vol. 5, p. 380; EOL 253: ‘[T]he origin of languages is not due to men’s first needs; it would be absurd for the cause of their separation to give rise to the means that unites them. To what may this origin then be due? To the moral needs, the passions. All the passions bring together men whom the necessity to seek their subsistence forces to flee one another. Not hunger nor thirst, but love, hatred, pity, anger wrung their first voices from them.’].
71. It is true, however, that according to Rousseau in the Essai men are not naturally inclined to show compassion toward other creatures like themselves. Our sentiment of pity, he argued there (see ibid., ch. 9, p. 93 [OC, vol. 5, p. 395; EOL 267–68]), is displayed in the ways that we identify with the suffering of others, and he described it as a feeling of empathy for which, even at first, we required a socially formed and well developed sense of judgement and imagination.
72. Ibid., ch. 9, p. 123 [OC, vol. 5, p. 406; EOL 277–78: ‘In this happy age when nothing recorded the hours, nothing required them to be counted; time had no other measure than enjoyment and boredom. . . . Here the first festivals took place; feet skipped with joy, an eager gesture no longer proved adequate, the voice accompanied it with passionate accents, pleasure and desire merged into one and made themselves felt together. Here, finally, was the true cradle of peoples, and from the pure crystal of the fountains sprang the first fires of love’]. In his article ‘Chant’ for the Dictionnaire de musique (pp. 83–84 [OC, vol. 5, p. 695]) Rousseau later remarked that men do not sing by nature, since true savages, mutes and infants are all marked by their lack of song: ‘Le Chant ne semble pas naturel à l’homme. Quoique les Sauvages de l’Amérique chantent, parce qu ‘ils parlent, le vrai Sauvage ne chanta jamais. Les Muets ne chantent point; ils ne forment que des voix sans permanence, des mugissemens sourds que le besoin leur arrache. . . . Les enfans crient, pleurent, & ne chantent point. Les premières expressions de la nature n’ont rien en eux de mélodieux ni de sonore’ [DM 375: ‘Song does not seem to be natural to man. Although the Savages of America sing, because they speak, the true Savage never sang. Mutes do not sing at all; they form only voices without permanence, muted howls which need wrests from them. . . . Children scream, cry, and do not at all sing. The first expressions of nature have nothing melodious and sonorous about them’]. Rousseau’s concession to the songs of American Indians was based upon Mersenne’s account (in turn drawn from the work of Jean de Léry) of ‘Trois Chansons des Ameriquains’ in his Harmonie universelle (see vol. 2, ii, p. 148 of the 1963 Paris reprint of the 1636 edition). In plate N of the Dictionnaire de musique a transcription of these three, allegedly Brazilian, tunes is misdescribed as a ‘Chanson des Sauvages du Canada’.
73. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 9. p. 113 [OC, vol. 5, p. 402; EOL 274]. See also Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 162 and pp. 168–69 [DI 159 and 164–66], and the manuscript fragment, now lost, transcribed in OC, vol. 3, p. 533.
74. The influence of climate upon the nature of language constitutes the dominant theme of chs. 8–11 of the Essai. The subject attracted the attention of many prominent Enlightenment thinkers, from whose writings Rousseau undoubtedly drew some of his own inspiration too. His principal sources may well have been that section of the abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s Réflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture (first published in 1719) entitled ‘Le pouvoir de l’air sur le corps humain prouvé par le caractere des Nations’ (see the 1733 Paris edition, vol. 2, xv, pp. 251–76) and a passage from Lamy’s La Rhetorique ou l’art de parler (see vol. 1, xv, pp. 81–82).
75. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 9, pp. 113–15 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 402–03; EOL 274–75].
76. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 10, pp. 129 and 131, and ch. 11, p. 135 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 407, 408 and 409; EOL 279, 280: ‘In southern climates where nature is prodigal needs are born of the passions, in cold countries, where it is miserly, the passions are born of the needs, and the languages, sad daughters of necessity, reflect their harsh origin . . . in those regions where the earth yields whatever it yields only after so much labor and where the source of life seems to reside more in the hands than in the heart . . . their first word was not love me but help me. . . . Such in my opinion are the most general physical causes of the characteristic difference between primitive languages. Those of the South must have been lively, resonant, accentuated, eloquent, and often obscure by dint of energy: those of the North must have been muted, crude, articulated, shrill, monotone, clear by dint of their words rather than of good construction’]. An illuminating treatment of these remarks is provided by Jacques Derrida in his De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967) pp. 318–22. In his Lettre (see La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 735–36 [OC, vol. 5, p. 316]) Rousseau treated modern Italian as if it were the contemporary language of love, and he described it there in terms that are similar to those which he attached here to the original southern tongues: ‘C’est le langage de l’amour . . . vif, bouillant, entrecoupé, & tel qu’il convient aux passions impétueuses’ [LFM 163: ‘There it is the language of love . . . lively, ardent, faltering, and such as befits the impetuous passions’]. He was, in any case, not the only writer in the eighteenth century to draw a distinction between the industrious labourers of the North on the one hand and the frolicsome peoples of the South on the other. Much the same point can be found, for instance, in Diderot’s (or Saint-Lambert’s) article ‘Législateur’ in the ninth volume of the Encyclopédie and in Montesquieu’s Esprit des loix, vol. 14, ii.
77. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 19, pp. 189–91 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 425–26; EOL 295–97]. In the paragraph preceding this passage Rousseau made clear that it was principally classical Latin, already less musical than ancient Greek, which suffered this fate. To be sure, several other Enlightenment thinkers, for instance Condillac (see his Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines, vol. 2, i.5, § 56), had already advanced that claim before him.
78. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 19, p. 189 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 425; EOL 295: ‘Thus melody, as it began to be less closely tied to discourse, imperceptibly assumed a separate existence, and music became increasingly independent of words. This was also the period when the wonders gradually ceased which it had wrought when it was but the accent and the harmony of poetry, and when it endowed poetry with a power over the passions which speech has since exercised only over the reason’].
79. See ibid., ch. 5, p. 55 [OC, vol. 5, p. 384; EOL 256]. Inspired largely by the physical and anatomical researches of Denis Dodart (see his Mémoire sur les causes de la voix de l’homme et de ses différens tons, in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Année 1700 [Paris, 1703], pp. 238–87), Rousseau drew a fuller and more general distinction between ‘la Voix de parole’ and ‘la Voix de Chant’ in his article ‘Voix’ for the Dictionnaire de musique (see especially pp. 540–43) [OC, vol. 5, pp. 1146–49].
80. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 11, p. 135 [OC, vol. 5, p. 409; EOL 280–81].
81. Ibid., ch. 7, p. 81 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 392; EOL 265: ‘All modern European languages are more or less in the same situation; I do not even exclude Italian. By itself, Italian is no more a musical language than is French. The difference is simply that one lends itself to music and the other does not’].
82. In his article ‘Musique’ for the Encyclopédie, vol. 10 (see p. 901), Rousseau had already distinguished ancient from modern music largely in terms of the connection to poetry that had once been the central feature of musical expression but had now been lost.
83. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 19, p. 193 [OC, vol. 5, p. 426; EOL 297: ‘Song thus deprived of all melody and consisting solely in the volume and duration of sounds must finally have suggested ways in which it might be made still more resonant with the aid of consonances. Several voices constantly drawing out in unison endlessly long sounds chanced upon a few chords which made the noise seem pleasant to them by accentuating it, and this is how the use of descant and of counterpoint began’].
84. ‘On sait que nôtre harmonie est une invention gothique’, Rousseau lamented (ibid., ch. 18, p. 181 [OC, vol. 5, p. 423; EOL 293: ‘It is known that our harmony is a Gothic invention’]). See also his Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, p. 716 [OC, vol. 5, p. 308; LFM 157], and his article ‘Harmonie’ in the Dictionnaire de musique, p. 242 [OC, vol. 5, p. 851; DM 413].
85. See especially Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 19, p. 195 [OC, vol. 5, p. 427; EOL 298]. Cf. ibid., ch. 17, p. 179 [OC, vol. 5, p. 422; EOL 293]; his Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 677–78 [OC, vol. 5, p. 293; LFM 144–45], and his article ‘Harmonie’, in the Dictionnaire de musique, pp. 241–42 [OC, vol. 5, p. 850; DM 412]
86. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 14, p. 155 [OC, vol. 5, p. 415; EOL 286: ‘The songs which to us are the most beautiful will only moderately affect an ear completely unaccustomed to them; it is a language for which one has to have the Dictionary’].
87. Ibid., ch. 19, p. 187 [OC, vol. 5, p. 424; EOL 295: ‘the calculation of intervals replaced delicacy of inflection’].
88. See especially ibid., ch. 18, p. 181 [OC, vol. 5, p. 423; EOL 293–94]. Cf. Rousseau, Lettre, in La Querelle, vol. 1, pp. 681 and 685–86 [OC, vol. 5, p. 294; LFM 145], and his Examen, in Rameau’s Complete Theoretical Writings, vol. 5, pp. 275–76 [OC, vol. 5, p. 357–58; ETP 277–78].
89. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 5, p. 57 [OC, vol. 5, p. 384; EOL 256–57]. ‘L’art d’écrire ne tient point à celui de parler’, he continued (ibid., p. 61 [OC, vol. 5, p. 386; EOL 258: ‘The art of writing does not in any way depend on that of speaking’]). Rousseau believed that the art of writing does not truly represent what we say; on the contrary, in his view, writing destroyed speech. It arose later and was from the start connected with needs different from those that gave rise to our earliest tonal utterances.
90. See ibid., ch. 5, pp. 67–69 [OC, vol. 5, p. 388; EOL 260–61]. Rousseau’s remarks in this passage, foreshadowed to a large extent by some of the arguments is in Plato’s Phaedrus, were elaborated further in a fragment of Neuchâtel Ms R 19 printed in the OC, vol. 2 (see pp. 1249–51). The most comprehensive treatment of Rousseau’s general distinction between spoken and written languages is provided by Derrida in his De la grammatologie (see pp. 321–26).
91. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 1, p. 39 [OC, vol. 5, p. 379; EOL 251–52].
92. Ibid., ch. 20, pp. 199 and 201 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 428 and 429; EOL 299: ‘Some languages are conducive to freedom; they are the sonorous, rhythmic, harmonious languages in which speech can be made out from quite far. Ours are made for the buzz in the Sultan’s Council Chamber. . . . Now, I maintain that any language in which it is not possible to make oneself understood by the people assembled is a servile language; it is impossible for a people to remain free and speak that language’]. D’Alembert raised the question of the link between political liberty and music in the very title of his De la liberté de la musique, a work which Rousseau had almost certainly read when he prepared this chapter of the Essai. For the most important of d’Alembert’s remarks about the subject see La Querelle, vol. 3, pp. 2216–17.
93. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 20, pp. 197 and 199–201 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 428–29; EOL 298–99: ‘What speeches then remain to be addressed to the people assembled? Sermons. And why should those who deliver them care whether they persuade the people, since it does not award privileges? . . . Our preachers agonize, work themselves into a sweat in their churches, without anyone’s having any idea of what they have said. After they have worn themselves out shouting for an hour, they leave their pulpit half-dead. Surely it was not worth the effort. . . . Imagine someone delivering a harangue in French to the people of Paris in the Place Vendôme. Let him shout at the top of his voice, people will hear that he is shouting, but they will not make out a single word. . . . The reason there are fewer mountebanks in the marketplaces of France than of Italy is not that in France people listen to them less, but only that they cannot hear them as well’].
94. Ibid., pp. 197–99 [OC, vol. 5, p. 428; EOL 298–99: ‘Societies have assumed their final forms; nothing can be changed in them any more except by arms and cash, and since there is nothing left to say to the people but, give money, it is said with posters on street corners or with soldiers in private homes; for this there is no need to assemble anyone: on the contrary, subjects must be kept scattered; this is the first maxim of modern politics’].
95. The first edition of the Essai was produced in 1781 in two different versions which have precisely the same format—and were incorporated in the same tomes—as the two versions of the original edition of the Examen de deux principes (see note 59 above).
96. Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), in The Works of Edmund Burke, 12 tomes in 6 vols. (London, 1803–13), vol. 6, p. 32.
97. See especially Daniel Mornet, ‘Les enseignements des bibliothèques privées (1750–1780)’, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 17 (1910): 465–68; Mornet, ‘L’Influence de J. J. Rousseau au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 8 (1912): 44–45; Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution (London, 1965), pp. 46–48, 87–88, 103, 104 and 155; and Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 3 and 162.
98. Burke, Letter, in Works, vol. 6, p. 39.
99. Rousseau, Emile III, in OC, vol. 4, p. 468 [E 194: ‘We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions’; ‘I hold it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to last’].
Only the most accessible English editions of Rousseau’s works are cited, and I have often preferred my own translation while nevertheless pointing to the location of another. [In this chapter the author himself provided the citations to the English editions.]
1. Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–95), vol. 1, p. 430; C 400–01.
2. Ibid., pp. 427–28; C 398.
3. Ibid., p. 438; C 408.
4. Letters 11 and 17 in Part iv, respectively.
5. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, p. 436; C 406.
6. Ibid., p. 440; C 410.
7. R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–98), no. 533, vol. 4 [pp. 273–81].
8. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, p. 445; C 414–15.
9. Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert, in OC, vol. 5, pp. 53–54 and 114–15; LD 58, 125–26.
10. Rousseau, Emile, in OC, vol. 4, pp. 305, 549; E 81, 253.
11. Rousseau, Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, no. 5477 [vol. 31, pp. 31–32].
12. Rousseau, Lettres morales, in OC, vol. 4, p. 1101 [ML 190].
13. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 181; C 175; Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, OC, vol. 1, p. 872 [RJ 164].
14. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, p. 410; C 382.
15. Ibid.
16. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC, vol. 1 pp. 1003–04; R 36–38.
17. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 1062, 1070–71; R 108, 117–18.
18. Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, in OC, vol. 2, p. 471; J 387.
19. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 180–81; C 175; Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 1063–64; R 109–10; and Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Botanique, in OC, vol. 4, p. 1201 [DB 93].
20. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 1068–69; R 114–15.
21. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Botanique, in OC, vol. 4, pp. 1220–21 [DB 109].
22. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC, vol. 1, p. 1069; R 115.
23. Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, in OC, vol. 1, p. 716 [RJ 44].
24. Ibid., p. 725 [RJ 51].
25. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC, vol. 1, p. 995; R 27.
26. Ibid., p. 1046; R 88.
27. Ibid., pp. 1042–44; R 83–85.
28. Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, in OC, vol. 2, p. 521; J 428.
1. Rousseau, Confessions IX, in the Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: 1959–[95]) vol. 1, p. 404 [C 377].
2. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Sixième Promenade, in OC, vol. 1, p. 1059 [R 103].
3. See especially my ‘La Querelle des Bouffons and the Italian Liberation of France: A Study of Revolutionary Foreplay’, in C. Duckworth and H. Le Grand (eds.), “Studies in the Eighteenth Century”, vol. 6, special issue, Eighteenth-Century Life 11, n.s., 1 (1987): 94–116; ‘Liberty, Egality and Fratricide’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 14 July 1989, pp. 15–16; and ‘Hegel’s Rousseau: The General Will and Civil Society’, in Sven-Eric Liedman (ed.), ‘Deutscher Idealismus’, special issue, Arachne 8 (1993): 7–45.
4. In addition to the work of Vaughan and Derathé which is considered here, there are particularly notable discussions of the place of natural law in Rousseau’s political thought in Iring Fetscher, Rousseaus politische Philosophie (Neuwied, 1960); Victor Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris, 1974); Franz Haymann, ‘La loi naturelle dans la philosophie politique de J.-J. Rousseau’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 30 (1943–45): 55–110; René Hubert, Rousseau et l’Encyclopédie’ (Paris, 1928); Paul-L. Léon, ‘Le problème du contrat social chez Rousseau’, Archives de philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique 3–4 (1935): 157–201; and Roger Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, 1968).
5. For Stoic and Scholastic contributions to the philosophy of natural law, see especially Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1985); Alfred Dufour, Droits de l’homme, droit naturel et histoire (Paris, 1991); Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (Oxford, 1939); and Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge, 1991).
6. For a fuller discussion of the differences between Vaughan and Derathé, see my ‘Natural Law and the Meaning of Rousseau’s Political Thought: A Correction to Two Misrenderings of His Doctrine’, in G. Barber, C. Courtney and D. Gilson (eds.), Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1988), pp. 319–35.
7. The Political Writings of Rousseau, ed. C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge, 1915), Introduction, vol. 1, pp. 40 and 48.
8. Ibid., p. 115.
9. See Rousseau, Contrat social, in OC, vol. 3, p. 360 [SC 49–50], and Robert Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (1950; 2nd ed., Paris, 1970), p. 342.
10. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 152 [DI 150].
11. Rousseau, Manuscrit de Genève, in OC, vol. 3, p. 284 [GM 155].
12. See Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, p. 165.
13. See Rousseau, Emile, in OC, vol. 4, p. 842 [E 462].
14. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 193 [DI 188].
15. See especially Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde Partie, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 184 [DI 179]; Rousseau, Manuscrit de Genève I.2, in OC, vol. 3, p. 288 [GM 159]; Rousseau, ‘Etat de guerre’, in OC, vol. 3, p. 610; and Rousseau, Emile IV, in OC, vol. 4, p. 524 [E 235–36].
16. See Rousseau, Confessions III, in OC, vol. 1, pp. 110 and 1283, note 5 [C 110]; Rousseau, ‘Mémoire à M. de Mably’; and Rousseau, ‘Projet pour l’éducation de Sainte-Maire’, in OC, vol. 4, pp. 31, 51 and 1265 [PEM 129].
17. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 183 [DI 178]. The passage is cited in Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, VII, ch. 6, § 10, n. 1 (in the first Barbeyrac edition published in Amsterdam [1706], vol. 2, p. 273). It also figures in Diderot’s errata for the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie, published in 1753, intended as an addition to his article on ‘Autorité politique’ in volume one, as well as in the Remontrances du Parlement de Paris of April 1753 (see Les Remontrances du Parlement de Paris, ed. J. Flammarion [Paris, 1888–98], I, p. 522). Barbeyrac’s source for his citation is a passage from Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government.
18. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 182 and n. 1 [DI 177]; Sur l’Economie politique, in OC, vol. 3, p. 244 [PE 5]; Manuscrit de Genève, in OC, vol. 3, p. 298 and n. 1; and the Contrat social, in OC, vol. 3, p. 354, n. 1 [SC 43]. The references and allusions are drawn from Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, ed. Barbeyrac, IV, ch. 4, § 4, n. 1 and VI, ch. 2, § 10, n. 2.
19. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 124–25 [DI 126] and, for Barbeyrac, especially his comments in Le droit de la nature et des gens, II, ch. 3, § 2, n. 2. In this case, at least, Barbeyrac just elaborates on Pufendorf’s own critique, in the light of the general agreement of learned men in the modern world, of Roman lawyers’ misconceived notions of ‘the law common to men and animals’—animals having the capacity to follow rules and perform duties only in a figurative sense, he claims.
20. Neither does the name of Barbeyrac figure in his correspondence. There are, by contrast, abundant references to Grotius throughout Rousseau’s major political writings and most especially in the Contrat social. In his correspondence, moreover, he refers to Grotius twice, the first time, disingenuously, to deny any debt to, or interest in, his works, the second time, a few years later, to acknowledge the authority of Grotius, reason and natural law (see Rousseau’s letters 712 and 2726 to anonymous lawyers and to Marc Chappuis of 15 October 1758 and 26 May 1763, respectively, in R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau [Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–(98)], vol. 5, p. 179, and vol. 16, p. 246). I am grateful to Janet Laming for granting me access to the name index of the Correspondance complète prior to its publication.
21. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 136, 183 and 183–84 [DI 135–36, 178 and 179].
22. See ibid., p. 153 [DI 151].
23. Rousseau, Sur l’Economie politique, in OC, vol. 3, p. 263 [PE 24].
24. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne, in OC, vol. 3, p. 844 [LWM 262].
25. Cf. Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, ed. Barbeyrac, I, ch. 1 § 20.
26. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 153 n. 1 and p. 159 n. 2 [DI, 151, 156], and Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, II, ch. 2, § 9 and II, ch. 1, § 6, respectively.
27. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 123, 132–35 and 148 [DI 124–25, 131–35, 146], and Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, II, ch. 2, § 2, n. 3, and II, ch. 2, § 4. It should be noted, however, that Pufendorf sometimes suggests (see ibid., I, ch. 1, § 7, for instance) that, while the pure state of nature did not exist at the commencement of human history, it arose later in the course of it.
28. See Rousseau, Manuscrit de Genève, in OC, vol. 3, p. 282 [GM 153–54].
29. Cf. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 135–36 [DI 134–36]; Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, II, ch. 2, § 2; and Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, I, ch. 2. Rousseau’s reasons for associating Cumberland with Pufendorf and Montesquieu on the subject of human timidity are not self-evident. From its second edition of 1684, there are frequent references in the De jure naturae et gentium to Cumberland’s De legibus naturae, first published in 1672, the same year as the initial edition of Pufendorf’s text. With reference to ch. 2, § 4 of De legibus naturae, Pufendorf himself suggests (De jure naturae et gentium, II, ch. 3, § 15) that his own conception of natural law is fundamentally the same as Cumberland’s. But ch. 1, § 4 addresses mankind’s benevolentia in terms of love and makes no comment upon human feebleness or timidity, in Pufendorf’s manner. Indeed, Cumberland’s critique of the essential misanthropy of Hobbes’s doctrine is based on a more positive notion of community under the rule of law than Pufendorf’s perspective of sociability bred from frailty in a res nullium in which the original community of mankind is conceived in a negative sense. In a subsequently deleted passage from the second draft of Emile (see OC, vol. 4, pp. 523 and 1475 [E 235]) Rousseau was to take Cumberland to task once more, on the subject of injustice. He may have had direct acquaintance with Cumberland’s work, or through Barbeyrac’s own translation, published as the Traité philosophique des loix naturelles in 1744, but he would not have been struck by any comment of Barbeyrac on the similarity between Pufendorf’s and Cumberland’s conceptions of human nature. Perhaps the likeliest explanation for his joining them together with respect to the idea of timidity is a reference by Pufendorf himself (in the De jure naturae et gentium, II, ch. 1, § 6) to ch. 2, § 28 of De legibus, followed immediately by Pufendorf’s own treatment in II, ch. 1, § 7 of (in Barbeyrac’s translation) ‘la foiblesse des Hommes’. It is difficult to disagree with Linda Kirk, when she claims in her Richard Cumberland and the Natural Law (Cambridge, 1987), p. 120, that Rousseau’s comments on Cumberland comprise ‘a superficial examination’.
30. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 151 [DI 149].
31. Ibid., p. 137 [DI 137]. Cf. Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, II, ch. 1, § 8.
32. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 132 [DI 132].
33. See ibid., p. 126 [DI 127].
34. For a fuller treatment of this subject, also addressing other commentaries, see especially my ‘The Influence of Diderot on the Political Theory of Rousseau: Two Aspects of a Relationship’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1975): 55–111. For an assessment of its bearing upon Diderot’s wider political thought, see the introduction to my edition, with John Hope Mason, of Political Writings, by Diderot (Cambridge, 1992). The same chapter of the Manuscrit de Genève is also designed to contradict Book I, article ii of Bossuet’s Politique tirée de l’Ecriture sainte, entitled ‘De la société générale du genre humain naît la société civile, c’est-à-dire, celle des états, des peuples et des nations’ [‘The society of mankind gives birth to civil society, that is to say, to states, peoples, and nations’].
35. See Diderot, ‘Droit naturel’, in his Oeuvres complètes, édition critique et annotée (Paris, 1975–), pp. 26 and 28, and Political Writings, pp. 19 and 20–21.
36. Employing the expression volonté générale for the first time in his own writings, Rousseau, in his article ‘Economie politique’, cross-references Diderot’s article ‘Droit naturel’. I have tried to show (see my ‘The Influence of Diderot on the Political Theory of Rousseau’, pp. 73–90) that Rousseau’s conception of the volonté générale in the ‘Economie politique’ bears striking similarities to Diderot’s own views in the ‘Droit naturel’, and at the same time contrasts sharply with central aspects of the political philosophy he expounded in both earlier and later writings.
37. See Diderot, ‘Citoyen’ and ‘Hobbisme’, in his Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 463, and vol. 7, p. 406, and Political Writings, pp. 15 and 27.
38. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 406, and Political Writings, p. 28.
39. See Rousseau, Manuscrit de Genève I.2, 3 and 4, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 283–85, 288, 292, 294–95 [GM 154–56, 159].
40. See Rousseau, Manuscrit de Genève I.2, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 287–88 [GM 158–59] and Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, Première Partie, in OC, vol. 3, p. 153 [DI 151].
41. Both works were published in Bologna, the first in 1978, the second in 1990. The Discussioni su Pufendorf address Latin commentaries of the period 1663 to 1700. Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes is presented by Palladini as contributing towards a reinterpretation of modern natural law.
42. See Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, II, ch. 3, § 15.
43. See ibid., II, ch. 3, § 20.
44. See especially Palladini, Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes, Part I, ch. 2 and Part II, ch. 3, pp. 91–171 and 245–71.
45. Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, IV, ch. 4, §§ 2 and 6. See especially I. Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the “Four-Stages Theory” ’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 270–72. Referring to the commentaries on Grotius of Kaspar Ziegler, Johann von Felden and Johann Heinrich Boecler, they all confused ‘communionem negativem cum positiva’, writes Pufendorf (De jure naturae et gentium, IV, ch. 4, § 2)—that is, common things belonging to nobody, on the one hand, and common things rightfully shared between several persons, on the other. Barbeyrac translates this as a confusion of ‘Communauté positive avec la Négative’, while Basil Kennet—in the English translation of Pufendorf to which he contributed the major share, dating from 1703 and incorporating Barbeyrac’s notes from 1710—renders the passage as a confusion of ‘Negative Communion with Positive’.
46. See Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, VII, ch. 1, § 4.
47. See Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce’, pp. 273 and 274; and Hont, ‘Negative Community and Communism: The Natural Law Heritage from Pufendorf to Marx’, unpublished paper presented at a workshop of the John Olin programme on the History of Political Culture, University of Chicago (February 1989), p. 32.
48. See Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, lines 925–87; Horace, Satires, I, sat. iii, ll. 99–123; and Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, I, chs. viii and xliii. These passages are all cited by Pufendorf in the De jure naturae et gentium, II, ch. 2, § 2. His principal account of the nature of property and its origins, following a discussion of the obligations imposed by language and signs, figures in Book IV, chiefly chs. 3–9. For Montaigne, see his Essais, I, ch. 31 (‘Des cannibals’).
49. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 151 [DI 149].
50. See ibid., Seconde Partie, in OC, vol. 3, p. 193 [DI 187].
51. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux, 2nd ed., 1970), ch. 2, p. 43 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 380–81; EOL 252–53].
52. See ibid., ch. 9, p. 113 [OC, vol. 5, p. 402; EOL 274], and Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde Partie, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 162 and 168–69 [DI 159 and 164–65].
53. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 9, p. 127 [OC, vol. 5, p. 407; EOL 278].
54. Ibid., ch. 2, p. 43 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 380–81; EOL 252–53]. For Mandeville, see his Fable of the Bees, in the sixth edition translated into French in 1740, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), especially ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, vol. 1, p. 346: ‘No Societies could have sprung from the Amiable Virtues and Loving Qualities of Man . . . all of them must have had their Origin from his Wants, his Imperfections, and the variety of his Appetites’. Rousseau, in both the preface to his play Narcisse and Discours sur l’inégalité (OC, vol. 2, pp. 965–96 [PN 97–98], and vol. 3, pp. 154–55 [DI 152–53]), challenges Mandeville’s claim, which he rightly takes to be Hobbesian in inspiration, that society was bred from our vices.
55. See the Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 9, pp. 95–107 [OC, vol. 5, p. 396; EOL 268] and Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 84–91.
56. See Rousseau, Constitution pour la Corse, in OC, vol. 3, p. 933 [PCC 150].
57. Rousseau, Contrat social II.11, in OC, vol. 3, p. 392 n. 2 [SC 78–79].
58. Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments (translating De cive), ch. 13, § xiii, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London, 1839–45), vol. 2, p. 176.
59. Rousseau, Emile, in OC, vol. 4, p. 461 [E 189].
60. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, chs. 10 and 20, pp. 131 and 197–99 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 408, 428–29; EOL 279, 298–99].
61. See Rousseau, Contrat social III.15, in OC, vol. 3, p. 429 [SC 113].
62. See Rousseau, Constitution pour la Corse, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 929–30 [PCC 147–48], and Le gouvernement de Pologne, ch. 11, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 1004–05 [P 224–25].
63. See Rousseau, Contrat social III.15, in OC, vol. 3, p. 431 [SC 115].
64. Ibid., p. 430 [SC 114].
65. Ibid., p. 356 [SC 45].
66. See Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, I, ch. 3, §§ 8 and 12.
67. See Rousseau, Contrat social I.4, in OC, vol. 3, p. 358 [SC 48].
68. See ibid., I.5, in OC, vol. 3, p. 359 [SC 49].
69. See Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, VII, ch. 3, § 1.
70. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde Partie, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 183–84 [DI 178–79]. Rousseau had himself sent a copy to Voltaire soon after its publication, and on reading the text Voltaire peppered its margins with expletives ranging from ‘faux’ and ‘ridicule supposition’ to ‘abominable’, ‘galimatias’, ‘quelle chimere’ and ‘Singe de Diogene’. But this passage he greeted as ‘tres beau’ (see George R. Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau [Columbus, 1933], p. 19).
71. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 183 n. [DI 178].
72. See Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, ed. Barbeyrac, VII, ch. 8, § 6, n. 2. In support of his defence of Locke, Barbeyrac cites a passage from Jacques Abbadie’s Défense de la nation britannique, first published in 1692. In note 1 he invokes the authority of both Sidney and Locke against Pufendorf’s own contention that a people which has rendered itself subject to absolute authority has no right to take up arms to recover its freedom.
73. See Rousseau, Contrat social, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 355 and 356 [SC 44, 45].
74. See ibid., p. 433 [SC 117].
75. See ibid., III.16.
76. See ibid., II.2.
77. Pufendorf’s text reads: ‘Peculiaris quoque species personarum politicarum est, quas dicere possis repraesentativas, ideo quod personam aliorum referant’. Barbeyrac’s translation is rendered thus: ‘Il y a encore une autre sorte particuliére de Personnes Publiques, que l’on peut appeler Représentatives, parce qu’elles en représentent d’autres’. In I, ch. 1, § 12 Pufendorf refers specifically to chapter 16 of the Leviathan, taking Hobbes to task for inventing the legal fiction that inanimate things, such as churches, hospitals or bridges may be represented by a person, whereas what he ought to have said is merely that the state empowers particular men to act with respect to such places or things. Pufendorf’s charge here is based upon a certain misreading of Hobbes’s text.
78. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, Discourse I, ch. 13, § 8; cf. Discourse I, ch. 12, § 5.
79. Rousseau, Contrat social, in OC, vol. 3, p. 428 [SC 112].
80. See especially the second edition of this work (Paris, 1971), which includes seven supplementary essays on Rousseau’s life and thought.
81. These themes, mainly from the Essai sur l’origine des langues, are discussed at length in my ‘Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution’, in R. F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Canberra, 1979), pp. 251–83.
82. See especially John W. Chapman, Rousseau—Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York, 1956); Sergio Cotta, ‘La position du problème de la politique chez Rousseau’, in Etudes sur le ‘Contrat social’ de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris, 1964), pp. 177–90; Lester G. Crocker, Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’: An Interpretive Essay (Cleveland, 1968); and J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1955), Part I, ch. 3.
83. See Rousseau to the Comtesse de Wartensleben of 27 September 1766, in his Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, no. 5450, vol. 30, p. 385.
84. See Rousseau, Lettres morales, Lettre 4, in OC, vol. 4, p. 1101 [ML 190].
85. This essay was first prepared for a conference on ‘Unsocial Sociability: Modern Natural Law and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Politics, History and Society’, held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte at Göttingen in June 1989.
1. Rousseau, Troisième Dialogue, in the Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. B. Gagnebin, M. Raymond, et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–95) vol. 1, p. 934 [RJ 213]. All translations are my own.
2. Rousseau, Emile, in OC, vol. 4, p. 245 [E 43].
3. The chief work on this subject remains Le Pélagianisme de J.-J. Rousseau, by Jacques François Thomas (Paris, 1956).
4. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Le mot civilisation’, originally published in 1983 in Le Temps de la réflexion, reprinted in Starobinski’s Le remède dans le mal (Paris, 1989).
5. Rousseau translated Tacitus, emulated his style and sometimes compared the impact of his own writings to that of his exemplar. The frontispiece of his Confessions, collated from one of his original manuscripts and published in 1789, portrays his bust, in senatorial garb on a marble plinth, like that of Tacitus.
6. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 20, in OC, vol. 5, pp. 428–29 [EOL 298–99].
7. See ibid., chs. 7 and 9, in OC, vol. 5, pp. 393 and 398–99 [EOL 265–66, 270–71].
8. Cf. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 162 and 168–69 [DI 159, 164–65], and Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 9, in OC, vol. 5, pp. 401 and 402 [EOL 273, 274]. A notable reading of the Essai’s biblical references and theological allusions is provided by Henri Grange in his ‘L’Essai sur l’origine des langues dans son rapport avec le Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 39 (1967): 291–307.
9. The manuscripts are (1) Neuchâtel Ms R n.a. 9, f. 1; (2) Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms fr. 228, fs. 39r–40v; and (3) BN Ms fr. 12760, fs. 615r–v. For printed transcriptions of these manuscripts see Rousseau, Oeuvres et correspondance inédites, ed. Georges Streckeisen-Moultou (Paris, 1861), pp. 345–46; Ralph Leigh, ‘Les manuscrits disparus de J.-J. Rousseau’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 34 (1956–58): 62–67; Rousseau, Fragment d’un brouillon, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 224–27, 1356–58 and 1377–79; Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Launay, 3 vols. (Paris, 1967–71), vol. 2, pp. 264–67; Rousseau, Diskurs über die Ungleichheit, ed. Heinrich Meier (Paderborn, 1987), pp. 386–410; and Rousseau, The Collected Writings, ed. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly, [13] vols. (Hanover, N.H., 1990–[2010]), vol. 3, pp. 96–101. Several fragmentary passages thematically connected with the Discours sur l’inégalité, some drawn from Neuchâtel Mss R 30, 48 and 104 and others now lost, have been transcribed in various collections and are today most accessible in OC, vol. 3, pp. 475–81, 509 and 527–28 and Meier, pp. 412–23.
10. See the Bibliothèque Jacques Guèrin, cinquième partie, catalogue of sale at Drouot-Montaigne, Paris, 29 November 1988, no. 36.
11. Neuchâtel Ms R 60 (ancienne cote 7877 c).
12. Neuchâtel Ms R 91 (ancienne cote 7887), fs. 104–05. This text, forming a projected preface for a collection of three of Rousseau’s writings, was first published by Albert Jansen in his still magisterial Rousseau als Musiker (Berlin, 1884) and became a subject of considerable interest to francophone Rousseau scholars following the appearance of Pierre-Maurice Masson’s ‘Questions de chronologie rousseauiste’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 9 (1913): 37–61.
13. See my Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language: An Historical Interpretation of His Early Writings (New York, 1987), appendix, pp. 435–93.
14. See my ‘Rameau, Rousseau and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 117 (1974): 179–238; Marie-Élisabeth Duchez, ‘Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues’, Revue de musicologie 60 (1974): 23–86; and Charles Porset, ‘L’ “inquiétante étrangeté” de l’Essai sur l’origine des langues: Rousseau et ses exégètes’, Studies on Voltaire 154 (1976): 1715–58.
15. See the Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms fr. 228, fs. 39r–40v; Rousseau, Oeuvres et correspondence inédites, ed. Streckeisen-Moultou, pp. 345–46; and Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Launay, vol. 2, pp. 264–67.
16. Leigh, ‘Les manuscrits disparus’, p. 63.
17. See Rousseau, Lettre sur la Providence [Lettre à Voltaire], in OC, vol. 4, p. 1068 [LV 241].
18. See the introduction by Victor Gourevitch to his edition of Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge, 1997), pp. xxvi–xxvii.
19. Rousseau, Confessions IX, in OC, vol. 1, p. 430 [C 400].
20. Barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor illis, drawn from Ovid, Tristia, V.x.37 [‘Here I am the barbarian because they do not understand me’].
21. See Adam Smith, ‘A Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review’, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence, 6 vols. in 7 (Oxford, 1976–87), vol. 3, pp. 250–56.
22. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1.10, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 184–85.
23. See Adam Smith, The History of Astronomy, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 49; and A. L. Macfie, ‘The Invisible Hand of Jupiter’, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 595–99.
24. See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, IV.2.9, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 456.
25. See Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 116–56.
26. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 200 [DI 195]. Rousseau’s invocation of this expression so much associated with Smith is noted by Eric Schliesser in his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation of 2002, ‘Indispensable Hume: From Newton’s Natural Philosophy to Smith’s Science of Man’ (see p. 238, n. 56); by me in 2004 in my entry on ‘Rousseau’ for the third edition of Adam and Jessica Kuper’s The Social Science Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (London and New York, 2005), vol. 2, p. 895; and by Istvan Hont in 2005 in Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, Mass.), p. 91, n.176.
27. Neuchâtel Ms R 18 (ancienne cote 7842), f. 8r. I am grateful to the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, and its keeper of manuscripts, Mme Maryse Schmidt-Surdez, in particular, for granting me permission to reproduce this passage.
28. Abbé Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, 20 vols. (Paris, 1746–89), vol. 5 (1748), p. 156.
29. See Peter Kolb’s Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, 2 vols. (London), vol. 2 (1731), p. 243. For the original German text of this passage (published in Nürnberg) see p. 533. A Dutch translation, under the title Naukeurige en uitvoerige beschryving van de Kaap de Goede Hoop, was published in Amsterdam in 1727.
1. James Burns, ‘Du côté de chez Vaughan: Rousseau Revisited’, Political Studies 12 (1964): 229–34. The first chapter of my doctoral dissertation, later recast as ‘Natural Law and the Meaning of Rousseau’s Political Thought’, in G. Barber, C. Courtney and D. Gilson (eds.), Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1988), pp. 319–35, embraces a reply to Burns.
2. Or, rather, Du Contract social, suppressed from the title-page on Rousseau’s instruction because it had become too crowded with words, although a number of copies of the first edition escaped that alteration.
3. See Richard Tuck, ‘The Contribution of History’, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1993), pp. 72–89, and Dario Castiglione, ‘Historical Arguments in Political Theory’, Political Theory Newsletter 5 (1993): 89–109.
4. James Tully, A Discourse of Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980), p. 98.
5. See Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford, 1988), pp. 232–41.
6. See J. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993). In The Locke Newsletter, 13 (1982), however, he replied to other criticisms of his interpretation of Locke’s meaning, by Thomas Baldwin and Waldron in particular (see pp. 9–46), which had mainly returned to the question posed by Macpherson as to whether capitalist relations could already have been enshrined in the state of nature. Matthew Kramer’s John Locke and the Origins of Private Property (Cambridge, 1997) offers a philosophical critique both of Locke’s account of the connection between private property and civil laws and, even more, of Tully’s alleged misreadings of that argument.
7. See Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle and James II’, The Historical Journal 35 (1992): 557–86; Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Locke against Democracy: Consent, Representation and Suffrage in the Two Treatises’, History of Political Thought 13 (1992): 657–89; and Richard Ashcraft, ‘The Radical Dimensions of Locke’s Political Thought: A Dialogic Essay on Some Problems of Interpretation’, History of Political Thought 13 (1992): 703–72.
8. See Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986), pp. 452–53; Goldie, ‘Locke’s Circle’, p. 564; and Ashcraft, ‘The Radical Dimensions of Locke’s Political Thought’, p. 771.
9. Ashcraft, ‘The Radical Dimensions of Locke’s Political Thought’, p. 772.
10. See Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London, 1889), p. xii and appendix I, pp. 193–210; Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes’, in G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (eds.), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1988), pp. 17–18; and R. Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford, 1989), p. 18. Tuck has elsewhere been more circumspect in doubting Hobbes’s composition of the Short Tract. In his ‘Optics and Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), p. 249, he remarks only that ‘until the work’s authorship and date are properly established, it is wise to ignore it in discussions of Hobbes’s intellectual development’.
11. See Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 170–71, n. 23.
12. See The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 1994), vol. 2, p. 874.
13. See Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes’, pp. 16–18.
14. See Jean Jacquot, ‘Sir Charles Cavendish and His Learned Friends’, pt. 1, Annals of Science, 8 (1952), p. 21n. In identifying as the work of Payne manuscripts previously thought to have been drafted by Hobbes, Malcolm does not address this claim by Jacquot, whose expertise in such matters was also considerable. He notes, however, that Payne’s handwriting closely resembles that of Hobbes. Payne, who was one of Hobbes’s best friends, appears to have transcribed other manuscripts, perhaps occasionally for Hobbes’s benefit. But in ascribing the Short Tract to Hobbes rather than Payne, the central matters at issue for most commentators have been the substance of the text rather than its handwriting, its compatibility of style and meaning with other works by Hobbes, and the absence of writings known to be by Payne which might point to similar interests or talent.
15. See The Correspondence of Hobbes, vol. 1, letters 33 and 34, pp. 94–114; Richard Popkin, ‘Hobbes and Scepticism’, History of Philosophy in the Making: A Symposium in Honor of James D. Collins (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 134–35; and Tom Sorell, ‘Descartes, Hobbes, and the Body of Natural Science’, The Monist 71 (1988): 521–23.
16. See Perez Zagorin, ‘Hobbes’s Early Philosophical Development’, Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 505–18.
17. See K. Schuhmann, ‘Le Short Tract, première oeuvre philosophique de Hobbes’, Hobbes Studies 8 (1995): 3–36.
18. See Henry Hardy’s editorial preface to Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993), p. x.
19. In my ‘Rameau, Rousseau and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 117 (1974): 179–238. Working independently, Marie-Élisabeth Duchez incorporated a transcription of the same text in her ‘Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues: Un brouillon inédit de Rousseau sur l’origine de la mélodie’, Revue de musicologie 60 (1974): 33–86. The material we each transcribed from Ms R 60 of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel now figures in vol. 5 of the Pléiade edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Rousseau, published in 1995 and edited by Duchez, as L’Origine de la mélodie. The only complete transcription of Ms R 60 can be found as an appendix to my Oxford D. Phil dissertation, published as Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language (New York, 1987), pp. 435–501.
20. By Théophile Dufour in his posthumously published Recherches bibliographiques sur les oeuvres imprimées de Rousseau (Paris, 1925), vol. 2, pp. 179–80, where the text is described as a ‘3e cahier’ in connection with Rousseau’s Examen de deux principes, under its former classification number 7877.
21. According to Rousseau’s own ‘Projet de préface’ (Neuchâtel Ms R 91) designed to introduce a collection of three of his works in one volume. For an account of the genesis of the Essai sur l’origine des langues in the light of Du principe de la mélodie, see especially ch. 5 of my Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language, pp. 294–326. The significance of the manuscript for an understanding of both the Discours sur l’inégalité and the Essai sur l’origine des langues is considered at length by Charles Porset in ‘L’ “inquiétante étrangeté” de l’Essai sur l’origine des langues: Rousseau et ses exégètes’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 154 (1976): 1715–58, and by me in ‘L’Essai sur l’origine des langues en tant que fragment du Discours sur l’inégalité: Rousseau et ses “mauvais” interprètes’, in M. Launay (ed.), Rousseau et Voltaire en 1978 (Geneva, 1981), pp. 145–69.
22. See John Plamenatz, Man and Society, rev. ed. (London, 1992), vol. 1, ch. 5, pp. 172–215.
23. Some of the papers pertaining to Monboddo in public and private archives which I have managed to photocopy over the years, including his correspondence with Lord Lyttelton which once formed part of the Hagueley MSS in the Birmingham Reference Library, have been dispersed and may now be difficult to trace. Such material informs, for instance, my essay, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Peter Jones (ed.), Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 145–68.
24. See Rousseau, Emile, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York, 1979), Notes, preface, n. 4, p. 481.
25. See Masson’s Rousseau, La ‘Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard,’ édition critique, d’après les Manuscrits de Genève, Neuchâtel et Paris, avec une introduction et un commentaire historiques (Fribourg and Paris, 1914), and La Religion de Rousseau, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1916).
26. See Rousseau, Emile (manuscrit Favre), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–95) (hereafter: OC), vol. 4, pp. 218–19 and 1283; Rousseau to Jean-Antoine Comparet, around 10 September 1762, in R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–98), no. 2147, vol. 13, pp. 37 and 43; and Rousseau, Lettres de la montagne, Première Lettre, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 693 and 1585 [LWM 138].
27. See Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, Cinquième Partie, Lettre 3, in OC, vol. 2, pp. 563–65 and 1672–73 [J 463–65 and 708].
28. See Rousseau, Emile II, in OC, vol. 4, pp. 323–24 [E 93].
29. I have here in mind Tully’s Locke in Contexts.
30. See Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, book IV, ch. 3 §6, and book IV, ch. 10 §10.
31. Particularly by John Yolton in Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis, c. 1984) and in Locke and French Materialism (Oxford, 1991).
32. This essay is distilled from a paper I prepared for the Oxford Political Thought Conference at New College in 1994 and draws a few fragments from other writings, including my ‘Past Masters’ Rousseau, first published by the Oxford University Press in 1995. I am grateful to Quentin Skinner for bringing Schuhmann’s work on Hobbes’s Short Tract to my attention, and to Janet Coleman for her comments on an earlier draft of the essay and for her forbearance.
1. That is, including the drafts and fragments which Leigh identifies as ‘manuscrits’.
2. Baczko, Lumières de l’utopie (Paris, 1978), part vii, p. 404.
3. Prepared by Janet Laming, Leigh’s assistant since 1979. [Fifty-two volumes in total, including the index, were published by 1998.]
4. ‘Rousseau’s Correspondence: Editorial Problems’, in J. A. Dainard (ed.), Editing Correspondence, papers given at the fourteenth annual conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 3–4 November 1978, (New York, 1979), pp. 39–40.
5. Ibid., pp. 40–42.
6. Ibid., pp. 45–46.
7. Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève (Geneva, BPU), Mss fr. 3852–58 embrace the published texts of Rousseau’s correspondence on which both Dufour and Plan made their annotations.
8. The Correspondance générale de Rousseau cites occasional corrections to the Musset-Pathay edition; the Lequien edition of the texts which the editors used most is in fact identical with that of Musset-Pathay.
9. I owe the bulk of this information about the editions Dufour pasted down to Charles Wirz, to whom I am profoundly grateful for the time he has devoted on my behalf, when he had none to spare.
10. Cf., for instance, the Dufour-Plan annotation to Rousseau’s letter to Coindet of 13 August 1767 (D-P 3446, CC, no. 6022), and the conspicuous absence of such annotation for Mirabeau’s letter to Rousseau of 30 July 1767 (D-P 3429, CC, no. 5998), bowdlerized to a far greater extent by Streckeisen-Moultou.
11. Plan, foreword to the Correspondance générale de Rousseau, 20 vols. (Paris, 1924–34), vol. 1, p. viii [‘Dufour left no precise indication about his intentions; his prodigious activity was limited to the hunt for materials, and he did not explain what he intended to do with them’].
12. Plan’s name does not appear there, though he is credited with occasional notes and with the supplementary table, published in 1953.
13. In the published discussion following Leigh’s ‘Vers une nouvelle édition de la Correspondance de Rousseau’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 35 (1959–62): 282. This text deals mainly with editorial matters arising from the original documents, as does the ‘Communication de M. R. A. Leigh’, in Les éditions de correspondances, Publications de la société d’histoire littéraire de la France (Paris, 1969), pp. 20–29. Gagnebin paints a rather more complimentary portrait of Plan in his introduction to the table of the Correspondance générale de Rousseau.
14. For a detailed account of the aborted negotiations of François and the Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Hélène Pittard-Dufour (herself a writer under the pseudonym Noëlle Roger), see L’Affaire des papiers Dufour et la Correspondance de J. J. Rousseau by Alexis François (Paris, 1923) and, with the same title, by Pittard-Dufour (Geneva, 1923). I have consulted the copies lodged at the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva. The original correspondence between these two protagonists, together with other pertinent letters, can be found in Geneva, BPU Ms fr. 4065 (see especially fols. 21, 34–35, 93–101, 104–14, 118–19, 123–25, 128–31 and 133–36).
15. ‘Fifty years a bookman’, the Arundell Esdaile lecture 1973 (London, 1974), p. 6.
16. Modern Language Review 49 (1954): 239. This remark actually pertains to Besterman’s edition of Voltaire’s Notebooks, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1952), which Leigh assesses in the same review.
17. Ibid., pp. 240, 241n, 242 and 244. Such comments can hardly have endeared Leigh to the editor of ‘the biggest project of its kind ever published or even attempted’, as Besterman described his work, notwithstanding his avowal of modesty to the effect that ‘the first person singular is not my favourite pronoun’—see his ‘Twenty Thousand Voltaire Letters’, in D. I. B. Smith (ed.), Editing Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto, 1968), p. 7.
18. In his opening lines, Besterman states, ‘This is high comedy. I made no reply to your review, and you now complain of the mere fact that I expressed, very indirectly, disapproval of it!’ His irritation at Leigh’s comments is abundantly clear: ‘You say in your letter that it cannot be seriously contended that your review is biassed [sic] or malicious. You are mistaken. I have received several letters, in which the least unamiable epithet applied to it is “acerb” ’.
19. ‘For many years now’, Leigh wrote to Besterman on 20 October 1956, ‘I have been toying with the idea of doing Rousseau’s Correspondance afresh, but I never thought of it as really imminent’. This holograph letter is to be found only at the Voltaire Foundation.
20. As is most evident from Besterman’s antecedent letter of 31 May 1965, the main source of his irritation was Leigh’s independent search for grants, ‘solely for your own benefit’, when he ought above all to be making some gesture to reimburse his publisher, ‘so heavily out of pocket’ on his behalf. Besterman himself had been profoundly irritated at never having been ‘able to obtain any financial help from any foundation towards the cost of publication’ of his own work, no doubt partly on account of his lack of an academic post (see ‘Twenty Thousand Voltaire Letters’, p. 9, and also ‘Communication de M. Besterman’, in Les éditions de correspondances, p. 8). In his reply of 3 June 1965, Leigh attempted to put his own ‘side of the picture’—a picture of debilitating debts and of a family unable to take holidays, on account of his almost full-time devotion to research, whose scale had prompted his request for a change in the terms of his fellowship so as to reduce the number of his teaching hours but also, in consequence, his total stipend.
21. In the meanwhile he had received another letter from Leigh dated 12 June 1965, announcing that the Trinity College Council had made ‘a generous and substantial grant in aid of my excess author’s corrections. . . . God bless Henry VIII and the Senior Bursar. I am enclosing my cheque for £148.40, being the sterling equivalent of Sw. fr. 1803.40’.
22. ‘You have already done more than all the other members of the committee together’, wrote Besterman to Leigh on 23 May 1956. Leigh’s name first appears among the members of the advisory committee of Voltaire’s Correspondence in vol. 17. He was to join the advisory committee of the definitive edition in 1974, with vol. 33 (vol. 117 of The Complete Works of Voltaire).
23. I have consulted the copy of this letter lodged at the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva.
24. For Besterman’s own account of his reasons, see his 1968 preface to vol. 1 of the definitive edition (The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 85), pp. xi–xiii. Even so, as Besterman makes plain in ‘Twenty Thousand Voltaire letters’, p. 11, he could not have begun to contemplate an edition of Voltaire’s correspondence in the manner of Leigh: ‘If every reference which could bear explanation had in fact been annotated, the entire publication would have run, at a guess, to three hundred volumes . . . that . . . could never have been undertaken or, if undertaken, could never have been completed’.
25. ‘Boswell and Rousseau’, Modern Language Review 47 (1952): 317. Unless otherwise indicated, the Leigh-Besterman exchanges cited here are in typescript, lodged in both Oxford and Cambridge—the Leigh originals at the Voltaire Foundation and the Besterman originals with the estate of R. A. Leigh. I am very grateful to Andrew Brown and John Leigh for making these documents available to me, for permitting me to publish material from them, and for their assistance in other matters. I am also indebted to Janet Laming, now completing the index to the Leigh edition of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau [completed 1998], for much useful information about certain papers; to Derek Beales, for uncovering typographical errors; and above all, as indicated above (see n. 9), to Charles Wirz, Director of the Institut et Musée Voltaire and Secretary of the Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva, for his permission to refer to Besterman’s letter to Khrushchev and for his generous assistance, so frequently extended to me, over many years. Earlier versions of this text were presented at a London meeting of the Johnson Club in December 1990 and at the Bristol Congress of the Enlightenment in July 1991. The first section (pp. 3–6) also figures in the proceedings of that Congress, under the title, ‘Taking Stock of the Leigh Edition of the Correspondance de Rousseau’, Studies on Voltaire 305 (Oxford, 1992): 1807–11.
[WHEN
WHEN |
an author finds himself separated from his editor by six thousand kilometres of ocean, it is normal for him to want to know if his messages reach their destination. |
WHEN |
an author hands in a manuscript to his editor in June and November is almost up without his having received any proofs, it is normal that he is a bit anxious, above all if, at the cost of a thousand efforts and a thousand sacrifices, he has arranged to correct the proofs before his imminent return to Europe, and this precisely to save money for said editor. |
WHEN |
an author has changes to request, it is normal that he would want to know where the typographers are, precisely so as to have them done at the least cost or without annoying his editor with demands that are impossible to meet. |
WHEN |
an author thought to notice, in the second and last proof of a work (which, rest assured, is not just a useful work but also a beautiful book) some typographical oddities which spoil the looks of it, it is normal that he points them out to his editor, and that he waits to receive comments about this. |
an author, weighed down by work and correspondence, without a secretary and not knowing where to turn, writes politely to his editor to ask him the reason for his strange silence, he does not expect to receive from said editor a very curt note that tells him nothing, dictated by a secretary who could not be up to date about these things, and signed by her.] |
1. See Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946), p. 711; and T. D. Weldon, ‘Political Principles’, in Peter Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, First Series (Oxford, 1956), p. 32.
2. See Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘Essai sur la politique de Rousseau’, in his edition of the Contrat social (Geneva, 1947), p. 95.
3. See Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), pp. 118–72. This immensely influential essay has been the subject of widespread debate in British and American political thought since its first publication in 1958. Much of the criticism to which it has been subjected comes from scholars who contend that there is and has always been only one fundamental concept of (negative) liberty, and not two. I share some critics’ misgivings about certain aspects of Berlin’s argument, but I am as convinced as ever that there are two concepts, and two main traditions of thought, at issue, and I have no hesitation here in adopting Berlin’s general distinction as my own, and hence in my choice of title. I am particularly persuaded by his claim that the doctrine of negative liberty is comparatively modern and that Constant prized it most of all (see Berlin’s Introduction, p. xlvi). The concept of negative liberty that I associate here with Rousseau, however, does not really form part of the tradition of thought which Berlin has embraced under that concept, for the reasons explained in this section of my essay. I have also treated the subject before, in a different context, in my ‘Rousseau’s Perfectibilian Libertarianism’, in Alan Ryan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford, 1979), pp. 233–52.
4. See Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 21 (Oxford, 1960), p. 140.
5. See Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris, 1950).
6. See, for instance, Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, 1970). It should be acknowledged, however, that Pateman focuses her attention upon Rousseau’s status as the foremost theorist of democratic participation and remarks upon his idea of liberty more briefly.
7. See ‘Some Aspects of the History of Freedom’, in Cranston’s The Mask of Politics (London, 1973), p. 32.
8. In the passage of the Leviathan already cited (see n. 4 above), Hobbes must surely have had Machiavelli uppermost in his mind when disposing of the ‘discourse of those that [from the histories and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans] had received all their learning in the politics’. Quentin Skinner, from whom I have drawn the greatest inspiration both here and in general, takes a wholly different view of Machiavelli’s conception of liberty, identifying it in what he takes to be its ordinary negative sense of independence from constraints, which, for Machiavelli, however, required the exercise of positive liberty for its attainment. See Skinner’s ‘Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty’, Politics 18 (1983): 3–15, and ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty’, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 193–221.
9. Constant’s famous discourse, De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes, dates from 1819.
10. See J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1955), pp. 38–50.
11. See especially Rousseau, ‘Préface de Narcisse’, vol. 2, p. 972 [PN 103–04]); the ‘Dernière réponse [à Bordes]’, vol. 3, p. 95 [LR 84]; and Emile III, vol. 4, p. 468 [E 194] in Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–[95]); and Rousseau to the Comtesse de Wartensleben, 27 September 1766, in R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–[98]), no. 5450, vol. 30, pp. 384–88.
12. It is worth noting that in his Cours de politique constitutionnelle and elsewhere, Constant identified both Hobbes and Rousseau as purveyors of despotism on account of their shared conception, on his reading, of the absolute sovereignty of the people. The similarity between his own contrast of ancient and modern liberty and that of Hobbes did not, so far as I am aware, attract his notice, perhaps in part because his distinction portrayed ancient liberty as practically unsuited to modern society, rather than as philosophically meaningless. De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes even ends with a plea for the reconciliation of both sorts of liberty, the one in its isolation judged incompatible with individual freedom, the other held to threaten the exercise of our right to participate in public affairs.
13. See, above all, Rousseau, Emile I, in OC, vol. 4, p. 245 [E 37] and Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, Troisième Dialogue, in OC, vol. 3, p. 934 [RJ 213].
14. I have pursued this subject at greater length in my ‘Rousseau and Marx’, in David Miller and Larry Siedentop (eds.), The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford, 1983) pp. 219–46. Some lines here, in the previous paragraph, and in the paragraph that follows, are adapted from that text.
15. See Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, ed. M. Fuchs (Bordeaux, 1968), pp. 154–55. Allan Bloom’s English edition of this text [LD], under the title Politics and the Arts (Glencoe, 1960), provides an invaluable guide to the place of Rousseau’s philosophy of the theatre in his politics.
16. See Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux, 1970), ch. 20, pp. 197–201 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 428–29; EOL 298–99]. For an account of the place of Rousseau’s philosophy of music in the context of his political theory, see my ‘Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century 4 (Canberra, 1979), pp. 251–83.
17. See especially Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Sixième Promenade, in OC, vol. 1, p. 1052 [R 96]; the Contrat social I.8 and II.7, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 364–65 and 381–82 [SC 53–54, 68–70]; and Emile I, in OC, vol. 4, p. 249 [E 39–40]. On the subject of mankind’s denaturation in society, as Rousseau perceived that development, see especially Michèle Ansart-Dourlen’s Dénaturation et violence dans la pensée de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1975).
18. To my mind, it is the insufficient attention paid to this fundamental distinction between our natural and political existence which mars John Charvet’s otherwise extremely perceptive The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (Cambridge, 1974). For an exchange of views about it, see Charvet’s ‘Rousseau and the Ideal of Community’ and my ‘Reply to Charvet’, in History of Political Thought 1.1 (1980): 69–90.
19. Rousseau, Emile II, in OC, vol. 4, p. 311 [E 85–86]. A notable discussion of this passage, and its place in Rousseau’s conception of natural discipline, can be found in the second chapter of John W. Chapman’s Rousseau—Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York, 1956), still an illuminating treatment of the whole of Rousseau’s political and social thought around the themes at issue here.
20. For Rousseau’s praise of Robinson Crusoe as a most useful book of natural education, see especially Emile III, in OC, vol. 4, pp. 454–55 [E 184–85]).
21. Above all, Lester Crocker in vol. 2, ch. 4 of his comprehensive biography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York, 1968, 1973). For, in my judgement, a more perceptive account of the relation between Emile and his tutor, see Judith N. Shklar’s, ‘Rousseau’s Images of Authority’, in Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau (New York, 1972), pp. 333–65.
22. See, for instance, Rousseau, Emile IV, in OC, vol. 4, p. 661 [E 332].
23. See Rousseau’s Emile et Sophie and Pierre Burgelin’s introduction, in OC, vol. 4, pp. clxiii–clxvi and 879–924 [ES 685–721].
24. See especially Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 134–35 and 141–42 [DI 134–35, 140–41].
25. I have dealt with some of the material in the next five paragraphs in the second and third section of my ‘Rousseau’s Perfectibilian Libertarianism’, from which a number of sentences are recapitulated here.
26. See Berlin’s ‘Historical Inevitability’, in Four Essays on Liberty, especially pp. 63–66 and 73–75, and the introduction, pp. xiii–xxv. Of course for Berlin the most appropriate (although not exclusive) place in which to identify Rousseau’s main conceptions of freedom is in the tradition of positive liberty, not least because of Rousseau’s conjunction of liberty with sovereignty. But I think it is worth noting how much closer to Berlin Rousseau appears with regard to the subject of determinism, on which Berlin parts company from the foremost philosopher of negative liberty, Hobbes.
27. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité (OC, vol. 3, p. 193 [DI 187]). This idea can be found in different formulations throughout Rousseau’s writings. For an excellent interpretation of his account of the social life we lead outside ourselves, see Jean Starobinski’s classic Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1971), chs. 1–3.
28. See de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu, in his Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1966–67), vol. 7, p. 37.
29. See Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité, the Manuscrit de Genève I.2, and the ‘Etat de guerre’, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 184, 288 and 610 [DI 179, GM 159]; and Emile IV (OC, vol, 4, p. 524 [E 235–36]).
30. See Rousseau’s Confessions IX (OC, vol. 1, pp. 404–05 [C 377]); his ‘Préface de Narcisse’, in OC, vol. 2, p. 969 [PN 101]; and his Discours sur l’économie politique, in OC, vol. 3, p. 251 [PE 12].
31. Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in OC, vol. 3, p. 966 [P 189]. In his Lumières de l’utopie (Paris, 1978), ch. 2, Bronislaw Baczko provides an extraordinary interpretation of the utopian vision of Rousseau’s Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne.
32. Rousseau, Contrat social I.8, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 364–65 [SC 53–54]. See also Rousseau’s Manuscrit de Genève I.2, in OC, vol. 3, p. 283 [GM 154].
33. L. G. Crocker, Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’: An Interpretive Essay (Cleveland, 1968), pp. 30, 61.
34. For a discussion of these passages, see Derathé’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, pp. 151–71.
35. In the introduction to his own edition of Rousseau’s Social Contract, reprinted in The Mask of Politics (see p. 73).
36. See Plamenatz, ‘Ce qui ne signifie autre chose sinon qu’on le forcera d’être libre’, in Hobbes and Rousseau, pp. 318–32.
37. Rousseau’s account of the substitution, in incremental stages, of the sovereign by the government in the Republic of Geneva bears some comparison with Trotsky’s later charge, in Our Political Tasks, that Lenin’s theory of party organization would give rise, in due course, to the substitution of the Social Democratic Party for the revolutionary proletariat, followed by a Central Committee substituted for the party, and then a dictator for the Central Committee.
38. It should be noted that there has been much academic controversy about the nature and extent of the Genevan inspiration for Rousseau’s Contrat social, with several scholars regarding that link as relatively insignificant by comparison with natural law and other philosophical sources. The principal evidence for the connection appears in several passages of the Lettres de la montagne, among them Rousseau’s remark there (Sixième Lettre, in OC, vol. 3, p. 810 [LWM 233–34]) that in the Contrat social he had not written about utopian chimeras but about an existing object, bearing witness against the outrage soon to be committed in his native city. It was for this reason, he supposed, that it was in Geneva but nowhere else that the Contrat social had been banned and burnt. Rousseau’s account of Genevan history in the Lettres de la montagne, nevertheless, is problematic, while the connection between the absolute sovereign of the Contrat social (from which no one is specifically excluded) and the Conseil Général described in the Lettres (which embraced by right only a fraction of the adult population of Geneva) remains similarly unclear. According to some of his critics, Rousseau’s reflections on Geneva portray him as much less democratic than might be inferred from his remarks on popular sovereignty in the Contrat social, although it should be borne in mind that he speaks of democracy in the Contrat (mainly in III.4) just as a (defective) form of government and not as a (perfect) form of sovereignty. On this much documented subject, see especially R. A. Leigh, ‘Le Contrat social, oeuvre genevoise?’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 39 (1972–77): 93–111.
39. Rousseau, Jugement sur la Polysynodie (Ecrits sur l’abbé de Saint-Pierre), in OC, vol. 3, p. 643 [JPS 97].
40. See also Rousseau’s fragmentary ‘Parallèle entre les deux républiques de Sparte et de Rome’, in OC, vol. 3, p. 538–43.
41. See the Contrat social III.15, in OC, vol. 3, p. 429 [SC 113]. Cf. the Projet de Constitution pour la Corse and the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 929 and 1004 [PCC; P 224–25].
42. I leave aside the Italian term indipendenza and its derivatives, which throughout the history of their relatively modern usage have had a more specialized meaning in political discourse than ‘liberty’. I also leave aside such German negations as Ungebundenheit and Unabhängigkeit, which can hardly be said to have had a resounding impact upon the literature of freedom.
43. This is not the place to undertake a history of Western philosophy, but perhaps Kant’s contrast between ‘die Freiheit im innern Gebrauche’ and ‘die Freiheit im äußern Gebrauche’, may serve to illustrate my point. Among Rousseau’s followers who have conceived his distinction as one between our ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ liberty, mention should at least be made of Bosanquet and his Philosophical Theory of the State.
44. For an introduction to this still relatively unexplored subject in the history of ideas, see Sergio Moravia’s ‘ “Moral” – “physique”: genesis and evolution of a “rapport” ’, in Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio (eds.), Enlightenment Studies in Honour of Lester G. Crocker (Oxford, 1979), pp. 163–74. Moravia focuses his attention mainly upon late eighteenth-century contrasts of the two terms.
45. Rousseau, Contrat social III.1 (OC, vol. 3, p. 395 [SC 82]). See also, for instance, the Discours sur l’inégalité (OC, vol. 3, p. 157 [DI 154–55]) and the Contrat social I.3 (OC, vol. 3, p. 354 [SC 43–44]).
46. See Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1754) (London, 1983).
47. About Rousseau’s concept of the legislator—even just in connection with his doctrine of liberty—a good deal more needs to be said than space here permits. I have already abused my share, and must leave the subject for another occasion. A superb discussion of the concept can be found in Bronislaw Baczko’s ‘Moïse, législateur . . .’, in Simon Harvey et al. (eds.), Reappraisals of Rousseau: Studies in Honour of R. A. Leigh (Manchester, 1980), pp. 111–30.
48. This essay was written too late to benefit from any of the comments and criticism I should have sought from colleagues and friends. As well as from Maurice Cranston and William Pickles, however, who together first excited my interest in Rousseau twenty years ago when I was at the London School of Economics, I have drawn much inspiration from the writings of one woman and three men in particular—Judith Shklar, Bronislaw Baczko, Jean Starobinski and, above all, Ralph Leigh. I now see that I should have benefited too, from reading James Miller’s Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven, 1984), but my text was sent to press before I could take stock of that work. Stephen Holmes’s Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, 1984) also appeared too late for me to consult it. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for enabling me to write the essay there during the 1984 Michaelmas Term.
1. Notable introductions to these themes, and to the already vast and ever expanding literature about them, can be found in the contributions to this volume [Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson and Björn Wittrock (eds.), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 20 (Dordrecht, 1998)] of Éric Brian, Randall Collins and Michael Donnelly; and in Peter Wagner, Björn Wittrock and Richard Whitley (eds.), Discourses on Society, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 15 (Dordrecht, 1991), most particularly in the essays there by John Gunnell (‘Political Science as an Emerging Discipline in the U.S.’, pp. 123–62) and Malcolm Vout (‘Oxford and the Emergence of Political Science in England, 1945–1960’, pp. 163–91).
2. See Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952); Lester Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore, 1963); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981); John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London, 1995); Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam, 1947); and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989).
3. For Koselleck’s account of such changes, see especially his Kritik und Krise (Freiburg, 1959) and his collection of essays dating from 1965 to 1977, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979). He frequently objects that he has been misunderstood, however, and in seminars and private discussions over many years he has suggested that he never had in mind any generalized notion of a Sattelzeit at all. For Foucault’s perspective on the conceptual metamorphoses of the same period, see Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966). The central themes of these texts are usefully summarized by Keith Tribe, in the introduction to his translation of Vergangene Zukunft, under the title, Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), on the one hand; and by Pamela Major-Poetzl, in Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Western Culture (Chapel Hill, 1983), on the other.
4. The seven volumes of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1972–92) have been edited by the late Otto Bruner and Werner Conze as well as Koselleck, but it is Koselleck in particular who has been the work’s principal guiding spirit since its inception. On the general methodology of Begriffsgeschichte in the manner in which he has pursued it, see especially Koselleck (ed.), Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1979); and Melvin Richter, ‘Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 247–63, and The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1995). For an account of how the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Sattelzeit, or pivotal period, of linguistic, political and social change in Germany, as he conceived it, marks the advent of a new epoch in its history and thus informs the structure of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe as an historical lexicon, see Koselleck’s own introduction to vol. 1, especially pp. xiv–xvi. In several of the essays of his Vergangene Zukunft, Koselleck stresses the importance of the emergence of new words, and of changing linguistic fashion, as encapsulating a perceptible ideological shift to a neue Zeit or even Neuzeit of modernity, for instance in the terminological displacement of Historie by Geschichte in German historical writing and discourse from around 1750. But just on account of their political and social ramifications, the pivotal linguistic and conceptual changes which he depicts do not lend themselves to compression or precise dating within a short span of years. The Sattelzeit of modernity traced in his writings sometimes appears to embrace the period from around 1770 to 1800 or 1830 rather than from 1750 to 1850, and occasionally it seems to have been initiated as early as 1700. In Das Zeitalter der europäischen Revolution (Frankfurt, 1969), a work produced collectively by Koselleck with Louis Bergeron and François Furet, the period portrayed as forming the nexus of Europe’s modern political and social history extends from 1780 to 1848.
5. The first known appearance in print of the word perfectibilité is in Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité of 1755. On the earliest uses of the word civilisation around the same time, see especially Jean Starobinski, ‘Le mot civilisation’, originally published in Le Temps de la réflexion in 1983, reprinted in his collection of essays, Le remède dans le mal (Paris, 1989).
6. With respect to the pivotal significance, for Foucault, of the year 1795, see Les mots et les choses, pp. 238 and 263. In Power/Knowledge, explaining his notion of historical discontinuity, he contends that ‘the great biological image of a progressive maturation of science . . . does not seem to me to be pertinent to history’. Pointing to medicine’s ‘gradual transformation, within a period of twenty-five or thirty years’, around the end of the eighteenth century, he remarks that there were not just new discoveries: ‘There is a whole new “regime” in discourse and forms of knowledge. And all this happens in the space of a few years’; Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London, 1984), p. 54. See also Foucault’s more general delineation of an age of Enlightenment, again associated predominantly with the last decades of the eighteenth century, and including not only new regimes of science but also the establishment of capitalism and a new political order, in ‘Qu’est-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklärung]’, Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 84 (1990): 35–63. With respect to the doctrines of the idéologues, dating as well from the 1790s, see especially vol. 8 (La Conscience révolutionnaire: Les idéologues), published in 1978, of Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale, 8 vols. (Paris, 1966–78); Sergio Moravia, Il pensiero degli idéologues: scienza e flosofia in Francia (1780–1815) (Florence, 1974); Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (Philadelphia, 1978); Martin S. Staum, Cabanis and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1980); Cheryl Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York, 1984); and Brian Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (Dordrecht, 1985). All recent commentators on this subject owe a debt to the seminal work of François Picavet, Les Idéologues (Paris, 1891).
7. See especially the writings of Baker, Forsyth, Head and Hont cited in notes 9, 11, 14, 28 and 35 below.
8. See, for instance, Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945); Katherine Faull (ed.), Anthropology and the German Enlightenment (Lewisburg, Kentucky, 1995); Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1988); and John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London, 1976).
9. See Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?, ed. Robert Zappieri (Geneva, 1970), p. 151. In all subsequent editions, for la science sociale Sieyès substituted the expression la science de l’ordre social. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in ‘The Origins of “La Science sociale” in France, 1770–1800’, Australian Journal of French Studies 19 (1982): 115–32.
10. See the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, ms. Dumont 45, fol. 19. Dumont reports of Sieyès that he hardly sees anyone else in the world but himself: ‘Il auroit voulu trouver une douzaine de personnes qui voulussent approfondir avec lui l’art social, c’est à dire qu’il lui falloit des Apôtres, car il a dit en propres termes que la politique etoit une science qu’il croyoit avoir achevée’ [‘He would have liked to find a dozen people to deepen the art of the social with him, meaning that he needed only Apostles, since he said in so many words that politics was a science that he thought had been completed’]. The passage is cited by J. Bénétruy in L’Atelier de Mirabeau: Quatre proscrits genevois dans la torment révolutionnaire (Paris, 1962), p. 399.
11. For these earliest recorded references to the term science sociale, see especially Keith Baker, ‘The Early History of the Term “Social Science” ’, Annals of Science 20 (1964): 211–26; Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975), pp. 391–95; Head, ‘The Origins of “La Science sociale” in France’; and my ‘Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 325–38. On the term’s English adaptation from the French in early nineteenth-century socialist writings, in the first instance apparently by William Thompson in 1824, see Gregory Claeys, ‘ “Individualism”, “Socialism”, and “Social Science” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 81–93. On the history of the Société de 1789, see Augustin Challamel, Les Clubs contre-révolutionnaires (Paris, 1895), and Baker, ‘Politics and Social Science in Eighteenth-Century France: “the Société de 1789” ’, in J. F. Bosher (ed.), French Government and Society, 1500–1850 (London, 1973), pp. 208–30.
12. See de Tracy, Commentaire sur l’Esprit des lois’ de Montesquieu (Paris, 1819), p. vii.
13. The suggestion that Volney in particular anticipated the Annales school, by virtue of the global historical approach he adopted in his Leçons d’histoire (delivered at the École normale in 1795 and first published in 1800), has been made by Staum in a notable discussion of the idéologues’ influence upon the French educational curriculum in the period 1795–1802 (see his ‘Human, Not Secular Sciences: Ideology in the Central Schools’, Historical Reflections 12 [1985]: 72). On the influence especially of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, but also of other classes of the Institut national over the same period, see also Jules Simon, Une Académie sous le Directoire (Paris, 1885); Staum, ‘The Class of Moral and Political Sciences, 1795–1803’, French Historical Studies 11 (1980): 371–97; ‘Images of Paternal Power: Intellectuals and Social Change in the French National Institute’, Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 422–44; ‘The Enlightenment Transformed: The Institute Prize Contests’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985–86): 153–79; ‘The Institute Historians: Enlightenment and Conservatism’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 13 (1986): 122–30; ‘Individual Rights and Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute’, Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 411–30; ‘Human Geography in the French Institute’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987): 332–40; ‘The Public Relations of the Second Class of the Institute in the Revolutionary Era, 1795–1803’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 16 (1989): 212–22; ‘ “Analysis of Sensations and Ideas” in the French National Institute (1795–1803)’, Canadian Journal of History 26 (1991): 393–413; and Minerva’s Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal, 1996).
14. See Baker, Condorcet, especially pp. 302, 371–72 and 388–90. Simon, in Une Académie sous le Directoire, stresses that the establishment of a Classe des sciences morales et politiques had been a deeply cherished ideal of Mirabeau and Talleyrand as well as Condorcet.
15. Diverse treatments of this theme can be found in Pierre Ansart, La Sociologie de Saint-Simon (Paris, 1970); Robert Carlisle, The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore, 1987); Henri Gouhier, La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, 3 vols. (Paris, 1933–41); Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); W. Jay Reedy, ‘The Historical Imaginary of Social Science in Post Revolutionary France: Bonald, Saint-Simon, Comte’, History of the Human Sciences 7 (1994): 1–26; Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Oxford, 1983); and Robert Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration (Munich, 1959).
16. Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle III, lines 303–04. Much of what comprises the second section of this essay, as well as some material from the fifth section, is developed from my ‘Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science’. See also Baker, ‘Closing the French Revolution: Saint-Simon and Comte’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), The Transformation of Political Culture, vol. 3 of Furet et al. (eds.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 1789–1848 (Oxford, 1987–89), pp. 323–39.
17. See the conclusion to Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 349–58, and his essay on ‘The State’, in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 90–131.
18. See the summary of Foucault’s lectures on ‘Sécurité, territoire et population’, offered at the Collège de France in 1977–78, in his Résumé des cours, 1970–1982 (Paris, 1989), pp. 99–106. His treatment of the subject first appeared in print in an Italian translation in the journal Aut Aut in 1978, and then in English as ‘Governmentality’, in Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21; this essay is reprinted in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London, 1991), pp. 87–104.
19. In a sense, the establishment of the nation-state, which I here trace to the French Revolution, may be said to superimpose a modern framework of the exercise of sovereign power upon certain ancient and medieval conceptions of national and communal identity in the rei publicae status of citizens joined together by a common purpose. Such control over persons as was exercised by the increasingly monolithic states of early modern Europe did not supersede their control over territories but reinforced it, while the genuinely modern nation-state came apparently to embrace the language of status twice over, in the personification of the body politic as a whole and in the ascription of a corporate personality to all its true members.
20. For comparisons of modern republicanism in eighteenth-century America and France, see especially R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959–64), and Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
21. By a vote of 491 to 90.
22. See Hegel, Über die englische Reformbill, first published in the Allgemeine preußische Staatzeitung, in his Politische Schriften. Nachwort von Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 310. This text is included in an English translation, by T. M. Knox, of Hegel’s Political Writings, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Oxford, 1964), where the passage about Sieyès figures on p. 322. It must be noted that Hegel here refers, not to Sieyès’ role in establishing the National Assembly in 1789, but to his authorship of the constitution of the year VIII, which he drafted as provisional consul a decade later, following the bloodless coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte that marked the transition of France’s revolutionary government from the Directoire to the Consulat. As First Consul, Bonaparte altered Sieyès’ scheme to suit his own advantage and ambition.
23. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede, in Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke, published by the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Hamburg, 1968–), vol. 9, p. 315, lines 14–15 and 27–28. In the English translation by A. V. Miller of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), see §§ 584 and 585, pp. 356–57.
24. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 317–18, lines 33–40 and 1–2, and p. 319, lines 4–11; Phenomenology of Spirit, §§ 585 and 588, pp. 357 and 358–59.
25. See William Sewell Jr. ‘Le citoyen/la citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship’, in Colin Lucas (ed.), The Political Culture of the French Revolution, forming vol. 2 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, pp. 105–23. In Sieyès’ philosophy, active citizens were, by and large, stakeholders or taxpayers, whereas women, children, domestic servants and foreigners were deemed to be passive citizens.
26. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 320, lines 9–13. Hegel’s text reads as follows: ‘Das einzige Werk und That der allgemeinen Freyheit ist daher der Tod, und zwar ein Tod, der keinen innern Umfang und Erfüllung hat, denn was negirt wird, ist der unerfüllte Punkt des absolutfreyen Selbsts; er ist also der kälteste, platteste Tod, ohne mehr Bedeutung, als das Durchhauen eines Kohlhaupts oder ein Schluck Wassers’ [Phenomenology of Spirit, § 590: ‘The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water’ (in Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1979), p. 360)].
27. See especially Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Les assemblées et la représentation’, in Lucas (ed.), The Political Culture of the French Revolution, pp. 233–57; Gueniffey, Le nombre et la raison (Paris, 1993); and Lucien Jaume, Le discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris, 1989). Pierre Rosanvallon’s Le sacre du citoyen (Paris, 1992), in large measure devoted to the theory and practice of citizenship in the course of the French Revolution, traces the progressive establishment of universal suffrage in France since 1789.
28. See, in particular, Paul Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée (Paris, 1939); Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester, 1987); Pasquale Pasquino, ‘Emmanuel Sieyes, Benjamin Constant et le “Gouvernement des Modernes” ’, Revue française de science politique 37 (1987): 214–28; Jean-Denis Bredin, Sieyès: La clé de la Révolution française (Paris, 1988); Keith Baker, ‘Sieyès’, in Furet and Ozouf (eds.), Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1988), pp. 334–45, and Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); Antoine de Baecque, Le corps de l’histoire: Métaphores et politique (1770–1800) (Paris, 1993); William H. Sewell Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and ‘What Is the Third Estate?’ (Durham, N.C., 1994); and Istvan Hont, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: “Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State” in Historical Perspective’, in John Dunn (ed.), ‘Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?’, special issue, Political Studies 42.s1 (August 1994): 166–231.
29. In the version of his lectures, dating from 1819–20, that were to form his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Hegel put forward, in starker terms than in any other passage of his writings, a critique of what he took to be Rousseau’s individualist notion of the will in so far as it distorted the very foundations of the state. As transcribed by an anonymous student, the passage, which corresponds to § 258 of the standard edition of this work, reads as follows: ‘Rousseau hat in neuern Zeiten die soeben erwähnte Ansicht vorzüglich durchgeführt. . . . Rousseau hat das große Verdienst gehabt, daß, indem er den Willen der Einzelnen zum Prinzip des Staats gemacht hat, er damit einen Gedanken, and zwar den Gedanken des Willens, zum Prinzip gemacht hat. . . . Rousseau hat so überhaupt den Grund gelegt, daß über den Staat gedacht worden ist . . . Das Schiefe an Rousseaus Theorie ist, daß er nicht den Willen als solchen als Grundlage des Staats gefaßt hat, sondern den Willen als einzelnen in seiner Punktualisierung. . . . Rousseau hat also einerseits dem wahrhaften Denken über den Staat den Impuls gegeben, auf der andern Seite hat er aber die Verwirrung hereingeführt, daß das Einzelne als das Erste betrachtet wurde und nicht das Allgemeine’ (Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts. Die Vorlesung von 1819/1820 in einer Nachschrift, ed. Dieter Henrich [Frankfurt, 1983], pp. 212–13). ‘Consequently’, continues the more familiar format of 1821 in its most recent translation by H. B. Nisbet, ‘when these abstractions were invested with power, they afforded the tremendous spectacle, for the first time we know of in human history, of the overthrow of all existing and given conditions within an actual major state and the revision of its constitution from first principles . . . These . . . abstractions divorced from the Idea . . . turned the attempt into the most terrible and drastic event’. According to Hegel, therefore, the French Revolution was fundamentally shaped from ‘false theories . . . which originated largely with Rousseau’ and was drawn above all from the ‘attempts to put these theories into practice’ (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood [Cambridge, 1991], pp. 277, 279). For detailed accounts of Hegel’s reading of Rousseau, see especially Hans Friedrich Fulda and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (eds.), Rousseau, die Revolution und der junge Hegel (Stuttgart, 1991), Pierre Méthais, ‘Contrat et volonté générale selon Hegel et Rousseau’, in Jacques d’Hondt (ed.), Hegel et le siècle des lumières (Paris, 1974), and my ‘Hegel’s Rousseau: The General Will and Civil Society’, in Sven-Eric Liedman (ed.), ‘Deutscher Idealismus’, special issue, Arachne 8 (1993): 7–45. On Hegel’s more general interpretation of the conceptual origins of the French Revolution, see also Luc Ferry, ‘Hegel’, in Furet and Ozouf (eds.), Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, pp. 974–77; Furet, Marx el la Révolution française (Paris, 1986), pp. 18–25 and 78–84; Lewis Hinchman, Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainesville, Florida, 1984), pp. 141–54, Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die französische Revolution (Frankfurt, 1965); and my ‘Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror’, in Political Theory 26.1 (1998): 33–55.
30. See Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, especially pp. 133–42. ‘Ohne es zu ahnen, hat Rousseau die permanente Revolution auf der Suche nach dem wahren Staat enfesselt’, he remarks (p. 136) [‘Rousseau unwittingly unleashed the permanent revolution that strives for the true state’]. ‘Bei Rousseau wird es offenbar, daß das Geheimnis der Aufklärung, seine Macht zu verschleiern, zum Prinzip des Politischen geworden ist’ (p. 138) [‘In Rousseau it becomes clear that the secret of the Enlightenment—to disguise one’s power—had become the principle of the political’].
31. See Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in Paul Langford and L. G. Mitchell (eds.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8: The French Revolution: 1790–1794 (Oxford, 1989), p. 314.
32. On Hegel’s interpretation of civil society and its distinction from the state, see especially Zbigniew Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 1984); Manfred Riedel, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Staat bei Hegel (Neuwied, 1970); and Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ‘Civil Society’ (Dordrecht, 1988).
33. See especially the Contrat social III.14–15 and the Gouvernement de Pologne, sect. 7 (‘Moyens de maintenir la constitution’), in Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes [hereafter OC], ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959–95), vol. 3, pp. 427–31 and 975–89 [SC 112–16 and P 197–211].
34. By which Rousseau of course meant just the citizenry, or the whole of the electorate eligible for public office. As opposed to sovereignty, which must be exercised directly by the people and from which no one could be excluded, government, he argued, was inescapably representative and therefore could never be democratic.
35. With respect to Sieyès’ debt to the Hobbesian theory of representation, see especially Murray Forsyth, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Constituent Power of the People’, Political Studies 29 (1981): 191–203. In his own notable treatment of Sieyès’ conception of the nation-state, Hont concludes that ‘as a political definition of the location of sovereignty, Hobbes’s “state” and Sieyès’ “nation” are identical. Sieyès’ “nation” is Hobbes’s “Leviathan”. Both are powerful interpretations, in a sharply converging manner, of the modern popular civitas’ (Hont, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind’, p. 203). With respect to the contrast between Sieyès’ and Rousseau’s conceptions of representation, but also the apparent convergence of their ideas of the general will and indivisible sovereignty, see Bronislaw Baczko, ‘Le contrat social des Français: Sieyès et Rousseau’, in Baker (ed.), The Political Culture of the Old Regime, vol. 1 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, pp. 493–513.
36. Rousseau, Emile III, in OC, vol. 4, p. 468 [E 194].
37. Rousseau, Lettres de la montagne, Septième Lettre, in OC, vol. 3, p. 815 [LWM 239].
38. This intellectual debt, often noticed by Sieyès’ interpreters, is specially highlighted with reference to manuscript sources by Pasquino in his ‘Sieyès, Constant et le “Gouvernement des Modernes” ’. With respect to his writings on economic affairs, however, most of which were completed before his attention was drawn to the work of Smith, Sieyès was principally concerned with the doctrines of the physiocrats, which he largely combated. Sewell in his Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, emphasizes Sieyès’ claim that he had conceived his own theory of the division of labour, which had gone further than that of Smith, prior to the publication of The Wealth of Nations.
39. For Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, see above all his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962), of which an English translation, mainly by Thomas Berger, is available under the title, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989). For a Straussian censure of modernity, with a Rousseauist flavour, see Pierre Manent, Naissance de la politique moderne (Paris, 1977). In Politics and Vision (New York, 1960), Sheldon Wolin frames his critique of modern political thought in large measure around conflicting images of community and organization. With respect to notions of a public sphere in France in the age of Enlightenment and the Revolution, see especially Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 181–211; Dena Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory 31 (1992): 1–20; and the contributors to the forum, ‘The Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century’, French Historical Studies 17 (1992): 882–956. Most of these authors also address the problem of the place of women within the public sphere of the period, on which Goodman’s line of argument, in particular, contrasts with that pursued by Joan Landes, in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988).
40. The abruptness and decisiveness of the break in French history which was occasioned by the establishment of the National Assembly was of course much discussed by both participants and contemporary observers, of whom, among the Revolution’s critics, Burke was perhaps foremost in his conviction that no more awful drama had ever been enacted so abruptly upon the stage of human history. Other commentators took a more sanguine view of such upheavals in France. ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world’, exclaimed Charles James Fox, in applauding the fall of the Bastille (see Fox, Memorials and Correspondence, ed. Lord John Russell, 4 vols. [London, 1853–57], vol. 2, p. 361). As Tocqueville was later to remark, ‘Comme [la Révolution française] avait l’air de tendre à la régénération du genre humain plus encore qu’à la réforme de la France, elle a allumé une passion que, jusque-là, les révolutions politiques les plus violentes n’avaient jamais pu produire’ (see L’Ancien régime et la révolution I.3, in Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer [Paris, 1951–], vol. 2, p. 89 [‘Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than for the reform of France, it lit a passion which the most violent political revolutions had never before been able to produce’, as trans. in Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Alan Kahan (Chicago, 1998), p. 101]). The French Revolutionaries’ determination to embark upon a new course of history, unencumbered by the past, is well illustrated by Lynn Hunt in her Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), for instance. But I have in mind less the innovative character of that break than the leading Revolutionaries’ conceptual disengagement even from Enlightenment programmes of reform, which were themselves put forward in order to transform a political system deemed to be in comprehensive need of change.
41. See, for instance, Robert Hahn, Kant’s Newtonian Revolution in Philosophy (Carbondale, Ill., 1988); Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford, 1993); Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford, 1991); and John Rundell, The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx (Cambridge, 1987).
42. In his Tanner Lectures on Human Values delivered at Stanford University in 1979, Foucault maintained that ‘since Kant, the role of philosophy has been to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience’ and ‘to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality’. Yet his occasional, and limited, defence of Kant’s critical philosophy never inspired him to interpret the Enlightenment as a whole in such sympathetic terms, since, as he remarks in the same lectures, it was ‘one of the Enlightenment’s tasks . . . to multiply reason’s political powers’ (see Lawrence Kritzman [ed.], Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture [London, 1988], p. 58). Foucault addressed the philosophy of Kant on several occasions after translating and editing Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht as the thèse complémentaire he submitted for his doctorate in 1960, and later, in Les mots et les choses, locating Kant’s work at the nexus of the period which he identified as marking the advent of les sciences humaines. See especially his lecture delivered to the Société française de philosophie in 1978, published as ‘Qu’est-ce que la critique?’, cited in note 6 above; a second lecture he delivered at the Collège de France in 1983, of which a revised fragment was published as ‘Un cours inédit’, Magazine littéraire 207 (1984): 35–39, with a subsequent translation by Colin Gordon, under the title ‘Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution’, Economy and Society 15 (1986): 88–96; and the essay he wrote not long before his death, first published in an English translation by Catherine Porter, as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, pp. 32–50. For notable accounts of Foucault’s changing perceptions of Kant and the Enlightenment, see Norris, ‘Foucault on Kant’ in The Truth about Postmodernism, pp. 29–99; James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenberg, ‘Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution and the Fashion of the Self’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 283–314, and Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Critique and Enlightenment: Michel Foucault on “Was ist Aufklärung?” ’ forthcoming in Norman Geras and Robert Wokler (eds.), The Enlightenment and Modernity [(Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 184–203].
43. I have commented at greater length on this distinction between democracy and representation, and on the part it has played in the development of twentieth-century political science, in ‘Democracy’s Mythical Ordeals: the Procrustean and Promethean Paths to Popular Self-Rule’, in Geraint Parry and Michael Moran (eds.), Democracy and Democratization (London, 1994), pp. 21–46. With respect to ideas of representation in eighteenth-century French political thought and their articulation in the course of the Revolution in particular, see especially Keith Baker, ‘Representation’, in The Political Culture of the Old Regime, pp. 469–92, and Jean Roels, Le Concept de représentation politique au dix-huitième siècle français (Louvain, 1969). For more comprehensive discussions of notions of representation in modern political thought, see especially Lucien Jaume, Hobbes et l’état représentatif moderne (Paris, 1986), and Hannah Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1967). Among the most notable contributions to the vast literature on modern theories of democracy, see David Held, Models of Democracy (Oxford, 1987); Geraint Parry, Political Elites (London, 1969); and John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London, 1973).
44. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (1951; London, 1958), pp. 230–31. Arendt here comments on what she terms ‘the secret conflict between state and nation’, arising with the very birth of the nation-state on account of its conjunction of the rights of man with the demand for national sovereignty. Her reflections on this subject have occasioned extensive commentary. See, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris, 1988), pp. 220–29, and Hont, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind’, pp. 206–09.
45. The phrasing of the third article of the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, which begins, ‘Le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la Nation’, is owed principally to Lafayette. For the fullest histories of the sources and drafting of the whole document, and of the deliberations leading to its endorsement by the Assemblée nationale on 26 August 1789, see Stéphane Rials’s commentary on La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Paris, 1988), and Marcel Gauchet’s La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris, 1989). In stressing that this identification of the rights of man with the rights of the citizen exposed to injustice all persons who were not duly accredited citizens of nation-states, I do not ignore the exclusion of women from citizenship which the declaration of the rights of man came to legitimize as well. In the modern world, women have in a sense been exposed to a double peril, in so far as they have been deemed unfit for citizenship even when meeting various states’ criteria for nationality. But since the French Revolution, they have at least progressively gained a civic identity in fundamental respects undifferentiated from that of men, whereas whole peoples which do not constitute nation-states have, in living and indeed recent memory, faced mass extermination and today still risk extinction in diverse ways. On the subject of the French Revolution and the rights of women, see especially Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, and Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine (eds.), Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York, 1992).
46. I have developed these remarks about Kant from two earlier essays: ‘Hegel versus Kant: From the Enlightenment Project to Post-Modernity’, in Knud Haakonssen and Udo Thiel (eds.), History of Philosophy Yearbook, vol. 2, for the Australasian Society for the History of Philosophy (Canberra, 1994), pp. 85–99, and ‘The Enlightenment Project and Its Critics’, in Sven-Eric Liedman (ed.), ‘The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of the Enlightenment’, special issue, Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 58 (1997): 13–31.
47. This essay bears only scant resemblance to my original talk on the transformation of political into social science at the end of the age of Enlightenment which I presented at the second colloquium on ‘The Great Transition’ held at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala on 11–13 June 1993. I am particularly grateful to Johan Heilbron and Björn Wittrock for their forbearance in awaiting my composition and completion of a text I scarcely had in mind when I first accepted their invitation to speak on a different subject altogether. I am also indebted to them, as well as to Istvan Hont, Joan Landes, Bruce Mazlish, Geraint Parry, Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, John Pickstone, Michael Sonenscher and Martin Staum, either for drawing a number of pertinent sources to my attention or for proposing judicious corrections which, however, I have not in every instance managed to include. My greatest debt is to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala, for facilitating my research and writing, in the course of a fellowship during the 1995–96 academic year. I have drawn upon some passages from my sections on ‘Manufacturing the Nation-State’ and ‘The Hegelian Misrepresentation of Rousseau’ in subsequently drafting two other essays: ‘The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel’s Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 35 (1997): 71–89, and ‘Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror’ (see note 29 above).