The political theories of Rousseau and Marx arouse stronger feelings than do most doctrines, and they have exercised a greater influence on the course of social revolutions than have the ideas of any other modern writers. But while each continues to attract widespread interest, they are seldom compared with one another, and only in Italy has there been any extensive discussion of the nature of the conceptual relations between them. Bobbio, Cotta, Mondolfo and Marramao have all written on the subject over the past forty years or so,1 and Galvano della Volpe and Lucio Colletti have each devoted books to it which proved sufficiently popular to warrant several editions.2 English readers, accordingly, should be thankful to New Left Books and Lawrence and Wishart for recently publishing translations of the two main works about Rousseau and Marx in that tradition—della Volpe’s Rousseau e Marx and Colletti’s Ideologia e società3—though some may wonder at the bearing of these texts upon their subject, once they have been shorn from the world of Italian Marxism to which they belong. Della Volpe’s book, whose English edition appeared in 1978, is a collection of essays written for the most part over twenty years earlier, in which the author’s principal aim is to assess what he takes to be the limited egalitarianism of Rousseau and Marx and to rescue this doctrine from some of its Stalinist misinterpreters. Colletti’s more engaging and better argued work confronts the views of della Volpe in the manner of a courteous critic, invoking the authority of scholarly essays drawn from the most respectable, and bourgeois, French and English academic journals. To my mind each of these books offers a provocative but not always illuminating treatment of the subject, largely because in translation they have been plucked from their time and context. Together with Touchstone in As You Like It, I think it can be said about them that ‘When they were at home, they were in a better place’. Far more satisfactory, in my view, though regrettably less familiar even to English readers, is the commentary by John Plamenatz in his account of Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man,4 to which my remarks here owe an intellectual debt I am happy to acknowledge.
Such links as would connect the philosophies of Rousseau and Marx ought, of course, to form a subject of interest in themselves, not least to historians of ideas engaged in tracing Rousseau’s influence or locating Marx’s sources. From time to time scholars have in fact attempted to establish the intellectual influence exercised by Rousseau over Marx, particularly as it may have been mediated by Marx’s father, who, according to Eleanor Marx, knew his Rousseau and Voltaire ‘by heart’.5 A few commentators have been intrigued, too, by the fact that in 1843 Marx turned to a meticulous reading of the Social Contract and in his Kreuznach notebooks transcribed no less than 103 passages from that work, all of which, incidentally, are still readily identifiable today.6 And if we know from Marx himself that he read Rousseau’s most important study of politics with such diligent care, it might appear from Engels’s testimony that he was at least equally if not more impressed by Rousseau’s second major contribution to political thought, that is, the Discourse on Inequality, since, in Anti-Dühring, Engels observed that this work includes a sequence of ideas which, in its dialectical detail, corresponds exactly (‘gleich auf ein Haar’) with Marx’s own masterpiece, Capital.7
Yet if such evidence seems fertile ground for plotting the course of a historical influence, or mapping the extent of a historical debt, it is fertile ground stretched thinly over unnegotiable channels. As both della Volpe and Colletti have ruefully observed, Marx, despite his considerable debt to Rousseau, ‘never gave any indication of being remotely aware of it’.8 There are no more than some twenty-two references to Rousseau anywhere in the corpus of Marx’s published writings, including his letters, and most of these are just passing citations.9 His father may have known his Rousseau and Voltaire by heart, but Karl seemed scarcely able to distinguish them, and on at least one of the occasions that he mentions Rousseau he speaks of the philosophy of ‘Rousseau-Voltaire’,10 as if this pair of mortal enemies of the Enlightenment formed a Gilbertonsullivan compound, each standing for much the same as the other. Marx must have left his painstaking notes from the Social Contract behind when, in his introduction to the Grundrisse, he likened the citizens of Rousseau’s ideal state to naturally independent Robinson Crusoes, coming together through covenants to engage in freely competitive social relations on the model later elaborated by Smith and Ricardo.11 For though Robinson Crusoe is, indeed, a book Rousseau admired, it is in Emile that he commends it12 and nowhere in the Social Contract, and neither a desert state nor one of freely competitive social relations has any place at all in the political argument of that work. [R. Wokler intended, in the event that this article was reprinted, to add a note acknowledging that there is in fact one reference to Robinson [Crusoe] in the Social Contract at I.2, in OC, vol. 3, p. 354; SC 43.] Marx’s misreading of the Social Contract, moreover, is no small matter of his memory having failed him during the fourteen-year interval between 1843 and 1857, when his mind would have been absorbed by other ideas. For the sense of the passage in the Grundrisse to which I have just referred closely follows a similar misreading of the Social Contract that figures in the Jewish Question which Marx drafted in the same year he culled Rousseau so assiduously and ought, presumably, to have been most under his sway. There Marx quotes at length from some lines in Rousseau’s chapter on the legislator, which he had actually transcribed himself, dealing with the metamorphosis of human nature and the moral transformation of man through the pact of association.13 Commentators have often been struck by the similarity between Rousseau’s account of the abrupt change in human nature brought about by the social compact, and Marx’s description of the proletarian redemption of our human essence through the revolutionary movement of communism, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,14 also dating from this period. We might have expected that Marx himself, if he did not acknowledge Rousseau as his source, would at least have been impressed by these parallels, but in the Jewish Question he addressed himself to Rousseau’s argument precisely in order to oppose it. Rousseau’s conception of an uplifted form of popular morality was, he claimed, artificial and abstract, because it set the citizen apart from the individual in his everyday life and thus failed to recognize that human emancipation must have a social as well as a political objective. What a blundering misconstruction of the text that is. Marx need only have turned to Book I, chapter 9 or Book II, chapter 11 of the Social Contract to see just how deeply committed Rousseau was to the social framework, and, indeed, institutions of economic equality, without which he believed the true liberty of morally transformed individuals could never be secured. Rousseau’s doctrine of human nature, radically transformed in accordance with the terms of a social compact, may be nonsense, but if so, then Marx’s central arguments of the Jewish Question and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which so closely resemble that doctrine in both substance and style ought to be regarded as implausible for practically the same reasons.
What, then, are we to make of Engels’s remark that the Discourse on Inequality corresponds to Capital in exact dialectical detail? Even if we make allowances for Engels’s hyperbole—for the fact that he sometimes uncovered extraordinary similarities between Marx and other thinkers while at the same time praising him for his profoundly original genius—there ought to be no doubt that in the Discourse on Inequality Marx found precisely that focus upon the social relations of men whose absence from the Social Contract he deplored. There should be no doubt about this, but doubt there must be, since Marx gives no sign of having found anything of the sort in the Discourse on Inequality. We know that he corresponded with Engels about Anti-Dühring and even drafted a manuscript on the same subject, of which Engels incorporated an edited version in his published text.15 In the preface to the second edition of Anti-Dühring Engels actually asserts that he had read the whole manuscript of the book to Marx before it was printed16—an unsubstantiated statement, though it suggests Marx had at least two opportunities, once in person, and once in print, to remark upon the fact that his closest collaborator was informing the world that his greatest work, the product of a lifetime’s reflection, had already been anticipated by Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality. This was not a trivial claim, and it is difficult to imagine that Marx was unaware that Engels had made it. Yet we have no reason for supposing that Marx ever attempted to refute, or disavow, or even take stock of it. He seems to have said nothing at all about the subject, and there the matter rests.
Worse still for scholars convinced of Rousseau’s influence on Marx is the fact that—so far as I am aware, at least—we have no evidence to suggest that Marx even read the Discourse on Inequality. Apart from his references to the Social Contract there are occasional citations in his writings of Rousseau’s Encyclopédie article on political economy, but no mention at all of the Discourse on Inequality, not so much as an allusion to this most Marxist of all Rousseau’s works. Nor, to my knowledge, did Marx ever refer to any of the other compositions which bear testimony to the radical philosophy of Rousseau and to the social and economic dimensions of his doctrine—to the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, for instance, the Letter on the Theatre, the Essay on Languages and all the rest. We can only speculate on what Marx might have said about Rousseau if he had taken the trouble to read these texts; one hopes that he might at least have found in them a doctrine more congenial to his own views, as well as some incentive to look at the Social Contract in a fresh light. It seems difficult to appreciate that Marx, who was so widely read in such a broad range of subjects, and whose major writings were so often set out as commentaries on the ideas of others, should have taken so little notice and—when he did notice—held such a poor opinion, of the social theory of a figure already regarded in his day as one of his main precursors. Yet there is no denying the fact that, as Plamenatz has observed, ‘Marx’s references to Rousseau are few, and on the whole unflattering and unperceptive’.17
Why Marx took such scant notice of Rousseau is a problem whose solution we are unlikely ever to discover. Conceivably, Marx may actually have known Rousseau’s writings too well instead of too little, and he may have been better disposed to them than he ever admitted. We should not forget that Hegel’s immense influence on the Grundrisse received scant acknowledgement from Marx, and sometimes he manifestly not only neglected to commend his sources but even poured his greatest scorn upon those figures—among them Proudhon and Bakunin—whose doctrines his own views resembled most.
Another, rather more plausible, answer leads in almost the opposite direction, and it is suggested to me by the fact that Marx’s lengthiest discussion on Rousseau—that is, his commentary in the Jewish Question—incorporates a critique of Rousseau’s abstract citizen in a more general censure of the juridical rights of man, including property, equality and security, won by the French Revolutionaries and proclaimed by them in the Declarations of the Rights of Man and their Constitutions of 1793 and 1795.18 Now we know from Anti-Dühring19 that Engels supposed the Revolution had marked the bourgeois and republican fulfilment of the abstract principles expressed in the Social Contract, and some such view seems also to be what Marx had in mind in his introduction to the Grundrisse. If so, it would appear to follow that Rousseau’s ideals, as Marx conceived them, must have come to practical fruition in a revolution which, on his own testimony elsewhere,20 had failed to achieve man’s true social emancipation. According to Engels, moreover, Rousseau’s social contract principles had been put into practice not only by the Revolutionary constitutions; they had also been realized in the Jacobin Terror.21 This was a thesis advanced earlier in the nineteenth century by Maistre and especially Hegel, among others, and it had been implied even before that in the writings of Burke. As several commentators have remarked—not least della Volpe and Colletti22—Marx probably drew much of what he did know about Rousseau from his reading of Hegel, whose own misrenderings of the Social Contract stemmed from what he took to be their practical application in the course of the French Revolution. Marx, I believe, was, like Hegel, less concerned with the sense of Rousseau’s doctrine than with its significance as an ideological expression of the aims and achievements of the French Revolutionaries, but whereas Hegel saw that significance largely in the Terror, I suspect Marx may have seen it more in the establishment of a bourgeois Republic. In one case, that is, the Social Contract was held to be a blueprint for a revolution that had gone too far; in the other, in what was perhaps good dialectical fashion, it may have been understood as the manifesto of a revolution that had not gone far enough. In both cases, however, if my guess is correct, the attempt to link the Social Contract directly to the Revolution led to striking misinterpretations of its author’s meaning. It may be one of the ironies of his poor scholarship that, by appraising Rousseau’s works in the artificial glare of a revolutionary doctrine he regarded as defunct, Marx not only failed to see, or neglected to state, how closely they in fact approximate the substance of his own writings. He also failed to notice how much revolutionary light, and even heat, they could shed upon the darker and colder corners of his philosophy. All of this, however, opens up a new field, full of unturned stones. I have not undertaken that research, and my remarks in this paragraph are less provisional than speculative.
Of course nothing I have said so far should be taken to imply that I regard Rousseau and Marx as proponents of unrelated social theories. On the contrary, the lack of a direct historical influence joining the two thinkers is a matter of interest only because we had good reason to expect that some such link might elucidate the striking conceptual similarities between them. At least a few of the works of Rousseau evidently did figure as part of Marx’s education, and it is in the light of their theoretical affinities that I find it surprising that Marx drew so little inspiration from the ideas of a writer I believe he ought to have admired more. Theirs is not a resemblance, such as that between Leibniz and Newton with regard to the differential calculus, or between Darwin and Wallace with regard to natural selection, of two men at about the same time coming more or less independently to similar conclusions. The fact, moreover, that the social theories of Rousseau and Marx do correspond closely, one with the other, seems to me manifestly clear. We have only to compare Rousseau’s conception of property in the Discourse on Inequality with that of Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to see this relation. We have only to juxtapose their respective philosophies of history in which class conflict is the vehicle of revolutionary change, and the substitution of egalitarian for inegalitarian property relations the condition of society to which men should aspire. I shall in a few moments try to identify important differences pertaining to just these matters, but I have no doubt that, at least initially, the resemblances are more striking still. Something akin to Rousseau’s conception of the general will was perceived by Marx to have been realized in practice by the Paris Commune. In his account of communist society, moreover, no less than in Rousseau’s social contract state, Marx anticipated that men would be brought together by fraternal bonds through which not only equality but also moral liberty could finally be won. However little each thinker had to say about the institutions of future society, both saw mankind under contemporary social systems as alienated from its human essence by forces of which individuals were at once the authors and victims, and by forms of economic exploitation made binding through the exercise of legal and political authority. No one has investigated these links more perceptively than Plamenatz, whose academic career was in part devoted to the rescue of both Rousseau and Marx, together with Hegel, from the ill-informed disdain shown towards their supposedly obscure ideas by political philosophers of an earlier generation. More tenuous, no doubt, but still striking are those links of practical significance and application with which commentators have drawn together at least some of the principles of Rousseau and Marx. A good many of Rousseau’s political detractors have held the doctrines of Marx to be loathsome for much the same reasons that they regard the views of Rousseau as insufferable, while his admirers, on the other hand, have often, as with Fidel Castro, seen the Social Contract and the Communist Manifesto as landmarks in the same magnificent revolutionary tradition. Can anyone deny that in Rousseau’s republic of virtue, just as in Marx’s classless state, each citizen will contribute only as much as he is able and, in turn, will receive as much as he needs?23
Such resemblances and parallels, and many more like them, may turn out to be profound and significant when fully elaborated, and I set them aside here only because I fear that even if they could be drawn in convincing fashion they would shed too little light on the peculiar genius of either man. For both Rousseau and Marx, as with most major thinkers, we shall generally come closer to an understanding of their meaning if we study their ideas against the background of the sources they tried to refute rather than those they managed to reflect. Too often our attempts to trace historical lineages from conceptual parallels do injustice to putative creditors and borrowers alike. If, on the one hand, Marx voiced only what Rousseau asserted first, then why should we listen to the stubborn mule, who may not have been attentive to the message anyway, when we can still put our ear to the horse’s mouth?24 If, on the other hand, Marx maintained what Rousseau said, but better, then why should we look for the fluff on the lamb when we can already fleece the wool from the sheep? In the absence of a demonstrably certain and direct philosophical debt, for which so many scholars have hunted or fished in vain, I should like to offer, as an alternative, a few points of criticism which betoken some contrasts between the doctrines of Rousseau and Marx rather than any lines of historical influence.
It is one of the many curious features of Rousseau’s intellectual biography that this continually uprooted, solitary vagabond held fast to a single guiding principle which, on his own testimony, informed all his major writings—to wit, that Nature made man happy and good, while society made him miserable and depraved.25 Marx, on the other hand, was for many years firmly rooted to his seat at the British Museum and long betrothed to the Revolution beyond it, but he sometimes appears to have stood his ground on little else, and his shifts of focus and interest, which led him to abandon many of his works before publication, have been the bane of his interpreters ever since. Persistent efforts by scholars to understand Marx’s exact meaning have, accordingly, suffered much the same fate as attempts by others to establish what became of Rousseau’s forsaken children. In the seemingly endless disputes about the compatibility of his humanist and scientific doctrines several issues have been raised time and again, and I trust I may be forgiven—at least for the reason that I mean to be brief—for resuscitating two of these issues here: first, Marx’s account of the correspondence of relations to forces of production in his theory of history; and, second, his views about the moral status or implications of that historical theory.
In a profoundly original account and defence of historical materialism, Jerry Cohen has recently argued that the correspondence between forces and relations of production described by Marx26 invariably attests to the primacy of the former over the latter.27 Some commentators have instead alleged that our relations of production, as Marx conceived them, must be so linked with any underlying forces that they cannot in fact be abstracted from or initially determined by them,28 but this claim is said to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx’s view. For while neither of these features of society can exist independently of the other, they are, according to Cohen, functionally related in such a way that one may account for the other’s character,29 with no circularity of explicans and explicandum.30 On this interpretation the forces are primary since, though they are themselves conditioned by changing relations, it is they which promote, or select, such relations as are conducive to their own further development.31 Productive forces so envisaged, moreover, are actually seen to incorporate an element of human agency rather than exclude it, so that, as Cohen puts this thesis, ‘once we notice that the development of the forces is centrally an enrichment of human labour power the emphasis on technology loses its dehumanizing appearance’.32
Now for a number of reasons which cannot be pursued here I am persuaded that Cohen’s argument provides a more sophisticated interpretation of historical materialism than any we have had before.33 And while I share some of the doubts of his reviewers as to the accuracy of his account of Marx’s meaning,34 I believe his occasional infidelity to the texts he explains tends to improve upon the original theory rather than detract from it. A defence which reformulates a thesis and manages to escape from some of its awkward corollaries seems to me all the more creditable for that, and as I mean here to invoke the philosophy of Rousseau in order to criticize not Cohen but Marx, I am content to accept Cohen’s revisions as if they had been made on Marx’s authority and with his assent. If I find Cohen unconvincing that is mainly because in defending Marx he has offered a defence of historical materialism too, and in that aim I think he has failed, for a host of reasons, among which at least a few can be drawn from the social theory of Rousseau. Let me turn, then, to some of Rousseau’s ideas which may be taken to intersect with those of Marx, and which I believe Marx might have sought to confront, rebut, or accommodate, if only he had been aware of them.
It seems to me, firstly, that Rousseau would have regarded the Marxist—or Marx–Cohen—doctrine of historical materialism as too much encumbered by stratified forces and relations which operate ‘independently of our will’, as Marx often put it,35 and which, according to Cohen, can be seen to correspond with one another in terms of non-purposive functional explanations.36 Why, I believe Rousseau might have asked, should so much weight be placed upon the absence of will, and upon explanations of a non-purposive kind? His account of property relations in the Discourse on Inequality and elsewhere37 suggests that he would have had little difficulty in agreeing with Marx that the ties which this institution engenders are essentially legal bonds arising from the division of labour characteristic of particular economic systems,38 but, unlike Marx, he emphasized the specifically wilful character of that bondage—the fact that it depends upon consent, persuasion, deception, and language.
We have only to cast a glance over their respective ideas of property to see this most striking difference between each author’s account of the economic foundations of society. For Marx our property rights were established by formal rules which constituted part of our intellectual or ideological superstructures whose features were ultimately determined by our underlying material forces of production. Since such rights could only be defined within a superstructure, they could not directly figure as part of the economic base of any class society.39 For Rousseau, on the other hand, private property did form the basic element of every existing social system, and that it did so was precisely due to its ideological character. The importance of his conjunction of the origin of civil society with the first claim to private property in the Discourse on Inequality lies in the fact that he conceived it as an entitlement enjoyed by some individuals to which others are required to give their assent. The private ownership of land, he believed, could only be established deliberately on the part of those who possess it and must be authorized even by those who do not. It was instituted by principles which require approval and legitimation, and he would not have accepted that the class divisions which rights of property express were really rooted in material forces independent of human will. Yet that claim must surely be the corner-stone of Marx’s theory of history, however Cohen or others interpret it. Society, wrote Marx, is not founded upon the law, but the law upon society, whose needs arise from the prevailing material mode of production.40 Engels also perceived this fact clearly enough when he asserted that we must eat and drink before we pursue politics and that, therefore, the economic production of the immediate means of subsistence forms the foundation on which our state institutions have evolved, and in the light of which our legal concepts must be explained.41 This was, he remarked, the great law of human history Marx had discovered, and it was informed by Marx’s own charge against his idealist precursors—made, for instance, in The German Ideology and repeated in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy—that consciousness is determined by life rather than life by consciousness.42 Cohen, who rightly subjects each of those works to a most rigorous interpretation, never refers to this statement in his defence of Marx’s theory of history.43 But if, as Engels supposed, it forms a crucial part of his mentor’s greatest discovery, I think Rousseau would have viewed it as his most profound mistake. For, by contrast with Marx, he surmised that consciousness—indeed belief of a kind which Marxists later termed ‘false consciousness’—was so inextricably bound up with life that no primacy of any sort could be ascribed to material existence over modes of thought.
The significance he attached to the concept of authority, and to wilful behaviour and rule-governed conduct linked with that concept, led Rousseau into fields of social thought, especially linguistics, which were largely unexplored by Marx. Since economic domination depends upon the legitimacy of rules, and since these can only be established by consent, then the devices employed to elicit that consent, Rousseau supposed, must also occupy an essential place in any satisfactory theory of our history. He believed that our main instrument of subjugation has been much the same as the medium through which we conjugate too, that is, language. For his part Marx was so preoccupied with the unintended consequences of our actions that he had relatively little to say about the role of language in human affairs. Just as consciousness was determined by life, so too, he claimed in The German Ideology, was language: ‘The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world’, he insisted, ‘[turns] into the problem of descending from language to life. . . . Neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own . . . they are only manifestations of actual life’.44 Rousseau, on the other hand, regarded language as of central importance as a determinant of man’s behaviour. The founder of civil society needed to find people foolish enough to believe him. In order to secure his entitlement to the land he had to induce others to renounce any claims of their own in his favour, and the institution of property itself depended upon the continual renunciation of a right by individuals who had not subscribed to the initial agreement but were persuaded of its justice. All that persuasion, of course, required the most artful eloquence and deception, the terms of which Rousseau recounts in several passages of the Discourse on Inequality and elsewhere, and which rather resemble, in a different context, the sublime rhetoric of the legislator of the Social Contract, who, we will recall, must also persuade without convincing.45 So inextricably was language bound up with the foundation of society, in Rousseau’s judgement, that he was actually unable to decide whether language was fundamentally a social institution or society itself a linguistic artefact.46 Not only the institution of property but all our interpersonal ties were characteristically conceived by him in a linguistic framework, embracing artificially fixed meanings and symbolic representations which we employ to identify and distinguish one another and mark out what later came to be termed our station and its duties. It was from the ways in which we ascribe sense and especially attribute moral significance to our behaviour and the behaviour of others that society was constructed, and from the linguistic base of our specification of terms stemmed the moral emblems of our specialization of roles, and ultimately the fixation of social man in an abstract world of his own making. The ideological principles enunciated in language were thus not divorced from the real substance of social life; they were its very foundation.47
I have here addressed myself very briefly to Rousseau’s views on language mainly to show how, unlike Marx, he believed the conception and expression of our ideas to be of prime consideration in determining the nature of our economic modes of life. It was Rousseau’s focus upon thought as it was bound up with life which led him to regard property as shaped as much by our authority relations as by the material forces of production to which those relations correspond. It was the same focus which prompted him, so much more than Marx, to consider the symbolic and cultural features of human behaviour responsible for both the character and origin of man’s exploitation by man. If property, as he conceived it, displayed the deliberate, wilful purpose of our economic ties—if this institution was in some measure explicable as the consequence of a performative linguistic act such as the issue of a command or a promise to obey—it was equally through language, he argued, that the subterfuge, the deceit, hypocrisy, and false values which underlay our allegiances were articulated and expressed. More perceptively, perhaps, than any other thinker before him, and certainly more perceptively than Marx, Rousseau recognized the importance of imagery and illusion as constitutive elements of our social bonds. We act upon reflection, but our reflection is misled, even depraved, he observed,48 and through language what we believe we see plainly turns out to be trompe-l’oeil. In our undertakings to respect the private property of others we envisage ourselves in a position to enjoy the same entitlements, even though all the land we could acquire is already in private hands. In political society we think ourselves free but run headlong into our chains,49 lured by the semblance of liberty. Everywhere we meekly accept the yoke of despotism because it is wrapped around us like a mantle of justice.
The whole of Rousseau’s theory of culture, in fact, reinforces this conception of illusory bonds which form the nexus of society. What are our arts, letters, and sciences but, as he put it, those ‘garlands of flowers woven round the iron chains by which men are weighed down’?50 What is contemporary theatre, he asked, but the adornment of vice behind the mask of eloquence which moves audiences to approve the most terrible crimes? What has our music become, now that it has been displaced from its springs of poetry and melody, but a collection of artificial scales and listless harmonies echoed, in speech, by the prosaic rhetoric of mountebank kings, counterfeit scholars and charlatan priests? Everywhere we are confronted by incantations and diatribes, by recitations from the pulpit and proclamations from the throne, distracted by the demons of art, stupefied by preaching and shouting devoid of sense. In music, he wrote, ‘the calculation of intervals [has been] substituted for the finesse of inflexions’,51 but this calculation of intervals was only a variant form of the divisive moral relations by which individuals have become equally enthralled in civilized society. Just as we have ceased to assemble together to determine our civic ideals, so, similarly, through art, science, and religion we have been numbed and made passive, displaced from the centre of cultural life and herded into its pit and pews. Transformed from agents of what we do into witnesses of what happens to us, we are, in the modern world, turned into a hushed audience and taught deference and timidity. In the arts, no less than in our political relations, Rousseau observed in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, ‘it is necessary to keep subjects apart; that is the first maxim of contemporary politics’.52 Such, I believe, was the essence of his view of culture, and it is an aspect of his social theory as a whole from which Marx, if he had been familiar with it, might have drawn some inspiration but also, perhaps, a number of correctives to his own approach as well.
These elements of Rousseau’s philosophy of culture, together with his conception of property, thus embrace a wider—more political, linguistic, aesthetic and scientific—spectrum of human activities than Marx allowed to be of central significance, and, of course, my aim here has been to stress the greater scope of Rousseau’s vision of our civilization’s decline as compared with Marx’s account of the factors which shape our historical epochs. But equally, this is just to say that Rousseau relied less than Marx upon the thesis that mankind is essentially Homo faber, that we are distinguished from animals, as Marx sometimes observed, by virtue of the fact that we produce our own means of subsistence, so that what individuals truly are, ‘depends on the material conditions determining their production’.53 For Rousseau, what individuals are depends as much upon the patterns of their fixation in abstract worlds of their own making as upon either their material relations, or their technological forces, of production. A conception of Homo faber lies at the heart of his own theory no less than at the base of Marxism, but what he adds to Marx is a richer anthropological theory54 of the exploitative nature of social relations in class-divided societies. He believed our chains were as much of cultural as of economic origin, and that it was through culture that Homo faber had become Homo fabulator and our species as a whole, not Homo sapiens but Homo deceptus. Marx taught us that we have nothing to lose apart from our chains, but if he had read Rousseau attentively he would have found explanations of more links in those chains than he ever perceived himself.
The second contrast between Rousseau and Marx I wish to consider has to do with the place of moral values in their doctrines. As I have already suggested, there are many similarities between their accounts of the defects characteristic of class society—their conceptions of man’s self-estrangement, their views of the dehumanizing effects of the division of labour, their perspectives on the suffering caused by social inequality generally. As Marx himself implies in the Jewish Question, the main difference between them seems to be that Rousseau’s principles were articulated in a political frame of reference, emphasizing such terms as sovereignty, equality and liberty, whereas in his focus upon our ‘species-being’ he instead stressed the social, rather than political, essence of man. On this reading of their disagreement it appears that Marx was just as much concerned with liberty as Rousseau was, though he conceived the context of human emancipation in another way. As we know from a familiar passage of Capital, he believed that the true realm of freedom only begins when labour is no longer determined by external purposes. ‘Freedom’, he wrote, ‘can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature . . . instead of being ruled by it as by [some blind power]’.55 The agents whose freedom must be truly realized are not abstract citizens but real producers, and Marx was prompted by this approach to the question of freedom to voice some of his most eloquent pleas on behalf of human liberty in terms of free time. A man who is so occupied in working for the capitalists that he has no free time is ‘less than a beast of burden’, he commented in Wages, Price and Profit,56 so that in place of the pompous catalogue of the inalienable rights of man he put forward what he termed ‘the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear when the time which the worker sells is ended and when his own begins’.57 The freedom to which Marx was committed thus appears to be as important a moral concept in his philosophy as freedom conceived in terms of sovereignty and the exercise of the general will was for Rousseau. On this interpretation we might even say that Marx’s theory is a corrective to that of Rousseau, based, as it was, upon a sharper awareness than Rousseau had, or could have had, of the economic forces and constraints which render us unfree even when we enjoy civil liberty and political independence.
Yet to render the contrast between their views of liberty in that way is also misleading, in so far as Marx was less concerned to ground abstract moral principles in our economic relations than to deny their direct relevance to his account of human history as a whole. ‘Communists do not preach morality at all’, he remarked in The German Ideology. Only discontented schoolmasters base their arguments for revolution on their moral dissatisfaction.58 Because Marx regarded most conservative moral doctrines as ideological, and most radical moral doctrines as utopian—above all because he saw morality itself as part of the intellectual superstructure of any economic system—he went to great lengths to expunge moral ideals from his social theory. Morality and all such ‘phantoms [of] the human brain’, he wrote, have no independence, no history, no development of their own. They are products of thought which derive their real existence from the material production of man.59 Now in adopting this stance Marx undermined much of the force of his own condemnation of capitalism. Since our moral ideas were shaped by the modes of production to which they correspond, he believed that they could only be assessed in terms of that correspondence and not with respect to their inherent merit or attractiveness. As he put it in Capital and reiterated in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the justice of transactions which take place between agents of production depends upon the extent to which they adequately express those relations; justice cannot be invoked as a standard by which to judge them: ‘[Their] content is just whenever it corresponds, is appropriate, to the mode of production. It is unjust whenever it contradicts that mode’.60 It therefore followed that whereas slavery or fraud was unjust with regard to the capitalist mode of production, there could be no injustice within the market itself—no such thing as an unjust wage, no unjust extraction of surplus value from a worker’s labour power. Because it was not an abuse of capitalist production but a manifestation of it, exploitation, in short, was not unjust.61 Indeed, any reform of capitalism which was designed to redistribute profits in such a way as to abolish the exploitation of workers must violate fundamental property rights sustained by the capitalist mode of production and hence would itself be an unjust imposition of a principle incompatible with it.62 The correspondence of moral ideals with their underlying modes of production precludes our calling upon any supposed universal standards in judgement of the merits of a particular economic system. From this point of view, justice, and indeed the rightness of all moral principles,63 is determined in something like the manner Hobbes thought necessary—that is, our values are established by a predominant de facto power whose control over human affairs they express and legitimate—with this crucial difference, of course, that the sovereign power described by Hobbes shapes our moral principles through an act of will, whereas that of Marx operates at a deeper level independently of our will. Marx’s mistrust of the language of morals, it seems, has its roots in just those misgivings which inform his doubts regarding the place of will and consciousness as determinants of human affairs in his theory of history.
On this point, at any rate, Marx is quite explicit. ‘Right’, he remarked in his Critique of the Gotha Programme,64 ‘can never be higher than the economic structure of [the] society’ to which it applies. Not only was he unwilling to accommodate any so-called rights of man in his philosophy, but he could find no room either, he said, for what this or that proletarian, or indeed even the whole proletarian movement, might imagine to be its aim, since the only question worth considering was what the proletariat is, and what, historically, it is compelled to do.65 Communism, therefore, was unconcerned with the pursuit of lofty moral principles. It is not an idea, he insisted, to which reality must somehow adjust itself. It is the actual movement transcending the present state of affairs, resulting from premises already in existence.66 However much other socialists might aspire to bend the laws of history, Marx himself suffered from none of their illusions and advocated no utopia of his own. The visionary authors of the Gotha Programme could hardly have suffered a sharper insult from him than his acid remark that they ‘could just as well have copied the whole of Rousseau’.67
Let me conclude, then, with the reply which I believe Rousseau would have made to these claims. The proposition that morality must always be explained in terms of our material modes of production is a thesis I have already dealt with in my remarks about his account of property and his theory of culture. The point Rousseau invites us to consider, we should recall, is that our ideas, including our moral ideas, and even our illusory moral ideas, are not built round or upon the material substratum of our lives, but are rather embedded within, and constitute an integral part of, the basic ways in which we live. If Marx had only put his case more modestly—particularly if he could have been guided by Montesquieu—Rousseau might not have quarrelled with him at all. Largely because he himself had learnt so much from Montesquieu, Rousseau was as convinced as anyone in the Enlightenment that our moral, legal and political principles arc influenced by forces outside us—by customs and mores beyond the control of individuals, and by such factors as climate and terrain beyond the control of men collectively.68 But neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau believed that those influences causally determine or functionally explain our moral ideas in any sense supposed by Marx or Cohen; they only, and everywhere, act as fetters upon the dissemination of ideas, in so far as they discourage the application of principles, independently conceived, in places and circumstances to which those principles are not rightly suited.69 According to Marx it was the relations of production that fettered the forces in ways which prompted a revolutionary transformation of society. For Montesquieu and Rousseau, by contrast, such fetters were a mark of more or less stable, rather than revolutionary, epochs; they operated upon intellectual superstructures and not economic foundations; and they manifested the influence of forces which were divorced from our will upon our social relations, and not, as Marx contended, the influence of social relations upon forces.
The difference between Montesquieu’s and Rousseau’s conceptions of such matters, on the one hand, and Marx’s theory of the relation between a societal base and its superstructure, on the other, is an important subject which, perhaps fortunately, there is not enough space to consider here. But I think it is worth mentioning Montesquieu in this context, because, according to Rousseau, that illustrious thinker had nevertheless laboured under a misapprehension about the nature of our moral ideas—a misapprehension which I believe he would have held that Marx suffered from too. For Montesquieu, wrote Rousseau in Emile,70 had conflated the interpretation of political principles with a study of actual states, whereas these were incompatible and wholly distinct subjects. He had, that is, confused fact and right, and even if Rousseau were as convinced by Marx’s materialist explanation of morality as he was by Montesquieu’s view of the spirit of laws, he would still have regarded Marx as mistaken to suppose that our ideals neither need nor could have any independent validity. ‘What kind of a right is it which perishes when force fails?’, he asked in the Social Contract.71 If force creates right, the effect changes with the cause, and the word ‘right’, since it has no meaning apart from force, means absolutely nothing.
Rousseau also differed from Montesquieu, and would, I think, have similarly disagreed with Marx, over at least one further point, connected with these matters, about the influence of morality. That difference is expressed most vigorously in his claim, made in the Social Contract,72 that ‘what is possible in our moral affairs is less sharply circumscribed than we suppose’. Marx may have had little patience for the groundless idealism and fantasies of other socialist thinkers, but for Rousseau it was in our dreams that we shaped and breathed life into our moral principles, and through our fantasies that we conceived the means for their realization in practice as well. If our social bonds were only manifestations of our abstract notions of obedience under circumstances in which we also supposed ourselves free, then no feature of our material mode of existence could of itself prevent our abandonment of those notions and hence, too, delivery from our illusions of freedom. However confined is reality, Rousseau observed, the world of imagination, which we inhabit at the same time, is infinite.73 And whereas in our minds and hearts every one of us may perceive a world without limits—whereas in masturbation, to which Rousseau succumbed all his life, we picture ourselves in the arms of a lover possessing any of the qualities we desire—so he imagined the possibility of mankind collectively achieving new bliss, acquiring a new corporate identity, under institutions of popular self-rule.
Just as reverie constitutes the free association of ideas never before conceived, democracy, as Rousseau pictured it, might be said to comprise a free association of people such as had never been truly envisaged before. The imagery of public participation in all facets of social life was deeply felt and richly drawn by Rousseau, around such aesthetic, religious, and cultural symbols of solidarity as he portrays in the military dance of the regiment of Saint-Gervais in his Letter on the Theatre, or the uplifting song of the grape pickers in The New Hélöise.74 Democratic politics as he saw it was infused with the charm and gaiety of a cultural festival, a popular banquet, a theatrical display of all the people, held in the open air, under the sky.75 Shakespeare’s melancholic Jaques in As You Like It may have regretted that ‘All the world’s a stage’, but through the force of his imagination Jean-Jacques aspired to make it so.
We should be mistaken, however, if we were to regard Rousseau’s images of freedom as utopian ideals of a kind which Marx thought irrelevant to the main course of human history. Time and again Rousseau insisted that fictitious and imaginary states of the past or future were not his concern. Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, he reflected in his Letters from the Mountain, may have been chimeras, but he had attempted in the Social Contract to lay the theoretical foundation of an object which was real, that is, the constitution of Geneva, and it was because he had set his sights too close to home rather than too far away that he had not been forgiven by his critics.76 Of course the Geneva he portrayed was not exactly real either, and its history is recounted by him in hypothetical terms not unlike his speculative reconstruction of the history of mankind in the Discourse on Inequality, where, in order to get at the truth, it had proved necessary to lay the facts aside. But in all his political works I believe Rousseau was determined to show that what we suppose to be real in public affairs is in fact abstract, artificial, illusory. They think that I am swayed by chimeras, he remarked about his critics in Emile; I see that they are moved by prejudice.77 His political doctrines were framed, as he put it in the introductory chapter of the Social Contract, to construct a system of laws as they might be, taking men as they are, and, in my view, his arguments have always drawn much of their appeal from the conviction underlying them—that our political and social institutions, being human contrivances, can be changed, and that, once they are changed properly, the despair and decadence of our lives, which is attributable to them, may be overcome as well.
How odd it seems, in the light of these differences, that it was Marx who was the revolutionary, while Rousseau always counselled restraint. Despite espousing the thesis that no social order ever perishes until all the productive forces for which there is room in it have matured, Marx felt little hesitation about advocating a communist revolution in Germany, before the fruits of capitalism had really been harvested, and in Russia, before the seeds had even been sown.78 Rousseau, for his part, foresaw a century of revolutions which would bring down the monarchies of Europe,79 and yet the liberty of the whole of humanity, he insisted, could not justify shedding the blood of a single man.80 He had drafted his political writings about Geneva not to foment revolution but to arrest it,81 and whereas Marx was later to try, but fail, to direct the revolutionary fortunes of his contemporaries in the Communist League and the First International, Rousseau actually managed, quite by himself—not only on his own testimony but also on that of other witnesses—to prevent the outbreak of a revolution in Paris which would have occurred but for the fact that the publication of one of his works so incensed the crowd that its hostility was turned instead upon him.82
Marx may have been committed to the shortening of the working day, and to increasing the free time of the working classes, but if his doctrine of historical materialism ensured that time was so much on their side, we may well wonder why both he and the proletariat did not have at least a little more time on their hands, while awaiting the full evolution of the economic system they must eventually bring down. Rousseau, whose rage against the corruption of the ancien régime was matched only by Marx’s contempt for fellow socialists, sought nothing so passionately as a life of solitude and isolation, which, however, was constantly upset by political turmoil of a kind Marx was never able to incite. All this is most baffling, and to my mind it confirms the conclusion of Plamenatz, specifically about Marx but which I believe he thought equally true of Rousseau—that each author, while pointing with one hand in the direction in which he wished us to go, was with the other throwing dust in our eyes.83 If Rousseau had lived in Marx’s day he would most likely have been inspired to think afresh about the material or economic forces that shape human history and their connection with those ideas by which, he supposed, men are moved too. If he had lived in our day he might well have looked at Marx’s putatively scientific account of our historical epochs and wondered whether it was not really an expression of just that naïve faith in humanity which had been held against him, and whether his own bleaker conception of our decline was not more justified than Marx’s optimism. Of this profoundly significant difference between their respective philosophies of history I have hardly taken any note at all here.
Stemming from what I have said, however, one thing does seem to me clear—and this is that Marxists now are in need of some of the light, and certainly more of the fire, of Rousseau’s vision to keep their movements out of the cold. Marx was in my view mistaken, or at any rate misleading, in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had only interpreted the world, whereas the point was to change it. In a sense Rousseau anticipated this remark when, in a reply to one of his early critics he had agreed, ‘Let us correct ourselves, and speculate no more’.84 But he also perceived, even if it seems Marx occasionally did not, that when we reinterpret the world we do come to change it, since a world of abstract images cannot survive as it is if men no longer accept the illusions of their place within it. In Emile he claimed that however much the golden age might be a chimera, to bring it to life it was only necessary to love it.85 An impossible task, no doubt, as he himself recognized. Yet by exciting such love, and by envisaging our release from bondage of our own making, Rousseau captivated the revolutionary imagination of mankind in fervent ways which Marxists have also managed to achieve, but only by abandoning the doctrines they purport to follow. Still in need of reinterpretation, the world they have changed remains much as it was.86