Chapter 7

ROUSSEAU’S READING OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS AND THE THEOLOGY OF COMMERCIAL SOCIETY

In the Troisième Dialogue Rousseau suggests that all his writings pursued a single theme—to the effect, as he puts it, that ‘Nature made mankind happy and good but . . . society depraves and renders it miserable’.1 Emile, in particular, he adds, ‘is nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of mankind’. He no doubt conceived Emile in that vein, since the opening line of its first book heralds precisely the claim that in the Dialogues he would declare to be his works’ chief contention: ‘Everything is good when it springs from the hands of our Creator; everything degenerates when shaped by the hands of man’.² Yet if on his own testimony we accept that this was the guiding thread of his philosophy as a whole, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the text which most fully elaborates Rousseau’s central principle, and which on account of the attention he there devotes to it lies at the nexus of his whole career, is the Discours sur l’inégalité.

The Contrat social was to become holy writ in the course of the French Revolution, when France’s political leaders were to focus on the nation’s spiritual regeneration, but the Discours sur l’inégalité far better articulates what Rousseau took to be the stages of mankind’s long day’s journey into night, which he sought to explain largely through a neologism that recapitulates the Pelagian heresy decried by St. Augustine—the faculty of perfectibilité, whose abuse by its possessors he deemed responsible for our species’ decrepitude.³ For most of Rousseau’s contemporaries and all the jurisprudential writers whom he challenges in this work, both the prospect and advent of civil society belied the dogma of original sin, according to which the miseries of this world were the legacy of our earliest ancestors’ self-inflicted fall from grace. In rejecting that Christian doctrine progressive thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contended that mankind could overcome the defects of its savage state, either without, or in advance of, celestial redemption. According to Rousseau, however, since the state of nature was innocent of both vice and danger, it had no need of the remedies of civil society or ‘civilization’, an equivalent term which acquired its modern meaning just around the time of the publication of the Discours sur l’inégalité.⁴ On the contrary, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf and all the other thinkers whom he challenges for having failed to strip away society from their portraits of the state of nature had conceived their ideas as solutions to a problem of which those solutions were in fact the cause. Civilization was in his view not the cure to the problem of human nature but the disease itself, whose stages marked our progressive rather than primeval abandonment of the traits with which our progenitors had been endowed by a benevolent God.

Rightly regarded by his political admirers as a modern legislator in the image of Lycurgus or Solon, and eventually esteemed as the Moses of Revolutionary France, Rousseau ought even more, in the light of what he declares to be his central principle, to be read as a modern Tacitus, the pre-eminent chronicler of human corruption.5 Each of Rousseau’s chief political texts, as well as dealing with modern writings, is cast within a classical mould, by which I mean especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses with regard to the Discours sur l’inégalité and Livy’s Rise of Rome with regard to the Contrat social. But they ought also to be read as commentaries on the Bible; that is, in the case of the second Discours as an interpretation of the book of Genesis and with regard to the Contrat social as a treatment of the book of Exodus. However we read it, the Discours sur l’inégalité offers us the richest testimony and deepest seams to be found anywhere in his writings of his conception of benign human nature and malignant human history described in the Dialogues as the guiding principle of his writings. The great tributaries of his system spring from that source.

Important questions must nevertheless be raised about the coherence of his philosophy and the links between its diverse themes if his claim is to carry conviction. What are his readers to make of the fact that two vast subjects to which he devoted more of his attention throughout his life than to any other matter apart from himself—subjects which, moreover, profoundly engaged his attention in the period he composed the second Discours and then around the time of its publication—are conspicuous by their absence from this text? Why is the Discours sur l’inégalité virtually silent with regard to music, on the one hand, and religion, on the other, each as central to his philosophy of history as a whole as any of the themes actually articulated in this work? That music and religion were of paramount importance to Rousseau in explaining both the origins of culture and the degeneration of mankind is amply manifested in his Essai sur l’origine des langues, which, although completed a few years later, is virtually a companion-piece to the second Discours in so far as it turns inside out its major and one of its minor themes, embracing an account of the evolution of society within the context of a history of language whereas the Discours encapsulates a history of language within the context of a history of the evolution of society.

The Essai sur l’origine des langues offers the most elaborate analysis anywhere in Rousseau’s writings of mankind’s corruption that was attributable to the deformation of languages since antiquity, while the final chapter of that work, entitled ‘The Relation of Languages to Governments’, occupies much the same place there as the concluding pages of the second Discours in addressing society’s ultimate decay, albeit in this case couched in terms of the proposition that languages that have come to be separated from music are inimical to freedom.6 The Essai equally, as the Discours does not, provides numerous illustrations drawn from Rousseau’s reading of Scripture and gives expansive scope to his philosophy of religion,⁷ as well as offering a critique of priestcraft, so vital to both his chapter on the civil religion in the Contrat social and the ‘Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard’ in Emile. Even the floods and earthquakes that according to Rousseau in the Discours must originally have brought savages into territorial proximity are, in the Essai, described not as fortuitous natural catastrophes but as supernatural phenomena caused by the tilting of the globe’s axis as if ‘with the touch of the finger’, thereby changing the position of the Earth and settling the vocation of mankind, giving rise to the birth of the arts, laws and commerce but also wars in scattered clusters of habitation.⁸ Why are these themes and images, so central to Rousseau’s account of our natural goodness and social corruption, not to be found in the most seminal exposition of his philosophy of history?

In this short essay I mean to address that question with regard to the still extant fragments of the Discours sur l’inégalité, in so far as they shed light on its original framework and the range of topics in it that Rousseau initially intended to develop. Just as the Contrat social distilled only a number of themes from a larger treatise he at first planned to call the Institutions politiques, so the second Discours embraces only a part of his philosophy of history, whose elaboration elsewhere can be traced to both early and intermediate sketches of the text, of which the manuscript submitted for publication has been lost. On Rousseau’s own testimony the subjects of music and religion were very much in his mind when he drafted it, and his main or at least only professed reason for removing the passages he penned about them was that they were in need of more ample attention than was permitted by the format of his argument. Excised from the Discours sur l’inégalité as unwieldy, this material would come to be interpolated within fuller expositions of the same topics in later works.

As with virtually all of his treatments of political themes, in contrast with so many of his other major writings, only a few fragments remain, now scattered between the world’s three principal collections of his papers, lodged in the Bibliothèque de Neuchâtel, the Bibliothèque de Genève and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Beginning with Georges Streckeisen-Moultou’s collection of Rousseau’s Oeuvres et correspondance inédites published in 1861, three of these fragments, described by their editors as drafts or preparatory segments of the second Discours, have appeared in print, as have a number of other disparate passages thematically related to this text. The first transcription was followed by several more in other collections of Rousseau’s writings, most recently in the third volume of the Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres complètes in 1964, the second volume of Michel Launay’s collection of the same material in 1967, Heinrich Meier’s German edition of the second Discours in 1984 and Roger Masters’ and Christopher Kelly’s English edition of the Discours sur l’inégalité in 1992, not forgetting an earlier notable article by Ralph Leigh on ‘Les manuscrits disparus’ published in the Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1959.9

A full assemblage of the manuscripts of the second Discours, however, would be substantially larger still. It would have to include Rousseau’s own marginal notes inscribed in a copy of his text in preparation for a second edition, sold at auction in Paris around seventeen years ago and belonging now to the Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Montmorency.¹⁰ Above all, it would have to incorporate material from Rousseau’s Du principe de la mélodie,¹¹ much of which came to be published in 1755 as the Examen de deux principes avancées par M. Rameau but which, in the light of Albert Jansen’s transcription in 1884 of another manuscript drawn from the same archive,¹² identifiably embraces material that originally formed part of the Discours sur l’inégalité, ‘that I removed’, wrote Rousseau, ‘because it was too long and out of place’, only to transport it subsequently to the Essai sur l’origine des langues. So far as I know, the sole complete edition of this manuscript in print remains my own, published in 1987 as an appendix to my study of Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language,¹³ although the material within it that would come to figure in the Essai was first published thirteen years earlier in two separate transcriptions, one by me and the other by Marie-Élisabeth Duchez,¹⁴ then entrusted with the thankless task, never completed and quite possibly never to be undertaken again, of providing a comprehensive edition of Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique and its associated writings.

While the manuscripts treating the corruption of music and language comprise the most substantial material which Rousseau withdrew, two others that broach the subject of religion ought to command our attention as well. The first, located in Geneva, was initially published with all its excisions and variants brushed away by Streckeisen-Moultou, while the second, more recently acquired by the Bibliothèque de Neuchâtel, was fully transcribed in print for the first time by Launay.¹⁵ These two fragments really comprise different states of what would have been a single passage apparently intended by Rousseau to serve as the original conclusion of his text but which he elected to strike out, not in its entirety but just in so far as it deals with religion. Each, marked by the visceral intensity of the prose style so characteristic of Rousseau’s political writings before the appearance of the rather loftier Contrat social, places heavy stress upon the machinations of priests in fomenting their parishioners’ superstitions and in terrorizing and ultimately seeking to usurp the power of magistrates. The first fragment begins with Rousseau’s lament at mankind’s endeavour to rise up from the domain of beasts to that of angels and concludes with references to the chimeras of the imagination that make us prone to magic, divination, astrology and other supernatural reveries. The second, which in its final version would become the penultimate paragraph of the published text, elaborates a theme already sketched in the first to the effect that if Heaven itself had not spoken, and if the Revealed voice of God had not taught men about the religion they should follow, there might have been no limit to the miseries inflicted on mankind by priests.

The young Marx, had he been aware of the passage, could have referred to it in his portrayal of religion as the opiate of the people; in his later writings he could have invoked the material Rousseau transferred from the Discours sur l’inégalité to the Essai sur l’origine des langues as exemplars of what he meant by the fetishism of commodities. It is at any rate by way of this twice deleted passage that the theological tenor of what Rousseau regarded as the guiding principle of his whole philosophy makes its fleeting appearance in manuscript fragments of the second Discours, for in the light of it we can grasp, even from a text which otherwise never mentions a divine power, Rousseau’s conviction that by contrast with His perfidious priestly interpreters God’s own genuine voice and Nature’s benign impulsions are the same. As Leigh remarks in restoring the excisions and variants of the Geneva or first draft of this passage cleansed away by Streckeisen-Moultou, ‘This is precisely one of the great lacunas of the published text . . . and even God Himself here adopts other forms within the ample skirts of Nature’.16

In several of his writings inspired by the Discours sur l’inégalité, most notably his so-called ‘Lettre sur la Providence’ to Voltaire of 18 August 1756, Rousseau was to develop the claims about religion withdrawn from his published text. The ‘first who spoil the cause of God’, he remarked in this letter, ‘are the priests and the devout, who never grant that anything occurs according to the established order’,¹⁷ adding—by way of a reply to Voltaire’s denial of the axioms that all is good and everything is right—that the whole is indeed good and that all is thus good for the whole. Rousseau thus makes plain that he subscribed to the ideas of Leibniz and Pope which Voltaire had attacked in his poem on the disaster of Lisbon, believing as they did, and as Voltaire did not, in the scala naturae or great chain of being and in the fundamental regularity of the universe. If for Voltaire the Lisbon earthquake could not but undermine credulity in divine omnipotence, for Rousseau it in no way challenged his faith in divine beneficence,18 since he insisted that the evils of this world were not of God’s making but of ours. In attributing those evils to human history rather than original sin Rousseau sought to exculpate God Himself and not only Adam and Eve for mankind’s subsequent fall.

In both his Confessions and correspondence Rousseau contended that Candide, published in 1759, was in fact Voltaire’s reply to his ‘Lettre sur la Providence’, although he declined to speak of it since, he claimed, he had not read it.¹⁹ With respect to Rousseau’s writings Candide may be taken to be a reply not only to the ‘Lettre sur la Providence’ but to the Discours sur l’inégalité itself, of which Rousseau had sent a copy to Voltaire in 1755, who promptly responded with a letter which began ‘I have received, sir, your new book against the human race’. Voltaire had scant patience for Rousseau’s historical pessimism, which he found as repellent as his philosophical optimism and his eschatological faith in Providence. To Voltaire and other philosophes the proposition that mankind was naturally good seemed as dogmatically vacuous as the opposite Christian contention that mankind was naturally sinful. From their progressively civilized point of view Rousseau stood closer to the forces of darkness than to those of enlightenment. His was the voice of the barbarian, as inscribed in the passage from Ovid on the title-page of the first Discours²⁰ but made articulate in the second. In espousing the belief that the human race is naturally good and that society alone has rendered it miserable, Rousseau managed to estrange himself not only from the sullen theologies of his day but also from their chief antagonists, the partisans of humanity, les lumières. Of all the major writings produced by enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century, none was so radically subversive of the philosophes’ campaigns to confront vice and relieve misery through the power of true knowledge as his Discours sur l’inégalité.

In the same year that Candide was published there appeared another text of central significance to the spirit of that age, whose author was equally attentive to the threat Rousseau had posed to it four years earlier. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith, like Voltaire himself in Candide, never mentions Rousseau by name, although in the Edinburgh Review of 1756 he had in fact proved one of the second Discours’ initial interpreters, sharing Voltaire’s and other philosophes’ dim view of the work’s tribute to savagery over civilization in its manifold contrasts of our species’ naturally benign innocence with its sinful history.²¹ Smith’s whole account of sympathy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments may be read as a critique, not only of Mandeville’s conception of self-love and Hutcheson’s alternative notion of a genuinely moral sense, but also of Rousseau’s ideas of amour de soi and pitié, which inspire the second Discours’ hostile portrait of sociable man, always living outside himself and having no independent identity except in the opinions of others, as distinct from the self-sufficient savage. The passage from the second Discours in which Rousseau contrasts l’homme sauvage and l’homme sociable is discussed at length by Smith and in his review is rendered in an appendix in the original French. In a brief remark of his Theory of Moral Sentiments where he describes the production of luxury, Smith came later to portray the natural selfishness of proprietors as ‘led by an invisible hand’, unwittingly advancing the interest of society.22 That expression, the ‘invisible hand’, can already be found in Smith’s manuscript history of astronomy dating from the late 1750s,²³ and it was taken up again in The Wealth of Nations of 1776 in much the same sense as in his Moral Sentiments to mean the promotion of a public benefit as an unintended consequence directed by an imperceptible force.²⁴

In the twentieth century the expression has come to be identified by many commentators as one of Smith’s most notable contributions to social theory, and both its history and meaning have been the subject of considerable scrutiny, most recently at some length in the fifth chapter of Economic Sentiments by Emma Rothschild.²⁵ Together with my friend and former colleague, Ryan Hanley, I am now engaged in retracing the history of the expression ‘invisible hand’, and we hope thereby to map fresh avenues out of Rothschild’s pioneering research. But from where precisely, from what most proximate source if there was one, did Smith come to invoke this expression and recast it with a meaning peculiarly his own? Hanley and I are convinced, or at least persuaded, that Smith’s chief inspiration was a passage from note 6 of the Discours sur l’inégalité, which he had just reviewed, in which Rousseau describes the Hottentots thus:

Their eyesight is so alert and the grasp of their hands so secure that Europeans are no match for them. At a hundred paces they will strike a target no larger than a small coin. . . . It is as if the stone they hurl is carried by an invisible hand.²⁶

The original manuscript source of these lines survives and is here reproduced for the first time:

Ils ont la vüe si prompte et la main si certaine que les Européens n’en approchent point. A cent pas, ils toucheront du’un coup de pierre une marque de la grandeur d’un demi sol. . . . Il semble que leur pierre soit portée par une main invisible.27

Rousseau is not himself this passage’s author, since it is drawn from Peter Kolb’s Caput Bonae Spei hodierum, Das ist, Vollständige Beschreibung des africanischen Vorgebürges der Guten Hoffnung of 1719, transcribed, in French, in the abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages²⁸ as is noted in the margin of the manuscript. But in the English translation from the original German Kolb’s text is rendered as an ‘invisible power’,²⁹ and it is apparently only in French, and by way of Rousseau, that Smith had occasion to notice it. How odd that this expression could, in Rousseau’s fashion, be transported as a moveable feast, not only from the eighteenth-century’s supreme critic of the age of Enlightenment to perhaps its chief advocate, but from a tool of native self-reliance to an instrument of market society. Having substituted natural forces for a divine presence in recounting mankind’s loss of innocence in the course of its manufacture of culture, Rousseau also bequeathed a compelling image of his theology to modernity’s new science of political economy, which even in turning his philosophy inside out could endeavour to show, no less than he had done, how human affairs might be successfully conducted without manifest controls. In passing from the Discours sur l’inégalité to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Nature’s invisible hand came to be recast as that of commerce, and civilization itself, steered by an imperceptible and divine but not omnipotent force, could henceforth be portrayed by those who were well disposed to it as more truly benign than the barbarian savagery Rousseau appeared to prefer.