Rousseau, Basic Political Writings 2e

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is a great political theorist, but he is read for the wrong reasons. Three social contract theorists, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Rousseau, are at the center of any introduction to political theory: Hobbes, for his intellectual rigor; Locke, because he is the theorist of the American Revolution; and Rousseau, because he is the theorist of the French Revolution. Locke may or may not have been an important theorist for the American Founding Fathers—the matter is much debated. Rousseau was not regarded as an important political theorist prior to the French Revolution of 1789; his major work of political theory, On the Social Contract, was published in French in 1762, but not translated into English until 1791, and his books were not a cause of the revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins admired him greatly, but they misunderstood him profoundly (their Rousseau was invented to serve their own purposes). It is scarcely worth reading Rousseau if we want to understand eighteenth-century politics, either before or after 1789, but it is certainly worth reading his works if we want to understand ourselves and our own politics. For Rousseau’s importance lies, as he always insisted, in his remarkable understanding of the nature of human beings. He, more than any other political theorist, has something important to say about who we are and what politics is for.

In order to understand Rousseau we need to bear three things in mind. First, Rousseau is always writing about Jean-Jacques. The first word of his Social Contract is “I”; the last word is “me.” In order to understand Hobbes or Locke, it helps to know something about seventeenth-century politics, but one need not know much about their lives. It really does not matter that Hobbes was employed as a tutor, or Locke as a doctor. Rousseau is different. Everything he writes—and not just his Confessions or Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques—comes directly out of a meditation on his own experience of life and is consequently about himself. Not entirely surprisingly, he was the author of a play, Narcissus, or the Man Who Fell in Love with Himself (1752). Who is Rousseau? When he writes about politics he consistently describes himself as “Citizen of Geneva.”² To understand his politics, we will need to start with his relationship to Geneva.

{x} Second, Rousseau is acutely aware that his contemporaries think that he is the author of “paradoxes.”³ Many of these paradoxes have become famous: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”; citizens must be “forced to be free.”⁴ A paradox can be a statement that is contrary to received opinion; or, more strongly, it can be a statement that appears to be self-contradictory or absurd. Rousseau’s paradoxes are both. In order to recognize that they are true, readers have to give up conventional ways of thinking, and consequently they have to adopt a way of thinking that appears impractical or irrelevant in most real-life situations. Rousseau’s political theory—at least as it appeared in print—is about principle, not practice.⁵

Third, Rousseau was incapable of seeing into the future. He writes often about “revolutions,” but even he could not imagine the American and French revolutions. When Rousseau writes of revolutions, he has in mind the major political upheavals described by René-Aubert de Vertot (1655–1735) in his books on the “revolutions” of ancient Rome and of modern Sweden and Portugal—civil wars and coups d’état we would call them, rather than revolutions. Rousseau has been accused of being the author of a totalitarian political theory, but of course Rousseau could never imagine Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia; he was familiar with what he called despots, a term that covered ancient Roman emperors such as Caligula, contemporary Ottoman rulers (though Rousseau never explicitly said so), the contemporary ruler of France, Louis XV, and, above all, his predecessor Louis XIV. It seems paradoxical indeed to accuse someone who hated despotism, who described himself as having an “indomitable spirit of liberty,” with seeking to establish totalitarianism.⁶

It is easy for us to think that every sensible person is hostile to despotism, but that is because our politics is the long-term product of the English Revolution of 1688 and of the American and French revolutions. In the mid-eighteenth century, the consensus was that some form of despotism represented the political future. David Hume, for example, argued that absolute government could be “civilized” and could represent the likely future for {xi} Britain.⁷ The leading figures of the French Enlightenment declared their support for despotic rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia; their objection to French despotism was not that it was despotic but that it was unenlightened.

The term “Enlightenment” comes from the German Aufklärung, and it is not one with which Rousseau was familiar. He often uses the adjective éclairé, which means literally “well lit” (an artist’s studio should be éclairé) and was used metaphorically to mean “well educated.” For Rousseau and his contemporaries, éclairé does not have the specific meaning of “enlightened.” Rousseau knew that he was supposed to live in a siècle des lumières, “an age of lights,” or an enlightened age. The term seems to have been invented by Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who, more than anyone, was responsible for one central aspect of the Enlightenment, {xii} the attack on the truths of revealed religion. Enlightenment philosophers did not agree on what ought to replace revealed religion. Some, like Baruch de Spinoza, Paul Henri-Thiry (Baron d’Holbach), and Denis Diderot, were atheists or pantheists; some, like Voltaire, were deists; and some, like Locke, wanted a more rational Christianity (Locke wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity [1695], and his disciple John Toland wrote Christianity not Mysterious [1696]), but, at a time when Protestants were being severely persecuted in France, all favored religious toleration and freedom of debate. A rejection of revealed religion and of a conventional Christian morality (of sexual continence, for example) was one of the first requirements if you were to think of yourself as a philosophe—the word means “philosopher,” but it was used in France to refer to enlightened philosophers, public intellectuals rather than university professors.

The philosophes of the mid-eighteenth century were united by more than a rejection of revealed religion. They had rejected the certainties of both scholastic philosophy (still mainly taught in the universities) and of Cartesianism and had adopted the epistemology and psychology of Locke—a cautious empiricism, a willingness to recognize the intellectual coherence of materialism, and above all a belief that human beings are shaped by their environment and, hence, by their upbringing. Thus, what united the philosophes was a conviction that society could be reformed—it could be made more equal, more tolerant, more skeptical.⁸ What went with this was a belief in progress—scientific progress, technological progress, economic progress, philosophical progress. The second half of the seventeenth century had seen a debate over whether the “moderns” were the equal of the “ancients.” The Enlightenment took it for granted that that debate had been settled in favor of the moderns: gunpowder and printing, the science of Newton, the philosophy of Locke, and the new commercial prosperity of the Dutch Republic and of England were irrefutable proof that the moderns had outstripped the ancients.

Rousseau lived in the middle of the age of Enlightenment; for a while at least he counted among his friends some of the greatest philosophes—Diderot, Jean d’Alembert, and Hume. But he was never an Enlightenment philosopher. Although he was far from being an orthodox Christian, he was more sympathetic to Christianity than any proper philosophe would be. If he did not uphold a conventional Christian morality, he was all in favor of virtue (by which he meant old-fashioned pagan virtues, such as courage and frugality, not fashionable “virtues” like politeness and sociability nor Christian virtues such as piety and chastity).⁹ He believed strongly that we are shaped by our environment, but he did not believe in progress. In contrast to the leading figures of the Enlightenment, he was systematically hostile to despotism. Rousseau was thus in the Enlightenment, but he was not of the Enlightenment; indeed, he became one of the Enlightenment’s leading critics, placing himself at the opposite pole from the Enlightenment’s figurehead, Voltaire, on almost every subject.¹⁰

Rousseau was by birth a citizen of Geneva.¹¹ His mother died as a consequence of giving birth to him, and his father was an unsuccessful watchmaker who fled Geneva when Rousseau was ten to avoid prosecution for assault. Rousseau became, in effect, an orphan. Just before he turned thirteen, he was apprenticed to an engraver. His master beat him, Rousseau responded by stealing, and his master beat him all the harder. When he was fifteen, Rousseau went out of the city one Sunday on a jaunt. The city gates were closed a little early, and Rousseau and his friends found themselves locked out. Rather than return with his friends the next day for the inevitable beating, Rousseau set out into the unknown. He was homeless, penniless, and friendless. Rousseau was to spend the rest of his life looking for a home, but he was incapable of finding one. Nothing could adequately correspond to his imaginary ideal, the home he would have had if his mother had lived.

{xiii} Rousseau escaped from his immediate predicament by converting to Catholicism. Geneva, the city of John Calvin, was Protestant; converts were welcomed and protected by the authorities of the neighboring Catholic states. By converting, Rousseau automatically forfeited his citizenship; he was no longer a citizen of Geneva. Rousseau was sent (on foot, a hundred fifty miles through the mountains) to Turin, where, after being instructed in his new faith, he found employment as a lackey—a menial servant wearing his employer’s uniform. His first employer died, and when her possessions were being inventoried, it turned out a little silver ribbon was missing. Rousseau had stolen it, but he accused an innocent servant girl. Both were dismissed, and for the rest of his life Rousseau was tormented by the thought that Marion, without a reference, faced a future of prostitution, destitution, and early death. Rousseau was more fortunate: he found new employment and was soon being groomed for promotion. But the prospect of spending the rest of his life as a servant was intolerable to him, and after eighteen months in Turin, he set out back toward Geneva. Rousseau had experienced dependence, and for the rest of his life he clung desperately to independence. He had waited on the rich, and he had learned to hate them. Later he would write, “I hate the great; I hate their high status, their harshness, their pettiness, and all their vices, and I would hate them even more if I despised them less.”¹²

Rousseau returned, not to Geneva but to Annecy, thirty miles south of Geneva. There, when he first fled Geneva, he had been taken in by Mme de Warens, herself a convert from Protestantism who was paid a pension to encourage others to convert. Mme de Warens, who was separated from her husband, was thirteen years older than Rousseau, and he quickly fell in love with her. For a few years, Rousseau was unsettled: he spent a year wandering, spending time in Lausanne and Neuchâtel, and pretending to be a music teacher, a job for which he was hopelessly ill equipped. He walked three hundred miles to Paris and briefly became a tutor. He walked back to be reunited with Mme de Warens, now in Chambéry, sixty miles south of Geneva. In 1732 Rousseau, now twenty, and Mme de Warens became lovers. Neither took much pleasure in their physical relationship. Rousseau preferred to pretend Mme de Warens was his mother, not his lover (he called her maman), and “felt as if I had committed incest,”¹³ and Mme de Warens always insisted that she was incapable of erotic feelings (though she had lovers besides Rousseau). Rousseau, who had received no formal education, now had the run of an excellent library and little else but reading to occupy his time.

After six years Rousseau found himself supplanted in Mme de Warens’ affections, and two years later he left to become a tutor, first in Lyons, then in Paris. For eighteen months he was secretary to the French ambassador to Venice, but was dismissed for insolence. At the age of thirty-three, he {xiv} returned to Paris, and there he tried to make a living writing music. He also became a research assistant to a wealthy couple, the Dupins. Louise-Marie-Madelaine was writing an endless feminist tract, and Claude was soon writing a vast, unreadable refutation of Montesquieu. Rousseau also fell in with Diderot and d’Alembert, who were embarking on an ambitious and subversive enterprise, the great Encyclopédie, a compendium of progressive thinking. Out of friendship, they commissioned him to write articles on music. Meanwhile Rousseau had taken up with Thérèse Levasseur, a laundress. She was not officially either his mistress or his wife (visitors mistook her for his housekeeper), but their relationship was to last until his death, and they were to have five children—each of which was taken promptly to the Foundling Hospital and abandoned. This was not particularly uncommon (Rousseau himself noted statistics suggesting 25 percent of children born in Paris were abandoned),¹⁴ but the death rate for infants handed in at the Foundling Hospital was very close to 100 percent. Rousseau long kept his abandoned children a secret, and when news of them spread it tarnished his reputation, which has never recovered.

In the summer of 1749, Rousseau was thirty-seven. He was living hand to mouth, with no security; he was one of five hundred or so writers (and perhaps a similar number of musicians) living in Paris, hoping to find some sort of success.¹⁵ He had failed in career after career: a failed notary, engraver, tutor, music teacher, clerk, secretary, composer. Rousseau was on his way (walking again) to visit Diderot, who was locked up in a prison outside Paris for having published a book, the Letter on the Blind, a defense of atheism. On his way, he paused to read an advertisement in a newspaper that announced a competition to write a short essay on the topic “Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purifying mores [or morals].” Rousseau later said that he was immediately overcome with a “dizziness like that of drunkenness.”¹⁶ “I beheld another universe and became another man.”¹⁷ He tells us that a whole system of ideas immediately became apparent to him—and close reading of the Discourse he proceeded to write suggests this is true. The Discourse not only won the prize; when published, it immediately made Rousseau famous—it was even promptly translated into English. Although in the next few years he wrote an opera and a play, he had now embarked on a career as an author, writing several defenses of the first Discourse.

{xv} In 1754 he wrote a second Discourse. This time, before publication, he made a pilgrimage to Geneva, where he rejoined the Protestant church and became a citizen once again. Publication of the second Discourse in 1755 was followed rapidly by publication of volume five of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, which included Rousseau’s article on political economy or, rather we might say (for his subject is not economics but the administration of the state), on government. It was at this point that Rousseau completed his political theory by adopting (or rather adapting) the idea of the “general will.” The next year Rousseau left Paris to take up residence on the country estate of a friend, ten miles north of Paris, in a cottage named The Hermitage. From here he published in 1758 a Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, which represented a sustained attack on the views held by Diderot, d’Alembert, and their associates. The ostensible issue was whether Geneva was right to have a ban on theaters, and Rousseau was once again defending ancient virtue against modern sophistication.

The break with the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, which obliged Rousseau to leave The Hermitage, was crucial in helping him find his own voice. Three works followed in quick succession: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), an epistolary novel about an affair between a young woman and her tutor (the title is a reference to Heloise and Abelard, famous lovers of the twelfth century; Rousseau’s book was first published as Lettres de deux amans [1761], then as La nouvelle Héloïse [1764] and only acquired its final title in the third, authorized edition of 1772), Émile, ou De l’éducation, a novel about the education of a young man (May 22, 1762); and Du contrat social (May 15, 1762). Julie and Émile were immediately enormously successful—Julie was the best-selling novel of the entire eighteenth century—and turned Rousseau into a “celebrity”; the word was new, and he uses it himself.¹⁸ People traveled long distances just to see him. His appearance in a public place caused crowds to gather.

In order to understand Rousseau’s career at this point we have to think about censorship.¹⁹ Diderot and d’Alembert were struggling to publish the Encyclopédie legally in France (they wanted the protection of a “privilege,” a form of copyright, so that their publisher could recuperate his costs). They were faced with growing hostility from the authorities. In 1757, Robert Damiens had tried to assassinate Louis XV, and the attack on intellectual radicalism, which had been gathering momentum over the previous years, became intense. Censorship was tightened significantly after Claude Adrien Helvétius’ On Mind (1758), which had been approved for publication, was condemned {xvi} to be burned by the Paris hangman. Most philosophes, however, chose to publish anonymously and abroad; this, for example, was how Voltaire’s Candide appeared in 1759. Copies were then smuggled into France and sold under the counter, in exactly the same way as pornographic books were. As a consequence, there was no copyright protection for author or publisher—successful works were quickly pirated—and it was almost impossible for an author, even the most successful, to live by writing. (Most successful authors relied on patronage of one sort or another, often in the form of a government pension. Voltaire was rich, but as a result of financial speculation, not royalties.)

Rousseau’s approach to publication was different. After the first edition of the first Discourse (which appeared anonymously), he usually published abroad but under his own name. His printer, Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam, would then seek permission to bring copies into France; in other words, Rousseau sought to avoid prepublication censorship while still conforming to the law. The case of Émile was somewhat different. It was printed with official permission by Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne in Paris, although on its title page it claimed to have been printed by Jean Néaulme at The Hague in Holland—a book needed to look as if it had been banned if it was to sell well. Here too, then Rousseau had sought to act within the law.

Rousseau hoped to operate within the law because he had recently acquired the support of powerful aristocrats, the Duke of Luxembourg and the Prince of Conti; and he had their support precisely because he had not signed up to the philosophes’ program of progress and religious skepticism. In many respects he could be read as a reactionary rather than a progressive writer. This was true even of a key chapter in Émile, the profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar. As far as Rousseau and the philosophes were concerned, this was an attack on irreligion—even if it could also be read as an attack on orthodox Christianity. Diderot wrote, “He has the religious on his side, and the interest they take in him is due to the bad things he says about the philosophes. Since they hate us a thousand times more than they love their God, they don’t care that he has dragged their Christ in the mud, so long as he’s not one of us.”²⁰ Diderot was wrong. On June 9, 1762, the book was banned by the parlement of Paris—the parlement being a court of law—and a warrant was issued for Rousseau’s arrest. Given the support for Rousseau in the highest quarters, the matter was handled delicately. Duchesne was given time to hide his stock, and he continued to sell copies by the simple device of sticking a new title page on the front, so that he was no longer (ostensibly) selling the book that had been banned. Rousseau was warned that he was about to be arrested. The police passed him on the road but made no attempt to stop him.

Thus Rousseau had to flee France because his religious views—boldly published under his own name—were unacceptable. But a few days later, {xvii} on June 19, both Émile and the Social Contract were burned in Geneva, the first because it was irreligious, the second because it was subversive. Read in Geneva, the Social Contract was subversive because it was an attack on the narrow oligarchy that controlled Genevan politics and an assertion of the rights of all citizens. It is a defense of democracy—one of the first ever written (the ancient Greeks may have invented democracy, but they wrote little in support of it)—but of ancient democracy not modern democracy, of direct democracy not representative government. It is important when reading the Social Contract to grasp that Rousseau intended it to be read as a commentary on Genevan politics but that when he wrote it he was living—and expected to continue living—in France. Rousseau is therefore cautious in what he says about monarchy (it is easy to see that his views imply a much more profound hostility to French absolutism than he explicitly states) and keen to make it clear that his arguments are irrelevant to the modern nation-state.

After protests against the banning of his work in Geneva proved futile, Rousseau renounced his Genevan citizenship in 1763. The man who liked to sign himself “Citizen of Geneva” was no longer a citizen—indeed, he had only been one as an adult for nine short years, during which period he had spent only a few weeks in Geneva. Now, once again, he was homeless. He was not to publish another major work during his lifetime. Rousseau moved first to a village near Neuchâtel, Switzerland, but a religious mob drove him out and pressure exerted by the Genevan authorities prevented him from settling anywhere else in Switzerland. Eventually he was forced to take refuge in England. David Hume arranged for him to stay on a country estate in Wootton in Staffordshire. Here Rousseau had a paranoid breakdown—he became convinced that Hume was his enemy and was spying on him. Rousseau’s fears were not entirely imaginary: Hume was indeed opening his letters and was trying to obtain a pension for him from the King of England (in Rousseau’s eyes a pension represented dependency; he always insisted on earning his own living, and late in his life, when his income from publishing had disappeared, he lived by copying music). Rousseau fled England in disguise, moved around anxiously from one hiding place in France to another, living under an assumed name, and then, readopting his own name, he settled once again in Paris in 1770. Evidently, he was once more receiving official protection, probably because he was playing a part in France’s complex engagement in Polish politics.²¹ In 1778 his health deteriorated (as a result of being run over by a large dog owned by an aristocrat), and he died in Ermenonville, outside Paris.

During his last years he had been writing a series of autobiographical works—The Confessions; Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (a text that is an extended expression of his paranoid delusions); and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (published only after his death). When Rousseau died he was famous {xviii} as the author of Émile and Julie, and, though to a much lesser extent, as the author of the first and second Discourses. The Social Contract had caused a stir in Geneva (where Rousseau had followed it up with a volume of Letters Written from the Mountain in 1764) but not elsewhere.

How are we to understand Rousseau as a man and as an author? First, Rousseau was, from the moment he walked away from Geneva, a walker.²² In The Confessions, he describes with delight the long walks of his youth, from Geneva to Turin and to Paris. But he also spent hours walking every day (often searching for botanical specimens). It was while walking that he did his thinking (and daydreaming, for he constructed an elaborate imaginary world for himself), and his last, unfinished work was The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Walking brought Rousseau close to nature, but it also allowed him to escape from society²³ and from the sense of belonging, of rootedness that goes with calling somewhere home. In Rousseau’s view, the natural condition of human beings was to be solitary wanderers. Rousseau never owned a house of his own and was horrified when one critic assumed that he must have land of his own somewhere. He never settled anywhere.

So Rousseau was, by choice, an outsider—a condition he embraced when, at the age of fifteen, he turned away from the locked gates of Geneva. He called himself a citizen of Geneva, but he never lived there as an adult citizen. He did almost all his writing in France, where he constantly emphasized that he was not French. The epigraph of the first Discourse is a pair of lines from the Roman poet Ovid: “Here I [my emphasis] am the barbarian because they do not understand me.” Ovid had been sent into political exile far from Rome (among the Sarmatians). Literally, a barbarian is someone who speaks incomprehensibly (he says “bababa”; the word is intended to be onomatopoeic). Ovid has no doubt that he is civilized and the Sarmatians are barbarians, but he realizes that they see the world rather differently. Rousseau’s epigraph announces that what he has to say will seem outlandish to many—either he is seriously wrong or the established values of the day are topsy-turvy. Either way he is an outsider.

But Rousseau was at odds not just with the rest of the world; he was at odds with himself. He placed enormous emphasis on the responsibilities of parents for their children, but he abandoned his own. He admired antique manliness and insisted on the subordination of women (while Voltaire, for example, wrote in favor of female equality), but his dress seemed effeminate, he took to needlework, and his sexual preferences were masochistic. He attacked the theater but wrote plays. He said the French (unlike the Italians) were incapable {xix} of appreciating good music, but he tried to make a living as a composer in Paris. He praised Geneva but never lived there as an adult. He refused pensions from the kings of France and England, but he accepted the patronage of aristocrats (though he always insisted on paying rent). He submitted his books to the censor (in both France and Geneva), but he wrote books that he knew—or ought to have known—would be banned. He advocated a state religion but could not accept the religion of any state. He claimed that human beings are naturally good but that they are entirely responsible for their own corruption. He made a cult of honesty and integrity but presented himself in The Confessions as a liar and a thief. Rousseau did not think he was unfortunate to find himself constantly at odds with himself; his fundamental claim was that this has become an inevitable part of the human condition. Rousseau’s work is one extended protest against this internal conflict.

Rousseau the outsider who always aspired to belong, Rousseau the man at odds with himself who always aspired to be undivided and at peace—it is these fundamental contradictions that left Rousseau no choice but to think in paradoxes.

Rousseau’s political theory is straightforward once one grasps the basic principles out of which it is constructed. His starting place is the paradox of the first Discourse: progress is a bad thing because it is morally corrupting. Human beings were better when their lives were simpler and less sophisticated. Underlying this argument—barely stated but already present—is a further paradox, the paradox of the second Discourse: inequality is the root of all evil. Progress requires inequality because it requires some people to have the time to concentrate on literature, philosophy, or science. Free time is one of the luxuries that only come into existence with inequality, and all luxuries are corrupting. Wealth brings about moral corruption, and progress intensifies the process.

We live in societies founded on very different values. We believe—or at least most of us believe (though concern about climate change has led some to question these beliefs)—that progress, economic growth, and prosperity go hand in hand and are fine things. We believe that we should all be equal before the law but that inequalities of wealth are essential in a competitive, free market economy—without them, there would be no progress, economic growth, and prosperity. It is natural for us to think that Rousseau is simply wrong.

Rousseau’s contemporaries also thought he was wrong, but for them it was a little more complicated than it is for us.²⁴ They knew that a number {xx} of previous civilizations, particularly ancient Sparta and republican Rome, had been opposed to luxury, which they had associated with despotism and decadence, and that almost all previous societies thought that trade should be controlled and restricted (by guilds, for example). Free trade, unrestrained economic growth, and the acquisition of luxuries by anyone with money to spare had not been defended before Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714; translated into French in 1740).²⁵ Mandeville’s claim was that a society of hardworking, prudent, parsimonious people would be poor, primitive, and easily conquered, while a society of spendthrifts, gamblers, drunkards, and pimps would be rich, civilized, and able to afford a powerful army. Rousseau and Mandeville were in fundamental agreement about the nature of contemporary society, but Mandeville approved of it and Rousseau was opposed to it. After Mandeville, in France, there were Jean-François Melon, author of A Political Essay on Trade (1734), and Voltaire, who had defended luxury in a poem titled Le Mondain (The Man of the World, 1736). In attacking luxury Rousseau could appeal to a long tradition of both moral and economic thinking, but he knew that his contemporaries were for the most part sympathetic—if not to Mandeville, who, like Rousseau, relished unpalatable paradoxes, then at least to Melon and Voltaire—and deeply hostile to traditional critiques of luxury, new wealth, and pleasure-seeking behavior.

In Rousseau’s view the critique of progress and luxury—the claim that progress and prosperity are bad for you—opens the way to a more radical claim: human beings are born good but are responsible for all the evil in the world. The word “good” here is very slippery: Rousseau thinks human beings are born good simply because they are God’s creation, and God made everything as it should be in the best of all possible worlds. But it is obvious that there is evil in the world, and it is clear that Rousseau does not believe in the orthodox Christian explanation for evil, the Fall, and Original Sin. Rousseau has a quite different explanation. According to him, natural men and women are, in a moral sense, neither good nor bad. They are concerned with their own survival; they are capable of feeling pity, but they have no capacity for moral thought or action. Morality begins only with society, with language, with sustained interaction. Rousseau thinks of society and language as resulting from social evolution, assuming that the first human beings (like, or so he thinks, gorillas and orangutans) lacked both. Our own picture of human evolution is distinctly different from Rousseau’s conjectural history, but it is worth remembering that every child does begin without language, without a sense of belonging to a community, and without a moral code—language, society, and morality are indeed things that we have constructed for ourselves and that we are socialized into. (I realize that many people {xxi} would insist that this is not true of morality. Rousseau, in this respect like every other Enlightenment philosopher, takes it for granted that we have no innate moral sense. Locke was held to have refuted the idea of an innate conscience. Consequently, we have to construct our moral principles on the basis of our experience.)

So in Rousseau’s view we are all born amoral. Two things happen when we enter society: we acquire the capacity for vice, and we acquire the capacity for virtue. Rousseau’s analysis of vice is clearer and more developed than his analysis of virtue, and this imbalance has caused a good deal of confusion. Vice is born of competition. Primitive men and women, wandering alone through the woods, think only of food, shelter, and sex. When these needs are satisfied, they have no further concerns. But social men and women are constantly comparing themselves to other people: which of us is the most attractive, successful, admired, and envied? All of these questions involve asking, not how I feel about myself but how others think about me. Thus, social people begin to live outside themselves; what matters to them are the thoughts and feelings that others have about them. Because they have only limited access to these thoughts and feelings, they are forced to imagine what they must be. So they live in a largely imaginary world in which they lose touch with their own thoughts and feelings but become emotionally dependent on the thoughts and feelings they believe others are having about them. (One can readily see how someone who thinks this is how we live might end up having a paranoid breakdown, as Rousseau did.)

This competitive, alienated, imaginary world breeds vanity, which is for Rousseau the fundamental vice. His name for it is amour propre (self-love), which he distinguishes from amour de soi (love of self).²⁶ Amour de soi is a healthy instinct for self-preservation, neither moral nor immoral, but necessary; amour propre is a corrupt, competitive desire to seem better than others, to be envied. People suffering from amour propre do not merely have a car to get from A to B; they have a larger car than their neighbors’, so that other people will see how important they are, or a faster car, so that others will see how vigorous they are, or a “classic” car, so that others will see what good taste they have. They identify themselves with objects (such as cars) and what they take to be the thoughts of others and lose any authentic sense of who they are. Consequently, even if they are successful—even if they are rich and admired—they are losers, dependent on others, incapable of authenticity. Rousseau’s account of how we live in society depends on being able to distinguish between a true self and a false self, a real interest and an imaginary interest. I have a real interest in not being hungry or thirsty; I {xxii} have an imaginary interest in acquiring a reputation as a gourmet cook or an expert on fine wines. Caught up in competition we lose touch with our true selves and our real interests.

But something else happens (or can happen) when we enter society: we acquire the capacity to identify with the society as a whole. Suppose I live on a small island—let’s call me an Islander. I decide that what would best improve the lives of my fellow Islanders would be a boat we could use for fishing, so I set about building a boat. Very likely, I hope that when I have finished my boat, people will be grateful to me and will admire me; we often compete to be thought more prudent or more virtuous than our neighbors. But in this case, I am not pursuing an imaginary good, but a real one; and I am not pursuing my own benefit, or not primarily my own benefit, but rather that of my community. It certainly helps that my interests and those of my fellow Islanders coincide—I would be unlikely to build a boat if I did not expect to eat some of the fish that would be caught. It certainly helps that I imagine that one day everyone will be grateful to me, but I work long hours because I know I am not just working for myself but for others. In other words, society makes it possible for me to be virtuous, provided I make an emotional commitment to the community that I belong to.

It will be much easier for me to make this commitment if certain preconditions are met. It helps if my community is small enough for me to feel that I know everyone else in it—a community of strangers is a contradiction in terms. It helps if its members have a great deal in common and live similar lives; they will not be able to identify with each other if some are poor and some are rich, if some are powerful and some are weak, if some live by fishing and some live by hunting, or if they are divided by religion. We can summarize these preconditions as proximity, equality, and similarity. Rousseau’s ideal community is a small town; the population of Geneva when Rousseau was growing up there was twenty thousand. Large, anonymous, unequal, diverse societies will foster vice, not virtue, because they will encourage competition, not a sense of solidarity. Rousseau thus offers a sociology of virtue. He also presents us with a profoundly uncomfortable conclusion: to achieve what we are truly capable of as human beings, we need to live in a society characterized by proximity, equality, and similarity; if we do not live in such a society then we will always be at odds with ourselves.

It is often said that Rousseau presents two alternative ideals, that of “man” (the individual) and that of citizen (the member of a community).²⁷ Émile, Julie, and The Confessions explore the idea of the good life as it can be constructed by one or two people within a larger, far from ideal, community. The Social Contract explores the idea of the good life as it can be constructed within the political community of a small city-state (what the ancient Greeks {xxiii} called the polis; Rousseau repeatedly uses the word politie, which an educated person would have recognized as a French equivalent of polis but which was not a word to be found in contemporary dictionaries). Now it is perfectly true that Rousseau tries to tackle these two issues: how can I best live here and now (in eighteenth-century France) and how could I best live if I were fortunate enough to be an Islander? But Rousseau is always clear that true self-fulfillment depends on losing yourself in something bigger than yourself. Aristotle said that human beings are by nature political animals, animals designed to live in a polis. Rousseau thinks that human beings are by nature solitary wanderers, but once they enter the world of society, they can achieve true fulfillment only within the polis. Outside the polis the best we can hope for is some sort of mitigated amour propre; inside the polis we can hope for virtue. Identifying with an imagined community (France or the United States) will not do, because it always leaves unanswered a fundamental question: Which is the real France?²⁸ The north or the south? Paris or the provinces? It is impossible to be French; you always have to be some particular sort of French person. It is even impossible to be a Parisian. If you live in Paris you cannot possibly know your fellow Parisians or feel for them (the population of Paris in Rousseau’s day was more than half a million); but you can if you live in Paris, Texas (population in the 2000 census, 25,898). Rousseau is a small-town boy trying to make it in the big city while insisting that to succeed you have to betray everything you believe in.

We are now in a position to grasp the central paradox of Rousseau’s political theory: that we can find freedom in obedience. Human beings are, Rousseau believes (following Locke), born free; in most political communities they are subjected to a form of dependence that amounts to slavery. We cannot go back to a presocial world, so how can we recover our freedom? This is the crucial puzzle that Rousseau believed he had solved in the Social Contract. Rousseau’s answer depends on a basic distinction between sovereignty and government—this is very close to the distinction between legislative and executive that would later become important for the U.S. Constitution. Sovereignty expresses itself through laws, and government expresses itself through decisions. The law says murder is a crime; the government prosecutes a particular individual for murder. The law says there shall be a national currency; the government decides that the face of George Washington shall appear on the dollar bill. The law says there shall be an army and a navy; the government appoints generals and admirals. The law gives the government the authority to impose speed limits; the government decides which particular roads will be limited to which particular speeds.

Sovereignty, Rousseau believes, should be exercised by the people (or at least all the adult males) as a whole. Let them gather at a town hall meeting {xxiv} and make decisions together. But when they think about what to do they must never ask themselves, “What would be good for me?” but only “What would be good for us?” In other words—Rousseau never puts it like this, but the thought is one he would have agreed with—they must vote as if from behind a veil of ignorance where they have no knowledge of their own particular circumstances and interests.²⁹ If they do this, their decision will embody what Rousseau calls “the general will.” Rousseau tells us that the general will is infallible, that it is always right. This seems very strange to us because we are used to thinking that the majority decisions of assemblies are often wrong. But in other contexts we are quite happy using concepts in which the ideal and the actual are inextricably confused: we believe that all laws must be just, and once a jury has declared someone to be guilty or innocent we think it is nearly always wrong to second guess the jury’s decision. Suppose the general assembly votes to ban cigarettes. I have spoken and voted against the ban because I think it will give rise to an illegal trade in cigarettes. But once the decision is made—once the general will is known—I must say to myself, “Now that we have a ban, I must help make sure it works.” Far from adopting an oppositional mentality, I must join in and identify with the majority. It is an indication of the novelty of Rousseau’s argument that he has to invent a new word, identification, to explain his thinking.³⁰

Rousseau’s argument may be new, but there is nothing psychologically odd about this “joining in” process. We do it all the time. When the coach picks a team we want the team to win, even if we do not agree with all the coach’s choices. When a business decides on a future strategy, all the executives work to make it succeed, even if some of them previously advocated a quite different strategy. In the British political system, when the cabinet makes a decision its members are bound by “cabinet responsibility.” They must defend, and accept joint responsibility for, a policy that some of them may have been actively opposing only a few hours before. All Rousseau requires of his citizens is that they engage in team thinking of this sort, and this will only be possible if they think of themselves as plain citizens, not as rich or poor, old or young, sailors, soldiers, or candlestick makers. If they vote on the basis of their individual interests, then the vote will simply establish which interest group is biggest; if they vote for what will benefit the community as a whole, then the vote ought to establish the general will. But of course circumstances change and people make mistakes, which is why Rousseau insists that the community cannot be bound by its previous decisions. There can be no fundamental law, no constitution, because every law is a new and complete act of sovereignty. Moreover, since we are all born free, we can only become citizens by an act of choice: we must freely choose to give priority to {xxv} our membership of a particular community. Then when we obey the general will we are living out our own free choice; even the minority, outvoted when a new law is enacted, obeys its own choice when it obeys the law.

It should now be apparent how human beings can be born free and be everywhere in chains: they are in chains whenever a will is imposed upon them that is at odds with the general will. It should also be apparent that people can be forced to be free. Suppose I decide to become an Islander, and we Islanders find ourselves at war with the Mainland. Then, as an Islander, I should be prepared to die for my community; while as an ordinary human being, of course, I would rather run away than fight. If I am conscripted I am being forced to be free, for no one can be free if we all put our particular interests ahead of our interests as a community. Rousseau is thus particularly concerned to overcome the free rider problem.³¹ I want other people to fight for my country, but I don’t want to fight (and die) for it myself. I want other people to pay taxes, but I don’t want to pay taxes myself. The solution is simple: I must be required to do what I want other people to do. It would be unfair to allow me to avoid paying the price (both in blood and money) for my freedom but to expect everyone else to pay.

It should also now be apparent that there is a fundamental ambiguity in Rousseau’s theory of virtue. If I identify with the welfare of society as a whole and am prepared to put my own interests to one side, then I am virtuous. But in a society where everyone identifies with the whole, having a team spirit is precisely what will be rewarded by the approval of others. In extended, unequal societies amour propre results in the vice of vanity; in tight-knit, egalitarian societies amour propre results in something indistinguishable from virtue. How could one recognize true virtue and distinguish it from benign amour propre? Only by finding it in someone who pursued the good of humanity in face of the opposition, rather than the admiration, of his fellow citizens—in Rousseau, for example.³² But such cases will be rare exceptions that prove the rule that we are shaped by the communities in which we live.

It is striking that it is very difficult to give an account of Rousseau’s political theory without employing terminology—for example, “imagined communities,” “veils of ignorance,” “free riders”—that was completely unknown to him. This terminology reflects late-twentieth-century efforts to come to grips with paradoxical aspects of the relationship between individuals and communities, but Rousseau would be entitled to say that he had already thought these issues through.

Rousseau never received a day of formal education in his life. As a child he received his education from his relatives, and as a young man he was self-educated. But it would be a mistake to think that this means he was in any way ill informed. Indeed not only is he exceptionally well informed, but he generally demonstrates excellent judgment; the texts Rousseau refers to when outlining his political theory are nearly all texts still read today (Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf—the great contract theorists—and, of course, Montesquieu). The judgment here is not so much Rousseau’s as Jean Barbeyrac’s. Barbeyrac (1674–1744) had produced important editions of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, was an admirer of Locke, and had edited and translated an important refutation of Hobbes by Richard Cumberland. Rousseau did not consistently exercise such good judgment; he wrote at length on the political theory of the Abbot of Saint-Pierre, who is now almost entirely forgotten. He did so partly to satisfy Mme Dupin, and writing about Saint-Pierre was an excuse for writing about a much less respectable figure, Hobbes.

Of all political theorists, Hobbes (the Hobbes of De Cive, for there is no evidence that Rousseau ever read Leviathan) is much the most important for understanding Rousseau, for Rousseau’s political theory is fundamentally a reworking of Hobbes’. Rousseau thinks that Hobbes’ intellectual system is “horrible,” but Hobbes himself is “one of the finest geniuses who ever lived.”³³ Hobbes argues that there is no law governing individuals in the state of nature and that they have a right to do anything to protect themselves. Rousseau agrees. Hobbes argues that a political community is constructed by all individuals coming together and agreeing that their own wills will conform to those of the majority. Rousseau agrees. Hobbes expects this initial democracy to choose to be represented by a sovereign other than itself, whereas Rousseau argues that the sovereign can never be represented, although he does expect it to hand over much power to the government. Where Hobbes replaces popular sovereignty with despotism, Rousseau supplements popular sovereignty with an executive that is answerable to the people. Rousseau thus seeks to halt Hobbes’ argument at the point where popular sovereignty has been established, and he reads Hobbes as if he were a democratic theorist.

Rousseau’s account of the place of religion in politics should also be seen as a reworking of Hobbes’. Hobbes thought that in all modern Christian {xxvii} societies political authority and religious authority were at odds and that the church must be made subordinate to the state. Rousseau agreed. Hobbes went further; he advocated a rigorous materialism, while Rousseau wanted to preserve a belief in God’s beneficence and the soul’s immortality, partly because he held that these beliefs encouraged virtue. And Rousseau, with a typical love of paradox, argued that religious intolerance is never justified—except as a response to intolerance.³⁴

Where Hobbes and Rousseau fundamentally disagree is on war. Hobbes thinks that in the state of nature there is a war of all against all; Rousseau argues that human beings’ interests start to conflict only when some individuals lay claim to so much property that there is not enough and as good left for others (an argument derived from Locke). The state, which should have been invented to further the interests of all, is (by a cunning sleight of hand) actually employed by property owners to protect their interests and disarm those without property. Thus war does not lead to the construction of the state; rather, the construction of the state leads to conflict between states (the conflict of all against all that Hobbes had read back into the state of nature), and it leads to conflict within the state (the exploitation of the poor by the powerful and the rich). As a consequence we live in an unending state of war. Violence between states, and between rulers and subjects, may break out only occasionally, but the state is always preparing for violence. In Sparta, the ruling elite regularly declared war on its subservient underclass, the helots. Rousseau thinks that an undeclared war of the rich against the poor takes place in every modern society. Carl von Clausewitz was later to say that war is the continuation of politics by other means; Rousseau’s idea of a “state of war” implies rather that politics is the continuation of war by other means. Thus Hobbes is right: we need to find a way of escaping from a war in which we are all caught up, but we are only caught up in this war because we live in political communities. How, then, to escape? The Abbot of Saint-Pierre had a utopian solution to this problem: the governments of Europe must get together and impose limits on each other (much as the United Nations seeks to use the collective force of all states to discipline some states). Rousseau thought it ridiculous to imagine that despotic governments would give up the quest for ever more power. How then could the small city-states he advocated defend themselves? Only by forming confederations. Rousseau is an early advocate of a federation of independent republics (perhaps the only respect in which he is a significant influence on the American Founding Fathers).

In addition to Mandeville (to whom {xxviii} Rousseau owes his account of the hypocrisy at the heart of commercial society), Hobbes (to whom he owes his account of popular sovereignty and of the state of war), and Locke (to whom he owes his account of the proper limits on private property in a state of nature), there is one other political theorist we need to have in mind when reading the Social Contract: Diderot. In volume five of the Encyclopédie (the volume in which Rousseau’s article “Political Economy” appeared), Diderot published an article on droit naturel (natural right). There Diderot argued that in principle we have a moral obligation to the whole of humanity to do those things that humanity as a whole would want us to do. Thus, Diderot ultimately grounds our obligations toward other human beings in what he calls the “general will.” Diderot’s general will seems pretty pointless: it is infallible, but it is hard to know what it says, and if we disobey it nothing happens to us. It is this theory that Rousseau adopts and adapts in the Social Contract. Rousseau localizes Diderot’s universal general will; in place of the whole of humanity, he substitutes the members of a particular city-state. We can usually discover the general will, he thinks, through a democratic vote of all citizens. If we disobey the general will, we break the law and can be punished—and indeed, we can be forced to be free. Rousseau thus takes the idea of the general will and turns it from a moral concept into a political concept—and claims that this concept solves the problem of how we can belong to a political community while retaining our freedom.³⁵

There is of course a further source for Rousseau’s political theory: the real constitutions of city-states. Rousseau made a careful study of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, of contemporary Venice (where he worked for eighteen months), and of his own city of Geneva.³⁶ In Geneva there was a general assembly that embodied the community as a whole, but it had lost the power to meet unless it was summoned, and its agenda was controlled by the oligarchy. In Rousseau’s eyes Geneva was a degenerate city-state, and if power could be wrested from the oligarchy and returned to the general assembly it might become once more a true republic. His own interventions in Genevan politics, particularly after the banning of the Social Contract and Émile, were designed to bring about this transformation.

In the years immediately before the French Revolution everyone was reading Rousseau (particularly the newly published Confessions), but no one was reading the Social Contract. In 1910 Daniel Mornet surveyed the catalogues of five hundred French private libraries for the years 1750–1780. He found 185 copies of Julie and one solitary copy of the Social Contract. A hundred years of further {xxix} research has done nothing to alter the picture Mornet drew.³⁷ So if Rousseau was a cause of the French Revolution, it was not through his political theory; it was through his fundamental claim that human beings are naturally good and that consequently there is no excuse for injustice—a claim readers would have encountered in Julie and Émile rather than in the Social Contract.

Almost overnight, the French Revolution changed everything. Between 1789 and 1799 there were thirty-two editions of the Social Contract in French—eight in 1792 alone.³⁸ When people were looking for a philosopher who advocated political revolution, they turned at once to Rousseau—partly because he was widely believed to have been the inspiration behind a democratic uprising that had taken place in Geneva in 1782.³⁹ One man above all constantly called on Rousseau as the guiding spirit of the revolution: the leader of the Jacobins, Maximilien Robespierre. He found in Rousseau much that served his purposes—a belief in the goodness of human nature, a love of virtue, a hatred of inequality, and the outline of a civil religion.

The question of Rousseau’s significance for the French Revolution is so central to any understanding of the revolution that it cannot be answered without committing oneself to a theory of what the revolution was really all about. Much recent literature has taken Rousseau as the emblem of a new type of language, a language that constantly rejected moderation and treated the revolution as if it were a series of speeches. On this view, Rousseau shaped the rhetoric of revolutionary extremism. An older literature argued that the revolution stumbled from crisis to crisis, and Rousseau became the philosopher of the revolution as it became, almost accidentally, driven to more and more radical expedients.⁴⁰ Neither approach seems to me to capture the central feature of the role of Rousseau’s books in the revolution.

On May 31, 1793, an armed insurrection of the sans-culottes brought Robespierre and his allies to power. Their power base was the Jacobin Club, which sought to control the National Assembly by claiming to speak for the people, to be an organ of direct democracy; its power depended on its ability to take control of the streets of Paris. This power lasted less than a year, for Robespierre himself was taking power away from the Jacobins and the sans-culottes before his own fall. He was executed on July 28, 1794. This brief year was the heyday of Rousseauism during the revolution, and the reason for this is very simple: Rousseau had rejected the principle of representation in favor of the principle of direct democracy, and he had accepted the logic of this position by turning back in his mind to the city-states of the ancient world. Fundamentally, the French Revolution was not French: the revolution took place in Paris, and Paris claimed the right to determine the fate of France. The {xxx} sans-culottes and the Jacobins claimed to speak for Paris and for France and thereby claimed the right to control the National Assembly of representatives. They backed up their claim with armed force. Rousseau was the only theorist who could be made to speak for a revolution that took place in the streets and squares of a single city. What mattered about Rousseau, then, was that he was a theorist of civic politics, of urban politics, not national politics.

Here the contrast with the American Revolution is crystal clear. The American Revolution stretched across thirteen colonies; no one city had a dominant position, which is why the government eventually had to be located in a brand new city, Washington, D.C. From its beginning the American Revolution was rooted, inevitably, in the principle of representation. Radicals like Paine wanted democratic, unicameral representative assemblies with unlimited powers; the Founding Fathers wanted the separation of powers, bicameralism, and an entrenched constitution. But nobody questioned the underlying principle of representation; and nobody in America took Rousseau’s Social Contract seriously.

So the place of Rousseau in the French Revolution comes down to the relationship between Paris and the Provinces:⁴¹ Rousseau, as an advocate of direct democracy, provided a spurious justification for the idea that the course of the revolution should be decided on the streets of the capital city. I say a spurious justification because if Robespierre exploited one key feature of Rousseau’s political philosophy, he also misrepresented him utterly. Rousseau had made clear that the people—all the people—must choose. The revolution substituted Paris for the nation, the sans-culottes for Paris, the Jacobin Club for the National Assembly, the Committee of Safety for the executive, terror for justice. Rousseau had never intended to justify substitutions of this sort, substitutions that made possible the concentration of absolute power in the hands of a few, and the sacrifice of the lives of vast numbers of innocent individuals to a revolutionary government claiming to act on behalf of a people whose wishes it had no intention of respecting. Rousseau had done his utmost to insist both on the rights of all, not of some faction or mob, and on the rights of each—the right of each individual to a fair trial according to the law.

In short, Rousseau would have been horrified by the revolution and he would have loathed Robespierre. He saw civil conflict in Geneva in 1737; he called it a “hideous spectacle.” He saw a father and son preparing to fight on opposite sides. He resolved, he would later say, “never to take part in any civil war, and never to uphold freedom by arms.”⁴² When conflict broke out again in Geneva in 1765, in large part provoked by Rousseau’s own publications, Rousseau hastily detached himself from the radical cause and called for restraint. Rousseau provided ammunition for revolutionaries, but he had no stomach for revolution. This does not, of course, absolve him of all {xxxi} responsibility. Above all, by consistently giving priority to the community over the individual, the general will over the wishes of individuals, Rousseau invited misinterpretation and misrepresentation. But we can hardly blame him for failing to foresee an event without parallel in previous history.

Shortly after the fall of Robespierre, a report to the National Convention recommending that Rousseau’s remains be transferred to the Panthéon captured well the complex and ambiguous relationship between Rousseau’s political theory and the revolution:

The Social Contract seems to have been made to be read in the presence of the human species assembled in order to learn what it has been and what it has lost.… But the great maxims developed in The Social Contract, as evident and simple as they seem to us today, then [on first publication] produced little effect; people did not understand them enough to profit from them, or to fear them, they were too much beyond the reach of common minds, even of those who were or were believed to be superior to the vulgar mind; in a way, it is the Revolution that has explained to us The Social Contract.⁴³

Of course we can go on reading the Social Contract as the handbook for political revolution, but when we do so we are not reading the book that Rousseau intended to write; we are reading Robespierre’s Social Contract, not Rousseau’s.

What is a good translation? One view is that the text should read so well that one can almost forget that one is reading a translation: Rousseau should be turned into a writer of twenty-first-century English. Another view is that, as far as possible, the language and sentence structure of the original should be retained: we should be constantly reminded that we are reading a text written in a different language in a different era. Translations of classic texts are of necessity always something of a compromise between these two approaches.

No translation, however brilliant, can give us information that is essential for the understanding of any classic text. In the first place, a good translation will often avoid what seems to be the obvious equivalent English word for reasons that at first seem puzzling. For example, industrieux does not mean “industrious” in eighteenth-century French; it means “skillful,” as “industrious” did in Shakespeare’s English. It only comes to mean “industrious” in nineteenth-century French. It would therefore be simply misleading to translate industrieux as “industrious.” Sometimes words in French are {xxxii} ambiguous, so that their English equivalent is unclear. Thus, eighteenth-century French has no word for “parental,” so paternel sometimes means gender-specific “paternal” and sometimes gender-neutral “parental” (just as the masculine pronoun sometimes refers only to males and sometimes to any human being).

Where translations inevitably fall short is in failing to alert us when words are new (Rousseau’s words “identification” and “perfectibility,” for example) or being used in a new sense (Rousseau gives new meanings to the words “city,” “sovereign,” and “government”),⁴⁴ and they give us no sense of which words are simply missing from the language (Rousseau complains at one point that he might appear to contradict himself, but this is only because he lacks the right words to convey his meaning).⁴⁵ In Russian, for example, there are no definite or indefinite articles (no words for “the” or “a”), yet every translation from Russian inevitably conveys the impression that there are, and obscures the choices the translator has had to make. Every reader of Rousseau needs to know that “social” was an unfamiliar word when he used it in the title of the Social Contract.⁴⁶ Three years later Diderot wrote the article “Social” for the Encyclopédie, which begins, “SOCIAL, adj. (Gramm.) a word recently introduced into the language.” We talk about social contract theories, but we do so only because Rousseau put the word “social” in the title of his book; neither Hobbes nor Locke writes of a “social contract.” Rousseau was in the forefront of a movement to isolate what he called (in words that seem straightforward to us) the “social system.”⁴⁷

We have already seen another example of Rousseau’s innovative use of language: Rousseau uses the word politie, and the obvious translation is “polity,” but no translation is going to tell you that the word is unusual in the French of Rousseau’s day, so unusual that Rousseau wrote to his publisher warning him not to let the copyeditors correct it to politique.⁴⁸ He needs the word because he has no word for a city-state; he makes do with the word cité (city), which he redefines as a community of citizens rather than an urban conglomeration. This example brings us to the very heart of Rousseau’s political theory. Politie and cité are nouns. For Rousseau the equivalent adjective is civil, as in société civile and religion civile. The standard English translations are “civil society” and “civil religion.” These are terms commonly used in English, and so these are the translations one should prefer. But société civile is the French translation of the Latin societas civilis, and the standard English translation {xxxiii} for this in modern English would be “civic society.” In eighteenth-century French there is no word for “civic,” and civil conveys a range of meanings from “urban” to “civilized.” When Rousseau writes of société civile, we have to decide whether he means urban society, civilized society, or (its root meaning) a society characterized by having citizens (a self-governing society, a civic society). Certainly he never defines “civil society” as being something different from the political community, as we would. So too when he writes of religion civile we have to remember that civil for Rousseau refers back to the city-states of ancient Greece and Italy; the civil religion is, in the first place, the religion of a polis. We say the United States has a civil society and a civil religion. Rousseau would have found this usage puzzling, as the United States is not a polis. In his view there can be no “civil society,” and perhaps no “civil religion,” in a nation-state.

How we understand politie and civil is thus central to how we understand Rousseau’s political theory. Central to his moral theory is another problematic term: amour propre—commonly translated as “vanity,” but vanity is always a vice, and as we have seen, amour propre can sometimes be virtuous. “Vanity” is a good translation if it reminds us that amour propre had standardly been a vice in writers prior to Rousseau, a bad translation if it makes us think it is always a vice in Rousseau’s own writing and thus obscures the way in which his argument differs from that of his predecessors. Another key term is moeurs, which means “customs” or “habits” and, more broadly, everything that a modern anthropologist might include within the term “culture.”⁴⁹ Moeurs has an English equivalent in “mores,” but it also bears on our understanding of Rousseau’s words moral (adjective) and morale (noun). It is easy to regard these as straightforwardly equivalent to “moral” and “morality,” but in the French of Rousseau’s day moral and morale refer to moeurs in general as well as to morality in particular. The words “culture” and “civilization” do not yet exist in the French of Rousseau’s day; Rousseau’s equivalent terms are moeurs and morale.

So when Rousseau answers the question posed by the Academy of Dijon, “Si le rétablissement des sciences et des arts a contribué à épurer les moeurs” (Whether the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of mores), moeurs can mean “morals,” “culture,” or both. Equally problematic are the apparently simple words “sciences” and “arts.” In the French of Rousseau’s day a science is any system of knowledge (including philosophy, even theology), and an art is any skilled activity, including metallurgy and shipbuilding as well as poetry and painting. Broadly speaking, Rousseau’s sciences are theoretical, and his arts are practical, and between them they include knowledge in all its many forms. As for “restoration,” the implicit reference is to the restoration (or rebirth) of knowledge that we call the {xxxiv} Renaissance. Since the Renaissance is above all about the restoration of classical learning, Rousseau’s answer is doubly paradoxical. He argues that progress is bad for us and that the recovery of classical learning in particular may make us apparently civilized, but it prevents us from being citizens. We have civility but we do not have civic virtue; we have culture but we do not have morality; we have politics but we do not have citizenship. Rousseau’s whole argument depends on distinctions that we would express by contrasting “civil” and “civic,” “culture” and “morality,” and “politics” and “citizenship.”

Is it possible to sum up in a sentence or two the difference between the language available to Rousseau for discussing politics and society and our language? It is. The rise of the social sciences has meant that our language provides a whole range of ways of distinguishing empirical from normative arguments. Rousseau’s vocabulary—terms like “moral” and “civil”—encourages a constant slippage back and forth between the two. Even “social,” which we normally use to provide descriptions of how things are rather than how they should be, is defined by Diderot in a way that elides the normative and the descriptive: “a word recently introduced into the language to designate the qualities which make a man useful in society, well-equipped to engage with other men: the social virtues.”⁵⁰ David Hume had defined what we call “the fact-value distinction” or “the is-ought problem” in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), but this book, as Hume put it in “My Own Life,” “fell dead-born from the press.”⁵¹ Rousseau would never have encountered “the fact-value distinction.”

Rousseau does not distinguish, as we would, between normative and empirical arguments, not because he is writing in French but because he is writing in the eighteenth century. He would have had equal difficulty making the distinction in eighteenth-century English, and when Hume did make the distinction it was scarcely noticed (or understood) by his contemporaries. However, by attacking the conventional values of his age, by exposing what he called “the contradictions of the social system,”⁵² by using “nature” as a normative concept to criticize society, Rousseau made it peculiarly difficult for everyone else to carry on taking their own value system for granted. If a whole range of distinctions—between morality and culture, principle and practice, values and facts—have come to seem obvious distinctions to us, that is a measure of the extent to which Rousseau’s way of thinking provoked an intellectual crisis, a crisis that has profoundly shaped our modern culture.

¹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 194.

² “Citizen of Geneva,” title pages of first and second Discourses and Social Contract, below, pp. 3, 29, 155.

⁴ Social Contract, Book I, chs. 1 (“… he is in chains”), 7 (“forced to be free”), below, pp. 156, 167. On forcing to be free, see (in English), John Plamenatz, “Ce qui ne signifie autre chose sinon qu’on le forcera d’être libre,” in Hobbes and Rousseau, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 318–32, and in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Critical Assessments, ed. John T. Scott (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003), 3:106–16.

⁵ He did concern himself with real-life situations in, for example, two works that were not published in his lifetime, Projet de constitution pour la Corse and Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne. The Social Contract was a much more realistic text than one might think, but only if read in a Genevan context.

⁶ Letter to Malesherbes, January 4, 1762. The classic text, much debated, is J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952).

⁷ David Hume, “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic” (1741), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 47–53. For his idea of a “civilized European monarchy,” see his essays “Of Civil Liberty” (87–96) and “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (111–37).

⁸ The classic text is Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932).

⁹ “J’adore la Vertu”: “Observations,” in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (5 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995), 3:39.

¹⁰ See Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).

¹¹ On Rousseau and Geneva, see James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

¹³ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), 189.

¹⁵ Robert Darnton, “Two Paths through the Social History of Ideas,” in The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Haydn T. Mason (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), 251–94, at p. 256; Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

¹⁸ See the 1781 Foreword to the first Discourse (“What is celebrity?”), below, p. 4. See also Antoine Lilti, “The Writing of Paranoia: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Paradoxes of Celebrity,” Representations 103 (2008): 53–83.

¹⁹ See Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995).

²⁰ Letter of July 18, 1762, quoted in Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 358.

²¹ See Jean Fabre’s introduction to the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne in Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes 3:ccxvi–ccxliii.

²² For insight into Rousseau’s psychology, Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998) is helpful.

²³ “I was born with a natural love of solitude,” letter to Malesherbes, January 4, 1762. See Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 31–53.

²⁴ Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

²⁵ On Mandeville, see E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

²⁶ For discussions of Rousseau’s understanding of amour propre, see N. J. H. Dent, “Rousseau on Amour Propre,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 72 (1998): 57–73; Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Niko Kolodny, “The Explanation of Amour Propre,” Philosophical Review 119 (2010): 165–200.

²⁷ Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

²⁸ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

³⁰ Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 24–34.

³¹ Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

³² See, for example, Rousseau’s self-description in “Préface d’une seconde lettre à Bordes,” Oeuvres Complètes 3:103–5. But see also how Rousseau attributes even his own love of truth to the hidden working of amour propre: letter to Malesherbes, January 12, 1762.

³³ For Rousseau’s words (“horrible” and “one of the finest geniuses …”), see The State of War, below, p. 256. On Rousseau and Hobbes, see Grace G. Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 21–42; Zev Trachtenberg, “Subject and Citizen: Hobbes and Rousseau on Sovereignty and the Self,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sources of the Self, ed. Timothy O’Hagan (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), 85–105; Peter J. Steinberger, “Hobbes, Rousseau and the Modern Conception of the State,” Journal of Politics 70 (2008): 595–611.

³⁴ Rousseau hesitated over whether to mount a direct attack in the Social Contract on the religious intolerance of contemporary France and eventually decided not to. See Social Contract, note 156 (below, p. 251).

³⁵ Patrick Riley, “Rousseau’s General Will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–53; Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau, 69–89.

³⁶ Sparta had a particular influence on Rousseau. See Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 231–41.

³⁷ Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy, 134. Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers, xvii-xviii, 67.

⁴⁰ Darnton, “Diffusion vs. Discourse,” in Forbidden Best-Sellers, 169–80.

⁴¹ Richard Cobb, Paris and Its Provinces, 1792–1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

⁴⁴ On “city,” Rousseau was presumably following Diderot’s article for the Encyclopédie, vol. 3 (1753).

⁴⁶ John Lough, “The Encyclopédie and the Contrat social,” in Reappraisals of Rousseau, ed. Simon Harvey et al. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1980), 64–74.

⁴⁷ Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 9 (below, p. 169). Letter to Malesherbes, January 12, 1762.

⁴⁹ “I argue that Rousseau invented anthropology,” says Darnton, “Two Paths through the Social History of Ideas,” 273.