In a sense the works contained in this volume, all of which were written between the end of 1762 and the middle of 1765, represent the conclusion of Rousseau’s career as an author. Although he went on to write his three great autobiographical works (the Confessions, Dialogues, and Reveries) as well as the important Considerations on the Government of Poland, none of these was, or was intended to be, published during his lifetime. The only work Rousseau published through his own initiative after 1765 was his Dictionary of Music (1767), which he had substantially completed five years earlier.1
In fact, in the Confessions, Rousseau says that by 1759 he “had been forming the plan of leaving literature altogether and above all the trade of Author.”2 He had just published the Letter to d’Alembert, and Julie was in press. Moreover, he was nearly finished writing Emile, his “last and best work,”3 and had decided to extract the Social Contract from an unfinished larger work, the Political Institutions. The money he expected from these last books was to finance his life of retirement. Thus, when they finally appeared in 1762, Rousseau “had given up literature completely” and “no longer thought of anything but leading a tranquil and sweet life as far as it depended on me.”4 As it happened, this possibility no longer depended on him. The storm that broke out after the publication of Emile and the Social Contract deprived Rousseau of tranquillity and ultimately caused him to resume “the trade of author” for several more years. Each of the works written during this period was a response to a specific attack on either his character or his recent publications.
Rousseau had fled France in June of 1762 to avoid arrest after the condemnation of Emile by the Parlement of Paris. Shortly thereafter both Emile and the Social Contract were burned in his native Geneva, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. As a result, he settled at Môtiers, near Neuchâtel, which was under the control of Frederick the Great of Prussia. In August Emile was attacked in a pastoral letter by the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont. Believing that he owed it to himself to reply, Rousseau responded with the Letter to Beaumont, dated November 18, 1762, and published the following March. Two months later he renounced his Genevan citizenship because of the failure of the government to reverse the warrant it had issued against him. This dramatic gesture led to a wave of controversy in Geneva, including a pamphlet war in which the partisans of the government were represented by the Procurator General Tronchin’s anonymously published Letters Written from the Country, a work that Rousseau undertook to refute with his Letters Written from the Mountain, composed in secrecy during 1764. It was published at the end of the year and quickly burned in numerous cities, although in Geneva itself it was declared to be “unworthy of being burned by the Hangman.”5 In addition to the furor it caused throughout Europe, the work had consequences for Rousseau’s effort to live his tranquil and sweet life at Môtiers. The local minister, Montmollin, who had been praised in the Letters, began proceedings to excommunicate Rousseau and stirred up the populace against him with sermons comparing him to the Antichrist. This culminated with the stoning of Rousseau’s house in September of 1765. In the midst of these events, which forced him to leave Môtiers, Rousseau wrote the Vision of Pierre of the Mountain, Called the Seer to poke fun at one of his local enemies, Pierre Boy de la Tour, a relative of his landlady who apparently had urged her to evict Rousseau on the basis of a revelation he said he had received from God.6
The circumstances of the composition of these works give a clear indication of their themes. They are defenses of both Rousseau’s character and the substance of Emile and the Social Contract. They use the occasion of very specific attacks to present his thoughts on the general issues of censorship, religion, and politics, issues that had always been at the center of his concern. Although Rousseau’s focus on these issues was continuous from the beginning of his literary career, it is important to keep in mind the polemical context of his treatment of them here. Evaluating the relation between the positions he takes in these works and those he takes in earlier ones is complicated by this polemical context. He is addressing the general public, but also has specific interlocutors ranging from the Catholic Archbishop of Paris who was also a peer of France, to a Protestant official of the Genevan republic, to a local drunkard of no repute.
Even the participation in polemical controversy over his works is something of a reversal for Rousseau. After the publication of the work that made him famous, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, he had taken it upon himself to respond to several of the innumerable attacks made on this work.7 This period of controversy took up two years. Throughout the series of exchanges, first for comic effect and then more seriously, Rousseau remarked on his distaste for such polemics.8 At its conclusion he resolved to engage in such controversies no longer. Subsequently, he did write replies to several criticisms of the Second Discourse, but he did not publish these replies. In sum, he sustained his policy of public silence toward critics for ten years of active publication until he decided to respond to Beaumont’s pastoral letter.
Both the Letter to Beaumont and the Letters Written from the Mountain begin with expressions of distaste for the polemical genre.9 The reasons Rousseau gives for departing from his resolution to avoid such disputes point in two different directions. First, he emphasizes, as he had in his polemics of 1751–1752, the personal nature of the attacks against him. While the arguments of his books can stand without further support from him, he is required to defend his character against claims that he is impious, reckless, and seditious. Moreover, as he insists in his later autobiographical writings, these attacks threaten to prejudice readers against him, thereby keeping the arguments of his books from receiving a fair hearing. Second, he argues that even more is at stake in the disputes over Emile and the Social Contract than his reputation or the fate of his books. In the Letters Written from the Mountain, he argues that his renunciation of citizenship has eliminated his personal stake in the situation in Geneva, but that the constitutional crisis caused by a governmental usurpation of power remains. Even more emphatically, in both this work and the Letter to Beaumont, he argues that his presentation of the relation between religion and politics represents the only satisfactory alternative to an unceasing battle between dogmatic intolerance and equally dogmatic disbelief.
The essence of Rousseau’s project of resolving the theological-political problem is shown by his description of the “religious condition of Europe” at the time of the publication of Emile. In the Letters Written from the Mountain he describes this condition: “Religion, discredited everywhere by philosophy, had lost its ascendancy even over the people. The Clergy, obstinate about propping it up on its weak side, had let all the rest be undermined, and, being out of plumb, the entire edifice was ready to collapse. Controversies had stopped because they no longer interested anyone, and peace reigned among the different parties, because none cared about his own anymore. In order to remove the bad branches, they had cut down the tree; in order to replant it, it was necessary to leave nothing but the trunk.”10 The disputes between Rousseau and the religious authorities who attacked him concern the nature of the “trunk” or heart of religion and whether this heart is compatible with “philosophic liberty.”
The boldness of Rousseau’s exchange with the Archbishop of Paris is underscored by the power of his interlocutor and the continued threat of persecution. The Archbishop’s Pastoral Letter banned Rousseau’s Emile as an “erroneous, impious, blasphemous, and heretical” work containing “an abominable doctrine, suited to overturning natural Law and to destroying the foundations of the Christian Religion.”11 The Archbishop accused Rousseau of being an agitator for atheism who takes “pleasure in poisoning the sources of public felicity.”12 Rousseau countered that not he but the dominant orthodoxies have “cruelly wounded humanity” by propping up with their authority the truly “abominable doctrines” that, unlike the “simple and pure” religion of the Savoyard Vicar, “inundate French fields” with “rivers of blood.”13 The issues between them involve nothing less than the foundation and consequences of traditional natural law doctrines and of Christianity itself.
Rousseau pointedly suggests that the “interest of Beaumont’s belief” can be seen at work in the Pastoral Letter—if only because the partisan passions unleashed in response to the publication of Emile make it necessary for the Catholic prelate to “howl with the wolves.”14 Against accusations that he himself is a hypocrite and an atheist, Rousseau defends not only his teaching but also his character by asserting the sincerity with which he writes. He argues that he has always written with the same principles, that it is not easy to understand why he would have disguised himself, and that he has never been heard to say or do anything that contradicts his writings. He repeatedly points out that, in fact, he would have fared better had he “openly declared himself in favor of atheism,” in part because he would have been aided by the party of the philosophers. What conviction does Rousseau champion alone against the two parties, the Christians and the philosophers, arrayed against him? His “sentiment in matters of religion,” which he states with “his usual frankness,” is that “the essential truths of Christianity . . . serve as the foundation of all good morality” and that Jesus Christ “ordered belief only in what was necessary to be good.”15 All the diseased branches from this fundamentally healthy trunk have to be cut off in order to save the tree. This position offends the philosophers because it favors religion too much, and the Christians because it is not pious enough.16
The philosophical novel Emile, the target of the Archbishop’s Pastoral Letter, investigates nature and the possibility of an education according to nature that would produce a human being who would be not only “good for others” but “good for himself.”17 The centerpiece of Rousseau’s attempt to reconcile human being and society is the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, which he thought “may one day make a revolution among men.”18 In the Profession, the character called the “Savoyard Vicar” preaches a faith according to nature or reason grounded in the inner “revelation” of sentiment. The Profession is “an example of the way one can reason with one’s pupil” so that he might find his “true interest in being good, in doing good far from the sight of men and without being forced by the laws . . . in fulfilling his duty, even at the expense of his life, and in carrying virtue in his heart.”19
In the Letter to Beaumont, Rousseau argues that we must examine the possible differences between religion considered from the point of view of its temporal or moral effects, and considered as truth. He insists that doing so is not a lapse in piety. He immediately concedes, however, that to suggest the possibility of a disparity between these two considerations raises doubts about the goodness of God, for since He made man for society, then “the truest Religion is also the most social, for God does not contradict himself.”20 Yet countless hecatombs have been the principal harvest the human race has reaped from the religions that have insisted on being considered true. In the context of this examination, Rousseau tells us that we must read his later works in light of the former, the Letter to Beaumont in light of the Second Discourse. He thus reminds us that whether social religion and the true religion coincide in his view depends upon whether Emile and the Second Discourse, works in which Rousseau reveals his principles “boldly,” teach that it is the finger of God upon the axis of the world, rather than accident, that impelled man out of the prehuman state of nature and into society, and that society and morality fulfill, rather than corrupt, nature.21 The issue turns on the question of how Rousseau’s “great discovery” regarding the natural goodness of man is understood by him to provide decisive guidance for human life.
The “human and social religion” begins from the principle that the religion that is useful for the human race, that conduces to peace and prosperity, is the one that should be considered true. For “it can be presumed that what is most useful to his creatures is what is most pleasing to the Creator.” We, however, can know nothing else of what is “pleasing to God.”22 The fallibility of reason and the equivocation of language, Rousseau argues, make it impossible for human beings ever to agree on what is the true revelation or what it might demand of us. Thus societies must take their bearings not from revelation but from what all men might hypothetically agree upon, that is, from the handful of essential tenets historically accepted by all the different religious parties or major faiths. These should be considered the essential religion and the “fundamental laws” of each society. The civil core of this faith is that “he who disobeys the Laws disobeys God.”23 Moreover, any part of each particular religious doctrine that extends further than these essential tenets should be understood by its adherents as being only the content of their own “national religion.” In any society, anyone who dogmatizes against the simplified or universal religion can be justifiably banished, because the conduct of men “in this life is dependent on their ideas about the life to come.”24 All shall believe that any decent man who sincerely follows his own religion shall be saved, and that it is impious to subject anyone to an accusation of insincerity on account of “opinions that are not connected to morality.”25 Rousseau argues for “theological tolerance” as the only means of finally obtaining peace. Because he conceives there to be an essential relation between the health of societies and a common civil religion, however, he also argues for “civil intolerance”: while any legitimate, established religion within a country shall be left alone for the sake of public tranquillity, the sovereign should protect the established national forms of religion and can justly prevent the introduction of a new cult as being against the laws.26 Further, it is the sovereign that regulates the forms of worship in each society. Theological tolerance and civil intolerance mean public indifference on all points of doctrine save the core of the “essential religion” that is required for the maintenance of public morality, and public authority over the practice of the national religion. The “social and human religion” aims at producing peace and both political and individual freedom by bringing human beings closer to their duties, removing the weapons from intolerance and fanaticism, and eliminating the authority of priests and theologians.
The Archbishop judges that Rousseau’s universal or essential religion based on utility “sets all the facts aside.”27 Rousseau must therefore show that his reduction of the Christian revelation to these essentials is in perfect accord with that revelation and leaves out nothing essential to it. Rousseau’s point of departure is the Archbishop’s own statement that reason and revelation necessarily coincide: “if reason and revelation were opposed it is certain God would be in contradiction with Himself.” Rousseau notes that this “is an important admission you make there, for it is certain that God does not contradict Himself.”28 The Archbishop insists that any individual’s reason, if it is not deficient and if his heart is open to the truth, is always able to come to knowledge of God by attending to “the impressions of nature.”29 Rousseau argues that perhaps not one in a million human beings outside of Christian society can come to know the existence of the Christian God through their own unaided reason, and thus are in a position of “invincible ignorance,” which differs from perversity of will. The difficulties of attaining a true or rational religion are such that, whatever may be the case of the pagan philosophers to whom the Archbishop points, the people are no more capable of theology or of understanding “the order of the universe” as proof of the divine existence than are children. Indeed, even with assistance, most Christians only succeed in attaining an anthropomorphic conception of God. Most human beings, then, are in a condition of “invincible ignorance” when left to the devices of their own reason. Now, we must think that a God who has made it so difficult for us to obtain knowledge of him, and so also to judge among the various revelations, would be unreasonably cruel to condemn human beings who err. Rousseau raises with increasing persistence the question whether we can be punished for the conclusions of our reason, whatever they might be, for God cannot blame us for the failings of the reason he gave us. One is in good faith when one reasons as sincerely as possible; one cannot help but will what one’s judgment leads us to conclude is good.30 Thus sincerity is all that God can demand of us. We see that among those of good faith there is a great variety of opinions regarding God and what he demands of us. Many then would seem to be sincere if belief is a hostage to a limited reason: the Christian as much as the Turk.
The human limits of reason affect not only our capacity to come to knowledge of the divine unaided, but also our capacity to submit to revelation. For the authority of revelation, in Rousseau’s view, necessarily depends upon the authority of those who attest to the event. One would thus be obliged “on pain of damnation” to believe the word of human beings whom we know are all too often limited, credulous, and even liars. Thus, Rousseau’s famous question: is it “simple, is it natural, that God should have sought out Moses in order to speak to Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”31 We therefore “need reasons to submit our reason”; the authority of revelation as transmitted to us must ultimately be established on the basis of “moral proofs,” that is, on the basis of our own experience and judgment of what is credible.32 Nor do miracles constitute convincing proof of the authority of doctrine, because, since they can be counterfeited, they must in turn be authenticated by doctrine. Thus “proof” from miracles is nothing but a vicious circle, and we are constrained to abandon them and “[r]eturn to reasoning.”33 While Rousseau agrees with the Archbishop that it is not easy for materialists to prove that “the Dogmas we consider to be revealed combat the eternal truths,” it is also impossible for reason to testify for mysteries such as that of transubstantiation.34 Rousseau’s character, the Savoyard Vicar in Emile, thus adopts an attitude of “respectful doubt” toward revelation, because while the Gospel bears certain “hallmarks of truth,” it is also “full of unbelievable things, of things which are repugnant to reason and impossible for any sensible man to conceive or to accept.”35 To insist that belief in them is essential for salvation is to do nothing but incite men to parrot words and even to be willing to kill their neighbor simply because he does not mouth them as they do.
Yet Rousseau insists that to see “insoluble difficulties” in a doctrine is not to reject it, so there is a category of things “beyond reason” essentially different from the category of things that are clearly “contrary to reason.” The Archbishop condemns Rousseau for holding, through “the character who serves him as mouthpiece”—that is, the Savoyard Vicar—that the question of “the creation and unity of God” is an “idle question” and “beyond his reason.”36 According to Rousseau, though the human mind cannot decisively comprehend the “origin of things,” we have two fundamental ways of conceiving of it. The principle of “the eternal and necessary existence of matter” has a great number of difficulties; but, of all the ideas we can have of the origin of beings, the idea of creation ex nihilo is the “least comprehensible” to reason. Thus the philosophers “have all unanimously rejected the possibility of creation” except for a small number the sincerity of whose motives can be doubted.37 Rousseau insists that reason’s preference is not incompatible with revelation on this point, since the eternity of matter was an idea accepted by the Church fathers, and the word “created” in the Bible has an ambiguous meaning.38 Reason tends to the view that the “coexistence of two principles,” matter and will, “seems to explain the constitution of the universe better” and that it “remove[s] difficulties which are hard to resolve without it, such as among others the origin of evil.”39
Nevertheless, Rousseau agrees with the Archbishop that the question of the unity of the creator God is not an “idle question,” and even claims in the Profession that unity is “established and sustained by reasoning.”40 The Vicar, however, “[s]topped on both sides by these difficulties . . . does not torture himself with a purely speculative doubt that does not influence in any manner his duties in this world.” What does the origin of beings matter, as long as we know “how they subsist, what place [we] have to fill among them, and in virtue of what this obligation [to perform duties toward others] is imposed on [us]?”41 The Vicar’s “involuntary skepticism” does not extend to the doctrine of the Gospel regarding those things “every reasonable Christian of good faith . . . wants to know about Heaven,” namely, “those that are of importance to his conduct.” A “superior proof” of the “true certitude of Christian revelation is the “purity and sanctity” of its moral teaching and the “wholly divine sublimity” of Jesus Christ, or of “the person who was its author.”42 About conduct the Gospel is clear—but apparently no clearer than reason alone. For, as Rousseau indicates, philosophy is sufficient to teach us how to control the passions, how to prevent vice from arising, or even why the necessity of moral conduct leads to that of belief in divine sanction.
The Archbishop belittles the Vicar’s position that, despite his ignorance regarding our origins, reason allows him to determine God’s attributes as “necessary consequences” of his being. One of God’s central attributes according to the Vicar is that “his will constitutes his power,” and from this power flows God’s goodness and his justice: “goodness is the necessary effect of a power without limit and of the self-love essential to every being aware of itself,” while God’s justice “is a consequence of his goodness.”43 But God’s justice is an attribute ultimately no more comprehensible to the Vicar than creation through will: he admits that “I affirm them without understanding them, and at bottom that is to affirm nothing.”44 The question persists, therefore, whether to live in the light of what is beyond reason is contrary to reason, because the Vicar is “forced” to reason about the nature of God in the light of “the sentiment of his relations with me”: so, for example, he is compelled to argue that “the triumph of the wicked and the oppression of the just in this world” alone prevents him from doubting the existence of providence, because God cannot justly disappoint the hope implanted in us that, if we are just, we will be happy.45 The only final defense of revelation, in the Vicar’s account, lies in our moral sentiment. Metaphysics no longer supports morality but is supported by it, or rather, at most, they prop up one another.46 Rousseau’s “unanswerable” reply to the Archbishop is the Vicar’s statement that the “worthiest use of my reason is for it to annihilate itself before [God] . . . it is the charm of my weakness to feel myself overwhelmed by [God’s] greatness.”47 This reply would seem to leave intact the question in dispute: whether a fundamentally moral as opposed to a metaphysical conception of religion is “reasonable” and sufficient.
Beaumont is vehement that the principal fruit of the Vicar’s teaching on sincerity is that it is “sufficient to persuade oneself that one possesses the truth,” even if one “[adopts] the very errors of Atheism.”48 This assessment would seem to follow from the view that the Profession teaches that the truth, as opposed to any sincerely held opinion, about God has become irrelevant for salvation, since God is just and cannot blame us for sincerely choosing the moral opinions we deem to be true. Since God cannot punish us for error, and therefore even for atheism, the believer need only concern himself with whether the “consolations” furnished by his reason are in the end only “chimeras.”49 That is, he need now fear only a mistaken belief in God altogether. Rousseau dismisses this characterization of the Vicar’s teaching. Rousseau could finally resolve the believer’s concern if he showed that following one’s conscience is the fulfillment of self-love on this earth, that an Emile could find the true reason for doing his duties “far from the sight of men” without being taught a version of the Profession.
In his other writings as well as elsewhere in Emile, Rousseau gives a different account of human nature than that which informs the Profession of Faith and the Letter. Rousseau sets down as “an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart.”50 He shows how “[a]ny man who only wanted to live would live happily.”51 The Archbishop views human nature as a violent torrent that constantly overflows the “powerful dikes” we must build in order to direct it toward salvation.52 Since Rousseau’s educational philosophy entails a denial of original sin, it corrupts the young because it does not teach them to steel themselves against the “fatal inclination” of their corrupt natures. The Archbishop therefore rejects it as “not even suited to making Citizens or Men.”53 He insists that Rousseau does not account, as Christianity does, for “the “striking mixture” of nobility and baseness, virtue and vice that is to be found within human beings, nor does it provide a sufficient account of human evil.54 Rousseau asserts that this is what the Vicar himself has “explained best.”55 The Vicar attempts to explain evil by embracing a dualistic account of the soul in which an active will, guided by a love of order, engages in a battle against self-love. This battle is the necessary price of the exercise of the freedom of will granted to us so that we may possess the “morality that ennobles” human life. The Vicar’s moral profession of faith stresses self-reliance and the free exercise of each individual’s will, and thus seems to reduce our dependency upon God’s intervention: God made us so that we can be good should we choose to be; and God made moral goodness akin to happiness such that it is almost, but not quite, its own reward. Thus we do not need to pray for God’s grace to escape from evil in ourselves, but can in principle prevent it from arising in us by our own efforts. This consoling teaching can be understood as a dualistic version of Rousseau’s own more radical account of natural goodness. Whether moral goodness has a foundation in nature in Rousseau’s thought depends upon a final understanding of what he means by the “active principle” and “conscience,” and how he responds to the Archbishop’s—and the Vicar’s—challenging claim that the development of moral goodness from a single source in self-love cannot be accounted for.
In the Letter, as in the Profession, Rousseau analyzes “difficulties about a sentiment” as geometers might determine that certain consequences are falsely derived from fundamental premises.56 At the same time, he clarifies the moral premises of religious thought, and attempts to build a human religion fully consequent to these, while seeking to persuade human beings to adopt a theology founded upon morality as a doctrine salutary to public felicity. Rather than destroying religion and virtue in his works, as the Archbishop alleges, Rousseau paints them in more natural forms while exposing their foundation in the human heart
While the Letter to Beaumont addresses Christianity as represented by a Roman Catholic Bishop, the Letters Written from the Mountain addresses Christianity as represented by the Protestant Reformation. In the former work Rousseau emphasizes his disagreements with Beaumont. In the latter he takes as a given the legitimacy of the Reformation as the established religion of Geneva. Because in this work he treats religion in the context of the political question of his citizenship, Rousseau confronts it somewhat less radically than he does in the Letter to Beaumont. Moreover, since his treatment of Protestantism stresses liberty of interpretation of Biblical texts, he avoids the issue of religious authority posed so strongly in the dispute with Beaumont.
In order to defend himself against the claim that his books undermine the established religion, Rousseau presents an interpretation of the Reformation. He insists that the Reformation is based on two fundamental principles: first, “to acknowledge the Bible as the rule of one’s belief” and, second, “not to admit any other interpreter of the meaning of the Bible than oneself.”57 Protestantism shares the first of these principles with Catholicism and has the second as its distinctive position.
To begin with, Rousseau focuses on this second principle, arguing that the essence of the Reformation consisted of a dispute over authoritative interpretation of the Bible. Disagreeing with the established interpretation on a variety of issues and unable to perform miracles to establish themselves as prophets, the reformers could appeal to nothing but the authority of their own reason. To the extent that a reformed church then presents a new interpretation as authoritative (as opposed to merely “probable” or the sign of a consensus) over the individual reason of its members, it undermines the basis of the Reformation itself. As Rousseau says, “Let someone prove to me today that in matters of faith I am obliged to submit to someone else’s decisions, beginning tomorrow I will become Catholic, and every consistent and true man will act as I do.”58
Having shown the implications of the second principle of the Reformation, Rousseau turns to the first. Does he accept the Bible as the rule of his belief? In other words, does he accept the revealed character of the Bible? This issue turns on the status of miracles, which Rousseau concedes that he has called into question. In fact, in the Vision of Pierre of the Mountain, Rousseau very boldly attributes to himself simple disbelief in miracles.59 Within the Letters Written from the Mountain, however, he does not go that far; rather, he insists only on the impossibility of knowing whether a particular fact is a miracle. “Since a miracle is an exception to the Law of nature, to judge one it is necessary to know these Laws, and to judge one reliably, it is necessary to know them all.”60 Even the wisest of humans, however, lacks such comprehensive knowledge. As Rousseau makes perfectly clear, this argument establishes, at most, the unknowability of miracles. It is no refutation of their possibility. He concludes, “That cannot be, is a phrase that rarely comes from the lips of wise men. They more often say, I do not know.”61 The question remains whether belief in these uncertain miracles is demanded by the Bible.
Rousseau answers this question in the negative. Considered as proof of the doctrine taught in the Bible, miracles are superfluous for those, like Rousseau, who accept that doctrine based on their understanding of “its utility, its beauty, its sanctity, its truth, its depth.”62 He argues further that many passages of the Gospel deny that miracles should be considered as inseparable from the teaching.63 In short, he argues that, acknowledging the Bible as the rule of one’s belief means accepting a non-miraculous moral doctrine taught by the Bible. This doctrine, severed from miracles and not imposed by the government or any other authority, is the “trunk” of Christianity, which Rousseau intends to preserve against the attacks of the Enlightenment.
Rousseau attempts to establish this understanding of Christianity through argument based on scripture, but he knows that argument has an effect on few people. In his discussion of the basis of belief he suggests that “good and upright people” (as distinguished from both the wise and those who are simply “incapable of coherent reason”) base their belief on the character of those who announce a doctrine rather than on the character of the doctrine itself.64 Later, in the Fifth Letter, Rousseau tacitly applies this account to himself. Contrasting himself to Voltaire and other authors who published anonymously in order to avoid persecution, Rousseau insists that his own frankness in publicly acknowledging his books is evidence in favor of the content of his books. In other words, his evident good faith is evidence for the truth of his position, and the evident bad faith of writers like Voltaire is evidence of the falseness of theirs.
The transition from the first to the second part of the Letters Written from the Mountain is made in the Sixth Letter, in which Rousseau turns his attention from religion to politics. In this letter he defends the Social Contract against the charge that it tends to destroy all governments. By presenting an analytic summary of the argument of the Social Contract he lays the foundation for the second part of the Letters, in which he gives an account of the present state of the Genevan republic. In short, he summarizes the principles that he then applies to the Genevan situation.
The analytic summary of the Social Contract does, indeed, show that Rousseau does not reject any form of government. While he expresses a preference for elective aristocracy in principle, he also argues that each of the other forms might be best in particular circumstances. Thus, far from arguing for the destruction of governments, Rousseau can present himself as a defender of all of them. To defend all forms of government, however, is not to defend all existing governments. The dynamite hidden in Rousseau’s willingness to defend all forms of government can be seen from his novel account of the difference between sovereignty and government and the novel account of chronic political problems that follows from it.
Sovereignty, which is identical to the legislative power, can legitimately reside only in the community as a whole. Government (except in a direct democracy) is a smaller body that executes the laws. Although the sovereign is the supreme power, it “always tends toward relaxation,” while the government (which must always be active in its execution of the laws) “tends to become stronger.”65 Rousseau has little confidence in the ability of institutions to check this tendency in the government. Moreover, he insists that admirable qualities such as loyalty and a sense of responsibility are likely to foster a corporate spirit in the government. In the end, in every community that has an effective government, the government will usurp the sovereign’s power and become oppressive. In sum, while every form of government is potentially legitimate, every existing government is a present or future oppressor.
The two sides of Rousseau’s position show themselves clearly when he turns to the Genevan situation.66 Confronting the controversy over whether the city is free or enslaved, he says, “Nothing is more free than your legitimate state; nothing is more servile than your actual state.”67 Genevans are particularly confused between the legitimate and actual state for two reasons. First, as a democracy, Geneva is the sort of state that is least well understood. “The democratic Constitution is certainly the Masterpiece of the political art: but the more admirable its contrivance is, the less it belongs to all eyes to penetrate it.”68 Second, because of the turbulence of Genevan history, the precise location of sovereignty has been constantly contested.
One might think that the obscurity is removed once and for all, not only for Genevans and democracy but also for all communities, by Rousseau’s insistence that the only legitimate locus for sovereignty is in the people as a whole. The logical consequence of this insistence would be the right of the sovereign to dismiss the government whenever the latter begins to usurp power. In short, Rousseau’s account of sovereignty seems to lead to a demand for radically new beginnings when inevitable corruption occurs. Rousseau, however, presents his doctrine as requiring the attempt to resist, rather than to initiate, innovation. This presentation, in turn, leads him to attempt to demonstrate the “original” state of the government that is to be preserved.
This demonstration is undertaken in the Letters Written from the Mountain and the unfinished “History of the Government of Geneva,” which was written as preparation for the larger work. In the “History” Rousseau argues that confusion about the underlying principles of politics is the hallmark of all modern governments, which were “built up successively out of pieces related less in accordance with the public needs than in accordance with private aims.”69 The search for the historical origins of political authority in a community that has no reliable history of its beginnings can only be fruitless. Instead Rousseau looks for a hypothesis that can explain the genesis of the existing government. He finds this hypothesis in the claim that, after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, sovereignty was in the hands of the Bishops of Geneva. Far from looking for evidence of a time when the Genevans themselves exercised legitimate sovereignty, Rousseau is content to focus on actual sovereignty.
One of the distinctive parts of Rousseau’s account is the positive role played by the Bishops, who were normally cast as the archenemies of Geneva. Rousseau reverses the view that political freedom came as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Rather than making religious reform the basis of political reform, he argues that the reformation could not have happened without the prior establishment of political freedom, and that the reformation only affirmed the liberty that had been essentially acquired beforehand. He argues that the entire History of the Government of Geneva can be shown to flow from the facts that its sovereignty was held by an ecclesiastical power and that its size made it vulnerable to its neighbors. Because the spiritual authority of the Bishops limited their temporal power, they were obliged to make concessions alternately to the Counts of the Genevese or to the Genevan people. Later the neighboring Dukes of Savoy took on the pretensions of the Counts. It was the efforts of the Bishops to resist this usurpation of their own authority that led them to strengthen the city enough to assert its independence. Having thwarted the pretensions of Savoy, the Genevans unwittingly found themselves with the fundamentals of a republican government, which came to completion with the expulsion of the Bishops during the Reformation.
These fundamentals consisted of a democratic general Council that ruled largely by delegating power to four Syndics who further delegated functions to advisors who came to make up the small Council. The history of the Genevan republic, traced in the second part of the Letters Written from the Mountain, is the history of the usurpation of sovereign authority by the small Council. This history frequently led Geneva to the point of civil war and ultimately to intervention of neighboring powers who imposed on the Genevan parties the Edict of Settlement. Rousseau both defends the Settlement as the salvation of the republic and attacks it as unwittingly providing cover for further usurpation. First, because the mediating powers misunderstood the democratic nature of sovereignty, they did not explicitly identify the general Council as sovereign.70 Second, they enumerated, and thereby limited, the powers of the general Council, leaving the impression that all other conceivable powers belonged to the small Council.
These misunderstandings have opened the door to the continuation of attempts at “innovation” by the small Council.71 The practical question facing the Genevans is how to prevent these innovations. In the Social Contract Rousseau had argued that the fundamental way to prevent usurpations by the government is to provide for periodic assemblies of the sovereign.72 In Geneva, however, these assemblies were suspended except for the purpose of electing new Syndics, who are nominated by the usurping small Council. The question, then, is how to draw the abuses of the government to the attention of the unassembled sovereign.
The answer to this question is found in the right of remonstrance, or complaint against the government. Rousseau argues that, while the sovereign can issue new laws only in the general Council, “outside the general Council it is not annihilated; its members are scattered, but they are not dead; they cannot speak by means of Laws, but they can always keep watch over the administration of the Laws.”73 A remonstrance against the government, then, is not a vote against the government, it is a statement of an opinion by a member of the sovereign that the government is usurping. The government can respond by satisfying the complaint, although it is more likely to answer the charge by branding as troublemakers those who raise it. This situation requires a judge to decide between the remonstrators and the government. One might think that an appeal is being made to the sovereign, but this cannot be the case because the sovereign can make pronouncements only in the form of general laws, it cannot judge individual cases. Consequently, Rousseau argues that the situation requires an assembly “that by a very important distinction will not have the authority of the Sovereign but of the supreme Magistrate.”74 In effect, a provisional government must be formed.
In Geneva, however, the existing government has refused to act in any way upon the remonstrances that have been made on behalf of Rousseau and his writings. Rousseau concludes the Letters by stopping just short of urging a revolution or an appeal to the intervention of foreign mediators. He says, “After having shown you the condition in which you are, I will not undertake to trace out for you the route that you must follow in order to leave it. If there is one, being on the very spot, you and your Fellow Citizens should be able to see it better than I can; when one knows where one is and where one should go, one can direct oneself without effort.”75 This caution is the result of the hope that the unity of the remonstrators may yet influence the government, but it is also the result of Rousseau’s view that—whatever might happen in the short run—either the present or a new government will continue to tend to usurpation.
The fact that the works contained in this volume were written in polemical contexts means that Rousseau’s expression in them is influenced by his need to defend himself and his books. The fact that he is responding to specific charges means that these works are sometimes narrowly focused on those charges. Nevertheless, the essential charges against Rousseau—that his works undermine religion and government—are fundamental enough to draw responses that enter very deeply into his thought. Moreover, the fact that the context in which these writings occur involves warrants issued against him, burnings of his books, and civil unrest compels Rousseau to address in a quite comprehensive manner the significance of his project as a writer.
Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace