Editor’s Introduction
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ed. Patrick Coleman, trans. Franklin Philip, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
2 Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, Paris: Vrin, 1970.
3 Jean Starobinski, Rousseau, la transparence et l’obstacle, Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
4 Bernard Groetuyssen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris: Gallimard, 1949 (published posthumously).
5 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 55.
6 Ibid., p. 24.
7 Ibid., p. 51.
8 Rousseau prides himself on sparing the non-specialist (‘common’) reader the philosophical questions that his observations raise. ‘It is … enough for me to have set things out in a way that the common reader has no need to consider them at all.’ Ibid., p. 54.
9 ‘This period … must have been the happiest and most enduring age … This state was the best for man … the human race was made to remain there forever … this state was the true youth of the world.’ Ibid., pp. 61–2.
10 Ibid., p. 62.
11 ‘O Man … here, as I have read it, is your history … in nature, which never lies.’ Ibid., p. 25.
12 Ibid., pp. 26, 32.
13 Victor Goldschmidt discusses all these concepts in Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau, Paris: Vrin, 1974. Althusser says of Goldschmidt’s book that ‘there have been studies of the genealogies of these concepts (Goldschmidt’s book is definitive), but there has not been enough study of the effects of this system as a whole’. Louis Althusser, ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso, 2006, p. 186.
14 In his 1966 course, Althusser affirms, according to an auditor’s notes, that this ‘solution is disarming: recourse to the heart’. Louis Althusser, Politique et histoire: Cours à l’École normale supérieure de 1955–1972, ed. François Matheron, Paris: Seuil, 2006, p. 304. In 1972, this ‘solution’ is not accompanied by a note of doubt. Let us point out that the idea of the ‘heart’ is not explicitly present in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, but is found in Emile and Rousseau’s autobiographical texts.
15 Éliane Martin-Haag has worked this vein with remarkable success. She reconstructs Rousseau’s ‘system’ on the basis of his biographical indications about his ‘conscience’, conceived as a sort of impetuous force of quasi-autonomous thought (Martin-Haag, Rousseau et la conscience sociale des Lumières, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009).
16 In Emile, there are many reflections on the question of the ‘right moment’. In Book 5, for example, in connection with the encounter between Emile and Sophie, we read: ‘Sophie was discovered long since; Emile may even have seen her already, but he will not recognise her till the right moment.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or Education, trans. Barbara Foxley, Indianapolis: The Online Library of Liberty, 2011, p. 331, translation modified.
17 Althusser rejects the notion of human ‘destiny’, although Rousseau defends it. Althusser’s reading annuls the Rousseauesque dispositive of the combination of causes (chance, mechanism, fatality). See Yves Vargas, ‘Althusser-Rousseau: Aller-Retour’, in Rousseau et la critique contemporaine, Études Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no. 13, Montmorency: Éditions du Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2002.
18 This explains Althusser’s reservations about Engels’ claim that ‘in Rousseau … we find … a line of thought which corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx’s Capital’. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science), in Marx and Engels Collected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, vol. 25, p. 130.
19 It is quite striking that none of the three pivotal concepts in Althusser’s reading, the forest, the accident and the chance occurrence, is to be found in the excellent Dictionnaire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (ed. R. Trousson and F.S. Eigeldinger, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), although it carefully combs through Rousseau’s work to inventory more than 800 different terms.
20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 62.
21 Let us cite the most recent of them: Jean-Luc Guichet, who tracks the animal through the whole of Rousseau’s work in Rousseau, l’animal et l’homme, Paris: Cerf, 2006; Luc Vincenti, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, l’individu et la république, Paris: Kimé, 2001; Blaise Bachofen, La condition de la liberté: Rousseau critique des raisons politiques, Paris: Payot, 2002; Bruno Bernardi, La fabrique des concepts: Recherches sur l’invention conceptuelle chez Rousseau, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006; Florent Guénard, Rouseau et le travail de la convenance, Paris: Honoré-Champion, 2004; and Éliane Martin-Haag, who, setting out from the idea of ‘conscience’, reorients Rousseau towards a partial but radical materialism (Rousseau ou la conscience sociale des Lumieres, Paris: Honoré-Champion, 2009).
22 Althusser, Politique et histoire, p. 111.
23 Ibid., p. 113.
24 The ‘circle of the social and legal theories which put at the origin of history, as its motor and principle, a reason that is in fact nothing but its result (consider also the circle of language)’. Ibid.
25 In 1966, we find ‘transformation of contingency into necessity’, ‘a specific law governing each of its phases’ (‘Rousseau et ses prédecesseurs’, in Politique et histoire, pp. 308–9). A graphic representation may be found in ibid., p. 300.
26 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 130.
27 Here are a few quotations that provide something of an idea of the theoretical tone: ‘It is Rousseau’s merit to have sketched a method that is already dialectical, the history of society’ (Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Introduction to Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, Paris: Éditions sociales, 1965, p. 42). ‘Marxism–Leninism takes note of Rousseau’s egalitarian claim for recognition of every merit and personal condition’ (Giovanni Della Volpe, Rousseau and Marx, trans. John Fraser, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, p. 91). ‘Rousseau’s doctrine, in spite of its entirely erroneous conceptions, played an important revolutionary role during the French Revolution’ (Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, translation of the third Russian edition, New York: Russell and Russell, 1965, p. 96). ‘Marxist … analysis has nothing to do with Rousseau’s, except that it attempts to solve the problem which Rousseau posed, the problem … of the social bond’ (Henri Lefebvre, De l’État, vol. 3, Paris: UGE 10/18, 1977, p. 53). ‘Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin have shown that freedom can only be achieved in and through society, and that it is by transforming society that we attain freedom’ (Guy Besse, ‘De Rousseau au communisme’, Europe, nos 391–2, December 1961, ‘Jean-Jacques à 250 ans’, p. 177). ‘It is Rousseau who expressed this in his second Discourse, by showing that social conditions (that is, people’s interrelations) depend on economic conditions (that is, people’s relationship to nature’) (Louis Althusser, ‘Les problèmes philosophiques de l’histoire’ [1955], in Politique et histoire, p. 175).
28 ‘I had invented my own … Marx … far removed from the real Marx … I suppressed everything which seemed incompatible with his materialist principles … esp. the apologetic categories of the “dialectic”, and even the dialectic itself.’ Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever and The Facts, ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, trans. Richard Veasey, New York: The New Press, 1993, p. 221.
29 See Yves Vargas, ‘L’horreur dialectique (description d’un itinéraire)’, in Jean-Claude Bourdin, ed., Althusser: Une lecture de Marx, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, pp. 147–92.
30 Louis Althusser, Lettres à Franca (1961–1973), Paris: Stock/Imec, 1998, p. 784.
31 Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, trans. Ben Brewster, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 1990, p. 197.
32 Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, p. 268.
33 ‘It is to the author of [Rousseau’s second Discourse or the “Discourse on the Origin of Languages”] that we owe another revival of the “materialism of the encounter”.’ Althusser, ‘The Underground Current’, pp. 183–4.
34 See especially Jean-Claude Bourdin, ‘Matérialisme aléatoire et pensée de la conjoncture: Au-delà de Marx’, in Bourdin, Althusser, pp. 193–228. See also Annie Ibrahim, ed., Autour d’Althusser: Le matérialisme aléatoire, Paris: Le Temps des cerises, 2012.
35 Louis Althusser, ‘Philosophy and Marxism: Interviews with Fernanda Navarro, 1984–1987’, in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 261.
36 Althusser, ‘The Underground Current’, pp. 174–5.
37 ‘He always catches a moving train, the way they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes from (origin) or where he’s going (end). And he gets off somewhere along the way.’ Althusser, ‘Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher,’ Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 290.
38 In contrast to the text published in Mexico in 1987 (‘Philosophy and Marxism’) which, oddly, seems to ignore this debt.
39 Althusser, ‘The Underground Current’, p. 187. On the ‘necessity/contingency’ relation, see Kenta Ohji, ‘Nécessité/contingence: Rousseau et les Lumières selon Althusser’, Revue Lumières, no. 15/1, 2010.
40 Althusser, ‘The Underground Current’, pp. 184–5.
41 It should, however, be noted that this abandonment of the circle modifies the vision of history: it is no longer a matter of accidents external to society which come from without to perturb it, but of ‘encounters’, that is, of independent causal series whose conjunction is not given in advance (Cournot’s theory, to which Althusser alludes, ibid., p. 193). Historical causality is thus clearly inside the system this time; we move from the impossible future of the circle to a possible but unpredictable future.
42 ‘My earlier problem of wanting to escape: how to get out of the camp while remaining there’ (Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, p. 206). It was a matter of hiding somewhere in the camp for three or four days while waiting for the end of the manhunt, in order to flee in the real sense.
43 Louis Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, trans. Grahame Lock, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, p. 220.
44 Althusser, ‘The Underground Current’, pp. 193–4, 195.
45 In connection with this ‘underground current of materialism’, Althusser carefully stipulates, in citing Rousseau, that he means ‘the Rousseau of the second Discourse’. This is understandable, for Rousseau attempts, in his way, to think the contingency that arrives ‘at the right moment’; he does so, however, by mixing up finalism with mechanism in a sort of makeshift causality. It is in Emile that Rousseau develops this confused theory of history.
46 Althusser, ‘The Underground Current’, pp. 183–4, translation modified.
Lecture One
1 Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, Paris: Minuit, 1969.
2 ‘The least movement affects all of nature: the whole sea changes because of a rock.’ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. and ed. Roger Ariew, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004, p. 281.
3 Althusser’s lectures on Machiavelli and Rousseau were preceded by four lectures on Hobbes and Locke delivered in October and November 1971.
4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ed. Patrick Coleman, trans. Franklin Philip, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 18.
5 Ibid., p. 15.
6 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
7 The year 1970 saw the publication of Robert Derathé’s magisterial Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps. Derathé situates Rousseau with respect to received concepts and goes on to point out similarities and differences.
8 TN: Only the latter of these two passages occurs near the beginning of the second Discourse. The former is similar to a passage that occurs there (Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 18).
9 Ibid., p. 51.
10 Ibid., p. 24.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 44.
14 Ibid., pp. 113–14.
15 Ibid., p. 24.
16 Ibid., p. 17.
17 Ibid., p. 15.
18 Ibid., p. 14.
19 Ibid., p. 83.
20 Ibid.
21 Rousseau, ‘L’État de guerre’, in The Political Writings, ed. Charles E. Vaughan, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915, p. 296.
22 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 18.
23 Ibid., p. 14.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 17.
26 Ibid., p. 46.
27 Rousseau, ‘L’État de guerre’, p. 305.
28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to Jacob Vernes, 18 February 1758, in Rousseau, Lettres philosophiques, Paris: Livre de Poche, 2003, p. 175.
Lecture Two
1 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 24: ‘Let us begin by setting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on this question.’
2 Ibid., pp. 15, 24–5. ‘I have … ventured a few guesses’; ‘hypothetical and conditional reasoning … conjectures based solely on the nature of man’.
3 Ibid., Note C, p. 87.
4 Ibid., p. 15.
5 Ibid., pp. 15, 53.
6 Ibid., pp. 53–4.
7 Ibid., p. 62.
8 Ibid., translation modified (‘independent activity’).
9 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or Education, trans. Barbara Foxley, Indianapolis: The Online Library of Liberty, 2011, p. 11, translation modified.
10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘On the Social Contract’, in On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978, p. 68.
11 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 61, translation modified (‘from the first state of nature’).
12 Ibid., p. 82.
13 TN: The French idiom here translated as ‘find his bearings in it’ means, literally, ‘no longer recognize himself in it’.
14 TN: There is a gap in the tape recording here.
15 Ibid., p. 53.
16 ‘Great floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited regions with seas or precipices; upheavals on the globe caused portions of the continent to break off into islands.’ Ibid., p. 59. TN: There is a gap in the tape recording here.
17 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science), in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 25, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp. 129–30.
18 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 83.
19 Karl Marx, ‘Afterword to the Second German Edition’, Capital Volume One, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 35, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp. 18–19.
20 ‘Just as the action of the soul on the body with respect to man’s constitution is unfathomable in philosophy [est l’abîme de la philosophie], so the action of the general will on the public force with respect to the constitution of the State is unfathomable in politics [est l’abîme de la politique].’ Rousseau, ‘On the Social Contract or Essay about the Form of the Republic’ (First version, usually called the Geneva Manuscript), in On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript, p. 168.
Lecture Three
1 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 62.
2 TN: The ‘objective’ sense of the word échapper (escape) is ‘to slip out’, as in ‘the words slipped out before he could think’.
3 Plato, Protagoras, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the Letters, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 321c, p. 319. ‘Prometheus … found the other animals well off for everything, but man naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed.’
4 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 55.
5 Ibid., p. 26.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 27.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 28.
11 Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Book 3, 405a ff., pp. 649ff.
12 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 30.
13 Ibid.
14 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, ed. Don and Peta Folwer, trans. Ronald Melville, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, Book 3, ll. 838–45, p. 93: ‘So, when the end shall come/ … And we shall be no more, nothing can harm us/ Or make us feel, since nothing remains/ … And if it were true that mind and spirit can still/ Have feeling torn from the body, that means to us / Nothing.’
15 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 29.
16 Ibid., p. 34.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 35.
19 Ibid., p. 55.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 46.
22 Ibid., p. 35.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p. 32.
25 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, being Part III of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, together with the Zusätze, trans. William Wallace and A.V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon, 1971, section 1, para. 398, p. 66.
26 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 2 vols, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 272–3.
27 Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, chap. 2, 1253a. Althusser probably used the translation by Marcel Prélot (Politique, Paris: Gonthier, 1964, p. 62). Aristotle’s sentence is more commonly translated ‘man is by nature a political animal’.
28 TN: Althusser’s translation reads commerce de secours et de service, ‘exchange … of assistance and services’.
29 Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, ed. Walter Simons, Oxford: Clarendon, Classics of International Law 17, 1934 [1672], vol. 2: On the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. C.H. Oldfather and W.A. Oldfather, Book 2, chap. 3, para. 18, pp. 213–4. The French translation that Althusser cites may be found in Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, Paris: Vrin, 1970, p. 143.
30 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 17.
31 Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, vol. 1, p. 253.
32 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 51.
33 Ibid., p. 43.
34 Ibid., p. 45.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., pp. 42–3.
37 ‘Does a dispute sometimes arise over a meal? He will never come to blows about this without his first comparing the difficulty of winning with that of finding his sustenance elsewhere.’ Ibid., Note I, pp. 95–6.
38 TN: There is a gap in the tape recording here.
39 Ibid., p. 49.
40 John Locke, ‘The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government’, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chap. 7, para. 79, p. 337: ‘For the end of conjunction between Male and Female, being not barely Procreation, but the continuation of the Species, this conjunction betwixt Male and Female ought to last, even after Procreation, so long as is necessary to the nourishment and support of the young Ones, who are to be sustained by those that got them until they are able to shift and provide for themselves.’
41 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 38, and Rousseau, Emile, p. 32.
42 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Note L, pp. 110–13.
43 Ibid., p. 37.
44 Ibid., p. 38.
45 Ibid., p. 28.
46 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
47 Ibid., p. 27.
48 Ibid., p. 53.
49 Ibid., p. 51.
50 Cf. ‘Nature alone does everything in the activities of a beast while man contributes to his own, in his capacity as a free agent. The beast chooses or rejects by instinct, man by free action.’ Ibid., p. 32.
51 Ibid., pp. 44–6.
52 ‘So pity is born, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature. To be sensitive and pitiful the child must know that he has fellow creatures who suffer as he has suffered.’ Rousseau, Emile, p. 168.
53 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 15.
54 Althusser is referring to a course he gave in January 1972.