My first introduction to Jean Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, occurred in less than favourable circumstances, and it is only today, earlier rather than later in my journey, that I have had the chance to see him in a new light. The agent bearing principle responsibility for this shift is Judith Shkar’s essay on the two types of utopias Rousseau advocates for: ‘Sparta and the Age of Gold.’[1] It is one of those fortuitous occurrences one does not imagine to intentionally come across, but manifests itself as a chance encounter that can only be the mysteries of fate and chance. Such accidental meetings are essential encounters, fleeting as they may be, for while the agents themselves may be small — sometimes even words or phrases, not even entire sentences, sometimes essays, not books — they are shifts of some ethereal character in otherworldly encounters that break what can sometimes turn into monotony and banality. To this date, I have thought of Rousseau as the proud father of the noble savage (knowing fully well that he never used the word even once in his oeuvre), of fantastical lands, the theoretician of the Homo Ignoramus.
I have, in a note in the past, expressed what may seem to be as violent as expression against Rousseau as one who is forced to read him may articulate:
“Rousseau is unfettered by the bounds of society, and this is why he lionises the noble savage, the Homo Ignoramus. The noble savage is one without manners, without norms of propriety behaviour, and the furthest thing away from the paragon of sophistication the fine English gentleman ought to be. When man gives precedence to his passions, enables himself to be taken over by his heart without the aid of his mind, and when he finally surrenders to that which is neither fine nor appropriate, he does not pursue the right path of reason. Instead, he goes out to look for the dawn of decadence and capitulates to being averse to what man has become. Man is destined for future greatness, but when he recedes to the state of nature, away from the sway of the forces of civilisation, he finds a sense of being but no comfort — that comfort being the result of a false appearance of peace and calm, and not true peace in itself.”
My revaluation of Rousseau begins with Shklar’s essay, but this does not mean that I do not maintain certain reservations about him; in the spirit of this essay, it would be prudent to omit these and express them at some later date and venue. So, who is this Rousseau that I encountered today?
It is Judith Shklar’s contention that Rousseau was “one of the greatest of the nay-sayers” who “diagnosed the emotional diseases of modern civilisation.”[2] Rousseau was a critic who presented a negative plan of action rather than a utopia in a substantial sense: Shklar makes clear that even Rousseau knew that his twin utopias of the ‘age of gold’ and Sparta were diametrically opposed, and that he proposed these utopic elements in his thought more as thought experiments than genuine plans of actions that would suppose change progressing toward a certain end. If we are to believe Shklar, it is evident that Rousseau was deeply cynical of the vice and decadence of his times, and yearned for something simpler and more ordered. But this same Rousseau, who would have been at home with the Puritans, had another redeeming characteristic: as we shall see, he was so sceptical of ‘change’ and ‘progress’ that he preferred to let things take their way and stand by the wayside, criticising and showing those who were the principal actors of change the error of their ways without providing solutions. Seen this way, Rousseau is the critic of modern civilisation, which is a mixed blessing for him. He is enamoured with the prosperity he sees around him, but he cannot think of the immoral acts that have begotten it, or the effect of this prosperity on the human psyche. In a way, prosperity and supposed progress have all but wrecked the bucolic community, whether it takes after the militaristic fetishes of the Spartans or some physical manifestation of Beethoven’s 6th.[3]
This leads Shklar to posit that Rousseau’s oeuvre “is an itemised account of ancient virtue and modern delinquency.”[4] Rousseau is, at his core, a proponent of ancient virtue over the modern; he is as enamoured by the ancient world as I am, if not far more. He constantly looks to the classical world to see outside of the boundaries of the wretched condition of modern man, though the criticism he levels is as applicable to classical societies in the height of their protomodernity as it is to Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century. Even the possibility of ancient virtue, though, is enough for Rousseau; Shklar points out that he is wholly indisposed to history and does not care to barter or trade with it.[5] He is critical because I think he finds the anomie of the present alienating — he recognises that he lives in a world in which virtue is all but impossible, and that the polis no longer seems to exist to secure some higher good but has descended to the earthly, material level of seemingly guaranteeing the road to commercial prosperity but paying no attention to the other essential facets of man’s humanity.
The corollary to Rousseau’s somewhat pessimistic attitude about the present is his doubt, which leads him to the recognition that “no society of men can be perfect.”[6] I have written previously here about Anthony Quinton’s definition of conservatism as the ‘politics of imperfection’, but seeing that Rousseau’s doubts about man’s prospects stem from a deep-rooted and psychological (if not philosophical) recognition of man’s imperfectability, it is curious that Rousseau has been allowed to be tainted by the French Revolution.[7] Rousseau’s philosophy was appropriated by the wretched philosophes who turned the French from a peace-loving peoples who suffered silently under the somewhat more favourable conditions of the Ancien Regime to a blood-thirsty, vengeful lot who acted boorishly, overthrew governments faster than they could acquire a modicum of legitimacy.
In light of Shklar’s reading of Rousseau, I can see how Rousseau would have reacted if he would have lived to see the Revolution: “He thought that any experience of change was always psychologically debilitating. Change meant uncertainty and upheaval for those who lived through it and as such it was at all times a source of suffering.”[8] Rousseau would have nothing to do with such a drastic change of events, such an upheaval: it was not merely change that the Revolution wanted; the Revolution was animated by a desire to make the world anew and wipe out the old with the same force that had destroyed the fantastical state of nature without recognising fully that man was torn between his social state and his nature. Even if the present situation was disagreeable — and there can be little doubt that it was — change, and especially radical change, represented a degree of unacceptable psychological debilitation. It is, I think, the sign of utopias that they advocate for no change whatsoever in their final state not merely because their creators think that their utopias are some variation of the full actualisation of thought thinking itself or some other essential maxim that is sublimated through the entirety of their sociopolitical experiments, but also because between the lines they understand that change itself is not desirable because of the pain it causes. Even change for the better, if there can be such a thing, is debilitating. While I am more or less ambivalent about change, Rousseau was animated by a powerful hatred of it, and I can sympathise with him. We have lost the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of the Greeks and the Romans, or the brief moment of its revival in Italy at the dawn of the modern world. We see a world around us that is devoid of any sense of enchantment, whether it be because of some degree of religious naïveté pace Weber or, as Rousseau would have us think, because of a unique sense of “modern delinquency.”[9]
The recognition of man’s imperfection leads to two principles; Rousseau expressed in a letter that “the principles of the Social Contract, he insisted, were reducible to two: that sovereignty must rest in the hands of the people and that aristocratic government is the best of all.”[10] The people must be sovereign, but this does not mean that rule by the people is the best rule for the people. As such, Rousseau is not enamoured by the ways of the people — those very people who have engaged in vice like fallen men, unable to live up to the standards of the golden village or the Lacedaemonians — and he rightly does not trust them to live up to the standards of virtue. His means of achieving the eradication of faction and resultant peace and harmony through the ‘general will’ and some form of ignorance in the populace is, well, not something I can countenance, and I do not think I ever will. Rousseau’s solution to man’s imperfection is to prevent man from coming to know that which can harm him. The incessant military drilling is for defensive purposes only, but that which is to be defended against does not lie waiting at the physical borders, but lurks within the self. By not giving one time to think about the implications of the knowledge one has, Rousseau does not permit the individual to doubt or to think about significant questions: “an active soldierly life leaves him no idle hours in which he might indulge in reflection and regret.”[11] Rousseau’s experiment is, to the sympathetic reader, a more militaristic version of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two; the latter has the added advantage of leisure to think, but still uses environmental factors to control with more than a guiding hand the mode and manner of one’s actions. Yet, Rousseau, whatever his utopic thought might be, is so deeply uncomfortable with change and so fundamentally disenchanted with progress that he will never push to actualise it. It is this that lends his work the complaining character of the critic than the active life of the social reformer, and it is unfortunate that both seem to have some correlative, if not directly causal links. Rousseau shows that the former ought to exist independently of the latter, and even utopias — although I doubt he ever used that word — were but convenient thought experiments, figments of our imaginations useful as crutches. But there were only functional goods — they were good as crutches, not as things in themselves.
Rousseau understood the power of the public sphere, and did not try to pare it down to the bare minimum, as has been the norm nowadays, when everybody seems to prefer their own company and form their own substantive association without catering to the associations that exist by nature, the poleis. “Like the endless ceremonies and festivals that Rousseau urged upon the Poles, the assemblies exist to remind men of their public role.”[12] Although he believed in some form of aristocratic rule, he was fully prepared to have men realise their social standings in a prominent, public manner. It was once my regret that few, if any, relics survive of those great processions, masked in some theistic veneer, that magnified the grandeur of the streets of Florence in its heyday. But Rousseau captures their essential spirit: they bring everyone together for a shared, common purpose that transcends the self. While Rousseau did not regard the self with much devotion or lavish it with any attention beyond that which was required to suppress it into whatever supplicant form he found at hand, his argument was a criticism of excessive individualism, one that is more pertinent today than it was when Rousseau thought his world was on the verge of atomisation. We vote on self-interest, think of the common good through its lowest common denominator, not its highest common factor, we equate wealth with happiness, and think of everything as arising from the individual. We comport to the individual far too much value, and this intense valuation is manifested in our proclivity toward decadent materialism and a general disregard for essential questions of virtue and vice and a predisposition to demands for individual rights but no duties whatsoever save for those to be enacted by an impersonal body of an increasingly bloating set of inefficient bureaucratic busybodies who lack even the grace of Sir Humphrey Appleby (though it must be noted that their frustrations seem to have similar, if not worse, results).
The public sphere, in any case, is in severe need of revitalisation, and with the rise of populism we can see why Rousseau’s work might be so essential: “The social contract is a constant transformation. For justice to replace instinct, and the idea of duty that of appetite, requires an unceasing effort.”[13] Every moment, we are at a fork in the woods, and we can choose to emerge from the woods and regale the rest with the tales of our adventures and misadventures, or run deeper into the woods, alone and lonely, terrified of the arbitrary and capricious nature of our present society.
[1] Judith N. Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold’, Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 1 (1966): 25–51. Shklar’s essay was brought to my attention by William James Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 110n.
[2] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 25, 26.
[3] Those in the know will know how important the 6th is to the 7th; without the former, the latter is alienated, lonely, and without belonging.
[4] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 33.
[5] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’, 26.
[6] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 36.
[7] See Gordon H. McNeil, ‘The Cult of Rousseau and the French Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6, no. 2 (1945): 197–212.
[8] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 48.
[9] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 33.
[10] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 38.
[11] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 40.
[12] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 39.
[13] Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models,’ 40.