The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Impossibilty of Reason

Matt Qvortrup

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719065811
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Presents an overview of Rousseau's work from a political science perspective. Was the great theorist of the French Revolution really a conservative? The text argues that the author of "The Social Contract" was a constitutionalist, closer to Montesquieu and Locke than to revolutionaries.

1

The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau ¹

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (St Matthew, 16.26)

Did Ludwig Wittgenstein write the most successful love story of his century? Did Thomas Hobbes compose an opera – and did it inspire the work of Mozart? Did Byron write poems about Hume or Leibniz? Did Schiller compose sonnets about Descartes and Locke? These questions seem too ridiculous to warrant an answer. Ask the same questions about Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the opposite is true. The composer of Le devin du village (the favourite opera of Louis XV), the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse (the best-selling novel in the eighteenth century), Rousseau was more than the famed educationalist and the ‘author of the French revolution’. He inspired Mozart, Derrida, Tolstoi, Kant, Marie Antoinette, Emile Durkheim, Byron, Goethe and Simone Weil, as well as politicians like Maximilien Robespierre, Thomas Jefferson, Simon de Bolivar and John F. Kennedy.

It is not surprising that this literary genius continues to fascinate.² ‘A classic’, noted T.S. Eliot, ‘is someone who establishes a culture’ (Eliot 1975: 402). Few others than Plato, Virgil and Christ (and the latter, arguably, had unfair parental support!) can lay claim to this status. As one scholar has put it, ‘In our time Rousseau is usually cited as a classic of early modern political philosophy. He is more than that: he is the central figure in the history of modern philosophy and perhaps the pivotal figure in modern culture as a whole’ (Velkley 2002: 31). Rousseau belongs to the noble few. Reviled and ridiculed, liked or loathed, the Swiss vagabond, who never attended university, let alone owned land or held privileges is, perhaps, alongside Karl Marx, the only modern thinker who qualifies as a ‘classic’.

Rousseau was aware of his genius but not unaware of his humble beginnings. ‘Never forget’, he wrote, ‘that he who is speaking is neither a philosopher, nor a scholar, but a simple man, a man of truth, unprejudiced, without a system’ (Rousseau in Riley 2001: 12). But he was also a sensitive – if occasionally paranoid – man, who penned the most penetrating, revealing, and at times, pathetic autobiography in the history of Western literature, namely Les Confessions. Having antagonised his former friends among the Encycloplédistes, the Genevan authorities, the Catholic Church, and just about everyone else, Rousseau did himself few favours by writing his Confessions – and his other autobiographical writings, Dialouges: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (1776), Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1778), and his letters to the French censor Malesherbes in 1762. As Byron noted about Rousseau, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: ‘His life was one long war with self-sought foes’ (Byron 1994: 214).

He had wanted to defend himself against the authorities, and against the accusations levied against his educational tract, Emile ou de L’education (1762). To this effect he wrote, albeit unsuccessfully, Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), which made matters worse. Increasingly paranoid, he turned to his apologiae; his autobiographical writings. How many pages does it take to write mea culpa? Rousseau didn’t seem to know.

It cannot be denied that Rousseau created art out of his sufferings, nor that these writings themselves contain elements of a profound political philosophy. Yet not everybody has been convinced. Paul de Man, the American literary critic, found that ‘the more there is to expose the more there is to be ashamed of; the more resistance to exposure the more satisfying the scene’ (De Man 1979: 285). Perhaps. But there is also another interpretation. Namely that Rousseau’s philosophy is based on the assertion that man is naturally good and has been corrupted by society. This was meta-phorically reflected in his autobiographical writings, argues a perceptive scholar:

The picture of Jean-Jacques’s departure from and return to nature is a part of the moral fable of the Confessions as well as a complementary part of Rousseau’s system. With the account of his own life, Rousseau gives a persuasive image of human experience. Jean-Jacques may be too idiosyncratic and at times too unattractive to be an exemplary figure. Nevertheless, the description of his experience does transform the readers of the confessions by exposing them to a new way of looking at life. (Kelly 1987: 248)

Perhaps so, however, the public perception of Rousseau was not softened as a result of his personal revelations of his misdeeds. Edmund Burke – his staunchest and first major critic – wrote scornfully (in Letter to a Member of the National Assembly) that ‘the insane Socrates of the National Assembly [Rousseau], was impelled to publish his mad confessions of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory’ (Burke 1991: 512). Not exactly a ringing endorsement, nor indeed a correct assessment – but a view adopted by many.³

Why did Rousseau write this autobiography? What is the point of revealing one’s faults to one’s enemies? It seems that he – a man of letters – believed that he could alter the public’s perception by explaining the background. He misjudged the public. To understand all is not always to forgive all. Perhaps he should have known better. It is certainly ironic that Rousseau, at calmer moments, let Julie utter that ‘taking so much trouble to justify oneself sometimes produces the contrary result’ (Rousseau 1968, Letter XXXV from Julie). Maybe he should have heeded the advice of his fictional heroine.⁴ He did not do this when he (ten years later) handed out notes to the Parisian citizens, complaining that France, ‘once kind and affectionate’, had ‘changed towards an unfortunate foreigner who is alone and without support and defender’ (I: 998).

It is hard not to resort to adjectives such as pathetic, mad or loony when describing this behaviour. Of course, Rousseau was not always like this – not even at the darkest periods of his life. It is worth remembering that Rousseau, at the very same time when he handed out desperate notes, also composed the supremely analytical Considérations sur la gouvernement de Pologne (1771).

Who was the real Rousseau? What was he like? A complex individual to be sure. However, his contemporaries’ assessments of him were remarkably similar, consistent and positive. Giacomo Casanova, who visited the philosopher in 1759, described him as ‘a man who reasoned well, whose manner was simple and modest’ (Casanova 1968: 223). David Hume concurred, finding him, ‘mild and gentle and modest and good humoured’ (Hume 1932: 527). These portraits complement the picture painted of him by Thomas Bentley. Recalling a discussion that touched upon subjects as diverse as the geological interpretation of fossils and the American declaration of independence, Bentley wrote:

He is a musical instrument above the concert pitch, and therefore too elevated for the present state of society, and all his singularities and errors, as they are called, proceed from the delicacy of his sensations. I was so taken up by his intellect that I almost forgot how it was clothed, though I remember he has a small slender body, rather below the common size, that he has a thin palish face with delicate features, and that he has great deal of expression in his eyes and countenance when he is either pleased or displeased, one of which he certainly is every moment; for nothing that he sees or hears or thinks of is indifferent to him. When nature was making this singular being, one could imagine she intended him for the air, but before she had finished his wings he eagerly sprung out of her hands, and his unfinished body sank down to the earth. (Bentley quoted in France 1979: 9)

Not all of his contemporaries agreed. Voltaire held him in utter contempt – on hearing the news of Rousseau’s death he wrote that ‘he ate like a devil, getting indigestion, he died like a dog’ (Voltaire 1973: 181). And this was one of his milder remarks! Yet there is a remarkable consistency in the descriptions of him as a simple man who seemed to personify his philosophical ideals of a (romanticised) Sparta.

No introduction to philosophy is complete without a narrative of the life of Rousseau. The story – recently (and admirably) told by the late Maurice Cranston (Cranston 1983; 1997) – has become almost mythological, and is well known even to less than avid readers of the European Canon. The story of the watch-maker’s son from Geneva who failed to return to his apprenticeship, when he found himself locked out of the city, and the tale of how he – a young man abandoned by his father⁵ – was taken in by Mme de Warrens, who converted him to Catholicism (and then seduced him!), is often retold. All this has become part of the tapestry of Western Kulturgeschichte. So too have the misdeeds of the famous and progressive educationalist who abandoned his own children to an unknown fate.⁶ As if this wasn’t enough Rousseau also revealed to the world how he suffered from urinary retention (I: 361).

Rousseau was trained in music. The musical training provided him with a vocational skill. For like most of the great men of letters, Rousseau did not earn his living from teaching at a university. It was note-copying, not writing, that provided him with a (modest) income. In the years before he was catapulted to fame he was extremely strapped for cash. After leaving Les Charmettes (Mme de Warrens’ chateau) he tried his luck as a teacher for Mably’s unruly children (and wrote an early treatise on the subject). Working as a tutor for the aristocracy was not uncommon among philosophers (Hobbes and Locke both earned their living in this way). However Rousseau – the great educationalist – showed little aptitude for pedagogy in practice. Increasingly driven by ambition and an almost Hegelian thirst for recognition, he went to Paris to seek fortune and fame. He found neither. However, he was able to charm influential ladies, like Madame de Broglie, who helped him land a job as a secretary to de Montaigu, the French ambassador to Venice. Rousseau duly went to Italy, was captivated by the country, its language and its music, but humiliated by his boss – especially because of his birth as a commoner and a foreigner. The proud republican found it humiliating to be ill treated by people who owed their positions not to their talents, but to the good fortune of being born to aristocratic parents. Rousseau was embittered but did not resign to his fate. He resigned from the job – and turned his anger into political philosophy.

It is remarkable given his obsession with music that this is the least studied subject in the otherwise vast scholarly literature about him (Riley 2001: 329),⁷ yet it is questionable if Rousseau would have enjoyed the same following – and vilification – had he remained but a musician. It is highly probable that Rousseau would have been – and remained – an obscure eighteenth-century composer had he not read the prize question of the Academy in Dijon in Mercure de France, asking ‘if the re-establishment of the arts and the sciences have contributed to an improvement in the morals of man’ (‘Si le rétablissement des sciences et des arts a contribué à épurer les mœurs’) (III: 1). Furthermore, it is probable that his erstwhile friends among the Philosophes failed to grasp what this bon sauvage was all about, and that they – had they known the true Rousseau – would have sought to strangle him at his literary birth.

Rousseau had read the prize question to Dennis Diderot – whom he visited in prison. It might seem odd that Rousseau – an individual with professed belief in God, the afterlife and salvation through Jesus Christ (IV: 955) – shared the company of thinkers who strongly opposed religion. It seems stranger still that it was Diderot, a materialist and supporter of the Whig interpretation of history, who urged Rousseau to pen his essay. Rousseau was a man of passion to an extend that it was difficult for his fellow philosophers to fathom. Unlike the Encycloplédistes he was not a man of compromises – Voltaire was perfectly willing to stay silent; Rousseau was not.

Diderot, so it might be conjectured, saw the Dijon prize essay as just another journalistic challenge – as a possible candidate for a deconstruction of the interpretation that the arts and sciences had benefited mankind. Diderot did not – and could not – sympathise with Rousseau’s view, but saw the essay as good sport and a challenging game.⁸ For Rousseau it was anything but a game. Modernity was an evil, indeed, the evil, which had disenchanted the world. It is worth considering this aspect in some detail, as Rousseau’s discontent with modernity and secularism, perhaps more than anything else, was the cause that fired his passion.

If there is a core to Rousseau’s oeuvre it would be his anti-modernism and his anti-rationalism. Philosophy – by which he meant the sciences – had clouded the worldview of man and led to a despair and lack of meaning (a feeling which was later to be depicted as Sickness unto Death by another antirationalist, Søren Kierkegaard).⁹ ‘Instead of removing my doubts and curing my uncertainties [the philosophers and the scientists] have shaken all my most assured beliefs concerning the questions most important to me.’ These ardent ‘missionaries of atheism’ (I: 1016) have done nothing for mankind.¹⁰ This feeling caused a sensation, and created a new trend in literature and politics. The sentiment that science had demystified the world – that the scientists had produced a worldview devoid of meaning by killing the graceful God of the Gospels in blind pursuit of wanton mathematical truths – was a central element in the movement, which bears the name of Romanticism, which Rousseau initiated. Without Rousseau there would have been no Shelley, no Keats, no Goethe and no Byron.

Rousseau was not a poet – although he had a go at this genre as well (Riley 2001: 3).¹¹ Unlike the preachers and the poets who gave sermons against scientism, Rousseau, as a philosopher, gave ‘reasons’. ‘They have perceived the evil, and I lay bare its causes and above all I point to something highly consoling and useful by showing that all these vices belong not so much to man, as to man badly governed’, he wrote in Preface to Narcissus (II: 969). Though a cultural critic, Rousseau saw himself as a political scientist – a man who had identified the source of evil in political causes.

It is not difficult to find evidence of the same despair over the inexorable progression of what Keats called the ‘dull catalogue of common things’. In Letter to Voltaire (written in response to the latter’s charge that God could not be almighty and good if he permitted the earthquake in Lisbon 1755), Rousseau made a point of noting that the disaster did ‘not make [him] doubt for a moment the immortality of the soul and a beneficent providence’ (Gourevitch 2001: 219). Rousseau was a religious man, indeed a Christian in an age of scientific reasoning, although his theological views were hardly complex or sophisticated: ‘… I serve God with the simplicity of my heart’ (Rousseau 1979a: 308). As a commentator has put it, for Rousseau, the ‘essence of Christianity lies in the preaching of a truth that is immediate’ (Starobinski 1988: 69). Or, as he himself put it, in his Observations:

The Divine book [ce divin Livre] is the only book the Christians need, and the most useful of all books even for those who might not be Christians, only needs to b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction and method
• 1 The politics of the soul: the life and times of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 2 The disenchantment of the world
• 3 Checks, balances and popular participation: Rousseau as a constitutionalist
• 4 A civic profession of faith: Rousseau’s and nationalism
• 5 The last of the ancients the first of the moderns?
• 6 Epilogue: in the beginning was song
• Chronology of Rousseau’s life
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover