Fugitive Rousseau: Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom 9780823257324

Citation preview

FUGITIVE R O U SSEA U

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j u s t

ideas

transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought

series editors Drucilla Cornell Roger Berkowitz

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FUGITIVE ROUSSEAU SLAVERY, PRIMITIVISM, AND POLITICAL FREEDOM

Jimmy Casas Klausen

fordham university press new york

2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klausen, Jimmy Casas, 1976– Fugitive Rousseau : slavery, primitivism, and political freedom / Jimmy Casas Klausen. — First edition. pages cm. — (Just ideas : transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8232-5729-4 (hardback) 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778—Political and social views. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Primitivism. 4. Slavery. I. Title. jc179.r9k53 2014 320.01—dc23 2013035840 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14

5 4 3 2 1

First edition

In memory of Michael P. Rogin

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction I

II

xi xiii xv 1

Slavery 1. Displacements

33

2. . . . and Condensations

73

Freedom? 3. Cosmopolitanism

115

4. Nativism

159

5. Fugitive Freedom

204

Afterword

265

Notes

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Index

325

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Illustrations 1 2 3 4

Title page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse Title page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social Frontispiece of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse Plate from Voltaire, Candide, ou l’optimisme, chapter 19

79 81 216 222

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Abbreviations CPC Constitutional Project for Corsica, in Political Writings, trans. Frederick Watkins (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953). É Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). ÉS Émile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969). FD Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse), in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). GM Geneva Manuscript, in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush et al. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994). GP Considerations on the Government of Poland, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Ld’A Letter to d’Alembert, in Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960). LP “Letter to Philopolis,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. LV “Letter to Voltaire,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. OC Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols., ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–95).

xiv

OL PE PF PN SC SD

SW

Abbreviations

Essay on the Origin of Languages, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. “Discourse on Political Economy,” in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. “Political Fragments,” in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Masters and Kelly, trans. Bush et al. “Preface to Narcissus,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. Of the Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (Second Discourse), in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. “The State of War,” in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

All of the above works are cited by page numbers, followed by references to OC, which include volume number first. Citations to SC include book and chapter numbers and then page numbers. Citations of other works by Rousseau not listed above appear in endnotes.

Acknowledgments Pace Rousseau’s own identification with the protagonist of Defoe’s novel and his desire that Émile too identify with Robinson Crusoe, Fugitive Rousseau could never have been the product of a man in isolation. This book, as Karl Marx would have agreed, has always been a social labor and will continue to be such in its reception. I am grateful to my friends, parents, sister, grandparents, and teachers for making this labor possible. For fear of trying readers’ patience, I will not exhaustively name you all. This work comes from research I began under the direction of Wendy Brown and Michael Rogin at the University of California, Berkeley, on cross-cultural encounters in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. Wendy served as sole director when Mike passed away in November 2001. I have dedicated Fugitive Rousseau to Mike’s memory. In an unsurprising Freudian twist, my thinking and the book’s concerns became more and more evocative of Mike’s work after his death. Wendy has been a fierce supporter and challenging critic of all my work, and I will always be in her debt. Paul Thomas, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and David Bates also oversaw my research, and this work bears the marks of each. I could not have asked for a more generous group of scholars to guide me. Kiren Chaudhry was an important interlocutor in the initial conceptual stages, as was A. A. Long in its final stages. The works-in-progress group that Wendy Brown convened stands as a model of constructive yet unstinting feedback, and I thank all who suffered through my labors. The research for Fugitive Rousseau has benefited from questions, concerns, conversations, and refutations by audiences at Harvard University, Grinnell College, the University of Virginia, the New School for Social Research, xv

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Acknowledgments

the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I was also fortunate to have presented papers at two American Political Science Association annual meetings to receptive audiences. I thank Christopher Brooke and David Williams, a fellow panelist, for having continued to grapple with my Rousseau since APSA 2004 in Chicago. Lawrie Balfour and Antonio VázquezArroyo were too kind as respondents at APSA 2008 in Boston; I also thank Neil Roberts, another fellow panelist, and his “Creolizing Rousseau” collaborator, Jane Anna Gordon, for upholding a shared intellectual horizon. During my two years as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Grinnell College, my colleagues always went beyond the call of duty, and I must single out both Ira Strauber and Alan Schrift for their mentorship. Ira read the original manuscript and rightly judged it to be doing too much. My colleagues here in Madison, in theory and beyond, welcomed my concerns and way of doing political theory. John Zumbrunnen has been a model senior colleague in political theory and has, asymmetrically, read more than enough of my writing. Helen Kinsella and Dan Kapust have been supportive interlocutors, as has Ed Friedman. Keisha Lindsay shared my concerns within and orientation to political theory. I am grateful to her. Fan Guangxin has reaffirmed my difficult love for Rousseau, and I look forward to his doctoral thesis on the Chinese reception of Of the Social Contract at the turn of the twentieth century. It humbles me that Patrick Riley claimed that I know my Rousseau. It has been in his former office in North Hall that some of Fugitive Rousseau was written. Perhaps not so oddly after all, it was for Elizabeth Povinelli’s anthropology seminar “Human Nature” that I recall having first read Rousseau; my studies of anthropology under Beth at the University of Chicago have shaped my subsequent approach to political theory. I did not take Michael Warner’s advice on how to organize the concerns that became this book, but I thank him for what must have been a boring conversation in the middle of a thrilling city in the summertime. John Neff provided daily conversation during the initial trials of the book project and continues to be an excellent friend. My beautiful dog Hambone was a scholar and artist in his own right. Time and space to think and write are hardly possible without fellowship and grant support, and I very gratefully acknowledge the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Graduate Opportunity Program at UC-Berkeley, the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the Committee on Support for Faculty Scholarship at Grinnell College, and

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the Graduate School and WARF Fund at UW-Madison. All have enabled my scholarly pursuits on Rousseau and the Enlightenment. I must thank six theorist-friends individually for their piercing and gracious insights. All have proven themselves dedicated scholars and allies, and I promise to continue to reciprocate. First, Julie Cooper and I kept in constant contact for daily encouragement and commiseration during our roughest stretches of writing. We shall have to celebrate lavishly if exhaustedly once again. James Martel has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work, as well as a collaborator on other projects. I always look forward to opportunities to carry on our tradition of catching up and talking anarchism in queer proximity to conferences. Robyn Marasco and Sharon Stanley are incomparable fellow travelers and such intense and acute interlocutors. Rome again awaits us. Finally, Alex Dressler and Annie Menzel have each advanced and refined my interpretations in conversations on Hellenistic philosophy and on the biopolitics of race and the legacies of slavery. Madison became positively delicious upon your arrival. The reviewers for Fordham University Press gave invaluable feedback, and each cheered on the overall project. I am so, so appreciative of their and the editorial board’s support. I am honored to be part of the Just Ideas series and am grateful to the series editors, Drucilla Cornell and Roger Berkowitz, for their interest. Finally, I cannot thank Thomas Lay and Helen Tartar enough for their forbearance throughout the review process at Fordham. They and Eric Newman have seen Fugitive Rousseau to publication thoughtfully, graciously, and elegantly.

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. . . if not a “counterprimitivism” as such, then at least a model of how the otherness of the primitive might be thought disruptively, not recuperated abstractly. —hal foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art”

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Introduction Camarade Depestre C’est un problème assurément très grave des rapports de la poésie et de la Révolution le fond conditionne la forme. —aimé césaire, “Le verbe marronner / à René Depestre, poète haïtien”

rousseau’s empire Why have political theorists whose work is marked by critiques of colonial modernity rejected Rousseau so vociferously over the past decade, while those who still champion Rousseau play a tug of war between liberal and communitarian accounts unmarked by postcolonial concerns? Fugitive Rousseau suggests that, although the charges of Rousseau’s critics are not unfounded, they are wrong to dismiss him, and that, symmetrically, liberal and communitarian interpretations are wrong to ignore imperial and colonial themes in Rousseau’s projects for freedom. This book argues that Rousseau’s political theory of freedom, especially collective freedom, must be reconstructed by way of, not in spite of, a reassessment of themes of empire, cosmopolitanism, and Eurocentric globalism. It thus offers a fresh perspective by bringing questions of empire and civilization to bear on studies of freedom in Rousseau and bringing Rousseau to bear on empire studies. Taking both interventions together, this book thus suggests that those peoples most radically displaced by colonial modernity—the black Atlantic

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Introduction

diaspora and indigenous peoples—can productively draw on Rousseau for developing contemporary practices of freedom. In what follows I read Rousseau as a theorist of political freedom who has been shaped by a contemporary history of European empire and settler colonialism, the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe and abroad, the related massive displacement of persons as chattel or indentured labor, the rise of a state system increasingly centered on Europe, the exportation of Western European lifeways, and accompanied domination by large-scale sedentary civilizational societies abroad. To say that Rousseau has been shaped by these histories I do not mean, and no one who has carefully read him could take me to mean, that he is their ideological apologist. Nor do I mean that he, of the exoticism, of so-called noble savagery, and latterly of the proto-Orientalist “Armenian costume,” straightforwardly occupies the position of these histories’ “victims.” This project, then, deepens the recent effort by political theorists in the Caribbean and North America to “creolize” Rousseau. Whereas C. L. R. James himself and the scholars whom Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts have gathered in a special issue of the CLR James Journal extend Rousseau’s arguments by reference to twentieth- and twenty-first-century questions, Fugitive Rousseau situates Rousseau’s political theory in the frame of a black Atlantic world that would have been broadly recognizable to him and refracts his arguments through the long tradition of the concepts of slavery and freedom—particularly marronnage—from Mediterranean antiquity through African American modernism in interwar Paris. Specifically, I extend the project of creolizing Rousseau by offering two interpretive points that simultaneously criticize Rousseau’s political theory for generating confusions and blind spots and yet find ways to recuperate aspects of his argument for contemporary projects of freedom. First, I note the fact that Rousseau rhetorically invokes slavery in all his major texts yet, in the main, rarely acknowledges modern race-based slavery. However, I balance this fact with a careful analysis of Rousseau’s rhetoric of slavery and conclude that Rousseau’s use of overstatement and analogy suggests that he is reaching for a language that comes to terms with the centrality of domination in constituting the institutions of political modernity (commerce, civility, complex society, and large-scale administrative states). Rather than seeing modernity as bringing about the revolutionary progress of freedom, Rousseau suggests by his rhetoric that he is developing a counterdiscourse on unfreedom. His simultaneous invocation of chat-

Introduction

3

tel slavery and rhetorical displacement of human trafficking must be seen in this light. Reading Rousseau rhetorically is central to any rigorous attempt to come to terms with his concept of freedom, and reading Rousseauian rhetoric means juxtaposing infrequent references to African slavery with more frequent references to moral slavishness and despotic subjection. Rousseau may be remiss in not acknowledging the African slave trade more squarely, but he does not dismiss its importance. Second, Fugitive Rousseau grapples with Rousseau’s primitivism in a way that, again, both reveals his deep ambivalences and conflicting impulses yet reconstructs from it an alternative and productive critique of historical-civilizational development—what Hal Foster refers to as a “counterprimitivism.” Rousseau’s thinking on so-called savages is usually considered a legacy of early modern social contract theory. On this view he follows in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke even as he criticizes them. However, I argue that it is more fruitful to place Rousseau’s thinking on savages and human development in an alternate tradition, that of Epicurean and Stoic philosophy—specifically, the stories of human progress offered by Lucretius and Seneca. Situating Rousseau’s thinking in terms of the reception of Hellenistic accounts of human development reveals central tensions in his own account, because Hellenistic philosophy offers three limit cases for Rousseau’s thinking on freedom: the savage, the sage, and the moral slave. In his chilly perfection, the Stoic sage represents a superhuman form of freedom and thus a poor role model for mere mortals. The moral slave represents what Rousseau calls the political “repose” of one who may be legally free but morally unable to enact freedom because she succumbs to corruption. The savage is ambiguous: according to Seneca, the savage is solipsistic, premoral, and thus not properly free; according to Lucretius, the savage expresses freedom and justice in vernacular but underdeveloped social forms and so is eligible for freedom. Rousseau, I argue, wants to subscribe to both accounts, but they pull him in divergent directions. Thinking through these limit cases, I show that Rousseau remains conflicted about the status of morality in relationship to freedom: sometimes it is a natural and premoral remainder such that only peoples uncontacted and uncorrupted by European civilization are free; sometimes freedom involves unremitting moral exercise, and therefore only advanced, nonprimitive peoples can be free. On the first account, political freedom still looks like natural liberty: it is primordial and can only be safeguarded on reservations of cultural purity. I call this Rousseau’s “reservation politics” and

4

Introduction

show that it is no surprise that liberals and communitarians place Rousseau in their camps, since reservation politics takes both rationalist and nativist forms. On the second account, political freedom involves moral vigilance in resisting unfreedom, and so its best representatives would be those who risk bodily danger to liberate themselves from any threat of slavery. I reconstruct this second, positive account of freedom from reading moments of political resistance across Rousseau’s political writings. The models for this freedom are fugitive slaves and “noncivilized” peoples who refuse the European political order. Whereas the first account is strictly primitivist, the second, Rousseau’s theory of “fugitive freedom,” is counterprimitivist: fugitive freedom may seem superficially primitivist, but since its practice of freedom depends on active flight from and therefore an educated intuition about dominating powers, it cannot claim ignorance of the varieties of domination in modernity. Although I do not offer a wholesale reconstruction of the argument in Of the Social Contract, I do argue that the case for fugitive freedom allows us to see elements of that important tract with fresh eyes. In the remainder of this Introduction I want to present the three thematics that structure these two interpretive points. The concept of exit, discourses of primitivism, and the problem of moral-philosophical naturalism frame the possibility of freedom for Rousseau and are threaded throughout the book.

of exits—or, fugitivity In a follow-up article to his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman nominates the corpus of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as representative of his theory of exit in the political realm. Hirschman writes, “the exit-voice model [has] something useful to contribute to the analysis of the state.” Rousseau’s work somehow holds the key, and Hirschman goes on to quote from the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (Second Discourse) and Essay on the Origin of Languages (SD 198–99; OL 253; OC III.203, V.380) and then discusses ethnological data gathered by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others on “so-called primitive” “stateless societies” in existence around the middle of the twentieth century. In Hirschman’s hands the assembled data and Rousseau’s corresponding theory reveal a tendency toward fission among segmentary lineage societies (i.e., “tribal” societies). Rather than to instigate internecine violence, disgruntled bands of people are more likely simply to exit their current society, to hive off from the

Introduction

5

original group, “without necessarily entering or joining some other group that seems to them better managed.” This regular access to exit by way of group fission serves to explain “some forms of statelessness” for Hirschman: after all, dispersive fission prevents an aggregate of persons from reaching the critical mass necessary for state formation. This present book is inspired by but complicates Hirschman’s claim about Rousseau. What unfolds over the next five chapters is a study of the means, limits, structured possibilities, and difficulties of exit, exodus, and fugitivity in Rousseau’s work. I think Hirschman is in some sense correct about Rousseau, though I will detail a few caveats. For, in spite of Hirschman’s specific deployment of Rousseauism alongside midcentury ethnology, there is more than primitivism and tribal fission at stake in identifying exit with Rousseau. Primitives are indubitably central in the oeuvre of this so-famous expositor of “noble savagery”—however, I will refer almost exclusively to Rousseau’s primitives and not to ethnologists’ data. Yet the problem of exit in Rousseau’s political writings is far stranger than Hirschman lets on and involves far more than primitives. The exit option touches on slaveries and practices of freedom—chattel and “metaphorical” slaveries, natural liberty and political freedom—it involves, too, mobility and immobilization, the origin and ends of human association, and nativism and cosmopolitanism. Insofar as exit also draws from and simultaneously troubles personal ethics and relations among peoples, then it involves Rousseau’s reception of a Hellenistic philosophical background and its Roman, and his French, imperial political context. Finally, although it would not be apparent from Hirschman’s deployment of Rousseau, exit after the passing of the state of nature is entangled with states (not just peoples) in Rousseau’s thinking, though in rather curious ways: not via the analogues Hirschman draws, though abstains from pursuing—namely, secession (exit in spatial proximity) and emigration (exit with spatial distance). Rather, radical exit in the world of states is enacted above all via fugitivity and marooning, practices that scramble proximity and distance. Exit, however, is a problematic concept—problematic enough that simply to assimilate it to Rousseau’s theoretical work, as though either his oeuvre or Hirschman’s concept were univocal, simply will not do. Broadly, “exit” refers to the capacity for individual consumers to take advantage of competition among business firms by moving—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes gladly—from one firm to another in response to a relative, perceived, or real decline in the original firm’s products or services. Exit also refers to

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Introduction

the exercise of this option. The exit option “impersonates” economics for Hirschman, though it is not unknown in politics (especially when one “votes with one’s feet”). Likewise, its fraternal twin, the voice option, “impersonates” politics because, for the most part, citizens or party members or other political actors in sedentary, large-scale societies cannot simply take their business elsewhere in response to their territorial nation-states’ declines; instead they can only voice their grievances by official and unofficial channels. Despite its primary association with economic actions of customers and firms, Hirschman and his book’s early followers found applications in political domains—declarations of independence, switching of political party loyalties, even the eventual fall of a regime that cannot stem departures. Hirschman’s deployment of Rousseau was only one case among others. Over the course of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, it is clear that Hirschman wants to see exit and voice as restraints or pressure mechanisms that ought to make organizations perform better (rather than fold altogether). While his units of analysis are corporate firms and disgruntled clients, he more specifically takes the point of view of the disgruntled (i.e., their rational choices) in behalf of the firm or organization. That is, Hirschman writes in the interest of corrections and regulations internal to an institutional system and in opposition to neo-laissez-faire economists’ refusal to consider catastrophic collapses produced by the negative externalities of (former) clients’ completely unfettered, utility-maximizing decisions. Though Hirschman criticizes free marketeers such as Milton Friedman (arguably one of the major specters haunting Hirschman’s book), his own model of more responsive and responsible decision-making inhabits the same choked horizon: Hirschman, just as much as Friedman, presumes very specific—secularist, liberal, unattached—subjectivities and institutions. He may write of contests over loyalty, but his individual subject-agents do not presumptively seem to act from within fields of power that shape their choices and to which they cannot quite be loyal or disloyal, since they themselves are products of those powers. Because I appropriate the exit model and apply it to the writings of one who considered himself a historian of nature and morality, it behooves me to give due diligence to the fact that Hirschman’s mode of analysis, while case-specific, arises within a specifiable conceptual history yet nonetheless deploys exit ahistorically. Since, as I have noted, exit touches on so many nodes in a network of problems in Rousseau’s writings, I will be presenting Rousseau as a theorist who tests and historically schematizes the concept of exit rather than simply

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founding and applying it. My critical conceptual exposition of exit in Rousseau’s writings will consequently trouble some of Hirschman’s apparatus. First, rather than there being simply “cases” of exit, I will be multiplying a cluster of concepts around “exit” to analyze Rousseau’s political writings. I do so because, second, Rousseau casts exit differently for different epochs—it is more or less constrained by degree or altogether distinct in kind as times vary. These two points are related. For Rousseau is quite clear that new modes of exit (as well as voice) are generated by specific turning or tipping points in the history of “humanity,” underwritten by perfectibility. Meanwhile, as new modes of exit arise, others close off. Thus, just as Rousseau thinks an aggregation of persons different than their association, likewise I would insist on qualitatively distinguishing exit during the state of nature from fugitivity in the world of civil society: the former features physical departure from a person or group, as Hirschman describes; the latter may evade government by physical distance but is just as likely to be characterized by techniques of cultural distancing amidst physical proximity. If Rousseau’s writings analytically historicize the varieties of exit available from epoch to epoch, then we must take note of its epochal changes. In the pure state of nature there was almost nothing to exit from, since any would-be captor’s finite physicality could never overcome the would-be captive’s constant access to escape into infinite nature. In other words, there was nothing but exits, which rendered capture, so rarely ventured, impossible. Even in the second state of nature independence made the availability of exit constant in principle, even if nascent society’s “sort of property,” which late primitives carved from nature and secured by mutual aid, rendered exit less likely in effect. Nonetheless, as Hirschman seemed to understand (and commandeered ethnology to support), exit’s availability produces a stable equilibrium in what Rousseau refers to as “nascent” society (SD 164, 167; OC III.167, 170). What happens to exit after the state of nature? The utterance “this is mine” initiates a process that results in the universal invasion of private appropriation and the global spread of civil societies. The effect, Rousseau notes, is such as to inaugurate a new state of affairs, which I describe in Chapter 1: in whatever hidden recess of the world a man would take refuge against oppression, he perceives everywhere over his head a menacing hand always ready to crush him. There is no longer any region where it is not a crime to dare claim the right of nature, and nowhere is it permitted

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Introduction

to be a man. Our Tyrants are doubtless right to cover the universe with their fetters like this. If there remained a single desert where it were possible to be free with impunity, it would soon become the fatherland of the human race. . . .

Now there is no exit from the system of private property or system of states, because no spaces of primitive liberty remain. If such a pure space had remained, then all who yearned for uncompromising freedom would have braved hell or high water to reach it—but presumably this would have outraged “our Tyrants,” who would have redoubled their efforts to conquer a pays so draining on their despotic designs. While there is no exit from this global territorial system, there is, however, ceaseless mobility within it. These total systems have managed to deform and co-opt exit’s mobility for themselves: the system of private property and the territorial state system shore themselves up in practices of conquest and expropriation and in the infinite interchangeability between master and slave. Furthermore, for Rousseau, they eventually give birth to an ideology called cosmopolitanism that gently chides them for excesses while airing an apologia for their broader worldview: latter-day cosmopolitanism would have no (human) exits either, since it encompasses all humanity. I consider these vast transformations in the first two chapters. That both chapters focus on slavery says a lot about Rousseau’s assessment of the changes that the exit option undergoes. How is it possible to regain freedom when the totalizing systems and doctrines of civil society capture all terrestrial space and, worse, englobe all humanity? Rousseau theorizes two possible responses and gives occasional indications of a buried third. In response to the moral slavery of cosmopolitanism, Rousseau proposes in Émile a form of political education via countercosmopolitan travel, which simultaneously encourages Émile to attach himself to his natal community yet prepares him to live anywhere in the world that fortune displaces him. Countercosmopolitan travel, then, both keeps the exit option alive in a new form for a world overspread by mediocre enchaining states and yet settles Émile in one place so that he does not wander as a homeless, stateless vagabond. To the Émilean strategy corresponds a second strategy, which responds to conquest qua political enslavement. Given that the brave new postlapsarian world abides by the maxim “conquer or be conquered,” the strategy Rousseau theorizes for coping with this Hobbesian international system recommends that well-disposed small or marginal states remain autarkic nonparticipants. In other words, they exit

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the interstate system by abstaining from its compulsions, by striving (at best) to render themselves innocent of external forces—and Rousseau believes small states or marginal peoples can succeed if they pursue truly nativist selfsufficiency. The writings on Corsica, Poland, and Geneva bear this out. Émile’s countercosmopolitanism (Chapter 3) and small states’ autarkic nativism (Chapter 4) resist slavery in the form of abstract and international domination, respectively—the moral slavishness of cosmopolitanism in its vernacular and philosophical forms and the political enslavement of conquest. Likewise, the final strategy of exit, fugitivity (Chapter 5), attempts to escape from slavery in any of its forms by transforming exit into an intimate, unremitting practice of freedom in flight. For reasons I discuss in the penultimate section “Fugitive Rousseau,” this strategy is not one Rousseau details explicitly but must be reconstructed from several moments in his writings. In such textual moments, fugitivity is characterized by mobile self-assertion and either geographic or cultural distancing from dominating others.

primitivism The objective of Rousseau’s recourse to the varieties of exit is to theorize the recovery or reinvention of freedom—but liberté is a complex concept in Rousseau’s oeuvre and bears strong, even necessary relations with problems of dependence, autonomy (making law for oneself ), and, that most slippery of terms, nature. Freedom also and consequently owes a lot to Rousseau’s thinking on primitive humanity. Rousseau is an expositor of “cultural primitivism,” which Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas have defined as “the discontent of the civilized with civilization or with some conspicuous and characteristic feature of it”—specifically in Rousseau’s case, discontent with civilized societies’ inexorable tendency toward slavery and domination— that is, illegitimate dependencies in their many guises. Cultural primitivism is often conjoined to “chronological primitivism,” which locates the most highly valued primitive way of life—for there can be many primitive ways of life, variably valued—by way of a philosophy of history characterized by, say, decline, cyclicity, undulation. Rousseau sets out the stakes of cultural primitivism most dramatically in the Second Discourse, for therein he sets up a schema that, I argue, he pursues in the rest of his political theory. This schema is fourfold: (1) alegitimate, asocial independence; (2) alegitimate, social independence; (3) illegitimate social dependence; (4) legitimate social interdependence. The chronological

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dimension of Rousseau’s cultural primitivism is complicated, for he favors two periods or two positions in this schema: the second and fourth. Although he values them for different reasons and, in his stricter moments, distinguishes them in regard to morality, as we shall see, he sometimes collapses these two periods or positions. The Rousseauian state of nature covers the first half of the schema. In the pure state of nature, when human animals roved about and almost never encountered one another in the spatial vastness of the natural world, they exhibited an independence that was both asocial and alegitimate. After many of them began to gather together in the fixed or semi-fixed settlements that marked nascent society, they still retained their independence, yet this independence was now social: they lived with, but did not require, one another, and each could manage to procure independently all she needed for selfpreservation and the first inklings of commodious life. This socially experienced independence still remained alegitimate, however, because morality, though nascent with society itself, was inchoate. The advent of private property—and with it the fateful, fatal double penetration of terrestrial space by civil society and states—introduces the second half of the schema. It also introduces the focal politico-moral quandary of life after the state of nature: the increased social interaction that civil society brings in its train accelerates the development of human perfectibility— the artful cultivation of natural human capacities—but in so doing, civil society simultaneously promises and thwarts properly moral action in the same double gesture. Hence, even though, in the resounding words of Of the Social Contract, the “transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked” (SC I.8, 53; OC III.364), nevertheless the way civil society actually unfolds pushes this promise of legitimate social interdependence beyond the horizon and installs illegitimate social dependence instead. In short, the transition from nascent society to civil society should have brought political freedom, characterized by autonomy and interdependence, but generated slaveries, heteronomy, and mutual dependency instead. The main body of the Second Discourse concludes on this grim note—in the civil state humans now qualify as morally responsible creatures even as they commit and multiply acts that violate morality. How can natural human perfectibility fulfill its own promise and facilitate the transition from illegitimate social dependence to legitimate social

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interdependence? Does the fourfold schema trace not a unilinear sequence of four stages but rather a path that forks such that, at the birth of the civil state, a nascent society can develop its perfectibility in one of two ways: legitimate interdependence or illegitimate dependence? One point is clear: retrogression is impossible. Just because morally responsible creatures have employed their perfectibility for vicious ends does not mean that humans should destroy society, annihilate mine and thine, or “return to live in forests with the Bears” (SD 203; OC III.207). As for the human boy who in 1694 had in fact been found living in the forests with bears—a case discussed by the Abbé de Condillac—Rousseau suggests that this feral child of Lithuania represents no counterproof about nature’s ultimate ends. The example of the wild boy only proves that perfectibility and nature qua origin go their separate ways: a creature naturally constructed for bipedalism but perfectibly adapting himself to his ursine nursery, the feral boy habituated himself to walk on all fours, just as a person lacking one or both hands will, by artful application, have learned to manipulate dexterously with his feet (SD 190–92; OC III.196–98). His case does not indicate retrogression but rather the physical adaptability of natural organs. However, at the same time, an adult human who developed bipedalism would find it impossible to rehabituate himself to quadrupedalism or to “subsist[ence] on grass and acorns” (SD 203; OC III.207). The feral boy raised by bears suggests, likewise, that humans who have developed in moral responsibility’s nursery cannot unlearn morality. After pushing through its threshold, return to an amoral state is impossible. They still remain moral creatures, even if morality itself is eminently malleable and the majority of humans have fostered vicious moral adaptations. Thus, in answer to those who impute to him advocacy of a return to “ancient and first innocence,” Rousseau protests, “Those [like himself ] . . . who are convinced that the divine voice called all Mankind to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial Intelligences; all of them will try, by practicing the virtues they obligate themselves to perform as they learn to know them, to deserve the eternal prize they must expect for it” (SD 203–4; OC III.207). Hence, whatever series of accidents pushed human perfectibility past the threshold of morality, humans’ newly achieved knowledge of morality brings new obligations along with its new powers. For Rousseau, the obligation exists because the power does. For example, although humans naturally were organized in a way that facilitated speech even if language itself is unnatural, nevertheless, once they

12

Introduction

gained the power thereof, they obligated themselves to its moral use. So there are moral ends to language, even if many abuse it. With all the languages in the world and all the types of speech, and with natural origin as no guide after the definitive break from the natural state, how can we identify virtuous and vicious uses of language? Just as “the organ of speech is natural to man” while “speech itself is nevertheless not natural to him” (SD 207; OC III.210), so likewise Rousseau would distinguish natural origin from moral ends. More broadly, the example of speech implies that we must distinguish natural genesis from the exodus out of nature that human perfectibility allows. Furthermore, since we cannot with certainty determine a finis ultimus, we must judge perfectibility not by the many and variable paths exodus can take, but rather by the structure of perfectibility itself. As such, what matters is not the content of any given instance of perfectibility, but its structural sustainability overall. Which epoch presents the greatest sustainability in the history of human faculties? The answer to this question will seem to confirm Rousseau’s primitivism and also his naturalism. For he identifies nascent society, often called Rousseau’s “Golden Epoch,” as most sustainable: this period [viz., nascent society] in the development of human faculties, occupying a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour propre, must have been the happiest and the most lasting epoch. The more one reflects on it the more one finds that this state was the least subject to revolutions, the best for man (XVI), and that he must have left it only by some fatal accident which, for the sake of the common utility, should never have occurred. The example of the Savages, almost all of whom have been found at this point, seems to confirm that Mankind was made always to remain in it, that this state is the genuine youth of the World, and that all subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species. (SD 167; OC III.171)

This golden epoch would have lasted forever if some exogenous cause had not befallen these humans. Indeed it happily continues in locales only just contacted in the Age of Discovery, although direct or indirect contact with civilization’s travelers will serve as the “fatal accident” that so rudely upsets the savages’ “just mean” and interrupts their timeless lives. In itself the

Introduction

13

way of life of nascent society is most sustainable, for nothing internal to its structure would knock it out of its eternal, stable equilibrium—only an exogenous accident, whether a natural or an alien human catastrophe, can do so. The passage and the way of thinking that it crystallizes would seem to corroborate Rousseau’s primitivism. It is not the earliest, pure state of nature that he calls “the best for man,” but this second part of the fourfold schema, which represents a simple, balanced way of life. Hence, it is not the natural savage—that is, not Condillac’s feral boy of Lithuania—but primitive natives who provide the model. Moreover, their nascent society occupies the near end of the other side of the rupture that closes the state of nature. In other words, “the best for man” belongs to a natural, therefore premoral, state. If we cannot go back to the forest to live with the bears, if beings given to morality cannot recede to amorality, then how can nascent society, the late state of nature’s primitive sociability, provide a model after the breach? What is the relationship between this society of alegitimate independence and an association of legitimate interdependence? What characteristics, if any, does nascent society’s primitive liberty share with political freedom? These are central questions of this book and introduce a recurrent problematic that I grapple with in the chapters that follow. I grapple with this problem by interpreting Rousseau’s political writings with reference to Hellenistic philosophy. For not only does he frequently refer to Stoicisim and Epicureanism, sometimes critically, but also these in turn influence how he theorizes nature and the primitive. The difficulty, though, is that these rival Hellenistic schools, though they converge on many matters with relevance to Rousseau, do not articulate congruent attitudes toward nature and the relationship between primitive and contemporary humanity. We can best discern Rousseau’s predicaments by understanding one of his deployments of Stoicism. To comprehend what Rousseau might mean by freedom and autonomy, it behooves us to discriminate the subtle overlaps and contrasts between Rousseauian and Stoic understandings of that fraught category: nature.

nature and sin: of sages, savages, slaves When Rousseau claims as his task, and that of those likeminded, not to “return to live in forests with the Bears,” but rather to “practic[e] the virtues

14

Introduction

they obligate themselves to perform as they learn to know them” (SD 203, 204; OC III.207), he aims not to return to nature but to counteract progressively denatured human sensibility. Such denaturing manifests itself as vice, and counteracting it requires some conception of nature as a standard. Nature for Rousseau is not reducible to origins—not least because the “original” state of nature is fragmentary and mythic. In contrast to two prior political theorists, Rousseau can be said to politicize nature itself. Whereas for Thomas Hobbes nature was prior to politics, or for John Locke nature qua natural right served as the stable ground of politics, nature is split for Rousseau: as origin, it is prepolitical; but as perfectibility—the cultivation of new human powers and new human limits—nature itself serves as both condition and object of contestable human action as soon as there is society. Rousseau hypothesizes his most infamous socially contestable action in describing the claim “this is mine,” but he laments that there was no contest, since it lacked a counterclaim—that is, the removal of stakes marking out the claim of private property in land and accusation of the appropriator’s imposture (SD 161; OC III.164). “This is mine” merely inaugurates the intensification of socially contestable action; it does not end it. Hence, nature remains, as the object of contestation, just as relevant in the civil state as in the pure state of nature or nascent society. While Rousseau defines nature against prior thinkers, the later Stoic Seneca makes a parallel move by defining nature against earlier formulations in Epistle XC. While Rousseau would not hesitate to agree with Seneca’s observation that while a “thatched roof once covered free men; under marble and gold dwells slavery,” nonetheless, the two differ on the implications. Whereas Seneca moralizes natural simplicity, Rousseau goes further by politicizing nature. (To be clear: Rousseau, too, moralizes. As I argue in Chapter 2, Rousseau condenses the meanings of slavery so that its chattel, moral, and political senses all remain in play.) Seneca’s entire strategy in Epistle XC is of great relevance to understanding the naturalism and primitivism supposedly subtending Rousseauian freedom. In Epistle XC, sometimes named “On the Part Played by Philosophy in the Progress of Man,” Seneca takes it upon himself not only to narrate the historical developments of humanity but also, in the process, to distinguish philosophy’s object and scope—namely, right reason or orthos logos— from what might be called instrumental reason. Seneca’s immediate target is Posidonius, who, on the one hand, maintains that during the Golden Age “government was under the jurisdiction of the wise,” yet on the other

Introduction

15

hand, confuses philosophy and technology. Seneca registers agreement with Posidonius on the former point, then notes: But that philosophy discovered the techniques employed in everyday life, that I refuse to admit. I will not claim for philosophy a fame that belongs to technology. “It was philosophy,” says Posidonius, “that taught men how to raise buildings at a time when they were widely dispersed and their shelter consisted of huts or burrowed-out cliffs or hollowed tree trunks.” I for my part cannot believe that philosophy was responsible for the invention of these modern feats of engineering that rise up storey after storey, or the cities of today crowding one against the next. . . .

Whereas Stoicism would identify the task of the philosopher as attuning herself to right reason in universal nature and therefore with limiting her passions so that they do not exceed but rather can antecede fortune, Posidonius would locate technical ingenuity within philosophical wisdom and thus chain philosophy to the ceaseless task of meeting human passions, whims, and desires. Seneca takes the hard-line view by excluding luxury, expediency, and repose from the purview of philosophy: these in fact oppose nature, whereas philosophy identifies itself with nature so as to achieve real freedom in autonomy—that is, legislating for oneself what nature and fortune will dictate. Seneca distinguishes philosophy in a different way in regard to primitive life. Not unlike Rousseau’s first age, when contacts were sparse and life awfully austere, a “rude age” commences Seneca’s timeline of human progress. However, “[n]ext there came the fortune-favoured period when the bounties of nature lay open to all, for men’s indiscriminate use. . . .” In this “second age” humans “were not wise men, even though they did what wise men should do.” That is, these primitives lived as if virtuously, though without merit. Those who are as if virtuous yet without merit know not what they do: justice and prudence are unknown to them yet nevertheless practiced by inadvertence. They are innocent “by reason of their ignorance of things,” unlike the Stoic sage. As a consequence, only the sage achieved true freedom, because he rationally developed nature for himself, whereas primitives lived in undeveloped nature. The primitive represents nature naive in itself, the sage nature virtuously for itself. The sage’s true virtue meant that he freed himself from attachments to externals or resistance to fortune; more precisely, only his will and not external goods was the cause of his ac-

16

Introduction

tions, and he always willed what fortune had in store; therefore, his will was his law, and nothing could dominate him. From this distinction between ignorant excellence and cultivated wisdom, Seneca concludes with a passage that Montaigne will quote in his essay “Of the Education of Children” and that Rousseau must have become acquainted with from either source, though sadly, as I note repeatedly, he seems willfully to forget its core insight: it makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin. . . . Virtue is not vouchsafed to a soul unless that soul has been trained and taught, and by unremitting practice brought to perfection. For the attainment of this boon, but not in the possession of it, were we born; and even in the best of men, before you refine them by instruction, there is but the stuff of virtue, not virtue itself.

Thus does Seneca clinch the triangle of figures central to Epistle XC: the sage, the savage, and the moral slave. The sage, orienting himself to right reason, has perfected his virtue by having knowledge of sin but refusing to assent to its impulsions. Attaining this boon was only possible because the sage inhabits a world where sin subjects all to its impulsions. Savages, however, do as the wise do only because, ignorant of sin, they have nothing to resist and therefore cannot merit the label “virtuous.” The moral slave confuses, whether ignorantly or viciously (but in either case inexcusably), the right reason that resists sin with the instrumental rationalities that invite it, mistakes delicacy for refinement, and in the end prefers slavish repose to virtuous freedom. As we see over the course of this book, all three figures function as limit cases for Rousseau’s thinking on the problem and promise of political freedom: the savage because her freedom is natural, not political; the sage because his virtuous freedom becomes otherworldly, thus a poor model for mere mortals; the moral slave because, by definition never free, she is nevertheless paradoxically and provocatively most slavish when she is a master (cf. SC I.1, 41; OC III.351). Famously for Rousseau, “savages” in the Americas and Africa were a philosophical revelation, not least for how they could test his concepts of ancient virtue. Contrasting savage man with civilized man, Rousseau describes the former as in fact more stoical than the Stoics. Hence savages achieve not just ataraxia but hyperataraxia: savage man “breathes nothing but repose

Introduction

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and freedom, he wants only to live and to remain idle, and even the Stoic’s ataraxia does not approximate his profound indifference to everything else” (SD 187; OC III.192). Ataraxia—that is, equanimity or imperturbability in the soul—is associated more often with Epicureanism than Stoicism. Nevertheless, while it is possible that Rousseau actually intended here the more typically Stoic concept of apatheia (lack of emotion), it is more likely that Rousseau’s knowledge of Hellenistic philosophies was eclectic and not rigorously differentiated by school. With specific reference to the evolving relationship among pity, amour-propre, and amour de soi-même, Christopher Brooke has recently argued for a “progression in [Rousseau’s] thinking, from the largely Epicurean text of the Second Discourse as it was submitted to the Academy [of Dijon] in 1754, . . . to the much more Stoic account in Émile, assembled a few years later and published in 1762.” Although Rousseau comprehended broad differences between Epicureanism and Stoicism, and although Brooke’s more strictly historicist account of a gradual shift from the former to the latter seems persuasive, I will be more concerned to show that Rousseau’s divided loyalties to the two Hellenistic schools both shape and consistently trouble his arguments across his oeuvre. Indeed, Chapter 4 in particular will reconstruct how a sharp divergence in Stoics’ and Epicureans’ (specifically Seneca’s and Lucretius’s) conclusions regarding primitive being comes to a head and blindsides Rousseau’s attempt to theorize a collective autonomy via autarky for small states like Corsica or marginal ones like Poland. For the moment, though, I wish simply to sketch the primitivist difficulty in regard to Rousseau’s understanding of Stoicism alone. Whether Rousseau mistook ataraxia for apatheia, the rival schools in any case borrowed and learned from one another under the Roman Empire, and ataraxia does appear as a concept in Stoicism specifically in Epictetus. Indeed it seems likely from the frequency of references to Seneca and Epictetus in his oeuvre that Rousseau developed the bulk of his knowledge of Stoicism from these late Roman sources. Significantly, Rousseau took Epictetus especially as no idle philosopher but as one whose life presented cases of edifying and fortifying philosophical praxis. Epictetus’s biography, after all, notably combines the figure of a born slave (Greek-born chattel owned in imperial Rome) who became a renowned Stoic sage. In “Discourse on Heroic Virtue,” Rousseau presents a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Epictetus as exemplary: he mentions “Epictetus’s equanimity [sens-froid] upon being crippled by his master” as “no less illustrious than the triumphs of Alexan-

18

Introduction

der and of Caesar.” Yet even this exemplar of ataraxia, imperturbability of soul, and also apatheia, impassivity in regard to the body, is surpassed by the hyperataraxia of the savage. Why? The savage achieves this coveted hyperataraxia and surpasses the Stoic above all because even the model Stoic has to perform a good many labors of self to enjoy a state of equanimity, while hyperataraxia comes naturally to the savage, who would not need to identify and weed out “factitious passions” (SD 186; OC III.192). Again, the sage will have striven to reorient herself to nature; the savage always remains in it. In explanation, Rousseau writes, But in order to see the purpose of so many cares [on the part of civilized man], these words, power and reputation, would have to have some meaning in [the savage’s] mind; he would have to learn that there is a sort of men who count how they are looked upon by the rest of the universe for something, who can be happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of others rather than on their own. This, indeed, is the genuine cause of all these differences: the Savage lives within himself; sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment. (SD 187; OC III.193)

The Stoic is already, as a sociable man, born and bred to live “always outside himself,” and Stoicism’s very arts of the self have to do with nullifying that which would make virtue (or its apparent absence) dependent upon anything external: other persons, contingent events, or the surrounding environment. For the Stoic, according to classicist A. A. Long, “pain [physical or mental suffering] and moral goodness (kalon) are not contradictory but categorically different,” so “if we desire to be happy all the time (and most of us do), a source of happiness in spite of pain is needed.” Antistoical would be he who never attempted to gain independence by resisting external forces and whose supposed virtue and happiness rested on the outrages of misperceived necessity—indeed, abjectly slavish would be he who reveled in this dependence. Stoic virtue entails living in accordance with rational human nature by achieving autonomy. “In assenting or withholding assent [to an impulse,] the Stoic is allowing or refusing to allow a sense-impression or proposition to serve as the antecedent cause of his actions; he cannot decline receipt of impressions, but only his act of assent can turn them into actual antecedent causes of what he subsequently does.” By turning one’s assent or rejection

Introduction

19

into the antecedent cause of one’s actions, one practices autonomy. While one cannot avoid being a passive recipient of sense data from the external world, one can, as an autonomous agent, will appropriate responses to externals. By “focus[ing] one’s desires and aversions exclusively on things that fall within the scope of one’s volition,” one diminishes the field of potential impulses that will require assent or the withholding of assent. In short, through autonomy, the Stoic lessens her sensitivity to external disturbances. The Stoic achieves ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, as a side-effect of her virtue. However, forming judgments in harmony with nature is not easy. Passions and opinion always threaten to divert or distract judgment in the sociable man. Savage man, on the other hand, already lives closely (if not perfectly) in accordance with nature and so operates with a very different sense of what constitutes pain and privation. In contradistinction to sociable man, the savage need neither resist nor not resist external forces. Whether these issue from a social environment, as would be the case in the Golden Age, or whether there as yet has formed no stable, sedentary (or, for that matter, nomadic) society to environ Rousseau’s savage, as in the pure state of nature, he in either case guards and maintains his independence. The Stoic struggles for ataraxia amidst society because she must actively train herself to disregard “the opinion of others.” The savage, however, lives his indifference naturally because his independence insulates him against interested amourpropre. He wants for nothing he cannot obtain and has no knowledge of complex, socially driven desires for (or aversions from) things beyond the scope of his volition. Savages and other natural men thus require no stoical arts of self. They do not need to will not to sin. Ataraxia’s antithesis entails being always outside oneself. Being always outside oneself, as Rousseau puts it, indicates poor reasoning about one’s natural situation and constitution. To live in and through the judgments of others is to enchain the possibility of one’s happiness and virtue to externals, which stand beyond one’s volition; it is, in sum, to be a slave. “When we do not live in ourselves but in others, it is their judgments which guide everything” (Ld’A 67; OC V.62). Choosing the vicissitudes of public opinion (or remaining ignorant that there even exists a choice) comprises the most lulling repose, the slave’s slumber. For the Stoic (as Long again explains), happiness (eudaimonia) consists “solely and entirely in ethical virtue and is thus completely independent of the . . . chanciness” of external goods, of which opinion surpasses all in instability. Ethical virtue has nothing to do with

20

Introduction

the incidental absence or presence of particular external goods. Aligning one’s actions with nature is the hallmark of Stoic virtue, and the happiness or eudaimonia of the Stoic requires nothing more than an independent will attuned to right reason, not to opinion or anything external. The free will, for Epictetus and other Stoics, is the “freedom from being constrained by (as distinct from going along with) external contingencies, and freedom from being constrained by the errors and passions consequential on believing that such contingencies must influence or inhibit one’s volition.” Because of their natural environment, savages and those like them enjoy freedom with repose. Such is natural liberty, and it is an “inherently flawed” sort of freedom, one that rendered the “ ‘fall’ into society . . . necessary,” as Hayden White puts it. By contrast, life after the advent of civil society, life after knowledge of sin, however, renders liberty a trying practice, which lends fullness to the experience of freedom. Hence, those sociable men who would recover their freedom must, as Seneca recommended, give up repose, for freedom is only gained by laborious discipline and discernment. This would explain why Rousseau sagely admonishes the Poles, “Repose and freedom seem to me incompatible; one has to choose” (GP 178; OC III.955). No longer in effortless harmony with nature, sociable men cannot delight in freedom and repose both. The choice is stark, for repose comprises slavery and contains a typical Rousseauian paradox on the order of and with similar content to the infamous “forced to be free” (SC I.7, 53; OC III.364). Here, if one chooses repose, then it is either not really a choice—for one continues to repose, not having positively acted to choose—or it is a positive choice no longer to choose: slavery by choice. If one chooses freedom—having been constrained to make a choice in the first place—then one had been unfree, and choosing itself entails self-liberation. Poles must renounce repose for freedom as Stoics do. By what Seneca called “unremitting practice,” then, Poles and others who would be free would approximate—as much as is possible in society—the natural ataraxia of the savage. They would win freedom by trading repose for unstinting practices of independence by reorienting themselves to nature. Not only is this an extremely tall order, but Rousseau may further confuse much in compounding his ambivalence by ambiguity. First, ambivalence: both primitive hyperataraxia and Stoic (especially sagely) ataraxia represent extraordinary ideals about nature, and thus Rousseau both admires them and regards them, qua extraordinary, with suspicion, since he would write for ordinary folk. At the same time his suspicion for both models leads him

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into ultimate indecision about which better serves as a model for ordinary peoples: one is more folksy but inappropriate, because it derives from the state of nature; the other belongs to the civil state, on the same side of the divide as the peoples Rousseau would advise, yet the Stoic model seems chilly, unsympathetic. Relatedly, second, ambiguity: Rousseau presents marginal peoples like Corsicans quite ambiguously, as though their marginalization from the economic traffic and cultural imperialism of conquering civil societies kept them primitive—that is, natives on the very cusp between nascent society and the denatured civil state. Freedom for societies at this cusp will require either reorientation to nature or preservation of nature. Reorientation and preservation, though, are rather different processes with two incompatible results. One demands, as Seneca noted, that one will not to sin, while the other remains ignorant of sin. In other words, political freedom will either intimately retain the remembrance of slavery and unremittingly resist it, or freedom will be walled off from sin, corruption, and any possibility of slavery so as to conserve its pure relation to nature inside of territorial reservations. Rousseau’s political theory for small states and marginal peoples— the writings on Corsica, Poland, and Geneva—confuses things because he elides the difference between reorientation and preservation in his indecision about the appropriate model for autonomy.

fugitive rousseau Rousseau also forgets aspects of his own most challenging insights about exit. For if slavery (qua forcible mobilization and immobilization) and freedom (autonomous locomobility) are spatial questions in Rousseau’s thought and thus figured most clearly in Hirschmanesque exit options, then, as I argue in Chapter 4, it is truly questionable whether marginal peoples or small territorial states such as Corsica achieve political freedom in the face of threatened conquest. Rather than making themselves free in practicing collective autonomy through autarky, Corsicans’ immobile insularity may instead hold them hostage to the very system from which they had hoped to exit. Hence, Rousseau’s theoretical explorations of political freedom for small or marginal states fail because the very rootedness that these writings advocate fatally demands self-immobilization. In the words of James Clifford, these peoples have roots, yet they do not have routes, and routes in some form would be prerequisite for political freedom on the exit model.

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Introduction

Abstention qua nativist autarky would prove ineffective, given that Rousseau accepts that all the other states in the interstate system obey Hobbesian compulsions. Yet Rousseau’s other set of explicit propositions for achieving political freedom—“Of Travels” in Book V of Émile—also fails according to its own premises. As I argue more fully in Chapter 3, Rousseau pretends that Émile, who undertakes travels to learn about the variety of political systems, is routed, but in the final analysis Émile’s activity is not travel. Rousseau pretends as well that Émile finally roots himself in a community by attaching himself at the end of his travels to his natal patrie, yet, because there is no indication that Émile has developed corresponsibility or mutual sensibility with anyone in that community, it seems impossible to conclude that his roots run deep. In a more charitable assessment, the Émilean project presents a liberalrationalist freedom model that, according to Anna Stilz, “holds that while some form of democratic solidarity may be necessary for just institutions to function well, that solidarity can be generated simply by understanding the good reasons for allegiance to those institutions, and need not take the form of a shared culture or national identity.” Émile finally declares loyalty to his natal patrie and his native pays—he arrives at his allegiance after his tutored travels. On Stilz’s freedom model, Émile achieves a model form of egalitarian reflective identification with others that discovers common ground for advancing and subscribing to particular, just political institutions. The Émilean model of social solidarity and political loyalty holds greater appeal for Stilz than the cultural-nationalist model at work in Rousseau’s Corsica, Poland, and Geneva writings precisely because the former is cognitivist—it works by deliberation and not physical or affective identification—and is arrived at ex post facto—one adopts the perspective of generality a posteriori rather than is a priori produced by it. If, however, as I argue in chapters 3 and 4, the Émilean and nativist autarky models are sutured as recto/verso sides of the selfsame ideological discourse, then it may be that Stilz’s freedom model cannot correct her culture (cultural-nationalist) model. Specifically, according to this ideology, Émile travels routes so that he can freely plant roots deliberately ex post facto; by contrast Corsicans cannot travel routes and must have no contact with corrupt foreigners for fear of eroding the ground that secures their native roots. The liberal-rationalist model presents loyalty as a positive act of political at-

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tachment by an unattached subject but forgets that this subject will already have been formed in such a way as to make liberal rationalism seem morally acceptable and thus proper to her. In short, the liberal-rationalist subject is just as much a product of cultural formation as is the counterpart she distances herself from, which she devalues as entangled in cultural nationalism in order to disavow the fact of her own cultural construction. Rousseau makes the criticism that thoughtless modern cosmopolitanism is, not dissimilarly, a kind of cultureless culture, and he aims, though ultimately fails, to contradict it with a genuine countercosmopolitanism. Hence, if the reconstructed cosmopolitanism of the freedom model is structurally tethered to the unreconstructed nativism of the culture model, then one cannot simply choose one side and cast off the other but must seek after an altogether different model. It is for this reason that I propose to pursue Rousseau’s abandoned insights on fugitive peoples and fugitive acts—insights buried in plain sight across several texts. Given that Rousseau hyperbolically declares all modern subjects slaves, even if not chattel slaves, a third model of political freedom—one dissociated from either recto or verso—would posit that peoples who have been formed even in slavery can develop fugitive techniques of freedom; they can achieve freedom fugitively even from slavery, because no form of domination is ever total. What are these fugitive techniques? And why is no domination total? Using marooning chattel slaves in the Americas and those Hebrew maroons of Exodus as touchstones, I speculate on Rousseau’s references to physical flight—exit within state spaces rather than (as with Hirschman) in stateless spaces—and to cultural flight—formations of mobile or diasporic community through techniques of cultural distancing. These are practices that win political freedom and some measure of collective autonomy against the background of domination and heteronomy. The question of the nontotality of domination I trace to Rousseau’s theoretical reflections on bodies politic and the distinction he draws between aggregations of bodies in contiguous space and properly integral associations. Briefly, any aggregation is subject both to forces that charge it with commonality—for example, the shared experience of slavery—and to other forces that riddle it with discontinuities. Thus government (which differs from sovereignty for Rousseau) can never rely on either uniformity qua commonality or atomization qua discontinuity, or both, to achieve total domination, because any people constitutes itself, its moi commun, its gen-

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Introduction

eral will, and its sovereignty in the play between commonality and discontinuity. No would-be masters could ever fully master this play of forces. At the same time, no people who would be free can simply repose in the play as a fait accompli but must construct practices of self-liberation from both integrating and riddling forces. Diasporic and nomadic peoples are virtuosi at managing both. Keen, loyal Rousseauians will perchance wonder what constitutes my archive for this “fugitive freedom.” Marooning African American slaves? Jews? Scholars have bemoaned that Rousseau does not say much about either, so whence my remarks? What I undertake is not what might be called a symptomatic reading, for there is no indication that Rousseau needed to subject fugitive themes to psychic censorship in his unconscious—a censorship that would demand recourse to psychoanalytic modes for interpreting feints, slips, and indirect revelations of a desire otherwise hidden. If the theme of and desire for fugitive freedom is buried, however, it is not because of repression and its symptomatology, but because of the proliferation of writing and thinking—even if, in my judgment, ultimately unproductive and contradictory—on other models of modern political freedom. Yet at the very heart of this textual abundance on the Émilean negative education and Corsica’s (and others’) nativist autarky models there are indications of other possibilities. These near-absences become knowable not so much in themselves but through their effects—that is to say, these other possibilities are present in Rousseau’s text, but they are nearly traceless. And, to reiterate, the obliqueness by which a reader gains knowledge of a fugitive model of freedom is owed not to Rousseau’s need to repress an unconscionable desire for flight but to its diminution and fragmentation by the overwhelming presence of the other two models. Qua model, fugitive freedom must be reconstructed from multiple, nearly traceless moments in Rousseau’s corpus. What I do methodologically, then, is to track the nearly traceless in a way comparable, perhaps, to what Rousseau himself must do in contrasting Athens and Sparta in Part I of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. Therein he notes that Athens left a record of its monumental splendor to future lovers of science and art—text, building, vase. In contrast, “The Picture of Lacedaemon is less brilliant. . . . All that is left us of its Inhabitants is the memory of their heroic deeds. Are such monuments worth less to us than the quaint marbles left us by Athens?” (FD 12; OC III.12–13). In the archeological and

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textual record of Greek antiquity, Athens loudly drowns Sparta out, but this does not mean that nearly traceless Sparta is unworthy of the notice of modern peoples—indeed, quite the contrary. Rousseau founds a primitivist critique of civilizationism on this contrast between overpresent Athens and almost traceless Sparta. What would it mean to live without affixing oneself to durable goods, the kind that leave traces in “quaint marbles”? If sciences, arts, academic philosophy sedentarize humans, then do they not become immobilized “Happy slaves” in the very process of civilization? Rousseau notes that, compared to political enslavement by conquest, the moral slavery of civilization is “perhaps more powerful” because “less despotic” (FD 7, 6; OC III.7). Rousseau’s model for the traceless, for a freedom practiced in eluding sedentarizing arts and sciences, is Sparta, but Sparta merely stands in as the exemplar of a larger set that includes primitives of all sorts: Scythians, Germans, American savages, early Romans, Swiss. In the pages that follow, then, especially in chapters 1, 2, and 5, I proceed to assemble, juxtapose, and cross-analyze moments of exit, evasion, and flight in Rousseau’s political writings. These form a pattern from which we may critically synthesize an account, a model, of freedom based on active flight from enslavement in all its guises. In contrasting fugitive political freedom against the other two models— Émilean countercosmopolitanism and autarkic small or marginal states—I am not performing a straightforward exegesis of Rousseau’s written record, which would call for a principle of charity by which one allows the auteur’s possible or actual contradictions to be resolved at a higher level of interpretation. By explicitly valorizing fugitive political freedom and expressly criticizing countercosmopolitan and autarkic models of freedom, I pit Rousseau against himself, which necessarily means I do not grant him the deference one might accord to such an auteur. However, when I say that a Rousseauian argument “fails” or is “confused,” I am less interested in attributing this to Rousseau and implicitly suggesting that the auteur has failed his readers. Even if we grant Rousseau the status of an auteur who triumphs over his material in order to save him from possible self-contradiction by instead calling it conscious ambivalence or deliberate paradox, we do so at the risk of ignoring how the history or conceptual structure of the sources, figures, and arguments that he commands so effortlessly may themselves contradict one another. My contention is that Rousseau is at his best when he goes beyond his antique and early modern sources and reaches instead into his

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broad Atlantic context for new ways of thinking. Even his presentation of les juifs owes less to biblical sources than to other contemporary ways of thinking about flight from slavery. The themes and patterns of argument that Rousseau shaped so passionately into a political theory did not—in spite of Rousseau’s brilliance—hold together without friction and misfit, then. Thus, rather than offering a more deferential exegesis of Rousseau’s corpus, what I do instead in roughly the latter half of Chapter 2 and in chapters 3 and 4 of this study is to trace out how recognizably Rousseauian themes draw on patterns of argument from Hellenistic philosophy—arguments about nature and morality and true independence, which, when taken to their logical extremes, pull Rousseau’s writings in different, sometimes irreconcilable directions. By locating moments of friction and misfit in Rousseauian arguments, we can see how the Rousseauian corpus is undone by the richness of its themes. At the same time, other parts of the Rousseauian corpus are reknit by other themes. For, while aspects of Rousseauian political theory are undone by the conflict in its reception of Hellenistic philosophical sources, its black Atlantic context does nevertheless give Rousseau resources to resolve certain problems around freedom in novel, generative ways—though Rousseau’s arguments do not emerge even from this context without friction. Chapters 1 and 5 and the first half of Chapter 2 are, then, more reconstructive than deconstructive. Reconstructing his arguments’ embeddedness in the referential universe of a world of chattel slavery—that is, Rousseau’s contemporary Atlantic world—these two and a half chapters are more concerned with highlighting and gathering together similar patterns across texts to show how they form alternative, recognizably Rousseauian, though less well understood, themes—themes such as the dynamic between enslavement and resistance yet also the mutually reinforcing varieties of enslavement. The themes I am most interested in—the slavery/freedom dyad, the relationship between chattel and other kinds of slavery, primitivism, politically inspired flight—occur mainly in the moral and political writings, and so I should say a final word on the title: placing “fugitive” next to “Rousseau” will evoke Rousseau’s life story and autobiographies. So it behooves me to conclude here on a note about the scope of this study. In what follows I will have only occasional recourse to his autobiographical works as documentary support. Certainly, the distinction seems arbitrary—perhaps egregiously so in the case of Rousseau, for whom genres of writing insistently intrude upon one another. In his case, text, life, and person were constantly troubling one

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another. Indeed, long after his youthful, preliterary vagabondage, the historical personage Rousseau found himself (made himself ) a fugitive in life because of his writing. The ultimate catalyst for his successive banishments was the public condemnation and delivery of a warrant for his arrest as author of Émile in 1762, though no doubt the educational treatise was merely the occasional cause for a wider persecution (legally real, psychically magnified). In his Confessions, books XI and XII, and Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau tracks his flight from Montmorency in France, his being chased within Switzerland from Yverdun to Môtiers-Travers to the Île Saint-Pierre, his last-resort escape to England, and finally retirement back in France. The period of his flight lasted eight long years (June 1762 to June 1770), counted from the departure from Montmorency to the return to Paris. In the autobiographical writings the fugitive theme’s pattern of expression suggests the deterioration of association, not, as in the political and moral writings, its creation and renewal. The autobiographical Rousseau considers it the triumph of his banishment that he regains (relative) solitude, that he is able to take leave of the obligations of civility, that he need not engage in sociability but on his own terms, that he can replace political and moral thought with botanical investigation, that branch and flower—not man and citizen, and certainly neither court nor salon—form his society: in other words, Rousseau claimed, whether actively and truly or passively aggressively, to feel gladness and relief at his “exile and adversity” because it permitted him to live finally as a “solitary self.” I do not believe that community generally and political community specifically should or need be confined to human or even animate beings only, but the doggedness of Rousseau’s assertions that flora should be his companions for life, that he resembled “a second Robinson” Crusoe, that he desired nothing more than that the authorities actually designate Île Saint-Pierre his prison, all suggest a persistent yearning for companionable humanity after its failure rather than its total disappearance and solitary forgetting. Certainly, there is much to be said for the relationship between Rousseau’s psychodynamics and his politicized representations of solipsism and oblivion. Indeed, the similarities hover near the surface of Rousseau’s description of life at Île Saint-Pierre, which approximates the solipsistic hyperautarky of “savage man” and the Epicurean account of ataraxia as static pleasure: alone in a boat on Lake Bienne he can forget the world and feels absolute pleasure, a pleasure that is not relative because it is asocial, coming from within himself alone. In spite of my discussion of these very themes

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in regard to Rousseau’s political writings, mainly in Chapter 4, I nevertheless choose to circumscribe my archive, since, in autobiographical accounts of his fugitivity, Rousseau—pathologically and symptomatically, to be sure— so stridently wishes to make himself the victim of politics rather than a fellow actor, even as he reactively manipulates banishment by rendering it active self-exile. I will spare the reader the interpretive gymnastics of integrating Rousseau’s own personal fugitivity into this study of Rousseau’s political corpus, then. Jean Starobinski already handled Rousseau the personality—especially the persecuted fugitive Rousseau, whose intense desire for innocence allowed him to be delivered from the genuine risk of sin that autonomous action always entails—ably and nobly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Any reader interested in the biographical fugitive Rousseau should consult “Imprisoned for Life,” the ninth chapter of Starobinski’s monograph, and “The Lapidation” in Maurice Cranston’s final installment of his trivolume biography. Fugitive Rousseau for my purposes in this study means collective fugitivity—fugitive or marooning bodies politic in the making.

itinerary I have divided Fugitive Rousseau into two parts. Part I, “Slavery,” comprising the first two chapters, explores the problem of slavery—how is it meant? is it a metaphor? perhaps an overstatement?—in Rousseau’s political writings, while Part II, “Freedom?,” investigates over the course of its three chapters the different Rousseauian projects for achieving freedom, for successfully putting into practice a truly legitimate social interdependence. In Chapter 1 I make the case that Rousseau’s frequent hyperboles—most famously, that humans are “everywhere” in chains (SC I.1, 41; OC III.351)—while by definition not descriptively true, nonetheless express a structural truth about the global reach of the systems of private property and territorial statism. By way of a close reconstructive reading of Book I of Of the Social Contract and several important passages from the Second Discourse, I show how it can be said that the varieties of modern domination enchain all persons everywhere, globally. Chapter 2 reckons with the different senses of slavery that Rousseau employs and argues that, far from distracting from the reality of the transatlantic trade in African chattel slaves, Rousseau’s use of the term to describe moral slavishness and political despotism enriches his analysis of the

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interconnection of modes of domination. Yet at the same time Rousseau’s recourse to Stoic concepts of freedom opens him to the contradictory effects within Stoic philosophical patterns of argument about slavery—effects that ultimately entangle Rousseau’s arguments about freedom. In Chapter 3, by refracting the negative educational project of Émile through its final section, entitled “On Travels,” I hold that, although travels are meant to crown Émile’s education by exposing him to the variety of political arrangements so that he is prepared to live anywhere yet will obligate himself to one regime, Rousseau’s anxieties about vice and impurity foreclose travel’s autonomy as an activity—specifically an activity that might expose Émile to contexts that would test his virtue. The author’s anxieties about purity thus prevent Émile from achieving his own autonomy, and how Émile is given to act when he is unexpectedly made a slave in Algiers, I maintain, confirms rather than disproves his inability to press his freedom. In Chapter 4, I present Rousseau’s writings on how small and marginal states can safeguard their freedom in a Hobbesian interstate system by cultivating autarky as collective political applications of Stoic and Epicurean exercises in the care of the individual self, but I contend that conflictual impulses within Rousseauian primitivism drive him yet again toward extreme suspicion of foreign influences, with the result that nativist autarky for Corsica, Poland, and Geneva generates xenophobic effects. Finally, in Chapter 5, I assemble instances of politically inspired flight and evasion from across Rousseau’s corpus and reconstruct from them an alternative project for collective freedom, one whereby freedom is practiced in flight from the multiple modern forms of domination. By juxtaposing minor moments of radical opposition in Of the Social Contract and moments of active resistance within Rousseau’s primitivism with the historiography on marooning slaves in the Americas and the Caribbean, I am able to argue that fugitivity constitutes a recognizable pattern across Rousseau’s political writings. The Afterword makes the case that fugitive political freedom, especially through its resonance in Sheldon Wolin’s account of fugitive democracy, provides a model that is rich with possibility—richer even than the radical universalisms and counterglobalizations of recent French and Italian radical thought. Against the attempts by early twenty-first-century radical theorists to counter the global totality presented by capitalism and the modern state by building an oppositional popular power on a massive scale, Rousseauian fugitive freedom’s contribution, I claim, derives from its distrust of large-scale continuities, its ad hoc quality—or, in more strictly Rousseauian

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terms, its refusal of a global general will and emphasis on the mutual particularity of communities. In light of this, I bring the book to a close with the counterprimitivist, yet still Rousseauian, image of Josephine Baker, who exited a racially segregated United States to secure a locale of freedom in Paris between the wars—a freedom that was modest, ambivalent, circumscribed, improvisational; one that refused to build the rest of the world in its image; one that drew together several sites in that world but did not claim to capture it whole. In closing, I want to reiterate that, if Rousseau’s primitivism and his account of political freedom are related, then it cannot be the case that we may simply ignore the primitivism or the language of slavery in order to arrive at an abstracted procedural or rationalist model of freedom. At the same time, we cannot simply write off Rousseau’s linking of freedom and primitiveness as a mere product of the limitations of scientific and ethnological discourses of his age. Rather, any account of freedom in Rousseau must combine critical and constructive approaches to his primitivism. Doing so, Fugitive Rousseau will, I hope, cast modest new light on certain problems of Rousseau interpretation to throw into novel relief some contemporary questions of political theory. Innovative perspectives may serve as correctives for familiar ways of seeing, but they inevitably suffer from their own blind spots. I certainly claim no immunity from such blindnesses. When Paul de Man notes that “[c]ritics’ moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insight,” I can at best indeed hope he expresses more than a pious wish.

1

Displacements . . . no enlargement of our boundaries can bring us back to the state from which we have departed. When we shall have done all we can, we shall possess much; but we once possessed the whole world. —seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium XC

The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became in turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed. —thomas hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

This is the world: there is no more than this. The unseen and disastrous prelude, shaking The trivial act from the terrific action. —conrad aiken, Preludes for Memnon XIX

“Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery” (É 42; OC IV.253). What would it mean to take Rousseau at his word when he publishes such a thought during the long eighteenth century, when the constituent features on which political modernity is built, such as the large-scale agricultural capitalist slave plantation, are taking form? The slave plantation was “an integral part of the economic life of capitalist modernity” and the reason “why the French Revolution and the San Domingo Revolution are so inextricably interconnected,” coming to a head within decades after Rousseau’s death. Rousseau continues, “So long as [civil man] keeps his human shape, he is enchained by our institutions” (É 43; OC IV.253). Why is (European) civil 33

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man enchained here and not the African, in chains during the Middle Passage and enchained by the so-called peculiar institution? Although I have named this chapter “Displacements,” its subject is not metonymy, the rhetorical figure that substitutes one thing for another closely (though tacitly) associated thing. Nor is this chapter’s subject metaphor, the figure by which one thing is substituted by another on the basis of broad similarity between them. For example, to substitute chains for the entire institution of chattel slavery is metonymy, while to substitute despotism by chattel slavery on the basis of the fact that both are modes of domination, one political and the other personal, is metaphor. According to Roman Jakobson, metaphor and metonymy are the two fundamental poles by which meaning-making occurs in language. That is, we make representations to one another (at least in Indo-European languages)—and, more pertinently here, Rousseau’s references to slavery make sense—by constantly employing these figures. While psychoanalytic theory after Jacques Lacan has consistently linked metonymy with the notion of displacement in the unconscious and associated metaphor with unconscious condensation, I will not discuss metonymy in “Displacements.” Rather, I will have more to say about displacement and condensation as metonymy and metaphor in the next chapter when I confront Rousseau’s rhetorics of slavery. However, I want to foreshadow it here, since slavery is the subject of these first two chapters. “Displacements” is thus linked with Chapter 2, “. . . and Condensations.” Briefly, my argument there is that Rousseau makes chattel slavery salient to an audience of people who have never themselves been subject to it by unleashing a play of similarity and difference across forms of domination— namely, (1) chattel slavery, (2) moral slavery qua enslavement of one’s will to others’ desires as spurred by interested amour-propre, and (3) political slavery qua despotism. We can discern the Rousseauian text’s method of meaningmaking by taking into consideration the following propaedeutic from Sigmund Freud: “By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis [i.e., psychic energy]; by the process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas.” In Rousseau’s writings the personal domination of chattel slavery displaces its signifying intensity onto moral slavery’s abstract domination and political slavery’s despotic domination of peoples; or, likewise, the latter are sometimes simply displaced by the image of chains. At the same time political and civil-moral domination are condensed into the figure of personal domination, the enchained chattel slave. The play of metaphor and metonymy

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is possible because chattel, moral, and political slavery are simultaneously similar yet different for Rousseau. All three likewise share domination as their content, yet chattel, moral, and political slavery manifest undeniably different forms of domination and occupy distinct positions within a hierarchy of brutality and terror. Hence, metaphorically and metonymically, it is meaningful (rather than nonsense) to call “civil man” a slave. Doing so, Rousseau piques supposedly free denizens of the civil state to envisage their own unfreedom by referring to the very paradigm of domination—namely, the vagaries of mere whim toward human chattel within an individual’s personal power. Rather than condensation or displacement, the present chapter reckons with hyperbole. Rousseau is given to overstatement: “everywhere he is in chains,” “the whole face of the earth is changed; everywhere nature has disappeared” (SC I.1, 41; SW 167; OC III.351, 603). Neither statement is true in the sense that it offers an accurately descriptive representation of the world in the moment of its utterance. However, I argue in this chapter for taking at face value Rousseau’s hyperbolic references to the total global absence or presence of a thing or relation. Thus I propose to understand how Rousseau’s recourse to overstatement on a global scale signifies meaningfully. Even if specific utterances—every terrestrial surface has been claimed by private property and states; or, no one is free any longer—do not express a literal truth, they express a structural truth. Indeed, if it is right that “[t]he last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899,” then arguably Rousseau’s hyperbole anticipates an actual future “closure of the map,” the total global dominion of territorial states and the regime of private property. Taking Rousseauian hyperbole seriously, we respect his own method as articulated in the Exordium of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men: “Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not affect the question. The Inquiries that may be pursued regarding this Subject ought not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings” (SD 132; OC III.132–33). I submit that hypothetical and conditional reasoning is at work in Rousseau’s global overstatement; that, by it, he is able to reveal important consequences of political modernity. So the task is this: to find out what is revealed and illuminated when we take Rousseau’s utterances at face value. For example, what would the total global disappearance of primitive natural liberty reveal about freedom’s reliance on a Hirschmanesque exit option? I take Rousseau as much as possible

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at his word in regard to his antinomies—that is, that we are all slaves, that savages did live in pure immediacy, among others. Taking these as true, one can test their truth-effects. Other scholars have approached Rousseau’s work from the opposite direction in regard to nature. Whereas they bring to Rousseau’s deployments of “nature” prior doubts by which they then proceed to test concepts of nature, primitiveness, etc., I try instead to work inside of the experimental operations of Rousseau’s writing. Broadly, I see those experimental operations unfolding as follows. Rousseau’s writing subjects features of modern, complex, large-scale statist society to an ordeal, an ordeal that takes “nature” as its reference point. Yet the ordeal by reference to nature opens up doubts about nature itself. Thus it reveals that nature is a moving target, not a fixed origin. However, this target regresses not in historical time but in global space, which is why Rousseauian hyperboles that invoke “everywhere” and “nowhere” gain purchase. The novel relations that begin at the various points where nature ends inaugurate themselves as totalizing social structures. Paul de Man puts it this way: nature in Rousseau’s texts “engenders endless other ‘natures’ in an eternally repeated pattern of regression. Nature deconstructs nature, hence the ambiguous valorization of the term throughout Rousseau’s works. Far from denoting a homogeneous mode of being, ‘nature’ connotes a process of deconstruction redoubled by its own fallacious retotalization.” This constant flight of the concept of nature, its fission and then self-recuperation as a whole entity, suggests that it is itself fugitive, not simply confused or circular. What falls from nature, or what nature could be said to be fleeing from as it recedes in space, are private property in land and the territorial state. By contrast to receding nature, these are fixed and solid, but we do not notice that they structure our reality, since the grounds from which we would observe them—that is, civil society itself—are founded on them. Necessarily, then, they dominate our worldview, so we cannot quite see them because they have produced what we are: civil humanity itself. Only by reference to vanished or vanishing “natural liberty” do we see that our own slaveryfreedom dyad is contingent. Only by discovering that our material ground is not naturally given, but rather is nature globally in recess, do we comprehend that our freedom is not fixed and solid but rather is as shifting and fluid as borderlines on a map. The ambition for this chapter is as follows: to claim that by the global scale of their overstatements—everywhere slaves, nowhere primitively free—Rousseau’s texts found modernity not on “the catastrophic rupture of

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the middle passage,” as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Richard Wright marked it according to Paul Gilroy, but rather on a different massive displacement, the final total displacement from nature itself, from the possibility of a homeland, from fundamental relations to place. In situating Rousseau alongside Douglass, Du Bois, or Wright, I do not mean to suggest that Rousseau’s big-bang theory of the global effects of uttering “this is mine” should replace the Middle Passage as constitutive of modernity. Rather, I am suggesting that reading from our perspective and with its globality in mind, Rousseau’s presentation of the triangulation of landed private property, slavery, and the territorial state offers a critical counterhistory—one that shows that modernity is born not with the eighteenth-century French republican transformation of the theory and practice of revolution. Instead, political modernity might, counterfactually but truthfully, trace itself to the moment that “this is mine” becomes regnant globally (which is nearly the moment it is first pronounced). On what did Rousseau base the insight of his hyperbole? C. L. R. James suggests that Rousseau’s critical insight owes to his insider’s/outsider’s relation to French civilization: “Rousseau was a master of French culture and civilization . . . but he was not a Frenchman. In that period of crisis, catastrophe, and difficulties, he could see what the average Frenchman could not see . . . this is one of the secrets of his work.” Given this special insight, how can Rousseau ground hyperbolic reasonings such that his texts come off as truthful yet counterfactual? Let us begin to assemble our archive.

everywhere, chains “L’homme est né libre, et par-tout il est dans les fers” (OC III.351). These lines that open the first chapter of Book I of Du contrat social are justly famous. Yet they hardly display Rousseau’s infamous flair for paradoxes. Far from courting paradox, that first sentence, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (SC I.1, 41), may do no more than mark periods before and after a historical change—that is, original freedom, then eventual slavery. This opening salvo admits a transformation that is monumental, to be sure, yet straightforward enough. The second sentence, however, raises the stakes in stridently declaring that master-proprietors have a greater claim on irons than their shackled and immobilized chattel slaves: “One believes himself the others’ master, and yet is more a slave than they” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.351). Typically, Rousseau’s

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economy of formulation proliferates questions here. May we assume that it is the masters who keep their chattel down? If so, then what force keeps the supposed masters down? Do these masters have masters, in other words? If everyone is in chains, then what distinguishes the enchainment of those who believe themselves masters from that of their slaves? Surely, this must be an instance where the “slavery” of masters should be taken metaphorically? The stated goal of Rousseau’s magnum opus is to search out a means by which social dependence, which tends to be slavish, can instead be rendered politically legitimate. Thus reads the paragraph in full: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others’ master, and yet is more a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can solve this question” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.351). Before aggregated persons can achieve the legitimate interdependence of political association, they must somehow properly escape their nonnatal chains, irons they were not born with. Success in fleeing from slavery in turn entails some understanding of what comprises their chains and makes them so wily that even ostensible masters are fooled. To arrive at such an understanding, I shall multiply the several possible meanings of the paradoxical second sentence of Of the Social Contract, Book I, chapter 1, because interpreting it transports us to the heart of Rousseau’s attempt to make manifest the interrelated modalities of domination that characterize political modernity. In doing so, I shall paradoxically try to inhabit the Rousseauian text intimately yet telescopically in order to reveal how unheimlich the familiar landscapes of Of the Social Contract and the Second Discourse appear when magnified exponentially. Ultimately, I make the case that the genesis of sociable humanity and the consequent development of the order of private property and arbitrary political rule produce relations of illegitimate dependence through displacement. That is, modern illegitimate dependencies (wrongly accepted as legitimate) gain their force in part by alienating sociable human beings from space—or, more precisely, sociable human beings are not alienated from space altogether but specifically from the primitive spatial order of what is called Rousseau’s Golden Age. If illegitimate dependencies bear a significant relation to displacement, then inaugurating truly legitimate social interdependence may require overcoming displacement. And if massively displaced peoples potentially comprise a diaspora, then the route by which

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such displaced sociable human beings root their legitimate social interdependence and thus make their collective self-determination possible is by truly inhabiting their diasporic consciousness and condition. The massive displacement that attends the passing of the Golden Epoch does not necessarily refer to a literal exodus or series of migrations, though it does make them inevitable for some people. (Likewise the closing of the Golden Age does not immediately open the door directly to modernity, though it does make this social condition inevitable for all in multiply articulated ways.) Rather than actual population movements, the massive displacement that I refer to here is akin to what Orlando Patterson calls, in a renowned analysis of slavery, “natal alienation.” Patterson defines the social nonpersonhood of the chattel slave as constituted in part by his forcible “alienation . . . from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master.” The orders of intimacy that anchor a (free, full) person in more or less stable (or stabilizable) intersubjective relations are denied to the slave; consequently, slaves are forcibly unmoored not only from natal ties and chosen family, but also from any enduring attachments to locale, grounded as these are in sociality. What Rousseau’s paradoxical formulation about masters’ greater slavery discloses is that masters too are natally alienated—indeed, more so than their slaves. And thinking systematically of these ostensible masters’ natal alienation in spatial terms will reveal that what typifies the displacement that masters experience are conquest and cosmopolitanism. (It is important to note that the cosmopolitanism that Rousseau diagnoses in the texts discussed in this chapter represents an inauthentic form; as we see in the next chapter and as other scholars have argued, Rousseau endeavors to reconstruct a genuine countercosmopolitanism in other writings, especially Émile.) Both conquerors and thoughtless cosmopolites allow themselves to become detached from locality. However, as we learn anon, they are led to sever attachments to locale not from force—that is, not in the same manner as chattel slaves are forcibly alienated—but rather through a form of domination that Rousseau finds all the more pernicious for being abstract. According to Moishe Postone, abstract domination “subjects people to impersonal structural imperatives and constraints that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of concrete domination (e.g., personal or group domination).” However, in order to attain to Rousseau’s critical standpoint, which enables

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him to adjudge abstract domination the height of alienation, it is necessary to learn how forced chattel slavery originates. The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men and Of the Social Contract both emphasize that generating lasting bondage is hardly effortless. Indeed, both take pains to prove the impossibility of slavery in the “pure” state of nature and during the Golden Epoch; necessarily, then, Rousseau’s writings invite their readers-interpreters to analyze the genesis of those constituents that make slavery finally possible as a social order. In the next section, I show that Rousseau reduces institutions of slavery to mere force in Of the Social Contract, Book I. That is, he dispenses with prior political theorists’ academic exercises in producing a so-called “right” of slavery. Leaving us only with force but emphasizing its exhaustibility and therefore its inability to sustain an institution on its own, Rousseau must then supply a supplement to force that can account for slavery qua institution. For this supplement we must go back to the Second Discourse to the account of the origin of territorial property and the nexus of causes that simultaneously forge the chains of illegitimate social dependence for everyone and close off the possibility of primitive liberty for anyone. I next describe the hyperbolic theoretical move by which Rousseau includes everyone under the category “slave.” Ultimately, I argue that political modernity for Rousseau is constituted by rupturing displacements caused by the closing off of “natural” space and the globalization of “this is mine.” In the companion chapter I assess the metaphoric and metonymic moves by which Rousseau puts Europeans’ African chattel in the same category as Europeans themselves. I trace a contrapuntal movement between insights Rousseau gleans from Hellenistic philosophy and the critical purchase of primitivism. On one side, Rousseau metonymizes slavery with the specific authority of Stoicism: Stoic philosophy licenses him to flatten the entire social field by calling all modern persons slaves; moreover, Stoicism’s harsh judgments of the thoughtless and unwise suggest that in fact the nominal masters are worse off than those they enslave. On the other, by guarding the critical perspective of primitivism, Rousseau is able to discover blind spots within the very solutions that Stoicism and other Hellenistic philosophies would advocate to counteract illegitimate dependency. Indeed, Rousseau finds the philosophical solution just as alienating and in its own way thoughtless as the thoughtless alienation it means to undo. Transporting himself to the primitive standpoint of the Golden Epoch allows Rousseau thus to connect Stoic cosmopolitanism to modern conquest and to see

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primitive local attachments as subject to dissolution not just by the latter but by the former, as well. These diagnoses of modernity’s unfreedom and conquest, spatial alienation and cosmopolitanism, led him to test various projects for—or at least to gesture toward possible routes to and roots for— overcoming displacement. All of these in common safeguard a fantasy of a homeland, specifically a homeland in time, a temporally primitive homeland. However, it is how these relations to a homeland are enacted and conceived that makes all the difference. For reasons fully borne out subsequently, in chapters 3 through 5 I argue that some of these are more and others less promising.

the impossibility of slavery by force alone Chattel slavery depends on forcible captivity and enforced displacement as its condition. In the context of Atlantic modernity, the Middle Passage represents force, captivity, and displacement simultaneously. Rousseau decompounds these three elements in his analyses of the origins of slavery. In neither the Second Discourse nor Of the Social Contract is Rousseau’s analysis of the origins of slavery historically reconstructive, for in the latter text too Rousseau endeavors at “setting aside all the facts, for they do not affect the question” (SD 132; OC III.132). In Rousseau’s view, proponents of early modern social contract theory traffic in a species of “origins” talk not so much in order to isolate logically the component elements of a social phenomena by reductio ad absurdum, as Rousseau does for slavery in Of the Social Contract and the Second Discourse, but rather in order to supply a plausible record for social prehistory that can be taken for all intents and purposes as real history. The first “origins” project might be called deconstructive, while the second is reconstructive. Rousseau’s origins project prioritizes deconstruction in the sense that he tests the conditions of possibility for chattel slavery by exploring all the ways in which slavery is impossible. Specifically, Rousseau isolates force, captivity, and displacement in order to put maximum pressure on each separately. Of the Social Contract examines the first; the Second Discourse scrutinizes the latter two in turn. Rousseau commences Of the Social Contract’s investigation of illegitimate social dependency—and therefore ultimately legitimate social interdependence—by disdaining arguments that slavery originates by force. Immediately after he declares that he may have found a solution to legitimate dependence, Rousseau launches a conditional phrasing—“If I considered only

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force, and the effect that follows from it, I would say; as soon as a People is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does even better” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.351–52). This statement’s conditionality declaims that force does not suffice as an explanation of the chains observed “everywhere,” since force may also account for enchainment’s absence. The verb “can” translates “peut” from pouvoir, which in its nominative form is the word for power or ability; thus the latter clause could read, “as soon as it has the power to shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does even better.” Force may aid the enslavement of some people, but this same power may just as well be used by the enslaved, at an opportune moment, to cast off their yoke. In other words, force succeeds in elucidating the origins both of slavery and liberation and also, although it is not mentioned here, in safeguarding original liberty. Thus, ambivalent force alone cannot therefore provide the solution to the puzzle of illegitimate dependence. To enslave successfully, force must have a supplement, and so Rousseau proceeds to test two that have been bequeathed to him by prior political theorists: right and convention. (As an aside for now, let us note well that the phrasing in question is not declarative, not a straightforward description of fact—force does this; force does that. It is instead evaluative and comparative—a People does well; it does better. In Chapter 5 I shall attend to the comparative dimension of this passage, which I contend is crucial to Of the Social Contract, when I discuss marronnage.) The opening words of the chapter “The Right of the Stronger” confirm force’s inadequacy and tender a supplement to it: “The stronger is never strong enough to be forever master, unless he transforms his force into right, and obedience into duty” (SC I.3, 43; OC III.354). Even the would-be master will exhaust his superior physical force; neither his strength nor his vigilance (unmentioned here but explored in the Second Discourse) will last forever. Force alone cannot master—this will be the constant refrain of Book I in Of the Social Contract and of two major scenes from the Second Discourse—and Rousseau makes his point by decompounding the constituent elements of slavery. Ultimately, he aims to demonstrate that force must be transformed by an alchemical addition, which will produce a dynamic reaction called “right” on the part of the master and “duty” on the part of the slave. Yet Rousseau finds something amiss with this formula. The terms “right” and “duty,” when connected to mastery and slavery, should don diacritical marks ex-

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pressing catachresis or, at best, irony: “the right of the stronger . . . is apparently understood ironically,” Rousseau chides. “Force is a physical power; I fail to see what morality can result from its effects. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most it is an act of prudence. In what sense can it become a duty?” he wonders. Again, he scrutinizes the component elements that a certain cabal of jurists and political theorists takes for granted and finds an “unintelligible muddle”: “once force makes right, the effect changes together with the cause; every force that overcomes the first [force], inherits its right. Once one can disobey with impunity, one can do so legitimately, and since the stronger is always right, one need only make sure to be the stronger” (SC I.3, 44; OC III.354). If one need only be stronger to be right or to have a claim to rectitude, then when the slave finds herself, for whatever reason, temporarily or newly stronger than her master, she may disobey legitimately. Her newfound superiority of force lends her the purported right she had previously lacked and that her erstwhile master lacks now. This “right,” such as it is, simply resides wherever might waxes superior, however transient such a state of affairs may be. Right is plainly and exhaustively reducible to might in such a system, and so Rousseau finds this invocation of “right” superfluous. Correlatively, if force carries the day in terms of the slave’s obedience, then duty does nothing and adds nothing properly its own and is therefore needless: “If one has to obey by force, one need not obey by duty, and if one is no longer forced to obey, one is no longer obliged to do so. Clearly, then, this word ‘right’ adds nothing to force; it means nothing at all here” (SC I.3, 44, emphasis added; OC III.354). Ultimately, force or might is the only element that adheres the whole fragile construct called “right of the stronger.” If “right” no longer supports anything on its own, then, inversely and symmetrically, “duty” no longer obstructs or constrains the person subjected to force. If duty and obligation are to stand their own proper ground as concepts independent of (and not superfluous to) might, then they must proceed from a domain altogether different from force—namely, right. The question of legitimacy will follow suit. “Let us agree, then,” Rousseau writes, “that force does not make right, and that one is obliged to obey only legitimate powers. Thus my original question [ma question primitive] keeps coming back” (SC I.3, 44 [trans. emended]; OC III.355). In other words, inasmuch as right signifies “nothing at all here,” then that person who would understand the primitive association of free persons must return to the original, primitive question: “What can make it [that is, social dependence] legitimate?” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.351).

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The right of the stronger carried some clout historically in justifying slavery and subjection, but, as much as early modern jurists and political theorists might invoke it occasionally, they found this right of the stronger flimsy and so tried to adjudicate the delicate field of slavery and subjection by other means—namely, covenant or contract. Rousseau thus tests this other possible key to the problem in “Of Slavery,” which he opens with the following formulation: “Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow-man, and since force produces no right, conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among men” (SC I.4, 44; OC III.355). On the way to distilling the legitimate from the unintelligible, Rousseau has already neutralized the so-called right of the stronger. Now he turns to convention in the sense of compact or contract, where he has a number of prominent authorities arrayed against him, at least as regards the relation between compact and a so-called right of slavery. A quite common justification for slavery in general—and the chattel slavery of Africans in particular—had developed from jurists’ elaborations of the law of war. Many early modern political theorists proposed that enemy combatants captured in war could legitimately be taken as slaves; they presumed that such prisoners of war would prefer continued life, even in servitude or slavery, to summary sentences of death. Hobbes, for example, writes: Despoticall. . . . Dominion is then acquired to the Victor, when the Vanquished, to avoyd the present stroke of death, covenanteth either in expresse words, or by other sufficient signes of the Will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the Victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure. And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a servant, and not before.

His solution is typical of a line of thought that asserts the existence of an agreeable moment in war when presence of mind, sound reason, or basic prudence would predominate enough to clear the ground for a convening of parties (Victor, Vanquished), leading to a convention that would end a state of war and begin a covenant of subjection. Grotius, in Rousseau’s view, even takes this reason or prudence to apply to a people as a whole: “If, says Grotius, an individual can alienate his freedom, and enslave himself to a master, why could not a whole people alienate its freedom and subject itself to a king?” (SC I.4, 44; OC III.355). There is, however, a semantic and temporal anxiety at work in these contractualist theories that underlines the artifice of covenants of subjection. An

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especially acrobatic excerpt of Locke’s Second Treatise epitomizes the problem: “the perfect condition of Slavery . . . is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive.” “For, if once Compact enter between them,” Locke continues, “and make an agreement for a limited Power on the one side, and Obedience on the other, the State of War and Slavery ceases, as long as the compact endures.” Slavery is war, but compact seems magically to convert all the signs: conquest to limited power, resistance to obedience. Hobbes, too, allows that slavery exists only prior to any covenant, and a mere captive, whether fractious or docile, is in no way yet obliged: “such men, (commonly called Slaves,) have no obligation at all; but may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry away captive their Master, justly.” Covenant, then, excludes slavery and war. It is the instrument of peace and the fruit of freedom. It ends slavery per se and begins servitude, properly speaking. Bizarre proposals, to say the least, and Rousseau lambastes their underlying premises, which result from an attempt to bond contract theory, which requires nominally free and nominally equal parties for any compact, to just war theory, which posits a righteous binary of victor over vanquished that therefore permits slavery as a substitute for the latter’s summary execution. Ostensibly the covenant marks an exchange of obedience by the vanquished for protection by the victor. What, however, protects the vanquished from the victor? Those flimsy words “servitude” or “limited Power” guarantee nothing at all—much as greater might never secures “right.” Certainly Rousseau does not hold back his derision: “Either between one man and another, or between a man and a people, the following speech will always be equally absurd. I make a convention with you which is entirely at your expense and entirely to my profit, which I shall observe as long as I please, and which you shall observe as long as I please” (SC I.4, 48; OC III.358). Convention barely masks an underlying brutality here. Indeed, convention continues and clandestinely condones the state of war. Hence, Rousseau attacks the right of enslavement on two fronts separately: the concept of “contract” and that of “war.” First, according to its ordinary premises, contract requires an exchange between two parties of right mind. A contract of slavery between victor and vanquished entails that the latter exchange his freedom in perpetuity in order to regain or preserve his life. Yet, the idea that one party would or could give away its freedom “irrevocably and unconditionally” lacks all sense. For, according to Rousseau, “[t]o renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s quality as man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties” (SC I.4, 45;

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OC III.356). This impossible exchange marks two aporias: economic and moral. Economically, “no possible compensation,” no conceivable equivalent, can be exchanged when one party gives everything it is or has. Freedom stands beyond measure, and, perversely, a victor or master who accepts another’s freedom remains permanently indebted to his slave. A patriarch cannot give his descendants; one cannot give oneself: “such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature” (SC I.4, 45; OC III.356). In short: no equivalence, no exchange; no exchange, no contract. Morally, the very existence of the party who would give everything, above all itself, is thereby annulled. One ceases to be at the very moment one gives everything of oneself. “Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man, and to deprive one’s will of all freedom is to deprive one’s actions of all morality” (SC I.4, 45; OC III.356). The condition “that stipulates absolute authority on one side, and unlimited obedience on the other” cleanly erases the one party at the very moment when it must muster all its moral powers of free will to pledge itself to the other. In sum: no freedom, no personhood; no personhood, no contract. The text briskly dispenses with a “contract” of slavery. Likewise, by eviscerating the very concept of war, it vanquishes the right to enslave prisoners of war. By leaching war of nothing less than enmity, Rousseau wills to banish from it the guts and gore that usually saturate its field. “It is the relation between things and not between men that constitutes war,” he states plainly. Consequently, enmity in war is only public enmity, officially and authoritatively enjoined. There is no natural or primitive enmity; it must, rather, be created ideologically by a thing—namely, the state. “War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders” (SC I.4, 46–47, emphasis added; OC III.357). This formulation significantly diminishes who counts as an enemy. It excludes what are today called “enemy noncombatants”—who are only called “enemy” by the false grace of decisions rendered by military leaders secure in the fortresses of power. Only combatants, those actively engaged as defenders, are enemies then, and “[s]ince the aim of war is the destruction of the enemy State, one has the right to kill its defenders as long as they bear arms.” Combatants are enemies, but even so, they are not enemies irrevocably or existentially. They are enemies only some of the time—only when they wield arms, only in this shrinking span of time does one have the right to kill them. However, “as

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soon as they lay down their arms and surrender they cease to be enemies,” or, rather, as Rousseau shrewdly corrects received doctrine, as soon as they cease to be “the enemy’s instruments, and become simply men once more, and one no longer has a right over their life” (SC I.4, 47, emphasis added; OC III.357). In Rousseau’s spare and tapered view, “war confers no right that is not necessary to its end.” There is consequently no such thing as a generalized right to kill in war. It is needless and unnecessary, and therefore in this instance wrongful, to kill anyone other than those whom the state instrumentalizes in its defense and who must therefore threaten one with weapons. No enemy, no right to kill; hence, war without enmity. Indeed, one could even imagine a war without killing, when, because no one subscribes to the publicly authorized enmity and because no one will consent to be the state’s stooge, no one bothers to defend the state or its designations: “It is sometimes possible to kill the State without killing a single one of its members” (SC I.4, 47; OC III.358, 357). No enemy, no right to kill: but if there is no right to kill, then there is subsequently no right to enslave. Even before the right to enslavement was codified as a subpoint of jus in bello or was (artificially) structured as a contract, convention dictated that one could enslave those captives of war whom one had not killed. However, “[i]f war does not give the victor the right to massacre vanquished peoples, then this right which he does not have cannot be the foundation of the right to enslave them.” One could conversely presume “the right to kill the enemy only when one cannot make him a slave,” but then one must wonder whether it is “not clear that by establishing the right of life and death by the right of slavery, and the right of slavery by the right of life and death, one falls into a vicious circle?” What, then, remains? Only force, again, at its brutest: “Even assuming this terrible right to kill all, I say that a slave made in war or a conquered people is not bound to anything at all toward their master, except to obey him as long as they are forced to do so” (SC I.4, 47, 48, emphasis added; OC III.358). When it speaks the language of either contract or jus in bello, enslavement does nothing more than transliterate force. The evident intent of these sections of Of the Social Contract is to deflate the high and mighty semantics of subjection. Locke and Hobbes might try to hoodwink us by alleging that contracts, compacts, covenants, or conventions end war and slavery and replace them with peace and voluntary servitude. Rousseau gainsays them in no uncertain terms:

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So far, then, is [the victor] from having acquired over [the vanquished] any authority associated with his force, that they continue in a state of war as before; their relation itself is its effect, and the exercise of the right of war presupposes the absence of a peace treaty. They have made a convention; very well: but that convention, far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuation. (SC I.4, 48; OC III.358)

I return to this passage in Chapter 5 in order to precipitate a positive account of resistance to despotic power. Here, though, I want to note that Rousseau’s text works hyperbolically by flattening the cunning and distracting distinctions of a tradition of political thought: the right of the stronger is nothing more than force; contract is force; the right of war is force; all are force, and so (at base) is slavery. And Rousseau will have no truck with the absurd “servitude” that Locke and Hobbes try to serve us: servitude is slavery, neither more nor less. As Carole Pateman has noted, “Rousseau is the only classic contract theorist who flatly rejects slavery and any contract—save the sexual contract—that bears a family resemblance to a slave contract.” Having rejected slavery as anything other than the mere exercise of force, Rousseau puts himself in a bind. If everything is force, then what keeps people from rising up at any opportune moment when it seems that their masters’ force is on the wane? Rousseau must account for an institutionalized form of docility on the part of the slaves. For if, as the premier sociologist of slavery Orlando Patterson puts it, “[n]o system of total power can ever hope to rely solely on naked force for the maintenance of power” and so must “supplement the use of force with a minimum of consensual mechanisms,” then what can give rise to such consent? Rousseau did not ignore such a problem. We have already come across the conundrum in the opening words of Book I, Chapter 3 (“The stronger is never strong enough to be forever master . . .” [SC 43; OC III.354]), but the conundrum’s true heart of darkness, in Rousseau’s work at least, inhabits a couple of paragraphs of the Second Discourse.

supplementing force In the spirit of Rousseau’s own occasional overstatement, one could assert hyperbolically that slavery’s absolute degree zero falls approximately at the division between parts I and II of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. The division of the two parts serves as a hinge

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joining two crucial originary moments: the one an impotent false start and the other an incidental yet consequential origin of civil society. The first moment, often overlooked, occurs several paragraphs before the end of Part I and establishes the impossibility of captivity in the state of nature. Then, after the hinge between the parts, Rousseau presents his much-discussed scenography of the private appropriation of land. Hence, although Maurice Cranston identifies the moment toward the middle of Part II of the Second Discourse, when the rich “at last conceived the most well-considered project” to consolidate their gains against further encroachment or expropriation by other haves by recruiting the throng of have-nots as their defenders, as the first of two social contracts in Rousseau’s political writings, I would, pace Cranston, antedate the properly first social contract to the moment that opens Part II, in which one human eloquently persuades his audience that a fenced plot is (in his eyes) mine (SD 161, 173; OC III.164, 177). This properly first social contract institutes illegitimate social dependencies and thus makes Cranston’s candidate possible in the first instance. Of the Social Contract itself, of course, details the (now) third social contract, which aims to constitute legitimate social interdependence. Yet, as we saw, Of the Social Contract’s path to truly legitimate social interdependence originates in slavery, first considered as authority by force and then as authority by convention. When he speaks of convention as possibly founding authority, it is not necessarily clear prima facie whether by “les conventions” Rousseau means conventional moeurs or legalistic agreements. Indeed, Rousseau exploits this indeterminacy that inhabits slavery’s dark heart and that manifests itself in the split between literal and figurative slavery and thus in the questions primitives (“original,” but also “primitive,” questions) on legitimate dependence that open Book I. While in its early history of usage “convention” connoted the assembly of persons often for juridical purposes and, by extension, the written record of their agreement, the term later, during the eighteenth century, came to signify the result of the most tacit of all possible consents (as in “it is a social convention to doff one’s hat before a superior”) in order to refer to an institution or practice whose origins were so obscured by tradition or history as to wear the label “since time immemorial.” Effectively, this latter version of “convention” shrouds in absence not only the original convening of human bodies (assembly) but also the agreement of minds (compact), so that the concept is bled dry of all evidence of initial human agency. Convention in this latter sense refers to a foundation without a founding, an institution whose insti-

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tuting moment is lost; in short, a convention in the absence of any convening at all—the vague abstracted achievement of “overlapping consensus.” Its power, in other words, is abstract, indirect. The textual strategy of Book I, as we saw, entails debunking the notion that there was ever any moment whatsoever of original agreement or assembly that could redeem our current conventional slavery. Instead, slavery by convention arose by slow emergence rather than melodramatic event, and even though the former process lacks the spectacular quality of the latter, it paradoxically succumbs to hyperbole just as easily. Strategically, Book I and the Second Discourse together posit the force of circumstance (and therefore the absence of individual agency) all the way down. The effect is to extricate the question “how was the social contract founded then?” from the more critical question, “what can make it legitimate now?” These are two distinct questions of which Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, and Locke had made “an unintelligible muddle” (SC I.3, 44; OC III.354). What emerges from separating the questions is a glimpse of an abstract domination at the heart of consensus. In the previous section I made the claim that Rousseau’s origins project is deconstructive. Yet, at least in regard to slavery, it is reconstructive, too. Together, the two different originary moments in the Second Discourse suggest that a matter-of-fact reconstruction of historical events cannot occur but by deconstruction: it is only by testing the impossibility of chattel slavery that a genealogical reconstruction of the creeping changes that eventually generate abstract slavery can be convincingly made. In other words, Rousseau’s reconstructive project in the Second Discourse does not unfold by way of individual great deeds, whether memorialized or anonymous. Although Rousseau’s own account of the founding of civil society hypothesizes an unnamed inventor of private property, Rousseau lays greater emphasis on reconstructing the series of contingencies that made possible that inventor’s grave deed of declaring “this is mine” in the first place. That series of contingencies steal the founder’s thunder by preordaining his deed, now rendered the produce of an almost traceless slow emergence rather than a momentous event. While certainly monumental, indeed an epitaph for the passing of l’age d’or, this properly first, maleficent “social contract” does not lack precedent. Moreover and by extension, it condenses not only the origin of property but also the emergence of slavery as an institution. Even though slavery goes unmentioned in the opening of Part II of the Second Discourse, this first social contract implies slavery and not merely property. I infer that it implies slav-

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ery by comparison and contrast to the moment at the end of Part I to which it is tethered. The two moments bear a strong resemblance, and yet the end of Part I insists on the impossibility of slavery, while Part II commences by finally establishing the final condition of possibility for slavery—namely, displacement. In the closing paragraphs of Part I, Rousseau takes pains to reconfigure what a version of enslavement based solely on might or force must have looked like. Thus this text presages the more elaborate refutation of Social Contract, Book I, published some years later. However, whereas Of the Social Contract considers the impossibility of slavery by force alone, Part I proves the impossibility of forcible captivity by adding the dimension of space. Rousseau means for his representation to be taken as fantastic because, in that hypothetical state of pure nature, “it would be rather difficult to get [Savage men] to understand what subjection and domination are.” “Of what use is wit to people who do not speak,” he adds, “and cunning to those who have no dealings with one another?” In this state there is yet no sly eloquence because there are yet so few encounters among human beings; there is yet no language because no opportunity for communication. And if there be encounters—malicious ones, even—one cannot extrapolate from these something so lasting and complex as subjection. “A man might seize the fruits another has picked, the game he killed, the lair he used for shelter; but how will he ever succeed in getting himself obeyed by him . . . ?” (SD 158; OC III.161). Presumably, one is meant to answer that this oppressor cannot in fact ever completely dominate the fellow he would put in bondage. Without obedience or some other chain of dependence, without the chaining and sedentarizing effects of the possessions of the civilized, without that “minimum of consensual mechanisms” that Patterson mentions, there is not slavery but merely quasi-Hobbesian hostility, ephemeral quarrels (SW 166; OC III.602). Nevertheless, having already emphasized how extravagant would be the a priori claim of slavery in the state of nature, Rousseau pursues the deduction to its ludicrous and logical end: . . . what would be the chains of dependence among men who possess nothing? [If one chases me from a tree, I will leave it to go to another.] If I am tormented in one place, who will keep me from going somewhere else? Is there a man so superior to me in strength, and who, in addition, is so depraved, so lazy, and so ferocious as to force me to

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provide for his subsistence while he remains idle? He will have to make up his mind not to let me out of his sight for a single moment and to keep me carefully tied up while he sleeps, for fear that I might escape or kill him: that is to say that he is obliged to incur willingly a great deal more trouble than he seeks to avoid and than he causes me. After all this, what if his vigilance relaxes for a moment? What if an unexpected noise make him turn his head? I take twenty steps into the forest, my chains are broken, and he never sees me again in his life. (SD 158, trans. emended; OC III.161)

Slavery by the force of might alone costs “a great deal more trouble” than the benefits one would seek to obtain from it. It requires that the master seal his slave in the envelope of his eternal vigilance, reinforced by the constant threat of superior bodily strength. Unrelaxed vigilance and physical might only work to immobilize the slave so long as the master can exercise superiority on both accounts, though. As soon as either the master’s vigilance or his strength wanes, then the slave has a window of opportunity for escape. And, according to this text, escape she will, for no chain of dependence— nothing other than exhaustively vigilant brute power—keeps the slave in check. In fact, escape remains the primitive possibility for this hypothetical slave in the hypothetical state of nature, and closing off precisely this exit option comprises the would-be master’s bane and task. The material conditions for slavery in the state of nature would consist in superior might and eternal vigilance, while the material conditions for freedom in the state of nature would consist in exit—that is, the existence of a “somewhere else” to escape to, an empty place where one can live unmolested. Such a place in Rousseau’s sparsely populated state of nature never lies more than two dozen paces away. And since the “state of nature” in the Second Discourse initially represents not so much a remote historical or anthropological reality as, in Dena Goodman’s words, “the totality of the qualities that constitute man’s nature,” which is to say, “a logical construct,” then such an escape back into primitive liberty never existed per se historically and no longer presents itself as a real possibility for human beings. Nonetheless, primitive liberty, as a logical construct that describes a prehistoric or ahistorical eternal nature, serves Rousseau well in the task of isolating the discrete moments of the origin of slavery among sociable humans. So as concerns this contest between two sets of material conditions—an unrelaxed superiority of strength and eternity of vigilance on the one side

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and primitive liberty and open space on the other—the passage from Part I asserts with some satisfaction that since the first one makes for an impossible (or at least extremely unlikely) attainment, then the other would trump it easily. The master’s physical presence and awareness would not be able to exhaust even a tiny field of the hypothetical state of nature without exhausting the master’s physicality itself. The master suffers from physical finitude, and his real foe—not, after all, his captive but rather the state of nature itself—is marked by infinitude. A window to primitive liberty will always eventually have opened up in the guise of both the limited scope of the master’s all-toohuman faculties and in the perpetual contiguity of a space unsaturated by any other would-be master’s presence. The outcome of the contest between exhaustible master and the inexhaustible state of nature—which would aid the slave-to-be by its mere adjacency just as contact with the earth bolstered the strength of Antaeus—is a foregone conclusion: slavery would be impossible because ultimately unsustainable. Enslaving a person in the state of nature would be like fighting a giant—that is, until a Hercules comes along in the guise of private property.

first closure: from nativized place to “this is mine” If slavery is impossible because physical force exhausts itself in its attempt to exhaust any captive’s means of escape, how, then, can slavery ever properly commence? Rousseau’s hyperbolic insistence on nature’s infinitude—and especially of space in the state of nature—would seem to make the possibility of slavery forever chimerical. Yet humans are perfectible creatures, for better and for worse. They do not maintain themselves in the pure state of nature forever. They must adapt to ferocious competition from and even predation by other creatures (including other humans): “He learned to overcome the obstacles of Nature, fight other animals when necessary, contend even with men for his subsistence, or make up for what had to be yielded to the stronger.” Those “natural weapons, branches and stones,” serve humans admirably for limited purposes of self-preservation (SD 162, 161; OC III.165). Yet, at the same time, perfectibility also brings adaptations that complicate the projects of human capture and flight. Humans develop relationships to place: one of the ways they improve upon nature is by learning to make a home for themselves in it; they begin, so to speak, to nativize their own habitat. On the one hand, nativizing space would seem to compromise ease of flight from would-be captors. Yet on the other hand, nativized place

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yields surprising new powers to erstwhile would-be fugitives, new impediments to would-be captors. In this arms race between would-be captors and would-be captives, sticks and stones will not be enough: each side will have to invent special spatial props to overpower the other. In this respect, introducing the weapon of private property may turn the tide of battle, but “this is mine” was neither the first nor the last decisive weapon. New spatial relationships, then, and their material, interpersonal consequences are among the most important “prior ideas” entailed in the famous origin of civil society, private property, and, by implication, slavery: The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the Earth no one’s: But in all likelihood things had by then reached a point where they could not continue as they were; for this idea of property, depending as it does on so many prior ideas which could only arise successively, did not take shape all at once in man’s mind. (SD 161; OC III.164)

In this complex and ambivalent passage, Rousseau again entertains an apparent absurdity, one that only “simple” people would take seriously, but he also immediately offers a qualification that erodes the absurdity of the proposition: “But in all likelihood things had by then reached a point where they could not continue as they were.” This is to say that, for whatever reason, the concept of property no longer strained credulity. Conditions, the state of things, had become such that no longer only the simple-minded (or unskeptical) few would put any faith in the claim, “This land is (and eventually: You are) mine.” The concept and word “property” did not, then, enjoy the divine status of ex nihilo creation in the impostor’s mind but rather resulted from a bricolage of “prior ideas” held together by material supports. The invention of private property, in other words, was highly likely—quite probable—at that point, “things” being as they were. A careful reading of this opening salvo must attend simultaneously to the apparent absurdity, the logical inevitability, and thus the diegetic plausibility of instituting private property.

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First, the scene seems absurd—but, importantly, it is really only apparently so, and its apparent absurdity derives from its simultaneous likeness to and unlikeness with the scene at the end of Part I. On the one hand, the two bear a likeness in that those who would suffer others’ appropriations seem to enjoy the freedom still to exit the scene. The captive truly does leave in the passage from Part I. Similarly, here the audience that finds itself ostensibly excluded from the claimed territory need not accede to the proposition in question and would seem to enjoy the same recourse: “I take twenty steps into the forest . . .” and the spell cast by the would-be private property owner is broken. Private property literally cannot take place if the struggle for its recognition is always forfeited by the availability of exit on the part of the potentially expropriated. The hypothetical hero from the beginning of Part II who pulls up the property markers and calls the private appropriator an impostor takes actions similar to the person who flees into the forest: both actively refuse recognition to the would-be appropriator. Yet here is where the differences between the two scenes matter. Rousseau does not describe flight into the forest as the response to private appropriation. Instead, the hypothetical hero’s reaction directly rebukes the would-be appropriator and negates private property by depriving the appropriator of his deceptively gotten gains. By contrast, flight of the kind described at the end of Part I would attempt to negate private property indirectly, by evasion. However, exit effectively leaves the appropriation in place. The appropriator would continue to enjoy the land he staked out. Of course, if no audience has stuck around to hear his claim “this is mine,” then none would feel deprived by the appropriator’s action: the privacy of property is moot without a captive public. However, the scene Rousseau describes is logically inevitable: so private appropriation will find its public. The captivity of this audience, its immobilization, need not literally have occurred. However, it is factually true within the scene—that is, diegetically. The speech act “this is mine” addresses a captive audience: its audience cannot in fact flee. No exit option remains to it. Why? The simple answer is that the scene does not take place in the state of nature, as did the scene at the end of Part I. Here people have gathered together rather than continued to disperse, and they have gathered because they have drastically, though “insensibly,” transformed their relationship to space (PF 66; OC III.546). The captive audience already knows “a sort of property.” Whereas denizens of the state of nature slept under any tree, temporarily dwelt in any cave, those captive to “this is mine” no longer experience the infinite substitutibility

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of natural spaces. Whereas the natural human chased from one tree simply seeks another because she attaches herself nowhere, addressees in the later scene will already have nativized nature and attached themselves to specific places. Whereas the state of nature unfolds as limitless sameness for natural humans because of (not in spite of ) the infinite ecological adaptations that their perfectibility affords them (SD 158, 162; OC III.161, 165), humans exit the pure state of nature by differentiating space. No longer incessantly adapting themselves to live anywhere on earth, they instead adapt nature to themselves. Soon ceasing to fall asleep underneath the first tree or to withdraw into Caves, they found they could use hard, sharp stones as hatchets to cut wood, dig in the ground, and make huts of branches which it later occurred to them to daub with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution which brought about the establishment and differentiation of families, and introduced a sort of property; from which there perhaps already arose a good many quarrels and Fights. (SD 164; OC III.167)

In short, these human creatures make themselves at home; they transform the infinite generality of natural space by nativizing finite, particular places. (I use nativize here in order to highlight the lack of finality or formula in these initial acts of trial and error. Moreover, I avoid the term domesticate because these patched-together dwellings did not permanently fix or sedentarize these humans, and certainly the act of adapting nature to themselves did not fully domesticate them in the sense of taming or civilizing them.) The “sort of property” these still natural humans have created is not yet per se private: it involved usufruct rather than ownership, enjoyment rather than exclusive title. Nevertheless, having made a place for themselves in nature, they will not brook forcible displacement by others: “a man must rarely have tried to appropriate his neighbor’s [hut], not so much because it didn’t belong to him. . . .” Just as there was no idea of slavery or obedience at the end of Part I, so here there is no notion of mine and thine as mutually exclusive. Thus it is not a notion of private property that prevents displacement here; rather, stealing another’s hut “was of no use to him” because “he could not get hold of it without risking a very lively fight with the family that occupied it” (SD 164; OC III.167). What precludes the forced captivity of another person in the pure state of nature also precludes the forcible displacement of persons here on the cusp of the Golden Epoch: namely, forcing others involves more trouble than it is worth. Where, in the scene at the

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end of Part I, the infinite majesty of nature itself negates enslavement, here the multiplied force of mutual aid negates expropriation—indeed, it gives rise to the “terror of vengeance,” which deters offenses by punishing them severely and thus forms a functional equivalent for positive law (SD 167; OC III.170). The mutual aid that protects against displacement is at first confined to the family; then, as humans gather into bands, the circle of “mutual help” (PF 18; OC III.476) likewise grows somewhat larger and, moreover, functions not just negatively to deter outside encroachment, but also positively to forge the mores that unite them as a people, “a particular Nation united in morals and character, not by Rules or Laws, but by the same kind of life and foods, and the influence of a shared Climate” (SD 165; OC III.169). In sum, natural humans have nativized a natural space, then aided each other against forcible displacement by others, and finally secured, in ever larger troops, their moral identity in being shaped by the ecological particularities of the place they have made their own. If the infinite space of the state of nature exhausts the force that any captor could ever muster to enslave another, here nativized place functions similarly to exhaust the force of possible appropriators and, by extension, possible captors, too. Several conjoined nativized places ground a social unity whose gathering of human forces formidably deters forcible displacement and therefore enslavement by others. Rousseau describes a social power founded in “a sort of property,” a power organically emerging from fiercely personal and agonistic attachments to land rather than, as with Locke, artificially instituted by contract over a collection of private properties otherwise deemed insecure. Moreover, just as Marx notes that continued access to commons and the persistence of small holdings shield people from wage slavery by availing them of means of production, so does Rousseau’s nativized place stand as a bulwark against chattel slavery by gathering together a substantive means of protection. Displacing or enslaving so vengeful and unified a people would require limitless effort—more than it is worth. Rousseau’s Golden Epoch provides the primitive answer to the task that Of the Social Contract sets for sociable humanity—namely, “To find a form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods of each associate with the full common force, and by means of which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obey only himself and remain as free as before” (SC I.6 49–50; OC III.360). However, the entity defended and protected remains yet an aggregation, not an association; its members’ freedom and independence are thus alegitimate, not legitimate, and guaranteed by vengeance,

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not justice; they are united by morals and character, not rules or laws—and, most significant of all, they are simultaneously empowered and bound by place, not a pact. Tethered as such to a specific place collectively nativized, such a people is, then, captive in a sense—and thus potentially a captive audience to a cunning outlander’s assertion that “this is mine.” However, the vengeance that secures their independence also protects them against credulity to a stranger’s confidence game. (In principle, the con man could hail locally, but insofar as he shatters a common moral life that combines independence and sociability, then he might as well be a stranger to his native community.) What, then, transforms a vengeful, independent captive audience into a credulous, dependent one? What makes “this is mine” likely? If private property results from a perversion of the “sort of property” that personally nativized place represents, then likewise credulity results from a perversion of the social bonds so crucial to this second state of nature. Whereas in “the first state of Nature” primitive humans altogether lacked amour-propre and morality, properly speaking, in the second state of nature amour-propre, along with morality, insinuates itself into human action. This amour-propre, however, does not motivate “petulant activity” as it does for sociable humanity (SD 166, 218, 167; OC III.170, 219, 171). If the latter mode of amour-propre is “interested” in that it afflicts sociable man with an insatiable ache to curry positive valuations from others as a substitute for the esteem he is unable to give himself, then amour-propre’s prior, primitive mode is “disinterested” in that it does no more than urge late primitive humans to avenge others’ negative opinions of them—that is, those valuations at variance with their own sense of esteem (see SD 170, 166; OC III.174, 170). Because at this stage each person is social only secondarily, her primary independence and self-reliance richly endow her with strong esteem. What can ever break this strong self-estimate? Tautologically, it seems, the answer is the sudden introduction of a sense of insufficiency. Within a system of individualized—or at most householdcentered—autarkies, there arose one party’s perceived personal-cum-material inadequacy. In a word, so long as they applied themselves only to tasks a single individual could perform, and to arts that did not require the collaboration of several hands, they lived free . . . ; but the moment one man needed the help of another; as soon as it was found to be useful for one to have

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provisions for two, equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary, and the vast forests changed into smiling Fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow together with the harvests.

Someone suddenly was led to believe she required another’s help. Such a situation could no longer be the “independent dealings with one another” of two incomparable self-estimates (SD 167; OC III.171). Rather, there arose lack and surplus, supplicant and patron. And thus mutually disinterested amour-propre transmogrified into mutually interested amour-propre, while social independence gave way to social dependence. In short, the (inevitable) moral perversion of amour-propre is underwritten by a correlative perceived transformation in material culture—namely, the radical disruption of material sufficiency. Thus has the captive audience to the declaration “this is mine” been rendered credulous, its amour-propre perverted. Thus is the scene perfectly plausible to its “sufficiently simple” audience. Because no one within the scene considers it absurd, that hypothetical respondent who would pull out the stakes remains a figment of the imagination of those not immediately in the scene, viz., us, the external, extradiegetic reading audience. The diegetic audience would no longer respond with disinterested vengeance to “this is mine” because its independently derived esteem, which had been grounded in individual self-sufficiency, which had in turn been grounded in personally nativized place, is now dislocated. Conversely, the impostor must needs declare “this is mine” because he too newly finds his prior personal estimate and the nativized place that grounds it somehow insufficient, though in a complementary way: he has grown ambitious; not his principal but his surplus is not enough (SD 171; OC III.175). What had formerly been a system of self-sufficiency, an aggregation of individualized autarkies, has now been found wanting, and in the very heart of this former system of nativized places, each marked by plenitude, there has developed a system of surpluses and insufficiencies, further agitated once others imitate the impostor and stake their own territorial claims or else stand captivated, though unmoved to imitation: charmed into passivity. This system of surpluses and insufficiencies arises within the prior system of individualized autarkies to displace it. This new system indeed is a system of displacements, not only in the sense that the utterance “this is mine” will necessarily remove some persons from specific places they had previously

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nativized as their own, but also in the darker sense that the order of private property entails a fundamental dislocation from place in general. What had made the second state of nature so special is that places, having been personally nativized, enjoyed unique qualitative value. Each nativized place was independent from and thus radically incomparable with others. As unique values each autarky was fiercely guarded against encroachments, and so the plurality of autarkies comprised a discontinuous landscape. Likewise, individual self-estimates were personally derived and without common measure. Disinterested amour-propre simply guarded against affronts to one’s independent esteem. Hence, against a line recently argued by Nicholas Dent and Frederick Neuhouser, I insist that amour-propre does not always, or by default, involve other-recognition. Distinguishing varieties of amour-propre along the disinterested/interested axis—as I do here, following Victor Goldschmidt—and not the inflamed/not inflamed axis reveals a kind of amour-propre that could in principle remain ignorant of others and their recognition or nonrecognition. In this discontinuous landscape, which supported incomparable persons, independence amounted to guarding one’s own esteem against any counterfeit representations of oneself in circulation among one’s comrades in mutual aid: one avenged those misestimates by others that drastically mismatched one’s own esteem because they threatened one’s independence, but this was (as yet) no “drive for recognition.” Disinterested amour-propre and the system of autarkies so harmoniously supported each other because fierce independence was their shared goal, and each form of independence guaranteed the other. In the new order of private property, however, not quality, but quantity prevails. Places become quantitatively comparable—measurable one to another—because no longer personally and uniquely valued. Place yields to space. Likewise, perhaps in spite of themselves, erstwhile natural humans now form a civil society precisely to the degree that they too avail themselves to measure. The replacement of disinterested with interested amour-propre makes impersonal comparisons possible by conducing each person to see herself through others’ eyes and then to calibrate that image of herself relative to others’ images; this system of mutual calibrations generates an impersonal metric of worth by quantifying comparison, eventually via the proxy of wealth (SD 171; OC III.175). Real, material differentials—real, quantitative inequalities—between persons and between their spaces become newly possible because, rather than safeguarding her own independent personal esteem against others, each now depends on others to reflect back to her a

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valuation of relative worth derived from this impersonal metric. The newfound dependency on others that interested amour-propre inaugurates now eclipses the system of autarkies and ushers in an age of universal heterarky. And herein lies the irony of “this is mine”: the system of private property—having private property of one’s own—does not represent material self-sufficiency or independent value. The utterance “this is mine” displaces self-sufficiency with other-supplementation. In fact, naming a thing (or person) mine highlights my lack of self-sufficiency. Mine in this nominative regime is a relative term, one that names not a person’s relationship to an object (or another person) in isolation, not the product of personal action on nonexclusive common objects (usufruct). Rather, in the scenes Rousseau describes, mine marks a person-object relationship always primarily vis-àvis a third-party audience who stands in a relation of privation and who is expected to participate in mutual but impersonal sizing-up. Mine presupposes others, has no performative purchase without them, but presupposes them so as to exclude them from the object while requiring them for the object’s valuation. In the universal system of supplements that is civil society, all persons require supplementation. None can any longer do without others: “man, who had previously been free and independent, is now so to speak subjugated by a multitude of new needs to the whole of Nature, and especially to those of his kind, whose slave he in a sense becomes even by becoming their master; rich, he needs their services; poor, he needs their help, and moderate means do not enable him to do without them” (SD 170; OC III.174–75). Devastatingly, even moderation cannot found autarky, because the measure of sufficiency no longer flows from oneself. All need to be supplemented by others—and the resultant system of supplements, a hyperbolically global system—proves that prior self-adequacy, prior plenitude, is now marked by interior absence, by self-inadequacy. The advent of private property and its logical inevitability as a system over the entire surface of the earth cause a fundamental dislocation from the prior order of personally nativized places. In rendering all places now relative to each other as quantifiable space by forcing unique places to succumb to a common measure, private property makes space purely substitutable again—though not as it had been in the first state of nature. There it was not the abstracted quantum of space itself that was interchangeable but rather specific features of the landscape that could promote natural human beings’ self-preservation: any tree, any cave will do, so long as the one bears fruit and the other shelters. “This is mine” makes endless, abstract substitu-

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tion and endless, abstract supplementation possible (with some infelicitous effects for proprietors-masters, as we shall soon note). It thus represents a massive displacement, the closing of place as a relation: I am alienated from the very territory I appropriate privately. Private appropriation displaces globally because, for Rousseau, it does not occur as an isolated instance but rather dominates systemically; it forecloses place as a general possibility. Yet private appropriation also displaces in more locally specific ways. Those who stand captivated and passive while the original impostor and all his imitators each utter in turn “this is mine” submit to being alienated from the places they had nativized. Formerly placed and now placeless, they refrained from acting relative to others and now cannot even seek out a new place to nativize, because this prior order of place has now definitively suffered supersession by a global contiguity of private appropriations. I am alienated from what I had personally nativized as my own (nonexclusively through usufruct); or, similarly, I may have abstained from deliberately settling on a “sort of property” before but now am altogether closed off from both this kind of usufructuary property and private property because I had refrained from action at the opportune moment. Categorically unlike the situation in the first state of nature, where a human at original natural liberty could simply repair to another tree were someone to insist on occupying a first tree, the lay of the land after the advent of private property fundamentally forecloses any escape or return to the prior order of place. The very things that make the utterance “this is mine” credible, the very condition that makes these words performatively do things, is the fact of universally lost independence, a loss that, in a sense, situates each human as captive audience to others’ words and deeds. Even if I had nativized place in the vicinity where “this is mine” was uttered, I am not bound to stick around—yet, nonetheless, things have gradually changed across the face of the earth so that now it does feel like more trouble than it is worth to pick up and leave: family ties, deeper knowledge of or keener affect for the country, disability, senescence, pregnancy may compromise my ability to go elsewhere and compete for unclaimed space there; or perhaps others will already have repeated “this is mine” beyond the horizon. In short, I am displaced yet stuck. The universal dependence wrought by the system of private property paves the way to chattel slavery and shares features with it—dependency renders each a “slave . . . in a sense” (SD 170; OC III.175)—but “this is mine” is not yet “you are mine.” However, private property generates both the global and the local displacements that bring chattel slavery into being.

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second closure: the chain of displacements The credibility of “this is mine” depends on hyperbole yet also unleashes hyperbolic forces of its own. The uttering of “this is mine,” because of its systemic force, drastically alters the conditions of human geography and thus marks a change in spatial orders that displaces those who had personally nativized places of their own. Not every inhabitant in the second state of nature established unique places for herself. Some surely had remained at natural liberty. However, those who had in fact cultivated a personal attachment to a particular place suffered the loss of place in general and personal displacement by another person’s private appropriation of that “sort of property” she had previously nativized, and this displacement does not occur by physical might. Rather, the words “this is mine” themselves do things in and to the world; they do not comprise a constative report of facts but actually succeed in taking land. Because this little hex draws its performative force from the perversely interested amour-propre of its audience, it need not therefore supplement itself with threats of physical violence. Interested amour-propre’s flirtation with violence will come in due time. To say “this is mine” displaces, then. The person displaced could, of course, privately appropriate her own “sort of property” by saying in her own turn “this is mine.” But what she will never accomplish in so doing is to recapture a relation of attachment to the sort of property she had once made her own. Instead, she would come to relate to that nativized place in a wholly new manner—through the motives and imperatives of interested amour-propre—and so would still be displaced within a place once of personal value. This twofold displacement is consequence of a first closure of space that “this is mine” sets in motion. Its force displaces not only by occupying space but by severing personal attachments to place. Yet this event, whose monumentality had been diminished by its likelihood (“. . . in all likelihood things had by then reached a point where they could not continue as they were . . .”), is also diminished by the subsequent developments it unleashes. Most importantly, the inaugural uttering of “this is mine” initiates a second closure of territorial space that creates a new series of interlinked displacements. Even if personally nativizing place becomes newly impossible in a regime of eminently substitutable spatial quanta, one could join the private appropriators rather than try to beat them at their game—but this holds true only up to a point. Territorial space does not, after all, unfold in limitless, glittering vistas. Though Rousseau may not say

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so outright, as Kant will famously do in his Perpetual Peace, he is perfectly aware that the earth’s sphericality geometrically delimits available space. Thus not everyone who eventually succumbs to the imperative to utter “this is mine” will succeed in unresisted, original private appropriation: some will have been shut out of the new order by not submitting to its imperatives the first time around. Once the utterance “this is mine” has been intoned serially across the earth such that private properties “covered all the land and all adjoined one another,” then the game changes again—definitively and massively. When private appropriation finally saturates all terrestrial space, then the supernumeraries whom weakness or indolence had kept from acquiring an inheritance of their own, grown poor without having lost anything because they alone had not changed while everything was changing around them, were obliged to receive or to seize their subsistence from the hands of the rich; and from this began to arise, according to the different characters of the poor and the rich, domination and servitude, or violence and plunder. (SD 171; OC III.175)

Servitude, if not slavery, originates here with the closure of space. Those who had in fact nativized places for themselves and then subsequently refrained from urgently declaring “this is mine” before it was too late to do so at least lost something—even if those places they had personally made had no worth in the new order. Those, however, who had never nativized places and then also abstained from appropriation during the time it was possible made themselves supernumerary: supernumeraries suffered definitive displacement within the order of private property by having taken no action at all, by their own stasis amidst the massive scramble going on around them. Only the following recourse arises for this sort of dispossessed person, dispossessed by inaction, by default: to live by brigandage or to submit to servitude to possessors. Definitively displaced as a first-order consequence of the saturation of territorial space by private appropriations and thus definitively dispossessed, she can seek subsistence by no other means than these. While Rousseau’s mention of character (les divers caractéres; OC III.175) may make it seem that native temperament predisposes the dispossessed for one subsistence strategy or the other in the new global ecology of adjoined privative properties, the choice between them is tactical. If mere subsistence is the objective for the dispossessed, then servitude and plunder are mutually substitutable. What is developing here, after the advent of private property

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but before the decisive “origin of Society and of Laws” (i.e., definitively advanced beyond nascent society [SD 173; OC III.178]), is an interpersonal state of hostility, in the midst of which the dispossessed will seek subsistence and thus preserve themselves by any means necessary: pander or plunder, servitude or seizure, on this estate, if not that one. If the origin of property, at least in the beginning, spawns a state of hostility, then one must view this new total system of adjoined private properties as generating its own perverse incentives. While the dispossessed can seek no final exit from the total system because there no longer remains any free space in which to recover their primitive liberty, they may nonetheless take advantage of the Hirschmanesque tactic of opportunistic exit from one estate to another: no bonds of loyalty keep the dispossessed from substituting plunder for servitude here if one or the other may get her even further on the neighboring property. Conversely, for maximum security of their holdings, private proprietors benefit from switching between domination and violence so as to find the optimal balance between them, one that attracts panderers while discouraging bold seizures on their part, yet repels plunderers while enticing them into servitude. So at least initially in this developing state of hostility, both dispossessed and possessors tactically inhabit either of the positionalities of either of the courses of action available to them in order to maximize subsistence and security, respectively. However, both reach an equilibrium point: it turns out that it behooves the rich to combine domination and violence by employing the dispossessed to combine servitude and plunder. And so these “old Slaves” of the rich create new slaves by plundering other possessors of their properties. Those who were made slaves by inaction now make slaves by conquest. Those displaced and dispossessed through their own inaction now displace and dispossess others. Their victims lie among that original class of people who had succeeded in private appropriation during the initial urgent scramble that closed off all available unclaimed space, but so do their masters: “The rich, for their part, had scarcely become acquainted with the pleasure of dominating than they disdained all other pleasures, and using their old Slaves to subject new ones, they thought only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors. . . .” Thus the rich subjugate their brethren. If all territorial space has been claimed in a series of privative declarations, then the rich “could no longer aggrandize themselves except at one another’s expense” (SD 171; OC III.175). The equilibrium between the rich and the poor whom they master maximizes interests for both, because the rich can

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combine domination and violence for expansion against neighbors and aggrandized amour-propre, while the poor combine servitude and plunder for surer subsistence and some security against abuse. However, the local equilibrium between rich and poor globally shatters security among private proprietors as a class. The rich employ “their” local poor to prey on their neighboring rich possessors. Thus erstwhile possessors, dispossessed by rich neighbors in league with “their” poor, now are reduced to poverty and slavery by force. The rich become newly poor, “new slaves,” at the hands of other, more forceful rich, but the poor, too, whether new or old slaves, learn to take advantage of the rule of might. Globally now, and systemically, any person—rich or poor, newly or formerly—may coordinate forces to attain the position of master or else may fall victim to others’ forces and become slave. There arises a total state of hostility in which no one’s position is secure—all are really and potentially slaves, the insecure masters above all, since they have most to lose and thus are most dependent. Any may believe “himself the others’ master, and yet is more a slave than they. How did this change come about?” Rousseau may claim not to know the answer in Of the Social Contract, but his Second Discourse reconstructs one possible approach. If nativizing place was a fatality of the first closure of space, then initial private appropriation is a fatality of the second closure of space. After no unclaimed space remains, then expropriation displaces appropriation as the necessary strategy for taking territory. Yet this strategy can only redound on the proprietors-cum-masters in the same way that the so-called right of the stronger redounds on the mighty: proprietors-cum-masters themselves become eminently displacible; they are undone by their own means. If, in the first and second states of nature, forcible displacement entailed more trouble than it was worth (because of limitless expanses for escape or mutual aid), then now, as a consequence of the second and definitive closure of space, forcible displacement certainly is worth the trouble. Given a window of opportunity in which a private proprietor’s vigilance or force wanes even momentarily, any voracious fellow possessor or any dispossessed person— whether newly or anciently dispossessed, whether loyal servant of her victim or total stranger—will find that the payoff in spoils outweighs the risk of death in the use of force. As a global consequence of this total state of hostility, no private possessor is ever secure. Indeed, she finds herself worse off than the would-be master at the end of Part I. There, at least, Rousseau describes a master mus-

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tering eternal force and vigilance to cling on to a sole captive—there, Rousseau might have said, “a quarrel begins and ends in a single day” (SW 166; OC III.602); there, it was an actual but passing quarrel between only two. Here, in the real, total, all-consuming state of hostility initiated by globally adjoined private property and universally inflamed interested amour-propre, it is the rich more than others who suffer the truth of bellum omnium contra omnes: “The rich, above all, must soon have sensed how disadvantageous to them was a perpetual war of which they alone bore the full cost, and in which everyone risked his life while only some also risked goods.” Pity the poor private proprietor. A sitting duck, a perfectly fixed target in the middle of his possession, the private proprietor invites external conquest or internal treachery. Rousseau continues: “Besides, regardless of how they painted their usurpations, they realized well enough that they were only based on a precarious and abusive right, and that since they had been acquired solely by force, force could deprive them of them without their having any reason for complaint” (SD 172; OC III.176). If expropriation is the only strategy that remains for territorial acquisition, then having any property at all entices others to take the risk of forcible displacement. Indeed, no possible justification can dissuade others; for only preponderant force can deter a breach of private possession, but preponderant force requires mastery of the poor, whose incentives to remain in servitude last only so long. The closed circle is vicious; the fortifications induced by “this is mine” strangle possessors and dispossessed alike. How, then, to exit this total global hostility?—“alone against all, and unable, because of their mutual jealousies, to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich, under the pressure of necessity, at last conceived the most well-considered project ever to enter the human mind” (SD 172; OC III.177)—namely, a novel state of slavery that yet again verifies that all are slaves—slaves this time by pact, by choice, a constrained choice, an imperative choice, a choice coerced by circumstances of total hostility, not the freely willed choice imagined by Grotius. In order to immobilize one threat to their security—namely, the threat of roving bands of supernumerary brigands—the rich must, so to speak, capture them; private proprietors must bind the placeless poor to themselves. The rich must act preemptively—better to find a way to commandeer these unstable supernumerary forces and affix them to their own estates than to court depredation by the errant landless: they disarm their possible aggressors by persuasion. In order to secure themselves against the other threat to their security—namely,

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their own inflamed ambitions—the rich must agree among themselves to fix property lines at the status quo. Thus, with a new utterance, to an audience positionally substitutable with themselves, the newly vulnerable rich propose society in the moment Cranston names the first social contract, but which, in my view, must be numbered second: “ ‘Let us unite to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure for everyone the possession of what belongs to him. . . .’ ” The speech produces an immediate and local effect: “All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom.” But it also unleashes a global effect as well, because, yet again, a new equilibrium among private properties and between possessors and the dispossessed alters the total field of incentives. Those in the vicinity of, but not party to, the new conglomeration of forces are compelled to imitate it in order to preempt any threat from it; these in turn push the wave of social aggregations further outward. Thus springs up a chain of new-minted societies: Such was, or must have been, the origin of Society and of Laws, which gave the weak new fetters and the rich new forces, irreversibly destroyed natural freedom, forever fixed the Law of property and inequality, transformed a skillful usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjugated the whole of Mankind to labor, servitude and misery. It is easy to see how the establishment of a single Society made the establishment of all the others indispensable, and how, in order to stand up to united forces, it became necessary to unite in turn. Societies, multiplying and expanding rapidly, soon covered the entire face of the earth, and it was no longer possible to find a single corner anywhere in the universe where one might cast off the yoke. . . . (SD 173–74; OC III.178–79)

What exactly has transpired here? By way of an analytical reconstruction through hyperbole, Rousseau has shown how Grotius’s slavery contract is false but true—false on Grotius’s own terms but true in the last instance because of global transformations of space. Whereas in Rousseau’s original state of nature slavery was impossible, slavery becomes possible in the end: that total state of hostility generated by the closure of space from globally conjoined private properties (which Hobbes misidentifies as a state of nature but is actually consequent to the advent of civil society) produces in turn global insecurity, which the rich parlay into a new form of mutual aid that

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establishes security, though at the cost of codified inequality. Proprietors here enact a parody of the mutual aid of the second state of nature. Whereas in the second state of nature conjoint human forces secured nativized places against intruders through aid mutually rendered by independent parties, contrastingly, in established civil society private property can only be secured by the united forces of unequal parties, most of whom are coerced by force of circumstance to enchain themselves to the rich in exchange for promises of subsistence and security. How else could the circumstantially dispossessed’s compromised freedom possibly benefit them, when it consists in nothing but immiseration compounded by insecurity? This security bought by chains is unstable, though, as is any order founded on private property, and Rousseau composes his infamous litany of revolutions of inequality. Each equilibrium arrived at from a prior state of instability never itself remains stable. Rather, each only temporarily settles relations until the new settlement itself engenders trends that destabilize it in its turn. First, rich and poor; second, powerful and weak; and finally, master and slave: the final result is a new state of nature, a third one, this one born out of civil society—indeed, the very one that earlier Rousseau indicts Hobbes for having misrecognized as the original state of nature. Rousseau writes, “Here everything reverts to the sole Law of the stronger and consequently to a new State of Nature, different from that with which we began in that the first was the state of Nature in its purity, whereas this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption” (SD 186; OC III.191). Humanity has traced a spiral. It has rounded the circumference fully but arrives simultaneously at the same point at a higher level of civilization and greater intensity of brutality. For at humanity’s most corrupt moment, just as at its purest, positions avail themselves to greater might and thus pure substitutability: “There is, in any event, so little difference between the two states, and the Contract of Government is so utterly dissolved by Despotism, that the Despot is Master only so long as he is the stronger, and that as soon as he can be expelled he cannot object to violence” (SD 186; OC III.191). In the first state of nature a human could be chased from her position in a tree by another’s violent threats or deeds, though, happily, she could repair to another tree, since all were the same. In this final state of nature a violated master cannot complain of his dispossession, for his social position depends—once again—on greater might. Happily or unhappily—does it make a difference, really?— the erstwhile master loses his position, perhaps only temporarily. If spaces

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were indifferent in the first state of nature, then social positionalities are indifferent in this final fatal parody of nature. The entire class of masters are potential slaves; all current slaves potentially may accede to the masters’ assignation; those who became slaves by (compromised, insecure) choice at the constitution of society thenceforth may compel others into slavery by (compromised, circumstantial) force. Consent, coercion, free will, deliberate action, compulsion, seduction, violation, thoughtless reflex intermingle indifferently in the total state of hostility, and they do so after the constitution of society, as well. Thus little ultimately changes in the material circumstances of morality by the constitution of society. What the newest speech act does do, however, is to christen this moral indifference as choice, if only temporarily, so that the landless appear to choose slavery for the sake of a security they mistake for freedom. To reiterate, “All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom” (SD 173; OC III.177). Slavery follows this final closure almost trivially as a universal institution—an institution made universal by the infinite substitutability of the position of slave. In other words, and hardly trivially, the establishment of society consecrates slavery as something other than the isolated (and ever so fleeting) instance of force and vigilance it had been in the pure state of nature. As Rousseau devastatingly and pithily declares in a sort of caption to a passage in “The State of War” that sketches a nearly identical set of incidents, once the first society is formed, “the whole face of the earth is changed . . . [and] there is no being free anymore” (SW 167–68, trans. emended; OC III.603). Slavery, then, is imperative, and it issues from the global order of things. In short, what Rousseau describes is an impersonal force. Accounting thus for a modern form of power as impersonal and woven into the fabric of quotidian, spatializing speech and action, Rousseau’s account of the origin of property thus differs critically from those of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In the authoritarian imaginary of the Leviathan, Hobbes posits that only the sovereign can properly originate property. Upon the sovereign’s word (and thus guaranteed by the sovereign’s word and sword), private property may come into existence. For Hobbes property primarily consists of rules, prescribed solely by the sovereign authority. In contrast to Hobbes’s authoritarian origin of property, Locke offers a pure intentionalist (if still Protestant) account, whereby that which is taken from “the State that Na-

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ture hath provided, and left it in” becomes private property by the mere act and very labor of removal. Property for Locke comes from the “mixing” or “joyning” of labor with Nature’s provisions. Locke’s theory applies as much to land as to discrete goods: “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.” By contrast, Rousseau’s account of the origin of property depends neither on conditions of authoritative decree nor on those of sheer individual designation. Rather, property arises in the Second Discourse from a relation between words and things over which no one person ever exercises full authority or intentional control. One may try to hold a plot of land or a person by force and vigilance alone, but the act will come to no account without that complex supplement of prior condition and instantaneous global effect disastrously unleashed by the speech act “this is mine.” Rousseau’s origin of private property is thus a complex structural transformation, hyperbolically yet really global, which has noteworthy ramifications for a theory of slavery. One becomes a slave, according to Rousseau’s text, not because someone else willfully says so or because one perversely may designate oneself as such (which Locke believes impossible anyway), nor because one may negatively refuse to choose any other status for oneself. Rather, just as property becomes inevitable at the convergence of several discrete conditions, one similarly may become a slave by force of the unintentional, unauthorized coincidence of circumstances. The institution of property marks a condition of heteronomy in the Second Discourse, not the individualist autonomy of Locke’s Second Treatise or the authoritarian autonomy of Hobbes’s Leviathan. In Rousseau’s political writings this impersonal heteronomy and the infinite positional substitution it inaugurates are the origin of slavery. Orlando Patterson’s “minimum of consensual mechanisms” that supplements force had always been tacitly consented to—and thus had always been merely and immediately conventional and abstract since the origin of civil society. As such, the first society and all those that, all across the face of the earth, arose to face it can claim only illegitimate origins. In short, all society exists by dint of subjection, by force or illegitimate consent, and usually both together. That is how we can all be born free but find ourselves everywhere in chains. Rousseau’s original statement may have been intended to refer to our moral slavishness—a focal theme across his writings, as we see in the next chapter—but a juxtaposition of Rousseauian hyperboles shows

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how the moral slavery of interested amour-propre is merely one node in a network of chains that extends everywhere, availing all to brutal slavery, since these chains permit no exit. Even the possibility of freedom is thenceforth structurally conditioned by these manacles such that those who would strive for freedom have no other choice but to sacrifice integrity in order to secure some cramped portion of themselves. For Rousseau, like C. L. R. James’s outsider, who “could see what the average Frenchman could not see,” those most blessed with foresight realize that choice under these circumstances is and will continue to be compromised: “the wise [les sages] saw that they had to make up their mind to sacrifice one part of their freedom to preserve the other, as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his Body” (SD 173; OC III.178). The establishment of society merely consecrates the structural conditions that the filling of earthly space had already brought about—namely, the simultaneous closure of natural infinitude, absolute exit, and—most crucially—primitive liberty. As we will see, fugitive freedom is born in this act of dismemberment necessitated by the global closure of primitive, natural liberty—yet in spite of the reference to les sages, the fugitively free person is not, as we note in the next chapter, a Stoic sage.

2

. . . and Condensations At first, luxury began to lust for what nature regarded as superfluous, then for that which was contrary to nature; and finally she made the soul a bondsman of the body . . . time was when all things were offered to the body as to a slave, but now they are made ready for it as for a master. —seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium XC

Que veut cette horde d’esclaves, de traîtres, de rois conjurés? Pour qui ces ignobles entraves, Ces fers dès longtemps préparés? —ces fers dès longtemps préparés? ........................... C’est nous qu’on ose méditer de rendre à l’antique esclavage! —“La Marseillaise”

Are you less of a slave for being loved and flattered by your master? You are certainly well off, slave, your master flatters you. Shortly he will beat you. —blaise pascal, Pensées, Fragment 393

In the first chapter I analyze slavery in Of the Social Contract, Book I, and conclude that Rousseau dismisses all traditional theoretical justifications for slavery as ill-fitting masks for mere force. In making this move, however, Rousseau poses a problem for himself, for he states that greater force is not 73

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enough on its own to institute a lasting relation: “The stronger is never strong enough to be forever master, unless he transforms his force into right, and obedience into duty” (SC I.3, 43; OC III.354). If brute force is not enough on its own to sustain any relation of subjection, then we must look elsewhere to account for the institutional character of slavery and private property. Rousseau offers elements toward a resolution of the insufficiency of force in a pair of moments in the Second Discourse. His account of the origin of property—specifically, its contrasts with the episode at the end of Part I of attempted enslavement by one person of another in the pure state of nature—can serve as an answer: an institutional form of subjection arises as an impersonal, imperative heteronomy that results from the peculiar concatenation of words and things whose global effects facilitate the closure and termination of primitive liberty in the universal appropriation of land. Only the lingering possibility of primitive liberty (whether social or asocial) had prevented property from becoming the closed and enclosing system that works to sustain and supplement force. Once the advent of civil society ends primitive liberty globally and instantaneously, then all society is based on the abstract subjection to a set of conventions that no one ever properly instituted but that all are coerced to consent to tacitly. In short, everywhere everyone is in chains, and every prior explanation for this universal slavery boils down to coerced abstracted subjection. Only the closure of primitive liberty by words and a state of things can supplement force and render slavery an institution. For Rousseau, however, the term slavery does not just capture only those have-nots dispossessed by a closed order of property. Rather, slavery refers to a positionality that all potentially inhabit. Prior to the closure of space, one need not have had anything; one enjoyed primitive liberty, absolute independence. After it, however, one either became a have-not or a have, but in either case—in either position within the total system of private property—one inevitably suffered dependency. The closure of space makes private property possible and therefore slavery, too, because pure primitive liberty depended on the inexhaustability of space—depended on the seemingly impossible transformation of (what was perceived as) global infinitude into (what is actually on a round earth) global finitude. The closure of space and this seemingly impossible transmogrification of the infinite into the finite are also what make us all possibly slaves—what structurally conditions universal slavery. It is important to emphasize that when Rousseau issues hyperbolic statements about the effects of the universal spread of the order of property

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and therefore of societies—judgments such as “the whole face of the earth is changed . . . [and] there is no being free anymore” (SW 167–68, trans. emended; OC III.603) or “it was no longer possible to find a single corner anywhere in the universe where one might cast off the yoke” (SD 174; OC III.178)—his overstatements express structural and not empirical transformations. Obviously territory did not instantly become crowdable, whereas before it had been uncrowdable. Rather, Rousseau’s texts describe an epistemological and practical transformation of the conditions of human experience; what literally grounds human relations has undergone such drastic alteration as to close off the experience of primitive freedom qua an independence expressed in terms of place. The first chapter, then, explored these transformations, which ground universal slavery in civil society as a structural relation of territorial private property revealed in global terms—hyperbolic yet truthful. This second chapter explores slavery as a universal moral relation—specifically how Rousseau flattens the social field of sociable humanity by placing many different kinds of subjection under the rubric “slavery.” Obviously “man” is not literally wearing chattel slavery’s chains “everywhere” across the globe—even if, structurally, civil society depends on the fact that anyone could potentially wear them. So Rousseau, in offering so provocative an utterance, must be condemning forms of subjection amounting to both more and less than the New World colonial practice of brutally exploitative ownership of some humans by others. What are the effects of Rousseau’s assimilation of all subjections to slavery? How does the analogy between chattel slavery and other forms of subjection both hit its target and yet fall short—especially if one of the perhaps intended effects is to tell us something about slavery’s presumptive other—namely, freedom? Confronting Rousseau’s recent critics, who express indignation that he does not acknowledge the centrality of the African slave trade in invoking the rhetoric of “slavery,” I find that such critics dismiss Rousseau’s references to slavery as merely “metaphorical” yet do not investigate the complex assimilation and differentiation at work in Rousseau’s conceptual and rhetorical apparatuses. Undertaking just such a task, I conclude that much of Rousseau’s own indignation is directed at decadent Europeans who cannot appreciate their legal freedom because, morally, they are slavish. Rousseau understands that all moral slaves are afflicted with deformed, denatured senses, and this explains in part why chattel slavery can be institutionalized. Yet Rousseau’s moralism has depoliticizing effects, fully apparent in his pre-

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sentation of Émile’s Barbary slavery in the sequel to Émile. What Émile says about himself as a slave reflects a standard Stoic line of argument about the categorical differences between legal and moral freedom: legal slaves may be paragons of moral freedom, as Émile is meant to be. This Stoic argument produces some ironic effects, which are reproduced in Rousseau’s own moralism. However, Rousseau repoliticizes some blind spots in Stoic thinking on freedom, even if these cannot fully compensate for Stoicism’s other moralizing qua depoliticizing effects that Rousseau seems perfectly happy to court.

the problem of slavery for rousseau Considering that the first chapter of the first book of Of the Social Contract begins with those famous, infamous words, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” it may come as a surprise that few scholars have given more than cursory attention to slavery’s place in Rousseau’s political theory or even in his oeuvre more generally. Not surprisingly, however, those scholars who have done so are critical of Rousseau. Rousseau’s flattening of the political field—that is, his polemical assessment that everyone is a slave, that we may all be born free, but all nevertheless wear the irons of slavery—has earned him the ire of one historian of ancien régime slavery: Book 1, Chapter 4, of The Social Contract is ostensibly about personal slavery, yet Rousseau glides immediately from the particular instance of the civil slave who alienates himself and enslaves himself to his master to the general question of whether an entire people can alienate its freedom and subject itself to a king. In other words, Rousseau is interested in the slave, white or black, only as a symbol of political domination, rather than in the actual condition of slaves in the French colonies of the time.

The problem of slavery and its connection to freedom pervades Of the Social Contract and takes root in the Second Discourse. Interpretations like this one by Sue Peabody are based on a reading that narrowly confines itself to the chapter whose heading names slavery, and her assessment ignores the extent to which Hugo Grotius’s proposition about one’s freedom to pledge oneself to slavery continued to transfix the imaginations of jurists and theorists up to the French Revolution. Grotius’s work enjoyed wider discursive currency than Peabody allows; it was not simply Rousseau’s callous oversight. “Although The Social Contract would not become widely read until the Rev-

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olution, it shows how a critique of monarchy via the metaphor of slavery was already being formulated mid-century.” In making a claim about metaphor and thereby pitting merely rhetorical philosophes against her study’s central subjects—namely, the activist lawyers who usually successfully tried cases for the manumission of black slaves brought to France from the colonies on the principle that slavery was forbidden on metropolitan soil—Peabody toes a venerable historiographic line that sees antislavery and anti-imperial references in pre-Revolutionary French political theory as nothing other than metropolitan antidespotism’s exotic new clothes. According to this prominent view, argued, for instance, by Reinhart Koselleck, critiques of African slavery and the extermination of American savages served as the “indirect political criticism” of French absolutism and, for Rousseau, of French society tout court. For these and other scholars, representations of slavery in ancien régime political thought are merely metaphorical. Alternatively, one could argue that the political rhetoric of slavery by Rousseau and others is a metaphor that condenses meaning not in space, assimilating colonial plantations to contemporary political despotism in Europe, but rather in time, assimilating Classical antiquity to the age of the Lumières. First, the very language of important strands of early modern political theory is derived from the legacy of Roman legal concepts. The transmission, translation, and reception of concepts such as libertas and potestas, principality and republicanism, and—most significantly here—domination and servitude, from Roman legal terms for master and slave, remain significant even in the Enlightenment context, and Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis, which made creative and important interventions in Roman legal thought, still looms large for Rousseau. According to recent critics of Rousseau’s and the Lumières’ neglect of African chattel slavery, these thinkers were deaf to plantocracy because they only heard the Latin siren song of the conceptual language of the dominus (master). Second and consequently, the philosophes’ interest in the rise and fall of the Roman Republic merely masks contemporary French republican sympathies and a criticism of French empire via narratives of Rome’s own decline and fall due to its imperial overextension. To be sure, Montesquieu peppered his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1721) with allusions to France’s malfeasance in the Indies and, in yet another (though nearer) metaphorical displacement, to Spain’s depredations in conquering the Americas. Moreover, according to J. G. A. Pocock, “a companion piece to Montesquieu’s work on Roman history is

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his unpublished Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, in which he argued that the growth of commerce had rendered empires of conquest impracticable—as, by implication, was not the case with archaic economies of antiquity.” Empires of conquest were sustainable in antiquity up until they caused the demise of an overreaching Rome, whose end spelled that of an epoch. France too would fail and fall if it persisted in following an outdated model: growing politically by conquest and economically by slavery. Montesquieu did not stand apart from other eighteenth-century French thinkers in drawing such connections. Throughout the early modern period, Rome became a flashpoint for proponents of republicanism and for critics of slavery and empire. As I show in a later chapter, these semiotic chains regarding the Roman Republic versus the Roman Empire (as well as Sparta versus Athens) pervade Rousseau’s oeuvre. Retrospectively, though, seemingly decisive evidence in favor of the association between antique slavery and its counterpart in modern Europe may be the prominence of the liberty cap in Revolutionary and republican imagery. The pileus, a close-fitting, round bell-shaped, sometimes smoothcrowned, sometimes slightly peaked cap associated with the free-born working citizen, was ceremonially bestowed upon ancient Roman slaves upon manumission and stood as a symbol of their newfound liberty. Held aloft on a pike, as in traditional republican iconography, a variant of such a cap appears on the cover page of Marc-Michel Rey’s 1755 publication of Rousseau’s Second Discourse along with a full-bosomed, white-skinned personification of Liberty and other symbols of freedom (broken chains, a bird flying from an open cage, and that “enemy of all constraints,” the cat) (see Figure 1). As Yvonne Korshak has noted, the symbol of the liberty cap mutated over time. In a coin commemorating his victory over Charles V of Germany, King Henry II chose, in 1552, to depict a pileus that “appears, quaintly, as a tallcrowned, narrow brimmed Renaissance hat,” not wildly dissimilar from that in Rousseau’s cover page. As many of his works were originally printed in Amsterdam by Rey, there may also be a visual association being made with the hats of the Protestant bourgeoisie who favored the Dutch revolt against the Catholic Hapsburgs in the late sixteenth century. Indeed, according to Franco Venturi, Dutch republicanism exerted deeper and more abiding influence on French Enlightenment republican sympathizers than ancient Roman republicanism. (Venturi’s thesis seems overstated, especially in regard to Rousseau.) In sum, the tall-crowned, wide-brimmed pileus on the Second Discourse’s cover page may derive not only from the image-repertoires of

Figure 1. Artist unidentified. Title page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1st ed. (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1755). Engraving by Simon Fokke. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. Call no. Case JO 758.

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antique manumission but also that of antidespotic rebellion. The pileus/hat appears again on the cover page of the first edition of Du contract social, this time held aloft on a pike by Athena/Minerva (see Figure 2.) The evidence remains undecisive in the final analysis. Rousseau rarely specifies in Of the Social Contract which slavery he intends for his readers to envision. Consequently, rather than decide among ancient and modern, metaphorical/metonymic enchainment and literal chattels, we must instead insist, as does Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, on “stressing the tense coexistence of the so-called ‘metaphorical’ and empirical, colonial uses of the term.” Stressing such a tense coexistence would suggest that Rousseau is not trying to mask Atlantic imperial power or to denigrate the slaves in the French West Indies by ignoring or displacing their bitter and brutal experiences as chattel. His figurative language is not straightforwardly and irredeemably parasitic on literal practice, even as the French were parasitic on colonial slavery, economically, politically, culturally, and even gustatorily in their consumption of sugar, coffee, and rum. Indeed, Rousseau is alive to the cruelties toward slaves presently situated in the French colonies, even though he does not protest frequently or effusively enough for critics such as Peabody or Louis Sala-Molins. Nonetheless, Rousseau achieves much, I am arguing, by flattening the political field and thus reducing all humanity to the level of enslavement. Doing so, he thereby dubs all familiar forms of social dependence illegitimate and points to their common origin. In regard to slavery, subjection, and illegitimate dependence, Rousseau’s meaning-making works by condensation of multiple terms into one as much as displacement of one term by another—that is, Rousseau renders his universal judgment meaningful by way of a play across metonymy and metaphor. He condenses multiple modalities of subjection into the most observably illegitimate one of all, that form of personal social dependence called chattel slavery, structured and conditioned by private property and often visibly designated by chains. At the same time, he displaces the signifying intensity of chattel slavery onto moral slavishness and political despotism in order to highlight the feature shared by all three in different forms: domination. So, concretely stated, chains metonymically figure chattel slavery, which in turn metaphorically figures civil-moral and political domination. The psychic force of unfreedom shifts constantly from metaphor to metonymy and back through condensation and displacement.

Figure 2. Benjamin-Samuel Bolomey. Title page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social, 1st ed. (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1762). Engraving by Charles-Ange Boily. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. Call no. SC 2711.

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Rousseau’s texts thus render subjection freshly conspicuous in assimilating its many possible forms to the most obviously physical one while provoking readers, precisely through the jarring effect of this universal assimilation, to contrast the multiple iterations of domination gathered under one sign and a common emergence. Hence, reading slavery as “merely metaphorical” may entirely miss, by dismissing, the way that the Rousseauian text constructs conceptual significance. Presuming that Rousseau slyly means to put less physically brutal versions of subjection before his readers’ eyes when he mentions chattel in chains, one assumes Afro-Caribbean slavery to consume the full range of possible slaveries. This narrow view of what constitutes slavery thus effectively dismisses sociable man’s “living only in the opinion of others” (SD 187; OC III.193) as not really also a kind of slavery. Seeing only metaphor, then, one blinds oneself to the metonymies and metaphors that Rousseau densely layers together. Differentiating the multiple valences of the term “slavery” in Rousseau’s work and how his texts compact them into a primary type will enable us later to assess, by passing everything broadly designated as illegitimate social dependence through a finer mesh, how Rousseauian freedom qua legitimate interdependence might be practiced.

on the senses of “slavery” Across Rousseau’s political theory, but especially in Of the Social Contract and the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, the words “slavery” and “slave” (esclavage and esclave) sort into three principal senses. Each points to a conceptually distinct power relation, but all share a family resemblance in being instances of domination—that is, illegitimate social dependence. There is, first, the “literal” sense of the term that refers to chattel slavery, the institutionalized private property in human beings, characterized by forcible captivity and natal alienation. To the ire of his critics, though, Rousseau’s political theory more frequently employs other senses of the term: slavery as the dependence induced by interested amourpropre and sociability generally, or moral slavery; and slavery as the despotic subjection of a people to one person, or political slavery. Either of these latter senses could be described as “broader” or “extended” or more “abstract” usages of “slavery” because they do not feature humans as private property subject to physical force. However, the previous chapter does make clear that Rousseau’s arguments in Of the Social Contract and the Second Discourse

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strongly associate private property in land with private property in persons, that the former’s reality conditions the possibility of the latter, that the yen for private property in land materially and psychologically binds humans to private property as a system and therefore constitutes (moral) slavery, and that this enslaving system of private property depends on actual or potential force and displacement. In short, even when humans are not literally enslaved as private property, they are (literally) enslaved to private property as a system. By rendering space substitutable, by abstracting it from independent moral and personal relevance, this system at the same time renders persons quantifiable and makes both chattel slavery and what might be called a distinctly modern commercial despotism possible, as Rousseau signals in an early passage of the First Discourse: “ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money. One will tell you that in a given land a man is worth the sum for which he would be sold in Algiers; another, pursuing this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They appraise men like herds of cattle” (FD 18; OC III.19–20). As both word and concept, then, “slavery” undoubtedly appears in many guises and contexts in Rousseau’s oeuvre, and these several iterations often seem to have little in common with one another. However, Rousseau distributes moral valences to enslavement in a way that cuts across surface variations among the ostensible categories of literal, figurative, moral, and political slavery. I shall briefly survey an instance of each sense of slavery in turn. The goal is not to catalog instances of slavery or servitude comprehensively throughout Rousseau’s works, but instead to argue that the intensities of brute force and displacement on which literal chattel slavery depends are not diminished in the other usages. Rather, the other senses of slavery tremble with the violences of chattel slavery, because the relation between it and these others works by a play across metonymy and metaphor. The intensities of the latter, nonchattel forms of subjection are heightened by the charge involved in associating them with the violences of chattel enslavement. Likewise, the alienated and yet imperious forms that appetite, will, thought, and sociability itself assume under the regime of private property tell us something about the chattel slave’s possible relation to freedom. Certainly, it is a rare moment when Rousseau makes any explicit reference to historical chattel slavery, ancient or modern, in his writings. In the political writings, one unequivocal textual reference stands out. In Of the

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Social Contract, Rousseau mentions in passing—apropos of the replacement of what in Chapter 3 I will call “patriotic compression” by a bloated, overextended populace—that the last census before the fall of the Roman Empire did not even have to count the number of slaves for the population to reach four million (SC III.12, 110; OC III.425). One must go further afield for references to contemporary African slavery. Notably, there is in Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse an at-once direct and, again, vague description of chattel slaves brought to the New World: I saw Europe transported to the extremity of Africa. . . . I saw these vast and unfortunate countries that seemed destined only to cover the entire earth with herds of slaves. From their lowly appearance, I averted my eyes from disdain, horror, and pity, and seeing the fourth part of my fellows changed into beasts for the service of others, I groaned at being human.

The passage is remarkable for its strange lack of sympathy. It is not that St. Preux in this letter to Julie shows no pity for the Africans enslaved, but rather that, in seeing them abjected from humanity by being objectified as property, he demonstrates an inability to redignify them as human beings. St. Preux’s struggle to pity—in the rich Rousseauian sense of that term (explored in the final section)—could stand in for the author Rousseau’s own ambivalence toward those held as chattel. The other two senses of the term “slavery” have a much more secure foundation in the texts of the Second Discourse and Of the Social Contract. Slavery qua despotism dominates the latter’s first book, where Rousseau incisively notes, There will always be a great difference between subjugating a multitude and ruling a society. When scattered men, regardless of their number, are successively enslaved to a single man, I see in this nothing but a master and slaves, I do not see in it a people and its chief; it is, if you will, an aggregation, but not an association; there is neither public good nor body politic. (SC I.5, 48; OC III.359)

Submission of a people or collected persons to despotism represents a collective dependency, one person’s enslavement of many, who in the last instance were transformed into several discrete persons from one people by their despot. However, the individual dependencies wrought by vain sociability

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seem veritably to provoke Rousseau’s greatest indignation and censure: “It is the hustle and bustle of commerce and the arts, it is the avid interest in gain, it is softness and love of comforts that change personal services into money. . . . Give money, and soon you will have chains. The word finance is a slave’s word. . . . In a truly free State the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with money” (SC III.15, 113; OC III.429). Slavery in both cases, political and moral, derives from an act of alienation and representation. One thus loses political self-reliance and economic self-sufficiency as cooperative endeavors among interdependent persons. “Slavery” is what names this loss for Rousseau: one alienates one’s practice of liberty to another person who then falsely claims to represent one’s good politically; one buys the labor of another legally free person as a substitute for what one could clearly do oneself. Ironically, what thus happens in consequence of these interpersonal relationships is not the affirmation of social interdependence but rather isolation qua mutual alienation: personal services become impersonal, while political association becomes a mere aggregation of dissociated individuals—the dismemberment of a body politic. How to make sense of the distribution of this word “slavery” across several concepts and multiple iterations? The fact that the first, most literal sense rarely appears in Rousseau’s oeuvre has prompted Daniel Whitman to criticize that Rousseau “goes far beyond, yet at the same time falls short of the issue of African slavery.” In a very general respect Whitman stands in agreement with critics cited earlier: for them it is not enough that references to slavery be “literal” in Rousseau’s corpus; rather, the literality must assume a historical type contemporary with Rousseau’s writing, specifically the Euro-Atlantic, plantocratic chattel enslavement of Africans. Nevertheless, by contrast with the complaints of other detractors, the double edge of Whitman’s criticism—too much yet not enough signification—indicates an awareness of the complexity of the meaning-making at work in Rousseau’s critique of political modernity. To understand this complexity, it behooves us to understand how the different meanings invoke and rely on one another, condense and displace each other’s intensities. A (hyperbolic) passage devoted to a critique of illegitimate social dependence in Note IX of the Second Discourse draws together the different senses of slavery and can serve as a conceptual nodal point. By contrasting a savage in the state of nature to a denatured social human, the endnote links a non-

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specific, ahistorical reference to slavery with extreme dissociation and ultimate isolation. Radical displacement from nature both correlates with and causes the slavery of self-interested sociability, which in turn both correlates with and causes slavery in the sense of privately appropriated chattel: Savage man, once he has supped, is at peace with all of Nature and a friend to all his kind . . . but with man in Society it is all a very different business; first necessities have to be provided for, and then superfluities; next come delicacies, and then immense wealth, and then subjects, and then Slaves; he has not a moment’s respite; what is most singular is that the less natural and urgent the needs, the more the passions increase and, worse still, so does the power to satisfy them; so that after long periods of prosperity, after having swallowed up a good many men, my Hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is sole master of the Universe. (SD 198–9; OC III.203)

If the savage places himself squarely at home in nature by fulfilling limited needs, the denizen of civil society is not simply displaced from both the pure and the secondary states of nature but rather veers progressively further away from it. The list, moving from necessities to slaves, traces what seems in principle an endless intensification of denaturing—yet there is after all a limit to denaturing, for, past a certain tipping point, the intensification of artifice, desire for it, and power to bring it into being grow together in direct proportion to the desolation of the earth until only the lonely despot remains, master of none. Thus, while the sated savage can approach others independently as friends, insatiable “man in Society” ironically can only approach others as dependents-enemies: because his denatured being can never be sated, he must needs regard any other person as either an instrument for or a rival to the attempted satisfaction of his artificial needs, thereby rendering true society impossible. Rather than associating with others on mutually interdependent terms, sociable man selfishly subjugates them to his appetites, mistrustfully antagonizes others (including his own dependents) as threats, and imperiously lords over them for personal aggrandizement. Hence, sociable humans’ appetites for artifice, insecurity, and ambition each thwart the possibility of legitimate social interdependence. The passage depicts the reign of these appetites as a self-enslavement that brings in its train chattel enslavement of others. Moreover, chattel slavery at its extreme is figured as one person’s cannibalism. At first, the would-be despot must assemble other

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human beings around him to aid him with his factitious needs; however, because these needs are so decadent and tortuous, addressing them consumes the very bodies of the people the despot must dominate. Consuming those whose services he commands thus results in self-deprivation, which in turn stokes the artificial need for yet new victims to cannibalize. Even if any blunt mention of private property is absent from this passage from Note IX, private property is nevertheless central to the entire set of relations it telegraphs: the origin of private property, first, marks the birth of the sociable human out of her massive displacement from the late state of nature and, second, conditions both conceptually and structurallyspatially the possibility of the private ownership of other human beings. As with the positive feedback loop between interested amour-propre and private property described in Part II of the Second Discourse and analyzed over the course of Chapter 1, the dynamic relationship between denaturing and selfor other-enslavement is not only viciously circular but mutually reinforcing. Indeed, for Rousseau these are not unrelated developments. Such is the insufferable dynamism of Rousseauian civil society: interested amour-propre produces the hard distinction between self and other in the moment of enchaining them to each other, with destabilizing consequences for both; meanwhile, private property in marking “mine” and “thine” generates a denatured and denaturing relation to place and persons. The further humans diverge from nature, the greater is their need for supplements to nature, and thus the stronger is their dependence on things and especially on persons treated instrumentally as things. Yet as these are progressively worn down and consumed in pursuit of progressively impossible satisfaction, both the appetite for and dependence on these supplements swells. Slavery—in all its concepts and iterations in the Rousseauian text—owes its very existence to a departure from the late state of nature.

on slavery of the senses Unsurprisingly, then, self- and other-enslavement raises questions about what social relations and forms of personhood might count as natural. As Rousseau is well aware, the locus classicus for political theories of “natural” slavery is Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle, Of the Social Contract reports, had claimed “that men are not naturally equal, but that some were born for slavery and others for domination.” With and against this ancient authority, Rousseau feels compelled to conclude that

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Aristotle was right, but he mistook the effect for the cause. Any man born in slavery is born for slavery, nothing could be more certain. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to be rid of them; they love their servitude. . . . Hence, if there are slaves by nature, it is because there were slaves contrary to nature. Force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. (SC I.2, 43; OC III.353)

The passage is significant in at least two respects. First, Rousseau uses Aristotle against himself and again links Of the Social Contract to the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. “[N]othing could be more certain” than that some humans seem naturally servile. However, by asserting that slaves seem servile because they are (objectively) naturally servile, Aristotle inconsistently applies his own stated method, a caption to which Rousseau places prominently on the title page of the Second Discourse as that work’s epigraph and guiding principle: What is natural has to be investigated not in beings that are depraved, but in those that are good according to nature. Aristot[le]. Politic[s] Bk. II. (SD 113; OC III.109)

Aristotle does not realize, Rousseau implies, that those whom he calls slaves by nature seem such because they were made slaves against nature. In adjudging slaves’ nature servile, Aristotle is studying an already imperfected or warped nature. In point of fact, that which Aristotle interprets as a pure, discrete entity is to Rousseau instead a fallen version of free human beings, compromised by force of circumstance. A second related point is linked to the discussion in the previous chapter: Rousseau has settled on another supplementary solution for the impotence of force. Cowardice, too, works to keep the enslaved in check. Force captures, but cowardice captivates: it effectively replaces eternal vigilance in the afore-analyzed scenario from the Second Discourse. The captor need not stand, ever wakeful, never turning his head at unexpected noises. When he can count on the captive’s cowardice as a minimal consensual mechanism, the master need no longer “incur a great deal more trouble” in capturing and keeping a slave (though there is surely some effort and a whole mess of trouble involved in instilling perfect cowardice, as we shall note in the next section and in the final section of Chapter 3, when we scrutinize how Émile’s prior negative education prepares him for perfect slavery).

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Cowardice, on Rousseau’s account, does its work so well, moreover, that it is no longer even needful that there be a master at all. Become second nature, cowardice goes further than merely supplementing force: it dispenses with force altogether because it renders human sensibility itself cowardly. These slaves have enslaved their own senses, not so that they do not feel their chains: indeed, they do. Yet—what is much worse—their cowardly senses take comfort in fetters. Again, Rousseau echoes the thought in the Second Discourse, where he targets other authorities in addition to Aristotle: both philosophers and politicians “attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude because of the patience with which the men they have before their eyes bear theirs, not realizing that it is as true of freedom as it is of innocence and virtue that one appreciates their worth only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and loses the taste for them as soon as they are lost.” Having lost the taste for freedom, such slaves luxuriate in the security of the routine tug of their irons. They enjoy peace and quiet (SD 176, 177; OC III.181)—but of a peculiar sort. Obviously, within the status system of civil society, all persons struggle over the familiar positions of “slave” and “master.” Yet these daily struggles for position and status paradoxically lend a sense of security: the cowardly sociable person’s insatiably interested amour-propre is hardly at peace with itself, yet this self-inadequacy has itself become a long-familiar sensation; hence, to live without it—to risk it truly—becomes unconscionable. Even those who hold the position of “masters” within this system have lulled themselves into the cowardly sensory habits of the total system of roles. These masters share denatured senses with their slaves—and enchained, denatured senses are prerequisite for this ultimately masterless system of slavery to perpetuate itself: “just as violence had to be done to Nature in order to establish Slavery, Nature had to be altered in order to perpetuate this Right” (SD 179; OC III.184). That these sociable humans finally prefer dependence serves as a hallmark of their denatured, enslaved senses. Without doubt, the idea of denaturing takes pride of place in the conceptual repertoire for Rousseau’s critique of modernity. Likewise, a notion of denaturing heavily informs the critique effected by the Stoics’ redefinition of slavery—from which Rousseau takes inspiration, more so indeed than from Aristotle. For both Rousseau and the Stoics, most slaves were scarcely aware of their slavery, and worse, those few decadents who could claim awareness of their enchainment actually condoned and tacitly invited it. Taken broadly, Stoic theorists envisaged three forms of slavery that, sig-

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nificantly and revealingly, diverge from Rousseau’s. For Stoicism there were, first, “literal” slaves—those human beings held as chattel in the service of their master-owners. Second, more abstractly, slavery described a condition all human beings share insofar as each is subject to fortune. Third, members of a large subset of this second category rendered themselves slaves, indeed slaves of the most unnatural kind, proving themselves unable to exercise will in accordance with reason, either in resisting fortune or in assenting to appetite. Some humans belong to the first sort of slaves; all are slaves of the second sort; most make themselves slaves of the third sort. How these three sorts interrelate—specifically, how they overlap and diverge—reveals what objects of criticism most powerfully drive Stoic conceptions of unfreedom. Yet, as we note presently, it is how slavery of any sort differs from an altogether different category of human that points to what freedom looked like primitively—and, most crucially, why freedom regained from unfreedom cannot look the same as the freedom originally lost. The musings of the imperial Roman thinker Seneca sketch some of the ways that the different sorts of slavery converge and stand in tension. In Epistle XLVII, Seneca addresses his friend Lucilius on slavery and slave ownership: “I’m glad to hear . . . that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. It is just what one expects of an enlightened, cultivated person like yourself. . . . Strictly speaking, they’re our fellow-slaves, if you once reflect that fortune has as much power over us as over them.” Seneca here remarks that chattel slavery not only forms a subset of the universal category of enslavement to fortune but also literalizes the latter. For the Roman imperial Stoics, the conventional practice of capture and enslavement of the freeborn in war (whose legitimation as a practice Rousseau dispenses with in Of the Social Contract, Book I) exemplified the slavery of all human beings to fortune—it could in principle befall anyone. Seneca’s letter thus assimilates the first sort of slavery to the second by condensation. The circumstances of the subset (chattel slavery) represent more intensively the condition of the full set (universal slavery to fortune): this is metaphor. Yet the moral reaction provoked by such metaphoric assimilation among conditions will vary from person to person. Seneca suggests that wise masters positively sympathize with their chattel: if the legally enslaved person literalizes the master’s own (superficially less fateful) enslavement to fortune, then the master’s recognition that his property are “fellow-slaves” would contribute to the humanization of those chattel slaves. By contrast, the nonwise master does not recognize that she shares a fate with the human beings

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she owns, and this lack of recognition thus assigns her to the last category of slave—one culpable for shackling herself. Unsympathetic to her own chattel slaves, the nonwise master refuses any deep apprehension of fortune’s universal dominance—she sees her slaves as, say, naturally servile and/or deserving of their misfortune; she abjects them, treats them as drastically unlike herself rather than as fellow-humans qua fellow-slaves. Consequently, she abuses her slaves as dehumanized instruments rather than using them humanely in accordance with morality. And in her abuse of them, she thus enslaves herself all the more, because her instrumental view of them invites her to assent so willingly to the whimsy of her impulses. With dehumanized instruments ready at hand, she allows fleeting desires and passions to commandeer her faculty of volition; she chains her will to impulse; she makes her own will unfree. This is the worst kind of slavery, because it is self-created: according to Seneca’s account, “there’s no state of slavery more disgraceful”—and by extension none more dehumanizing—“than one which is self-imposed.” One need not be a nonwise legal master, of course, to condemn oneself to moral slavery. A legally free person owning no slaves could suffer selfimposed slavery, too. The relevant condition is the moral one, the nonwisdom, rather than the legal one, chattel ownership-mastery. “Slavery, in the sense which interested the Stoics,” one specialist insists, “is the moral condition of the non-wise.” Sundering the moral from the legal condition of slavery, the Stoic stance made possible a quite harsh judgment of some legal slaves’ moral actions. That is, chattel slaves could in a sense intensify their legal slavery in remaining morally ignorant—thus compounding slavery of the first sort with that of the third. Hard-line Stoicism thereby produced some ironic positions on slavery. For example, a legal slave who took badly to her slavery by persistently revolting against her fate (and her master) would earn legitimate condemnation by even a wise, humane master. By contrast, a legal slave could refuse self-imposed moral slavery by conforming her will to the lot dealt her by fortune—namely, life in the role of owned property affirmed with equanimity. Advancing the Stoic view by authority of his personal experience as a slave at imperial Rome, Epictetus—whom Rousseau lauded for cultivating utter dispassion even while his owner-master was breaking his leg—defined the slave thus: “he who can be constrained or necessitated or impeded or thrown into anything against his will is a slave.” Moral quality of will, then, and not legal status sorted slave from free. There is more than a little of the Stoic view in Rousseau’s representations of slavery. Rousseau too called everyone a slave—everyone, that is, who has

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lived after the passing of the state of nature. He too condenses this universal condition into that of legally (if illegitimately) enchained human property by making the latter and more specific category represent the former as fellow-slaves—in other words, in the interpretive move that irks so many critics, he too condenses and displaces slavery. And, importantly, Rousseau too reserves his sharpest censure for those who allow themselves to sink into slavery—who in short enslave themselves. For instance, although he admits that “moral freedom” is not his focus in Of the Social Contract, he nonetheless cleaves to a definition whereby “the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom” (SC I.8, 54; OC III.365). Finally, as we shall see in analyzing the narrative of Émile’s Barbary captivity, Rousseau’s text too generates judgments of real, legal chattel slaves that prove to be just as ironic as hard-line Stoic views.

émile’s barbary captivity: moralism and politics Rousseau shares much, then, with Stoicism on the characterization not only of slavery but also of freedom, and the parallels between them serve to reveal how ambivalent Rousseau’s understanding of freedom ultimately is. Adopting—though politically adapting—a Stoic view of freedom as autonomy, Rousseau regards any alienation of one’s will for the sake of appetite or inclination as tantamount to slavery. Alluding to what will become across Rousseau’s oeuvre a familiar distinction between the unmerited goodness of savages in the state of nature and the virtue that the civil state makes possible (though by untiring effort), he argues that the “transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man by substituting justice for instinct,” duty for physical impulsion, right for appetite, and reason for mere inclination (SC I.8, 53; OC III.364). Political freedom differs from moral freedom only in that the general will of the associated people prescribes the law for every person. Autonomy is thus a collective project, binding severally on everyone in the real and particular association, rather than an individual endeavor by which one tries to conform one’s will to the dictates of some abstract rational nature. At the same time, however, moral analysis is never far from the political in Rousseau; after all, he authors not only Of the Social Contract, but also, of course, Émile and other works Senecan in tone or inspiration. How to make sense of this not quite perfect overlay? And how, moreover, to distinguish the moral and political tendencies while nevertheless sustaining a

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cognizance of their virtual simultaneity? Approaches to this second question will come in the following three chapters. A critical first step toward the first question, though, involves realizing that Rousseau’s thought may owe this too-close propinquity of moral and political concerns—the almost exact coincidence of individual responses and collective relations in face of the structural effects of civil society’s abstract domination—to the nearly precise conterminousness of two kinds of slavery, the generic chains Rousseau observes “everywhere” (because it is structurally impossible to be free after the passing of the state of nature) and the more specifically blameworthy sort of individually self-imposed slavery. Not dissimilar from the relation Seneca draws between the natural slavery of all and moral slavery of most, Rousseau’s structural “everywhere in chains” and the moral “impulsion by mere appetite” overlap with only the slightest margin of difference, and what occupies that margin of difference is the more than minor degree of autonomy that Rousseau’s thinking on freedom allows amidst the quite generalized heteronomy of modern civil society. We can discern this overlap between the universality of structural slavery and the pervasiveness of moral slavery through a preliminary examination of Émile’s enslavement in Algiers. Ultimately, not only in the episode of Émile’s Barbary captivity but also perhaps beyond, Rousseau’s endorsement of the Stoic definition of slavery may allow the moral concerns to overflow more rigorously political analysis. Rousseau’s unfinished, unpublished sequel to Émile, Émile and Sophie, subtitled Les solitaires (The Solitary or Lonely Ones), witnesses Émile descend into urban spectacle, adultery, frippery, and all manner of vice and sin—a descent brought on by inordinate, unstoical grief upon the successive deaths of Sophie’s parents and Émile’s and Sophie’s daughter. Upon realizing that he has hit rock bottom, he then departs to travel alone to undertake a new life but is kidnapped and sold into slavery in Algiers by Barbary pirates acting in league with the perfidious captain of the ship Émile had boarded. Unsurprisingly, Émile does indeed establish a new lease on life—and achieve a new, active appreciation of “freedom”—in slavery. According to one prominent line of interpretation, the episode of Émile’s North African slavery seems meant to showcase the success of his negative education, for in the end he bears his chains with great equanimity and is able to wax philosophical—indeed, positively Senecan—about how little his plight differs from the lot of all human beings. Considered from the standpoint not of this interior, moral freedom but rather of a more ac-

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tive and political conception of freedom, however, the real effect of Émile and Sophie would seem to veer far from the evident intention. Here I wish to scrutinize how this intention itself gets represented by evaluating what Émile is made to say about enslavement. In the next chapter, which focuses on Émile and Émile, I will elaborate the logic and effect of the divagation from this intention by probing how Émile is given to act as slave. If, in Rousseau’s oeuvre, the term “slavery” figures other less directly violent forms of subjection, then Émile’s Stoic slavery literalizes this figurative language and confirms it by negation: Émile is free in slavery, while others are enslaved by modern sociability though they are legally, nominally free. It would be worth our while to focus on this complicated simultaneous transfer and condensation of meaning in Émile and Sophie. “[N]ever,” admits the mature enslaved Émile, “did I have as much authority over myself as when I wore the barbarians’ irons” (ÉS OC IV.917). His comment is double-edged. On the one hand, it seems intended to demonstrate the familiar Stoic proof that it is unwise others who are truly unfree, even when they do not bear the chains of legal slavery. However, on the other hand, it seems retrospectively to damn Émile’s meticulous upbringing: the tutor Jean-Jacques’s grand exercise of negative education will in fact, in light of this comment, have rendered Émile slavish all along, and thus it should surprise nobody that, already slavish, Émile believes himself freer as a slave in Algiers than he ever was before. Certainly, if the soul has already been denatured, then how could it be otherwise than that the soul fools itself into feeling freest when the body is enchained? Chapter 3, pursuing this line of thinking, will fully subvert Rousseau’s attempt to rewrite and correct Stoicism in the character of Émile. Here, though, it seems best to reckon with how the adult enslaved Émile aims to capture Stoicism’s selfunderstanding. Émile and Sophie seems almost a merely academic exercise in illustrating the Stoic idea that the sage can attain freedom under any circumstance, even in chattel slavery—an idea already indeed made flesh in the life of the manumitted slave-philosopher Epictetus under the Roman Empire. As though mimicking Epictetus, Émile asks, “Who can make me wear two sets of chains? Was I not wearing one set before? There is no real servitude but that of nature. Men are only her instruments.” If nature has already enchained humans, then the chains they subsequently put on each other hardly matter. Indeed, secondary shackles are barely felt by the sage—though they escape sensibility in a different way than they do for the nonwise, who in

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fact feel their enchainment to nature or fortune all the time but remain unaware of their unfreedom. Spouting Stoic platitudes in his servitude, Émile concludes, “my change of state was more apparent than real; that, if liberty consists in doing what one wills, not a single man is free; that all are weak [and] dependent on things out of hard necessity” (ÉS; OC IV.917). The central idea of Émile’s answers to his own questions is already familiar from Seneca’s letter on slavery, though Rousseau substitutes Seneca’s servitude to fortune with an emphasis on humans’ dependence on nature. As noted in the previous section, Stoics hold the view that attempted rebellion against external or legal chains bespeaks an inability to “accept the duties and limitations imposed upon the individual by his or her place in the social structure and by the accident of servile birth,” duties that proved central to the Stoic duty of “living in conformity with nature.” Suggesting that we are all too liable (morally speaking) to be slaves to external constraints has the effect of humanizing the legally enslaved, as in Seneca’s Epistle XLVII. The effect of the Stoics’ humanitarian view went no further than moral reform of the individual person, however: “The whole approach of the Stoics was to suggest changes in the behaviour of individual masters . . . and in the end, all was to depend on the willingness of the slaveowner to follow Stoic precepts.” Hence, “there is no evidence that any Stoic philosopher argued for either the abolition of or fundamental changes to the institution of slavery”—much less slave rebellion. Considering Rousseau’s debts to Stoicism, especially in regard to slavery, it may seem peculiar that Émile spearheads a Barbary slaves’ rebellion—though, as we shall see, he does so in the name of a more deeply abiding Stoicism. (Again, here I focus only on what Émile is made to say and leave how he is given to act for Chapter 3.) Although Stoic philosophy’s ethical focus may have shifted under the Roman Empire from the almost otherworldly sage to the ordinary person, and its political focus from the cosmopolitan community of willed rational nature enjoyed by gods and attained only by sages to those political arrangements appropriate for the secondary communities that ordinary citizens inhabit “accidentally,” its hard attitude toward slavery did not change. Though interested in reforming political regimes so that better arrangements could help ordinary people progress further and more consistently toward virtue, Stoics under the Roman Empire did not espouse revolution, rebellion, or tyrannicide as political solutions to repressive regimes. While Stoicism barred rebellion or otherwise outright resistance to legal slaves and

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bade instead that they accept their places with equanimity, it did, however, hold out one last-ditch possibility. Wise persons who, by the misfires of fortune, found themselves targets of repressive regimes could in the last instance commit suicide or make some other “well-reasoned exit” from life “rather than compromise their integrity under political pressure.” (Seneca himself was bidden to commit suicide by Nero and tried to dignify his sentence by imitating Socrates’s way of carrying out his own death penalty.) Similarly, the Stoics reasoned that those whose legal status was slave but whose moral status was free could in the last instance exit the institution of slavery, too, by suicide: if not liberty in conformity with the place fortune accorded, then the solemn liberty of death by one’s own deliberate hand. Despite the undeniable inspiration that Stoicism provokes in Rousseau, his texts offer every indication that certain of its solutions to real dilemmas leave him cold. In particular, Rousseau betrays a sneaking suspicion that Stoicism’s individual moral practices of freedom seem ill-suited to challenges of collective political unfreedom. In the final two sections I explore two ways in which his suspicions unfold. In the following section, which introduces Rousseau’s fugitive moment, I develop a contrast between Stoicism’s cognitivism—the priority it grants to soul, reason, will, mind—and the place Rousseau accords to bodily practice. In the comparison Stoicism comes off seeming too immaterial—perhaps even amounting merely to a mind game—and thus at best without political effect. The final section analyzes Rousseau’s charge that Stoicism’s hyperrationalism renders it too philosophically individualist—even when it makes much ado about advancing human fellowship, as in cosmopolitanism—and thus at worst Stoicism may be accompanied by the political effect not merely of ignoring repressive politics but of stoking despotic conquest, hence despotism, hence slavery.

resisting constantia in publicis malis In spite of Stoic writers’ influences on Rousseau’s thought and the otherwise independent parallels between them, there are also differences. Rousseau for the most part politicizes the Stoic moral outlook on slavery and freedom— and this entails in turn politicizing nature, at least to some degree. Broadly speaking, Rousseau conceives of interested amour-propre as effecting relations of power that are only intentional on the part of discrete subjects at the most local level of analysis but that, taken globally, interlock to shape a closed and ultimately masterless system of endless exertion omni contra

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omnes that lacks any ostensible external validity or objective other than its self-perpetuation. This understanding of power generates two consequential differences from Stoicism on slavery, one global and one local. First, globally, Rousseau’s universal slavery is not primarily moral or natural. More precisely, it is not a global moral consequence of humanity’s natural condition of uniform subjection to fortune. For Rousseau universal slavery is primarily a structural political condition, one underwritten by relations of power in the form of universal abstract domination by interested amour-propre and its effects. If universal human dependence on fortune is for Seneca not at all a question of legitimacy, though self-imposed slavery is proof and fruit of morally illegitimate dependence, then for Rousseau both sorts of slavery count as illegitimate dependence, though the somewhat more specific personal form is both constrained and enabled by global political conditions. Fortune is alegitimate for Seneca because it is not humanmade; only humans’ responses to what fortune does are in their control, not fortune itself. Rousseau, by contrast, imputes more human responsibility for fortune than does Seneca. In Rousseau’s politicized conception fortune would mean the total system of effects woven by each person’s acting from interested amour-propre. Thus both humans’ responses to fortune and, after the passing of the state of nature, fortune itself (at least in part) are human products. Hence, for example, in tracing the lineaments of exactly what concerning the Great Lisbon Earthquake (1755) would per se count as catastrophic, Rousseau judged that a good deal of the misfortune was owed to human artifice: while the event itself was indisputably natural, it was hardly nature or divinity that compelled humans to live cheek by jowl in the mode of interested mutual dependency caused by having tied their worth to superfluities external to themselves; hence, not nature but humans’ denaturing bears responsibility for fortune’s domination (LV 234–35; OC IV.1061–62). Second, precisely because Rousseau understands fortune in civil society to be at least in part an effect of human artifice, he is able to recognize repression’s uneven local distribution within global domination. In other words, though abstract domination is universal, it is not, for all that, uniform but rather varies in modality and intensity. Thus Rousseau countenanced a form of slavery that Stoicism’s typology of slavery would not include: political despotism. By contrast, the mainline Stoic view starkens the topography of the total social field to one of either moral freedom or moral slavery only; hence, not only does it relegate legal slavery to irrelevance, but also it could be said to ignore political repression, as well. Counting political despotism

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too as slavery emphasizes that not just persons but whole peoples may be subjugated by a would-be master, as, for example, were the ancient Jews in Egypt. Calling political despotism slavery thus presents an important divergence from Stoicism’s depoliticizing individual focus. Although certainly the multiple types of slavery that Rousseau recognizes will tend in his view to concatenate and thus to reinforce one another’s repression—for instance, it is highly likely that a moral slave who legally owns chattel slaves would live under a despotic regime because one illegitimacy begets others—nevertheless Rousseau’s topography of civil society displays greater variability in the intensities of subjection and features finer distinctions among modes of repression than does Stoicism, at least in its Senecan iteration. The difference between the Rousseauian and Stoic topographies is thrown into highest relief by considering what Rousseau and later Stoics would advise as the legitimate recourse available to unfortunates who happen to find themselves living under a politically repressive regime—what Rousseau, after Montesquieu, would call “despotism” in order to highlight its kinship with slavery. Both Stoics and Rousseau of course urge self-preservation, but they disagree on what this means in practice. Whereas late Roman Stoicism and early modern neo-Stoicism would advocate a moral response to political repression—specifically, individual moral constancy in face of public ills, constantia in publicis malis—Rousseau’s Second Discourse by contrast exhorts outright defiance of direct threats to freedom. That is to say, Stoic self-preservation under circumstances of despotism involves internally conforming one’s will to external political infelicities. The Stoic approach was to counsel constancy and to achieve and maintain autonomy by conforming one’s will only to that which remained strictly within one’s control. Virtuous wisdom enjoins patient sufferance of despotic repressive regimes, since such externals lie beyond one’s volition. Freedom consists in willing one’s place, even if located behind a despot’s yoke. The wise do not feel political subjugation when they assent to being led by fate. The nonwise, however, always feel enslaved: in resisting their yokes, they are dragged along unwillingly, even when legally and politically free. The Classical philosophy scholar David Sedley assesses the Stoic view as follows: “The wise are free, and remain so under any regime, however repressive. . . . Ordinary people are slaves, and are totally wretched, and that remains so whatever kind of regime they may live under.” By locating moral slavery in one’s fractious resistance to fortune, Stoics thus deemed outright political resistance reprehensible, which goes far toward explaining why there devel-

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oped “no Stoic tradition of advocating either tyrannicide or any comparable means of overthrowing repressive regimes.” Reform, where one is wellplaced to initiate it, is the only way to reconcile morality with one’s political circumstances. Otherwise, Seneca counsels Lucilius, “That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure.” Because freedom inheres in the soul, the wise preserve themselves and their freedom by bearing externals without complaint. The consequence of securing the freedom of one’s soul, however, is that the Stoic must in a sense sacrifice her body: in the act of patient sufferance, the free soul must will the enchainment of the body to externals. By contrast, in a moment of fierce militancy that, as we see in following chapters, Rousseau does not sustain, the Second Discourse argues that preserving freedom involves risking the body by making it the vehicle of the soul’s resistance against physical repression and moral enslavement. If Stoics would recommend, in contrast to public repression, a moral flight into the interiority of a freely willing soul, then Rousseau applauds physical flight qua moral and political rejection. In contrast to Stoic passion, in contrast to Seneca’s passive fortitude, what Rousseau urges is fugitive action: Man’s natural dispositions for or against servitude therefore have to be judged not by the degradation of enslaved Peoples but by the prodigious feats of all free Peoples to guard against oppression. I know that the former do nothing but incessantly boast of the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that they call the most miserable servitude peace: but when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, rest, wealth, power, and life itself for the sake of preserving this one good which those who have lost it hold in such contempt; . . . when I see multitudes of completely naked Savages scorn European voluptuousness and brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death in order to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for Slaves to reason about freedom. (SD 177, cf. 131, 187, 218–19; OC III.181–82, 132, 192–93, 220)

In another instance of metaphoric metonymy, Rousseau’s savage stands in as the exemplary member of its genus—namely, all free peoples (cf. GP 178; SC III.4, 92; OC III.954–55, 405). For Rousseau, the extremity of bodily risk that savages court measures the priority of their disposition for freedom: it would make no sense to bear the pain of death, dismemberment, or disfiguration if freedom were not prior and motivating. Yet what is remarkable here is that, while also serving as a priori motivation, freedom is actualized in the performance. Quite unlike that archetypal

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Stoic who could be happy even while burning alive (because it is not bodies that matter for happiness, which derives from virtue and is categorically different from bodily comfort), Rousseau’s savages risk their bodies as the external proof and fruit of the free state of their souls. Thus there is no one-to-one correspondence between external physical sign and internal moral status whereby bodily enjoyment would denote moral happiness; nor is there a total categorical indifference between the two, as in Stoicism; nor still is there an indication that corporal sacrifice now brings as its result happiness and freedom later après coup. Rather, the passage suggests that the free body displays moral and political independence precisely via its flirtations with the risk of pain. A free person, a free soul, is inseparable from an unsubmissive body, and nonsubmission is won—and nondomination proved—through unflagging bodily activity rather than quietude. Yet the converse is also true for Rousseau, and this converse proposition provides one means by which he perverts Stoicism’s self-understanding. If bodily nonsubmission, even at the price of pain, confirms freedom, then submissive bodies prove their souls’ enslavement. As Stoicism would insist, willing that one’s body place itself under the yoke of fortune or fate bears almost no family resemblance with thoughtlessly yoking one’s will to bodily pleasure. It thus hardly seems correct to say that the Stoic sage submits to pampering. However, here Rousseau does not distinguish between those who give themselves and those given: the sage’s virtuous state of quietude may not differ enough from the vicious security of the voluptuary. Both exhibit slavishness because they submit their bodies, especially willfully (cum impulsively) but also by willed assent, and especially, though not exclusively, because of pleasure. What Rousseau’s stance in this hard-line moment allows to be glimpsed is a doubt about the sage’s sense of self—a doubt about Stoicism that we shall see come fully to fruition anon. If, for a Stoic such as Seneca, the worst kind of slavery is self-imposed, it may be so because it mixes both willfulness and unwillingness: it is pure personal heteronomy because the faculty of will is simultaneously chained to and magnified by appetitive impulses. The Stoic’s slavery, however, combines willing submission to fortune and willed control of impulses—she resists the urge to resist what lies beyond her control and thus autonomously assents to cosmic heteronomy. The hard line of Rousseau’s passage suggests that willed slavery (to fortune) and willful slavery (of the body) may not look so different in practice. Stoic sage and unwise master could both be said to impose slavery upon

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themselves, after all. Hence, deliberate acquiescence and uncontrolled selfimposition may become practically indistinguishable—not least because the Stoic might be fooling herself about what she wills and what she does not. If willing conformity to a repressive order produces both a quiet, constant soul and a more secure body, then mind and senses may baffle each other about which is the willed objective and which the unwilled side effect. Moreover, if this confusion of willing and unwilling has not already occurred, then the Stoic seems to tempt future confusion of reason and sensation in the act of leaving her body hostage to a repressive, servile order while safeguarding freedom only in her soul. If the body’s corruption is not yet conduit to the corruption of the soul, it may yet well be: whether sages or voluptuaries, “they call the most miserable servitude peace” (SD 177; OC III.181). Although soul and body are categorically different, Rousseau alludes to the danger that, over time, bodily senses may addle the reason of the soul. Thus the Stoic’s strategy to achieve self-preservation by yielding over the body as hostage to a repressive order such as despotism may be self-defeating in turning the peace of internal freedom into miserable servitude externally. As such, the Stoic strategy of constancy may end up overturning the priority of cause and effect. In this way all that Rousseau criticizes in Aristotle may apply to Stoicism, too. It may not be the case, as Stoicism would intend, that a willing mind guarantees conformity of the body to the position in which it finds itself by the accident of fortune. Rather, cause and effect may be reversed: a submitting body may ensure a willing, all too willing, mind; willing one’s slavery may generate slavishness. Moreover, the cowardice that Rousseau supplies as partial explanation, counter to Aristotle’s naturalization of servility, for slavery’s reproduction as an enduring institution might cast doubt on the sage-slave’s moral self-certainty: is it really right reason and a free will that encourage her not to buck against the yoke given her by fortune? Or does cowardice do the trick of keeping her sub jugum? While Stoicism’s plea for constantia in publicis malis leaves the body hostage to external despotism while safeguarding the soul’s freedom and thus lures this hostage to become conduit for moral slavery, Rousseau by contrast describes a savage who preserves herself by submitting no hostages to others’ domination. Truly free peoples cannot surrender their bodies to political domination while preserving interior freedom, because body and soul are inseverable. As against Stoicism, Rousseau does not deem physical and moral personhood to be categorically different. Rather, but for the exceptional instance of auto-harmonious primitives in the pure state of nature

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(see Chapter 3 and the Introduction), confirmations of real moral purity in salutary physical activity comprise a consistent theme across the Rousseauian corpus. The fugitive savage as metonymy for all free peoples illustrates that morality is actualized by bodily performance. However, as against the deconstructive critique of performativity, which casts doubt on the authenticity, sincerity, originality, and successful reception of words and deeds, of iterable utterances and performances, Rousseau would wish to dispense with the threat of insincere or infelicitous citations of real moral acts, and the distinction between the auto-harmonious primitive and the truly moral person is meant to contain this possibility. And this distinction points to a final point about the passage on fugitive savages: it confirms, in its divergence from Stoicism specifically in regard to political despotism, how Rousseau can recognize universal abstract domination and more specific local distributions of repressive power at the same time. In the very fact of needing to flee, fugitive savages reveal their capture by and availability to universal slavery as a global reality: they no longer are uncontacted, living in isolated nativized places pristinely beyond the reach of civil society’s order of spatial substitutability and private appropriation. Once “the whole face of the earth is changed”—and thus spatial relations structurally transformed—then “there is no being free anymore” (SW 167–68, trans. emended; OC III.603), even for fugitive savages. Yet at the same time, if there are also local distributions of repressive power and resistance, then it is possible to call some peoples free amidst the global domination of this new structural order of unfreedom, and these fugitive savages stand in for all such free peoples who safeguard themselves against locally encroaching despotisms.

pitiless egocentrism: cosmopolitanism and conquest In the valorization of autonomy and the criticism of sociable men’s typical dependence on externals, Rousseau adopts the broad outlines of Stoic virtue, but he is also acute to the potential perversion of Stoic ethics: namely, a chilly egocentrism that arises from its emphasis on the moral relation to self rather than legal or political relations among persons. Specifically, he acutely perceives that self-preservation, a staple of Stoic philosophy, can turn in upon itself and become a form of despicable selfishness masquerading as sociability. While guarding against being always outside oneself, against living only in the opinions of others as does sociable man, one may neverthe-

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less quite possibly retreat too much inside of oneself. Thus an even more vicious danger presents itself: “The most vicious of men is he who isolates himself the most, who most concentrates his heart in himself ” (Ld’A 117; OC V.107). Why is Stoicism’s introversion so vicious? In avoiding inflamed amour-propre, it perversely reproduces it in egocentric cosmopolitanism’s chilliness to familiars but ardent love for abstract humanity. Moreover, this philosophically fortified egocentrism has its mirror image in the political domain: conquest. The first succumbs to a more elevated rational moral slavery in attempting to overcome base and thoughtless moral self-enslavement, while conquest results in despotism—political slavery. For Rousseau, Stoic cosmopolitanism lacks pity just as much as does despotic conquest: cosmopolitanism is taken up as imperial philosophy, after all. Though we will see that Stoicism is the likely target, Rousseau does not fault any philosophical school or system by name when, in the Second Discourse, he condemns “the Philosopher” for alienating, alienated coldness: It is Philosophy that isolates him; by means of Philosophy he secretly says, at the sight of a suffering man, perish if you wish, I am safe. Only dangers that threaten the entire society still disturb the Philosopher’s tranquil slumber, and rouse him from his bed. One of his kind can with impunity be murdered beneath his window; he only has to put his hand over his ears and argue with himself a little in order to prevent Nature, which rebels within him, from letting him identify with the man being assassinated. Savage man has not this admirable talent. . . . (SD 153; OC III.156)

Though Stoicism may affirm constancy and equanimity as means to overcome moral slavery, such tranquility and quietude can also serve as means by which to negate or shut out others’ pain, as, for example, a wise master may do when refusing to sympathize with her legal slave’s particular plight. It requires a practical “talent” (and thus temporary loss of repose) of arguing philosophically with oneself to regain the ostensible freedom from identification with others’ suffering: abstract philosophical humanism does not come naturally. Unnaturally, “the Philosopher” measures danger as all or nothing: either the entire society suffers from menace or else nothing whatsoever threatens the Philosopher’s quietude. Ataraxia, then, can be egocentrism’s ruse as much as philosophy’s aspiration. In denigrating “the Philosopher,” Rousseau found himself solidly in agreement with the philosophes, or perhaps the latter found themselves—in spite

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of themselves—in agreement with Rousseau, who in his self-exile appeared to them very much the antisocial sage he was himself mocking. In the Encyclopédie article “Philosophe,” adapted from an earlier work by Dumarsais (1743), the true philosopher, for whom “the sole necessities of life render commerce with others necessary,” is contrasted favorably against the sage, who by implication “believes himself in exile in this world, . . . in enemy country.” “It is easy to conclude,” the article states, “how far the insensitive sage of the Stoics is from the perfection of our philosopher: such a philosopher is a man, and their sage is only a fantasm [phantôme]. They blush at humanity, while he glories in it; they would foolishly annihilate the passions and elevate us above our nature by a chimerical insensibility.” Likewise, in “Stoicisme,” Diderot calls the Stoic a man of iron and not of flesh. “After having regarded [Stoics] as the best of men, one took them as the most malicious,” because, Diderot charges, the Stoic school, full of hypocrites, universalized a moral system that only its ancient founder Zeno could follow. As Mark Hulliung puts it upon surveying French Enlightenment discourse on the appropriate relation between the philosopher and the world, “[n]o philosophical figure fares worse in the writings of the philosophes than the Stoic, no philosophy comes under attack more than Stoicism,” because the sage and the school both were seen as haughty in withdrawing from the world and criticizing worldly attachments. (Ironically, this chilly withdrawal from human fellowship into the wondrous world of contemplation is the charge Cicero’s most Stoicizing text, De officiis, obliquely levels at Plato’s Academy.) “How embarrassing, then,” Hulliung concludes, “that after such sustained exercises in destruction,” Diderot and his cabal “were driven back, willy-nilly, to the same Stoic ideal as the only way to cope” with the worldly attachments they accused the sage of ignoring and with the fetters that such attachments inevitably placed even on philosophers who did not want to believe themselves in exile within the world or in enemy country there. What but a modified Stoicism might offer tactics for navigating unbesmirched a grasping court society, a voracious salon society, an increasingly pushy bourgeoisie, and the crown’s imperial assertions? Rousseau shares the same ambivalence of Stoicism as his prominent contemporaries. Like Christian moralists of the previous century, he worries that Stoic virtue may disguise vice. Though Rousseau does not specify what or whom he means for the “Philosopher” to signify, it was a commonplace among the philosophes to blame the Stoic sage for callous aloofness and inhumane insensitivity, even as they realized that some withdrawal from

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society proved necessary: social criticism after all seemed to require at least some critical distance. Rousseau does not mention the Stoics, but he need not, as the resemblances are clear and resonant with a contemporary discourse. Stoicism, then, makes sense as the exemplary target for his criticism of “Philosophy”: after all, he does at one point call Stoics a “laughingstock” (LP 225; OC III.233). However, by not specifying Stoicism as the culprit, Rousseau can point to a problem broader than and encompassing Stoicism and possibly rescue it from its egocentric tendencies. “Philosophy” stands in for a more abstract vice: alienating reason. “It is reason that engenders amour propre, and reflection reinforces it; reason that turns man back upon himself; reason that separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him: It is Philosophy that isolates him . . .” (SD 153; OC III.156). The set of relations that Rousseau condenses here is complex and forms the sinews of a sociopolitical critique that will connect cosmopolitanism, conquest, and various slaveries. Pitilessness, it turns out, both symptomatizes moral slavery and facilitates chattel and political slaveries. Before dissolute reason separated man and turned him back upon himself, he was presumably not separated or isolated—or he was so only spatially, as dispersion characterizes man’s condition prior to settled society. If not positively or actually together prior to reason, humanity must have harbored some potential for linking one person with another without thereby yet uniting them. This power, which works by way of identification, Rousseau calls pity, “a disposition suited to beings as weak and as subject to so many ills as we are; a virtue all the more universal and useful to man as it precedes the exercise of all reflection in him, and so natural that even the Beasts sometimes show evident signs of it.” Pity, “the pure movement of Nature prior to all reflection” (SD 152; OC III.154–55), results from a nearly automatic mental action on the part of one animal witnessing another’s pain: she sees another suffering and immediately imagines herself in a situation identical to that suffering being’s. “Indeed commiseration will be all the more energetic in proportion as the Onlooking animal identifies more intimately with the suffering animal. Now this identification must, clearly, have been infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning” (SD 153; cf. É 213; OC III.155–56, IV.491). In the state of nature humans did not make distinctions between semblables and other creatures, which explains why Rousseau does not specify the species of animal whose commiseration he describes: there was simply fellow suffering, whatever the animal, or there was not.

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However, the state of reasoning introduces semblance and thus prioritizes identification not of suffering but of similarity in external form. Pity and its sibling, self-preservative amour de soi-même, both enjoy a Stoic provenance in oikeiosis, a technical term that refers to appropriation of others to self in the sense of affirming the proper relation of others to self. Despite this provenance, pity may nevertheless get diverted by Stoicism. Natural pity traces between the observer and the sufferer, between self and other, a complicated itinerary called amour de soi-même (love of self ). But amour de soi-même’s routes are tortuous: they easily err. The train of affects that links one person to another, via imagination through identification to pity, may run amiss in one of two ways. Either it gets diverted when reflection short-circuits imagination so that one cannot identify with any other self and thus never goes outside of oneself; or else it refracts back onto the original ego when reflection warps imagination so that one identifies not with another’s sufferings but rather with another’s judgment of oneself. The first aberration typifies a problem of philosophy, which recognizes the abstractions “man” or “humanity” but will not intervene to save specific suffering beings (whether human or otherwise) from pain. The second typifies spectacle: it is thus that one can be “always outside of oneself ” and yet not have pity (or have only the most superficial, calculated, “personally interested” kind [PN 100; GM 78; OC II.968, III.284]). Both represent cases of interested, inflamed amour-propre, negatively valued, egocentric self-love. (Amour de soi-même, when it does not go astray and yet drives reflection— rather than being hijacked by it—can produce a positive form of amourpropre that recognizes sameness and difference simultaneously: namely, the disinterested amour-propre discussed in Chapter 1.) Because motivated by (self-) interest rather than disinterest, both instances of amour-propre annul the other person’s unique value, either by failing to see anything beyond the bounds of oneself or by looking to the other as nothing more than a mirror for oneself; in Rousseau’s words, interested amour-propre “inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else” (SD 218; cf. CPC 325–26; OC III.219, 937). As though marking the need to distinguish actual pity from its aberrations, the text of Essay on the Origin of Languages reads thus: “Pity, although natural to man’s heart, would remain eternally inactive without imagination to set it in motion. How do we let ourselves be moved to pity? By transporting ourselves outside ourselves; by identifying with the suffering being. We suffer only to the extent that we judge it to suffer; we suffer not in ourselves but in it”

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(OL 267–68; cf. É 223; OC V.395, IV.505–6). Pity requires that one employ the motive force of imagination to transport oneself into another’s situation, and it is only in this traveling to and inhabiting the place of an other that one properly begins to appreciate it on its own terms. One pities, then, by suffering only in an actual, other creature, not in oneself. In this respect, Stoicism’s wise slave-master’s reflectively projecting shared sufferance of outrageous fortune onto her legal slave derails pity for the latter’s personal suffering of natal alienation: it is not simply an accident of fortune that some become legal slaves; rather, real institutional mechanisms alienate persons from natal or native ties. Pity entails a figurative voyage to another’s standpoint, a transporting of oneself outside oneself that draws two beings together as semblables, not because of similarity of external form but because of shared vulnerability. By extension, actual voyages during which pity does not operate thus produce false or inadequate judgments merely of external forms. With respect to these literal travels, philosophy again proves itself deficient in pity: Regardless of how much individuals may come and go, it would seem that Philosophy does not travel. . . . [O]ne is utterly astounded to find that these people who have described so many things [in their voyagers’ tales] have said only what everybody already knew, that all they were able to perceive at the other end of the world is what they could perfectly well have observed without leaving their street, and that the telling traits that differentiate Nations and strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. Hence that fine adage of ethics so much harped on by the ruck of Philosophasters, that men are everywhere the same. . . . (SD 209–10; OC III.212)

One might conclude that these writer-voyagers lacked a capacity to reflect philosophically upon what they observed. Rousseau, however, asserts that reflection is precisely the problem. Reflection diverts or distorts imagination and thus stifles pity. The telltale sign of reflection’s baseness, moreover, is its association with philosophy. To be sure, in this passage from an endnote to the Second Discourse, Rousseau for once carefully dissociates philosophy from xenophilic pseudophilosophy by calling practitioners of the latter “Philosophastic” (Philosophesque) and lamenting that true philosophy does not travel. More frequently, though, Rousseau condemns the whole lot of philosophers, which suggests that pitiless reflection inheres as a malign tendency in

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philosophy more generally, in Stoicism’s wise slave-master and beyond. By training himself to turn deaf ears to his fellow humans’ suffering beneath his window, “the Philosopher”-sage trains himself to resist nature rather than to achieve harmony with nature. He tries to achieve ataraxia for its own sake, whereas it is properly won as a side effect of the exercise of virtue. Worse than fetishizing freedom from disturbance, though, the perverse “Philosopher” tries to identify with abstract humanity—a merely generic, superficial form—so as to avoid identifying with real, unique human beings in his vicinity—for example, chattel slaves. His philosophical reflection diverts or distorts imagination and thus stifles pity. Thus the “Preface to Narcissus” declares: A taste for philosophy loosens all the bonds of esteem and benevolence that tie men to society. . . . [C]ontinued reflection on mankind, continued observation of men, teach the Philosopher to judge them at their worth, and it is difficult to have much affection for what one holds in contempt. Before long he comes to focus on himself alone all the interest which virtuous men share with their fellows; his contempt for others heightens his pride: his amour propre grows in direct proportion to his indifference to the rest of the universe. Family, fatherland, become for him words devoid of meaning: he is neither parent, nor citizen, nor man; he is a philosopher. (PN 99, cf. 102; OC II.967, 970)

Again, “the Philosopher” deserves reprehension for killing pity. Reflection has shut him in upon himself and magnified his indifference to a humanity whose sufferings and motivations he will not understand. Having perhaps once been victim to the malfeasance of his fellow man, the philosopher mistakes detestation of humanity for detachment from it (cf. É 236, 234; OC IV.525, 524). In turn, hateful aloofness alienates “the Philosopher” from all actual social ties. Unmoved, he stands proudly pitiless and alone, never venturing from his mental abode. “The Philosopher” callously perverts Stoic ataraxia, which might otherwise offer a means of escaping the second form of amour-propre associated with spectacle. By attempting to opt out of “living only in the opinion of others” as does sociable man (whom he “holds in contempt”), he overcorrects and retreats hermetically into himself, inadvertently recapitulating amourpropre but in inverted form. His egocentrism may thereby impair cosmopolitanism, one of Stoicism’s great legacies to the philosophical tradition.

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The perverse effect on cosmopolitanism of Stoicism’s tendency to egocentrism is cumulative. Callous, perverted ataraxia incapacitates the very sentiment behind the Stoic’s declaration that she is a citizen not of this tribe or that nation but of the whole world. Rousseau thus insists that a philosophy like Stoicism can lead to egocentrism, resulting in a lifeless, abstract affiliation with humanity taken as a faceless whole. Between ego and cosmos, there is no other relevant moral relation or political association. Reflection has opened the maw that devours all intermediate relations—“words devoid of meaning,” as Rousseau put it—between the ego and the cosmopolis. In the preliminary draft of the Social Contract, Rousseau indeed derides “those supposed Cosmopolites who, justifying their love of fatherland by their love of mankind, boast of loving everyone so that they might have the right to love no one” (GM 81; cf. É 39; OC III.287, IV.249). The passage is echoed in Émile, and indeed it is the predestination of that text that Émile will not justify his love of fatherland by the love of mankind that develops in him during his travels. In the Stoics’ earliest theorizations of it, the cosmopolis was not strictly an earthly city but was rather that natural community of agreement of all highly rational beings, including superhuman sages and gods, that inhabited a divinely directed universe. This Stoic cosmopolitanism of tradition hardly escaped Rousseau’s criticism of hyperrationalism—specifically, a hyperrationalism that transmogrifies into a chilly egocentrism by way of an abstract reflection that abandons pity. Cosmopolitanism did take on less specialized meanings as it developed from these traditional roots. Rousseau’s writings react in particular to two of these less specialized senses, the first weakly normative and the second primarily descriptive; each splits off and foregrounds an aspect from the traditional Stoic conception. First there is cosmopolitanism as bond of abstract humanity, which borrows from Stoicism the notion of commonality among beings—though here instead of reason’s reasoning that rationality is the shared feature, it reasons instead a universal substitutability among humans on the basis of generically similar external form. The second emphasizes the nonproximity implicit in Stoic cosmopolitanism in order to lend cosmopolitanism a meaning of global, material expansiveness beyond an immediate locale through distant political conquest and commercial interconnection. On Rousseau’s view, each is differently slavish. Rousseau reacts to the older Hellenistic rendering and to its more recent vulgar usages. He rejects the technical Stoic sense, the weakly normative ac-

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count, and the final descriptive usage for reasons specific to each—namely, the inhuman hyperrationalism of the first, the abstract substitutability focal to the second, and the imperialist uniformity of the third. Nevertheless, in a certain respect, the three are not different: all feature a certain chilly alienation and a forsaking of pity resulting from the mismeasure of self by interested amour-propre. Thus Stoic cosmopolitanism, universal humanity, and global interconnection exhibit perfect compatibility with the order of private property and especially chattel slavery. The self-aggrandizement that the order of private property relentlessly preordains thrives on the conquest of space and the infinite substitutability of persons. It thus inevitably enacts political despotism and personal bondage while provoking cosmopolitanism and abstract global humanism in hyperreaction. Yet insofar as these moralizing hyperreactions themselves proceed from the pitiless mismeasure of vulnerable beings, they simply reproduce the natal alienations they mean to correct. Indeed, the fact that Stoicism exhorts cosmopolitanism while remaining deaf to the specificity of political despotism merely serves to trumpet this alienation. According to Rousseau’s worldview, then, aggrandizement and conquest, whether as interstate practices or social attitudes, arise alongside and thus are complicit with cosmopolitanism. This close kinship of conquest and cosmopolitanism—kissing cousins descended from egocentrism—cannot be stressed enough. Cosmopolitanism dissolves the possibility of benevolence by distributing it widely and promiscuously; its adherents love all humans generically so as to love none in particular because they love and are interested in themselves most of all. This philosophical cosmopolitanism stands at the apex of a more general “progress of society [that] stifles humanity in men’s hearts by awakening personal interest” (GM 78, trans. emended; cf. PN 100; OC III.284, II.968). Nonetheless, some motivating sentiment must do the work of binding society in lieu of the benevolence that cosmopolitanism saps, and inflamed personal interest arises in benevolence’s stead. In turn, this interested amour-propre drives slavishly vain, expansive social personae—slaves who must own slaves—and conquering states—despots who must enslave peoples. In closing, it is worth noting that the argument that cosmopolitanism is the post facto philosophy-of-convenience for empires is not a new one. Hellenistic and Roman cosmopolitanism has sometimes been considered Alexander the Great’s and Roman imperialism’s owl of Minerva or worse, their ideological lapdog. There have been similar murmurings in regard to late

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modernity’s cosmopolitans and current globalization. Rousseau’s argument is unique among such interpretations, however, in offering a deep structural critique and projects for systemic correctives. If it were not bad enough that cosmopolitanism is symptomatic of bad philosophical reflection about an abstraction called humanity, then cosmopolitanism’s kinship with conquest should ring its death knell, yet indeed it does not. Rousseau wagers that he can correct cosmopolitanism and moreover that he can give proper measure to political collectivities so that they neither conquer nor are conquered. In Part II I critically reconstruct three strategies that the Rousseauian corpus legates to us for overcoming the abstract domination expressed by “everywhere in chains” and the more local repressions it supports. In Chapter 3 I argue that Rousseau aims to correct cosmopolitanism’s dystopian alienation by affixing it in space. By having Émile return to the patrie after traveling through the world, Rousseau revises cosmopolitanism by way of patriotism so as to secure true independence for Émile. However, Rousseau’s commitment to purity menaces the project with a totalizing dependence—in short, a form of slavery. In Chapter 4 we see that a collective project of patriotism might achieve political independence through interdependence among a people bound by commiseration and geographic compression. The project of collective autonomy is yet again threatened, though, for the immobilizing rootedness of patries may set them up as pointlessly self-sacrificing hostages to interstate fortune. In Chapter 5 I return to Rousseau’s fugitive moment, which is introduced above in the section “Resisting Constantia in Publicis Malis,” and offer a sustained analysis of the way a fugitive political strategy combines self-rooting interdependence and self-routing independence to secure the mobile collective freedom proper to a world characterized by spatial displacement and condensed unfreedoms.

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Cosmopolitanism You do not tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with one move after another. Restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick mind. —seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium II

Being able to depart for where we will is the prototypical gesture of being free, as limitation of freedom of movement has from time immemorial been the precondition for enslavement. —hannah arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing”

In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. —frantz fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

During the long eighteenth century, from circa 1648 until about 1789, when revolution and Continental war disrupted travel and mobility, the Grand Tour typified the education of the young men of privileged classes, at first the aristocracy and later the “professional middle classes” or the “bourgeois propiétaires.” Or, as not every young man with the wherewithal for the three-year circuit cared to endure the physical rigors of early modern transit, it would be more accurate to say that if the Grand Tour did not typify the education of aristocrats, gentlemen, and the elite bourgeoisie, at least it represented an educational ideal for those who would be the bearers of high culture after the Renaissance. Furthermore, as an ideal, the Grand Tour was only “putatively” educational, as one scholar notes, for it could take on primarily professional or pleasure-seeking dimensions in serving as an in115

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ternship of sorts for diplomatic service or, for those prodigal sons of Europe, a drawn-out libertine adventure. Indeed, the subentries for “Voyage” in the Encyclopédie alert us to other uses and usages of travel: mercenary or commercial, marine, legal—not to mention missionary, martial, and colonial. Nonetheless, travel took pride of place in humanists’ vision of education as a lifelong philosophical affair. Paraphrasing Francis Bacon (though without attribution), Louis le Chavalier de Jaucourt puts it thus in the Encyclopédie’s longest subentry for “Voyage”: “Today travels in the civilized states of Europe . . . are in the judgment of enlightened persons, one of the most important parts of the education in youth, and a part of the experiences of older people.” This humanistic judgment of importance is not only a contemporary one, however. For de Jaucourt launches the entry with a gesture to its Classical value, as well: “the great men of antiquity judged that there be no better school for life than that of travels. . . .” Invoking the authority of antiquity, de Jaucourt’s entry implicitly recalls the philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism: edifying travels (perhaps especially the Grand Tour) would produce not citizens of this or that particular locale but instead citizens of the world. Thus, if the many faces of travel became also the many masks of cosmopolitanism, then correcting travel with a proper normative vision of the relation between self and world might rescue cosmopolitanism from its twin dangers, selfishness and self-sacrifice: either autonomy metamorphoses into hyperrational egocentrism, or civil society immobilizes and enslaves sensitive selves via worldly attachments. The advent of social contract theory alters this cosmopolitan ideal. With social contract theory, travel ceases to be solely a labor of self-cultivation and cultural refinement understood in a universalizing humanist frame: for any political obligation worthy of the name demands specific knowledge, not only of one’s rights and duties within one’s natal polity, but also of the diversity of other political arrangements and possibilities abroad (cf. É 302–5; OC IV.617–23). Travel ceases to be crucial strictly for producing the wellformed man and becomes indispensible for educing the well-informed (male) citizen of a specified polity. Certainly, John Locke makes informed consent to a particular polity a crucial aspect of his Second Treatise of Government. The Second Treatise would lead one to believe that a future political subject can only attain the status of “informed” by having traveled to other places for knowledge of alternative constitutions, and yet there is no explicit theorization of travels as political education in the Treatise. Inversely and symmetrically, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke pursues the

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topic of travel as educationally informing, but does not discuss it in political terms of obligation or consent. In Locke’s writings the two ideals of travel remain separate. It is not until Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education that the Lockean educational travels and political obligation get sutured together. In what follows I examine the tensions within and final breakdown of Rousseau’s cosmopolitan project in Émile via its consideration of travel. Rousseau inherits and must transform a prior ideology of travel because, while travels make him anxious, he nonetheless concedes their value. Travels imperil the traveler’s virtue, but they are necessary as a mobile arena for virtue’s embodied performance and confirmation. One backstory for Rousseau’s simultaneous anxiety about and commitment to travel lies in the tension within the understanding of virtue as practical moral goodness in Émile. Specifically, Rousseau comes to the conclusion that virtue is nothing without its risk—risks such as travels provide. The moral assumptions behind negative education and its scientific support derive from Rousseau’s borrowing of Stoic and Epicurean moral problematics and, separate but related, his unique version of sensationalist psychology. It is here that we begin to see Rousseau’s inability to sustain his declared commitment to travels and practically risked virtue. Rousseau’s cognizance of the fragility of virtue makes sense of his tendency to prejudge intercultural encounters in terms of conquest—the conquest by vice of all that is pure. However, this Rousseauian tendency reveals the conclusive disjuncture between travel and negative education and the political effects of committing to the latter and not the former. Because travel animates and encapsulates Rousseau’s worst fears about the corrosive and corrupting effects of modern society, he must torture it into a virtuous conformity with his vision of natural purity. To stave off the vicious effects of travels, he alters travel’s conditions of possibility, but, altering such conditions, he thereby makes travel impossible according to its conventional terms and thus thwarts the intention of travel as education for a political subject who will root cosmopolitanism in nativism. Travel in both the humanistic Grand Tour and Lockean social contract traditions is intended to complete one’s education (as a liberal cosmopolitan humanist or as a consenting citizen of a localizable polity), yet, because of the perilous status of travel in Émile, negative education must already have made travel morally feasible. That is, Rousseau turns the relationship between travel and education on its head: travels do not crown and complete education; rather, negative education must have been completed before travels take place. However, the very ends that drive Rous-

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seauian negative education (essential goodness, purity) contradict the means to their achievement (namely, the risks of sin and corruption). For if negative education’s intended purity can never reach completion without continually risking the possibility of corruption, as Rousseau well acknowledges, then purity is effectively never itself complete and must always require but never abide the supplementary risk of impurity. The effect of this contradiction is double: negative education proves at last unachievable, and all travels occurring under its aegis are nullified by having been domesticated. Rousseau’s failed endeavor to paper over the mutual opposition between the preservationist aim of negative education and the always possible aimlessness of travel demonstrates again the simultaneity of his essentialist commitment to purity and his awareness that if pure ends are at all possible, then they can exist only by dint of impure means. In the impasse between virtuous but interminable education and vicious but necessary travels and between the Scylla of egocentrism and the Charybdis of worldly self-obliteration the goal of autonomy—and ultimately the possibilities of theory and critique—get lost. Hence, in the end I argue that Émile’s Barbary captivity in the sequel to Émile does not contradict but rather confirms that the negative educational project does not build an autonomous but rather a morally enchained Émile.

travel: political promise / moral problem After inuring the pupil Émile’s physic, after instilling self-possession in him for his social and moral relations, after a neo-Hellenistic education that would locate virtue and happiness nowhere but in that bit of nature within him, the tutor Jean-Jacques ignores his own earlier reservations that a “harmony” between nature and society’s claims is “impossible” and that, “[f ]orced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” (É 39; OC IV.248). In “On Travels,” the final section of Émile, which would seem to culminate Émile’s education, Jean-Jacques attempts to bridge this gap between making a man and making a citizen, and Rousseau (i.e., the author) does so by bridging the Lockean gap between humanism and contractarian obligation: Now that Émile has considered himself in his physical relations with other beings and in his moral relations with other men, it remains for

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him to consider himself in his civil relations with his fellow citizens [ses concitoyens]. To do that, he must begin by studying the nature of government in general, the diverse forms of government, and finally the particular government under which he was born, so that he may find out whether it suits him to live there. For by a right nothing can abrogate, when each man attains his majority and becomes his own master, he also becomes master of renouncing the contract that connects him with the community by leaving the country [pays] in which that community is established. It is only by staying there after attaining the age of reason that he is considered to have tacitly confirmed the commitment his ancestors made. He acquires the right of renouncing his fatherland [sa patrie] just as he acquires the right of renouncing his father’s estate [la succession de son pére]. Furthermore, since place of birth is a gift of nature, one yields one’s own place of birth in making this renunciation. According to rigorous standards of right, each man remains free at his own risk in whatever place he is born unless he voluntarily subjects himself to the laws in order to acquire the right to be protected by them. (É 455–56; OC IV.833)

Having presumably secured Émile’s status as morally well-formed man, the tutor now attends to the consequent project of educing a citizen from this man. And in the rest of this passage, Rousseau condenses and simplifies the Second Treatise’s basic doctrine of original nonsubjection and the theory of tacit consent and correlative obligation built upon it. Where Locke declares that children are born subjects to no polity (§118), Rousseau likewise insists that each “remains free” in his place of birth. Both theorists elaborate a right of exit from this radically negative freedom, whose most unambiguous exercise would entail the alienation of one’s patrimonial estate. Rousseau, following Locke’s articulation of tacit consent, allows for the possibility that this child, upon reaching majority, might remain in the natal polity and thus will have “tacitly confirmed” a political obligation that need bear no more than an accidental (or, in Rousseau’s language, dative) relation to place of birth. Finally, Rousseau, again inspired by Locke, mentions a more robust form of obligation: voluntary subjection—that is, express consent. What is remarkable in this passage is not merely that it appears in an educational treatise rather than Of the Social Contract or that a near-equivalent for it is lacking in the latter. (Rousseau does admit apologetically in a footnote a few pages later that he is reiterating points from the latter, published

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nearly concurrently with Émile [É 462n; OC IV.842n].) Rather, most remarkable are Rousseau’s explicit assertion of an imperative to study government and governments for purposes of informed consent to a particular regime and that this assertion occurs in the context of a discussion of travels whereby travels become constitutive of political citizenship—whereby routes become constitutive of contractual roots. Although the exit option and the theoretical separation of tacit from express consent in the Second Treatise at least implicitly suggest the necessary contribution that political education about “the nature of government in general” and “the diverse forms of government” would make for informed consent, and although the Second Treatise teems with references to travel and mobility, Locke is never so explicit about the interrelation of travel, political education, and civic decision as is Rousseau in this passage from Émile. Education is a necessary condition for proper civic choice and informed political obligation; yet the means by which such political education is attained, viz., travels, remains largely untheorized in the Lockean social contract. And yet the project of informing consent by way of travels is crucially different from the classical tradition of a political theoría. In scholars’ recent reconstructions of the term’s usages in Classical Greece (fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e.), theoría (qewria) and a related family of terms were associated with a number of more or less religious meanings: a type of festival; a spectator at such a festival; a sacred delegation to a sanctuary, often officially representing a Greek polis; the travels of such a delegation; an official or delegation sent from a city-state to other city-states to announce a festival; and sacred sightseeing more generally. Although perhaps ordinarily invoked for religious contexts, the term also wandered beyond such contexts. In perhaps paradigmatic examples of such extensions of usage, theoroi in Plato’s Laws refers to the emissaries sent off by the polis to gain knowledge of other constitutions, and Herodotus uses a verbal form in the Histories to designate the travels of the barbaros Anacharsis around Greece in search of comparative knowledge of the nomoi of different peoples. More broadly, then, theoría invokes two dominant ideas—sometimes together, sometimes separately: travel or pilgrimage; insight or wondrous vision. In the tradition of political theory as received from ancient Greece, these meanings become combined and partly secularized so that political theory refers to real or metaphorical travels for purposes of gaining comparative insight into political matters.

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However, emphasizing too much the cognitivist and secularist sense of insight neglects the ritual-moral and embodied aspects of travel. As we shall see, Rousseau’s sensationalist psychology makes him very much aware that travels are far more than simply cognitive: they involve not only learning in the head but also moral formation in the body. The story of Anacharsis’s travels—or rather their violent end—might educate us here about perceived threats of travel and theoría. Anacharsis was killed by his brother King Caduidas (or Saulius) upon resettling among the Scythians after his travels in the Greek world. Something more than an intrafraternal monarchic consolidation was at stake in this murder. The insight Anacharsis gained from travel was not simply cabineted in his head but enacted in his moral practice: Herodotus has it that Anacharsis performed foreign religious rites, while Diogenes Laertius mentions a general enthusiasm for things Greek, but whatever the case, Caduidas (Saulius) perceived something intimately threatening about the distinctive strangeness Anacharsis now embodied. Although Herodotus’s philhellenic judgment has it that the king was xenophobic and nativist, a Scythian perspective suggests that it was not the fact of foreignness per se that was troubling, but rather anticipated local effects on a nomadic people of Anacharsis’s specifically urbane foreign habits. Against a liberal-rationalist reading of Émile, wherein ideas are acceded to, rejected, or manipulated inside the cabinet of the head, and whereby political allegiance and loyalty are thus decided intellectually, “On Travels” as culmination of Rousseau’s negative educational project so desperately wants to signal that travels are risky because they make moral and cultural impressions on travelers’ bodies. In addition to forming bodies, though, travel taken as a norm already marks an ideological split within a cultural formation. Thus “having an idea” to travel, for example, is already a cultural practice produced by a discursive formation that would designate cognitive and corporeal moments separately—first autonomous decision, then execution or abstention—that is, rather than a recognition that much geographic movement or immobilization is not autonomous (for example, as in the transatlantic slave trade), or that travel can be a reflexive habitus of bodies (for example, among nomadic peoples). Ideas formed about or by travel are not always matters of idle thought, then, or of intentional decision, but rather are matters of embodiment and of how the cultural production of subjects orients them to norms qua bodily practices but also, in the same gesture, cannot exhaustively, authoritatively prevent those norms’

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drift or mutation. Anacharsis, then, is formed in the context of Scythian nomadic mobility, but he undertakes mobility of a different kind, identified by Greeks as theoría, and pays with his life for having drifted too far beyond the (locally presumed) sustainability of Scythian norms, as was evident in his bodily conduct upon his return from abroad. Although theoría undergoes an extension beyond domains specific to the sacred, still at play in both its extended Classical usage and also in modern resonances is the quasi-religious wonder at the sheer diversity of forms that humans’ political arrangements can assume, a wonder constituted by at least provisional distance from the particular constitution of one’s home polis and whose enchantment is sustained by distance from any other arrangement, as well. Such wondrous distance may seem dangerous in the Scythian context, as Anacharsis’s murder alerts us. One person’s intellectual insight is another’s corporeal corruption. Nevertheless, in a dominant strand of the Greek tradition, the wonder of theoría depends on the open-endedness and undecidability arising from reveling in continued comparison among terms rather than deciding in favor of any one—or at the very least, theoría’s wonder depends on a continued tension between undecidability and final decision. By contrast to the lack of finality of the theoría tradition, social contract theory depends on a final decision to affix or obligate oneself. Whereas theoría remains open-ended, its task of judgment without terminus, the final intention in social contract theory (though perhaps not its final effect) is closure: one consents either tacitly or explicitly to a preexisting polity or one founds one anew with others. Consent and closure are certainly goals of the final book of Émile, and “On Travels” tries to weld a joint from two separate Lockean proposals, thus culminating and refracting the entire educational project of Émile. However, in attempting to reconcile the humanism of Some Thoughts Concerning Education with the political contractualism of the Second Treatise, Rousseau exposes and perhaps widens the very rifts he had set out to transcend: between citizen and man, between affixing oneself to a localizable home and the unfixity of world citizenship, indeed, between differential legacies and effects of cosmopolitanism, between political obligation and theoríacritique, between moral goodness and the risk that would make it meritorious, and above all between negative education and travels. Although it acknowledges the importance of travels for the tendering of critical, informed consent to government, Rousseau’s Émile ultimately fails to allow travels to

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be politically meaningful because the overriding project of negative education prevents them from entertaining the risk of autonomous meaning. One person’s rational consent is another’s rejection of cultural formation. But in Émile’s case, the one person and the other are selfsame. In the essay “Traveling Cultures,” a study of displacement as constitutive of culture (i.e., rather than displacement as migration away from any particular culture), James Clifford notes that “the notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest are local (natives) appears as the ideology of one (very powerful) traveling culture.” Prima facie Rousseau would not disagree with Clifford’s representation of this dominant ideology of travel. Indeed, Rousseau would agree with Clifford that, according to this dominant traveling culture’s self-understanding, the world is divided by a necessary and sufficient recto-verso relation: we alone are mobile and culturally dynamic, because they are immobile and culturally static. However, Rousseau would dissent from Clifford’s evaluation of this ideology. Clifford aims to debunk this traveling culture’s self-understanding as partly false and wholly an exercise of domination: it is not true that mobility and cultural dynamism characterize only the recto, but it is true that misrecognizing, distorting, and discounting mobility and cultural dynamism on the verso serves as a means to govern the conduct of “native” cultures. Rousseau would not dispute the truth claims inhering in this traveling culture’s self-understanding but would evaluate the two sides of the proposition differently: that certain classes of people travel and act the part of the cosmopolitan is true but lamentable; that the rest are local and remain native is true and laudable. For Rousseau a recentering of the normative orientation of otherwise alienated cosmopolitanism can occur via natalist localism. As I noted in the previous chapter, suspicion of those who claim the mantel of cosmopolitanism pervades Rousseau’s writings. To grasp more fully Rousseau’s ambivalence toward cosmopolitanism, it behooves us to get a sense of both its Hellenistic and Enlightenment theorizations. The fortunes of Hellenistic cosmopolitanism fluctuated throughout its career in the early, middle, and late Stoa. Certain later Roman Stoics presaged Rousseau’s concern about its potential for chilly, egocentric abstraction and tried to allay their critics’ worries that cosmopolitan love of humanity would abolish and supplant any interest in one’s local affiliations. Adherents of the first Stoa originally adopted cosmopolitanism in order to think beyond the narrowly polis-centered affiliations that organized ancient Greek

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political consciousness: they saw life station and polis as mere accidents of birth and therefore morally irrelevant. Martha Nussbaum elucidates that the Greeks of the Early Stoa developed the image of the kosmopolitês, or world citizen, more fully, arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities—the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration that is, in Seneca’s words, “great and truly common, embracing gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our state by the sun.”

Later Stoics placed more or less emphasis on the global community to the correlative detriment of local memberships, although it seems that no Stoic went so far as to reject local communities altogether, as was, perhaps, the intention of the Cynic Diogenes, whom Diogenes Laertius credits as having originally avowed, “I am a citizen of the world.” Disagreements on cosmopolitical theory within and between Stoa centered on two primary questions of praxis: how much special attention to accord to local social ties, and what exactly comprises one’s duty to aid enemies or foreigners. Hierocles, whom today we classify as a Stoic (although he was not identified as such in Rousseau’s time), developed an image meant to reconcile the local and the cosmopolitical: each person should imagine herself at the center of nine concentric circles that move outward to include immediate family, then extended kin, next other relatives, then neighbors, next fellow tribespeople, then concitizens, next neighboring towns’ inhabitants, then all fellow countrymen, and finally humanity in toto. The cosmopolite’s moral task would then entail treating as much as possible the members of one circle as one would the members of its smaller, neighboring circle. Thus one would “draw the circles together somehow towards the centre, and . . . keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles to the enclosed ones.” Doing so one accords a foreigner respect and aid not unlike that normally rendered to compatriots and so on. More proximate to Rousseau, Diderot’s Encyclopédie article “Cosmopolitain, ou Cosmopolite” calls upon a simplified iteration of concentrism. By contrast to Hierocles, Diderot invokes only three concentric circles in the Encyclopédie. Nonetheless, he echoes the Stoic ethical injunction that the cosmopolitan prefer those who reside in the larger, enclosing circles to those in the smaller, enclosed ones: “I prefer . . . my family to myself; my fatherland [patrie] to my family, & the human race to my fatherland.” Besides the seri-

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ous definition, Diderot offers two jocular references to either one who is homeless or one who, for better or for worse, is nowhere a stranger—that is, home anywhere—in the Encyclopédie entry. Whether Rousseau had encountered the textual fragment of Hierocles, it is likely that he was familiar with Diderot’s entry, since it dates from before the break in their friendship. Furthermore, either could have found a similarly attenuated concentrism in Cicero’s Stoicizing De officiis or Montesquieu’s blending of Ciceronian with Malebranchian themes. In any case, Émile’s final filial choice of his fatherland as his political home—penned after Rousseau’s alienation from the philosophes—may directly respond to Diderot’s high-flown cosmopolitanism, or at least the impulse behind it. Émile’s psychically homeless status as one who feels at home nowhere and anywhere simultaneously and yet chooses to settle down in his natal home hints that Rousseau inhabits Stoic-inspired Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in order to revise it. Rousseau equates modernization with global flux and spatial displacement, so a “modern cosmopolitanism” is doubly marked by intensified transformations of all locales; Émile’s good countercosmopolitanism would put him above the fray, aloof from the flux, therefore psychically and morally at home anywhere, any season, any station (É 42; OC IV.252–53). I will, though, cast doubt on whether intention matches effect in Émile: the young man may be home anywhere / home nowhere not because he wills to detach himself from the flux of external goods but because he does not know how to make attachments. Descriptively, modern cosmopolitanism represents for Rousseau cold detachment from place, indeed utter displacement and shallowness of moral attachment: citizens of the world are precisely not patriots, even if they claim loving citizenship in a particular patrie. Although Rousseau does not explicitly link cosmopolitanism to travel (as does Clifford), he does express suspicions of travel and travelers that parallel his suspicions of cosmopolitanism. When he claims, “[j]ust as the least cultured peoples are generally the wisest, so those who travel least are the ones who travel best” (É 452; OC IV.828), he turns the dominant traveling culture’s self-understanding upside down. Less culture, less travel are more highly valued morally. Likewise, those who travel frequently, bad travelers, will tend toward cosmopolitanism because they are least able to form fixed attachments to any place; they are thus morally suspect. But Rousseau offers a paradox of simultaneous fixity and displacement here. Those whose orbits are most locally circumscribed, those affixed most securely to their native homes would travel best (were they to

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travel); they would never suffer the existential homelessness of the cosmopolite, because their proper homesickness would always orient them morally and thus politically, as well. So not all travels are ruled out, only some: “it is bad reasoning to conclude from the fact that we travel badly that travel[s are] useless” (É 455; OC IV.832). Consequently, throughout “On Travels” Rousseau stands as much on guard as he can against the infelicities of travel without proscribing it altogether. Valuing the local, fixed, and native, he expresses a profound anxiety about the unboundedness of travel and the possibilities of radical dislocation that it brings into play—the spatial displacement and moral enslavement symptomatic of political modernity. Travels have some utility, indeed are necessary for political projects such as informed consent. They serve a valid moral purpose, but they endanger and imperil the very subject who would benefit morally and politically. The lines between insight and corruption, between consent and rejection of cultural formation, are fragile indeed. In order to rescue Émile from the legion infelicities of traveling, then, the activity must be bounded by rules and formed by discipline. The activity must set its moral and political compass by a predetermined goal—a predestination. Travels must be circumscribed so that they issue in practical embodied political attachments rather than in utter detachment: “Everything that is done by reason,” Rousseau thus insists, “ought to have its rules. Travel—taken as a part of education—ought to have its rules. To travel for the sake of traveling is to wander [errer], to be a vagabond. To travel to inform oneself is still to have too vague an aim. Instruction which has no determined goal is nothing” (É 455; OC IV.832). The urge to protect Émile against that ominous “nothing” by fixing his destination and drastically reducing his field of play while en route prompts Rousseau to assume a number of paradoxical positions, paradoxes that, in this case, fail him rather than serve him well.

predestination: how to govern travels So travels endanger but are not useless. In order to reap their political benefits without undoing the negative moral education of Rousseau’s imagined pupil, travels must be governed, administered, even tortured into conformity with a determinate goal. The tutor must sever travels’ promised intentions from their problematic effects. Rousseau effects this transmogri-

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fication of travel in three ways. First, if travel most purely attains its best intentions when it least occurs—because its delicate quintessence cannot bear repetition because (according to Rousseauian sensationalist psychology) infelicitous effects reinforce each other over time—then travels must nearly not take place at all. Since Émile must travel to locate his home and establish domestic attachments, then he must, with the tutor’s administration, get it right the first time and be done with it. Second, if properly administered, the activity will be rigidly structured, and travel governed by a rigid structure and destined goal will allow almost no play. Play or slack permits the aimlessness or vagueness of aim that occasions sin—errancy, in other words, produces error. As we shall see, global and mental divagations beget each other. Third, he who travels must not succumb to the subjectivity of the traveler. In “On Travels,” Rousseau writes several relentless pages on the perfidy of travelers—their exoticism and moral relativism, their simultaneous egoism and emptiness, and above all their mendacity (É 451–52, 454–55; OC IV.827–28, 831–32). According to the Savoyard Vicar’s criticism of Montaigne (seemingly a reference to “Of Cannibals”), travelers, when not outright liars, make claims about sights seen whose truth is suspect, if not literally incredible (É 289; OC IV.598–99). Because of the lies of the perfidious few—or many, since one cannot know for certain—all self-identified travelers warrant suspicion. Thus liar-travelers not only lie, but they steal too—they indirectly rob credibility from those who would report faithfully what they have observed and experienced. Liar-travelers rob accurately reporting travelers of the ability to make truth’s status manifest to receptive audiences. Travels tend not only to throw the subject’s anterior moral status into flux but also to edge the cultural environment toward chaos wherever they take place. Hence, not only must the structure and subject of travels be rule-bound; so must the field of activity itself: one must have rules for the locations in the itinerary, as well. Here Rousseau reveals how recto relates to verso in his ideology of travel. If only travelers are mobile and morally corrupt, then it follows that natives, nontravelers, remain stationary and morally pure. Indeed, in Émile (as in earlier writings), Rousseau elaborates an ideology of nativism and rustic localism. “One must go to the remote provinces—where there is less movement and commerce, where foreigners travel less, where the inhabitants move around less and change fortune and status less—in order to study the genius and morals of a nation. See the capital in

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passing, but go far away from it to observe the country [le pays]. The French are not in Paris, they are in Touraine.” The best ethnological specimens, those most clearly displaying the original essence of their national genius, thrive far from beaten paths, “closer . . . to nature” (É 468, 469; OC IV.850, 852). Capitals, those centers of consumption, commerce, class mobility, and the arts—not to mention origins and destinations of travels, as Rousseau the erstwhile Parisian is aware—open themselves to iniquity, corruption, and infelicity. Cities are par excellence the sites of corruption because people overcrowd there; cities “are the abyss of the human species,” where “the races perish or degenerate”—which is why Émile must be initially raised in the country. If the French are more French in one place than in another, it is because some have remained truer to a kind of timeless essence that will spoil when no longer “closed in upon itself ” (É 59, 453; OC IV.277, 820). The fear of impurity and desire to safeguard original national character that subtends Rousseau’s nativism mix an Augustinian rhetoric of fallenness, a Platonic distrust of flux, and a Montesquieuian justification of organically local culture. Hence, even when those promiscuously open regions of France (viz., Paris) launch travelers, they still stubbornly stay “closed” to otherness, but in a different way. Parisian travelers are already so fallen, so much the product of flux and multiplicity, and thus so far from being an organic product of local conditions—they are so deeply corrupted and so profoundly imprinted by prior contacts—that they do not even register other people’s practices any longer. “Of all the peoples of the world, it is the French who travel most; but they are so full of the practices of their own country that they confound everything which does not resemble those practices” (É 452; OC IV.828). Interested amour-propre prevents the French from seeing anything that is not an effect of the interested amour-propre already so well manifest in themselves: they reflect and recognize themselves only in their foreign hosts. In sum, Rousseau subscribes to a dominant, double-sided ideology of travel but overturns this ideology’s moral self-evaluation. Whereas travel is highly valued according to discourses of cosmopolitanism, civility, civilizational progress, and cultural dynamism—which therefore cast as “backward” the natives and locals on whom travel is parasitic—Rousseau reverses the signs and champions nativism and localism to the deprecation of traveling cultures. In overturning this ideological self-understanding, Rousseau renders travel suspect—suspect but not proscribed. Though he nonetheless

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concedes that Émile must travel in order to tender morally meaningful consent to a political covenant, the tutor must administer the travels in such a way as to safeguard Émile’s native, local status. As we shall see, he succeeds all too well: he allows the moral problem of travels to trump their political promise.

negative education: desires and passions During their travels, the tutor will most certainly not have Émile traipse about all starry-eyed, dreaming of utopian republics. Rousseau calls any such reverie une chimère, a chimera—not merely a mythic creature but a patchwork of incongruous elements born of the most extravagant fancy. Before they even embark for Émile’s travels as political education, the tutor warns him against imagining any such myth as a potential choice. The tutor cautions his charge not to expect the successful fixing of an ideal home: “If we do not succeed, you will be cured of a chimera. You will console yourself for an inevitable unhappiness, and you will submit yourself to the law of necessity” (É 457–58; OC IV.836). In the tutor’s admonition is contained two major prongs of Émile’s moral project, each inspired by the early modern legacies of rival Hellenistic schools of philosophy: on the one hand, the consolations of Epicurean philosophy for unhappiness; on the other hand, the Stoic dictum that escaping necessity depends on submitting to it. The first entails moderating desires to be coterminous with one’s faculties so as to attain an overall absence of perturbation; for Émile this means uprooting chimerical desires. The second demands an extirpation of the passions because, if passions bid one to resist necessity, then virtue requires one to combat them; for Émile this moral endeavor will have the paradoxical effect that he can only enact his virtue by combating vice, to which he must therefore be constantly exposed, tempted but not overwhelmed. Rousseau, however, does not weigh these equally, for avoiding unhappiness does not suffice for moral goodness if one is not also virtuous. If well-conducted political travels take as their predestined goal the location of a suitable place to call home defined by its worthiness of consensual political membership, then a subsequent danger to guard against is setting one’s standard of worth too high: what one counts as “suitable” may provoke some untrammeled imaginings. A chimera, after all, combines the most noteworthy features of incommensurable beasts. To preempt such imaginings

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the tutor disenchants the world of mythic choices, first by provoking idealism and then by cutting it down to reality. In order to undertake this ethical task the tutor stokes his pupil’s desire for pastoral privacy: “Give me Sophie and my field,” Émile had exclaimed, “and I shall be rich.” Responding, JeanJacques admonishes Émile that appearance rarely conforms to reality in the dealings of modern sociable men: “But where is the state where a man can say to himself, ‘The land I tread is mine’? Before choosing this happy land, be well assured [whether] you will find there the peace you seek. Be careful that a violent government, a persecuting religion, or perverse morals do not come to disturb you there” (É 457; OC IV.835). Acutely illustrating the ease with which the very ancien régime institutions from which one would escape into pastoral privacy exercise tentacular means (taxes, litigation, payoffs) to encroach upon that ideal, Jean-Jacques prepares this future citizen not to expect too much of any regime. The tutor thus tempers Émile’s aspirations with a dose of reality. JeanJacques warns his pupil that on their travels he will find that men are vicious, will conclude that, “in vain efforts to ensure” freedom and thus to escape necessity, men actually “use up their freedom” in the very institutions intended to aid them. Predictably, upon finishing their tour Émile draws precisely these conclusions. “After having employed almost two years in roaming some of the great states of Europe and more of the small ones,” Jean-Jacques will ask Émile, “Well, my friend, you remember the principal object of our travels. You have seen and observed. What is the final result of your observations? What course have you chosen?” To this question Émile can muster no particular compliment to any state in Europe, great or small (É 471–72; OC IV.855–56). All teem with vicious people. Everywhere humans have fastened themselves in chains—government, religion, civility. Although Émile had originally undertaken his travels, according to the tutor, “to find some piece of land where I could be absolutely on my own,” this young man seems to have found each country neither more nor less suitable than any other. Jean-Jacques conducts Émile through a disenchanted world, so the latter will realize after his travels that there exist no pastoral utopias, and that any place that might qualify as such has been invaded by the insinuating institutions of anciens régimes. Consequently, Émile is made to develop a disenchanted countercosmopolitanism befitting a world lacking chimeras: “What difference does it make to me where I am? Wherever there are men, I am at the home of my brothers [chez mes fréres]; wherever

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there are no men, I am in my own home [chez moi]” (É 472; OC IV.857). In a world where ideal escape cannot be imagined, a world lacking chimerical utopias, it matters not an iota where this “I” finds itself—even if, as it turns out, that place happens to be in Algiers, in chains. Rousseau associates a certain freedom here with the exorcism of chimeras. Moderating untrammeled political desires by attuning the imagination that provokes them to a realistic geography of mediocrity liberates a moral subject, wherever he may find himself: “I shall not be free in this or that land, in this or that region; I shall be free everywhere on earth.” He “who does not have a fatherland [patrie],” the tutor concurs, “at least has a country [pays]” (É 472, 473; OC IV.856, 858). The ultimate patrie does not exist and so must be jettisoned as a desire, and if no perfect place stands out in real geographic space, then any country will suffice. In such a disenchanted world, Émile can be made homeless without being injured by fate because he will be able to feel at home anywhere. His is a disenchanted cosmopolitanism in another sense, too. Not only does Émile give up on the idea of any actually existing, geographically localizable utopia; also, he will never even have pondered a chimera so generically abstract as a universalist humanism. Though he will in the end positively attach to his patrie while morally prepared by psychic homelessness to keep house anywhere on earth, Émile will venerate neither his natal community nor a translocal city of godlike wise persons together sharing values derived from nature’s reason. Against chimerical utopias, the tutor instills instead a countercosmopolitanism as negative ideal. Émile’s freedom does not issue from any place outside himself—no geographic locale, no political regime, no external attachments—because freedom is not political or institutional but rather moral and internal. Echoing Senecan and Epictetan notions, Rousseau insists, “Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it with him everywhere. The vile man takes his servitude everywhere. The latter would be a slave in Geneva, the former a free man in Paris” (É 473; OC IV.857–58). The tutor aims to give Émile a moral training similar to the bodily discipline he has already undergone: both the moral and the physical training toughen the pupil against dispiriting outrages of fortune. If imaginary homelands lie outside the realm of real human requirements and beyond humans’ faculties to constitute them, then humans harm themselves in desiring them fruitlessly and so must free themselves from them. Émile’s

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travels are intended to complement his earlier education in the proper and prudent relation to things that are in “our control only in certain respects,” as described in Book II: Our unhappiness consists, therefore, in the disproportion between our desires and our faculties. . . . It is thus that nature, which does everything for the best, constituted him in the beginning. It gives him with immediacy only the desires necessary to his preservation and the faculties sufficient to satisfy them. . . . Only in this original state are power and desire in equilibrium and man is not unhappy.

However, “[a]s soon as his potential faculties are put in action, imagination, the most active of all, is awakened and outstrips them. It is imagination which extends for us the measure of the possible, whether for good or bad, and which consequently excites and nourishes the desires by the hope of satisfying them” (É 80–81; OC IV.303–4). That hope of satisfaction, it goes without saying, is a false one; in fact, it is not just false, but chimerical. Imagination indubitably tends toward extravagance, and in lavishing one’s attentions on what escapes one’s powers, it sets one up for injury and woe: “Each one extends himself, so to speak, over the whole earth and becomes sensitive over this entire large surface. Is it surprising that our ills are multiplied by all the points where we can be wounded?” (É 83; cf. SD 175; OC IV.307, III.179). The tutor, then, would guard against this power of imagination, which would lend itself to making too many shallow attachments. In short, the imagination is responsible for producing inclinations and impulses, which result from the false extension of human faculties: one imagines (incorrectly) that something is within reach, that one has the faculty to attain it, and one experiences this falsely extended faculty in the absence of its object as privation, a form of pain (É 80; OC IV.303). To this situation one could respond as would an Epicurean—by limiting not only the immediate source of pain but also the imagination that produces the painful feeling of privation (e.g., limiting the intake of alcohol and the desire for alcohol) in order to achieve a state of ataraxia, or lack of disturbance, which is an Epicurean model of pleasure (but which Rousseau associates with Stoicism). Recommending this model, Rousseau advocates moderating desires, a procedure elaborated by Epicurus, who distinguished among necessary desires those that are natural and necessary desires and those altogether empty. Thus Rousseau’s call to rise above perceived privation in order better to modulate desires to faculties corresponds to an Epicurean

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ethics of the self: the tutor disabuses Émile of imagination’s chimeras and narrows the scope of his desires as strictly as possible to those “desires necessary to his preservation.” Rousseau calls upon an Epicurean ethical idiom to cure his charge of an empty desire for an ideal patrie—a desire that would have remained painful and unfulfilled because unfulfillable—but Rousseau also borrows another more directly disenchanting procedure from the Epicurean Lucretius. In De rerum natura Lucretius composed a more unified picture of the atomistic, purposeless universe outlined by Epicurus. In his poem Lucretius brought to bear a scientific outlook on problems of mythology, deity, and mortality. For one, Lucretius notes wryly, “You need not suppose, therefore, that there can ever be . . . a Scylla, half sea-monster, with a girdle of mad dogs, or any other such monstrous hybrid between species whose bodies are obviously incompatible.” Likewise, zoology and physiology “obviously” would suggest the unnaturalness of the fire-breathing compound of goat, lion, and serpent called the chimera. Lucretius is critical of ideals or dreamy imaginings—these may be nothing more than vague forebodings of death. Unable to face death without disquiet, humans have entangled themselves in so many methods for “running away” from themselves: “If only they perceived with equal clearness the causes of this depression, the origin of this lump of evil within their breasts, they would not lead such a life as we now see all too commonly—no one knowing what he really wants and everyone for ever trying to get away from where he is, as though travel alone could throw off the load.” Likewise, then, Émile’s potential desire for the chimera of an ideal patrie is merely an unlimited desire, a monstrous hybrid of obviously incompatible earthly societies that figures as nothing more than a vague longing to escape himself out of misunderstanding himself. The political chimera must be crushed by a disenchanted countercosmopolitan outlook just as the zoological chimera is crushed by Hellenistic atomic physics. No political chimera may serve to animate his travels lest these become a manifest restlessness in and with the world that really derives from restlessness of self. Analyzing desire, distinguishing those that are empty from those natural, and within the latter category identifying those that are necessary (because not everything natural is necessary), Jean-Jacques believes that he can better conform Émile’s properly natural desires to the real limitations of his human faculties. As always, Rousseau’s model for this conformity, which existed in the original, natural state, where the greatest desire is no longer to want any-

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thing, is the natural man, the primitive. Thus his exemplar coincides with that in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, with which Émile is often in dialogue: “They [the cannibals] are still at that fortunate point of desiring only so much as is ordained by their natural needs: every thing beyond that point is superfluous for them.” Although Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar may reject Montaigne’s reports of cannibalism as “uncertain and bizarre practices, based on local causes unknown to us” (É 289; OC IV.598), he attributes to them as to all humans a prepolitical sense of justice, which we might associate with the pity and amour de soi-même that bad, denaturing cosmopolitanism diverts us from. In Émile, Rousseau seems more interested in a second basic feature of humanity’s common nature: not prepolitical justice, but precisely this conformity between desires and faculties that denatured humans have lost. Achieving this conformity by escaping denaturing, Émile would avoid the pains caused by the affliction of unfulfillable desires. Eluding pain, he would be unperturbed—not unhappy—and therefore free. But for Rousseau Epicureanism offers freedom only in a negative sense: freedom from disturbance caused by false, restless feelings of privation. And so the faculty of imagination—even an inflamed imagination—cannot be abolished without also abolishing freedom in a more positive sense: freedom as enacted virtue. To manifest the gap between the two freedoms, Rousseau examines the case of natural man, who lives in such immediacy that there is complete harmony between his desires and faculties and who may therefore be free, though not morally so. “If [a good man] had been born in the heart of the woods, he would have lived happier and freer. But”—and here Rousseau launches an important contrast—“he would have had nothing to combat in order to follow his inclinations [penchans], and thus he would have been good without merit; he would not have been virtuous; and now he knows how to be so in spite of his passions” (É 473; OC IV.858). Rousseau’s autoharmonious primitive being who as yet suffers no inflammation of the imagination cannot be morally free. He is good and free “without merit” because, in not yet having inclinations to resist, he does not enact virtue. When Rousseau speaks of acting in spite of passions, he places himself more squarely in a Stoic idiom than an Epicurean one. The objects of impulses are not always vicious or to be avoided. Many external goods, such as basic nutriment, are necessary by nature and right reason, and so it is appropriate to assent sometimes to an impulse to eat. Similarly, self-love (amour de soi-même) is for Rousseau “a primitive, innate passion” from which an impulse to self-preservation (Stoic oikeiosis) naturally follows

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(É 213; OC IV.491). One accords with rational nature in assenting to such appropriate impulses. Consequently, the tutor must order his pupil’s three educations, namely, “the one coming from nature [which] is no way in our control; that coming from things [which] is in our control only in certain respects; that coming from men [which] is the only one of which we are truly masters.” Ordering pedagogical method in this way installs nature as inspiration and endpoint: “What is that goal? It is the very same as that of nature. . . . Since the conjunction of the three educations is necessary to their perfection, the two others must be directed toward the one over which we have no power” (É 38–39; OC IV.247). When shadowed from Stoicism’s guiding light, viz., a life in accordance with rational nature, humans “disfigure everything” and “love deformity, monsters.” Hence, if “[e]verything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things” and “everything degenerates in the hands of man,” then recovering nature means preventing degeneration and preserving the human being’s originary condition (É 37; OC IV.245). If man is naturally good, then the goal of Rousseauian negative education is thus to preserve a human’s nature from the poisonous tentacles of social institutions in order to make possible a life in rational harmony with nature. Since virtue, according to the Stoics, is independent of external goods, it is crucial that one who aspires to the virtue of the Stoic sage act such that she be the cause of her actions: “the wise man,” writes Seneca, “. . . escapes necessity because he wills to do what necessity is about to force upon him.” Such is autonomy—to take as one’s own the law that would otherwise be imposed by external necessity. However, passions thwart any such attempt to escape necessity by free volition because they exaggerate impulses and render rational judgments about them more difficult by overburdening the will. Passions are, as the second-century philosopher Galen puts it, “ ‘the excess of impulse,’ since people overstep the proper and natural proportion of their impulses.” The excessive impulse renders the will fractious and disobedient to rational judgment about whether it would behoove one to assent or to withhold assent to the object of that impulse. “Evil” and “moral badness” are thus, as A. A. Long puts it, “a matter of misjudgment.” “The characteristic of a bad disposition,” Long concludes, “is the lack of independence and freedom: it permits behaviour to be determined by any cause except orthos logos [right reason], that is, it surrenders its self-determination to emotional judgments and external influences.” Or, in the words of the Savoyard Vicar:

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. . . my will is independent of my senses; I consent or I resist; I succumb or I conquer; and I sense perfectly within myself when I do what I wanted to do or when all I am doing is giving way to my passions. I always have the power to will, I do not always have the force to execute. When I abandon myself to temptations, I act according to the impulsion of external objects. . . . But it is in this precisely that my freedom consists—my being able to will only what is suitable for me, or what I deem to be such, without anything external to me determining me. (É 280; OC IV.585–56)

In contrast, the autoharmonious primitive of the woods does not merit the label “virtuous” because, while he certainly does not misjudge his circumscribed inclinations, he does no judging at all, as he has no excessive impulses to scrutinize by judgment. Émile “is not a savage to be relegated to the desert” but instead “a savage made to inhabit cities” (É 205; OC IV.483–84). He must learn to maintain well the proportions of his impulses and to judge their objects well, as desert savages need not do, but this presumes that Émile will be exposed to the external objects that would inflame his passions so that he can enact virtue by combating their impulsion. And in order to muster the fortitude necessary for the virtuous resistance to external impulsions, especially the alien impulsions that travels introduce, Émile must be already fully formed morally. For, while Jean-Jacques has recognized travel as pedagogically useful and even politically necessary for a project of civic obligation within the confines of a social contract, he also admits that travels expose pupils to the greatest of dangers—not physical rigors, but much worse: moral corruption. It is for this reason that travels must not crown an education but rather must come separately, after its completion. Yet completion is precisely what the tutor continually defers.

negative education: sensational psychology Because the circumstances of modern civilized sociability—its incitement of a surfeit of passions, its production of a superfluity of desires—make it very difficult to judge external inputs well, everything that comes in contact with Émile must be prescreened. The very conceit and conditions of negative education make it necessary that the tutor be not only “the child’s master” but also “the master of all that surrounds him” (É 95; OC IV.325).

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The conclusion of Émile’s negative education will a priori have already made possible his ability to withstand the moral perils of travel, will already have fortified him against corruption. However, as we have seen, the tutor deems it necessary to administer Émile’s travel according to strict rules. The intention of negative education is to prepare Émile for travels; the effect of travels is to prolong the tutor’s superintendence of Émile’s education. Jean-Jacques must therefore continue to master Émile’s environs, even during the travels that would mark his relative maturity. Hence, even during his travels, Jean-Jacques will protect Émile against what the Savoyard Vicar called the “impulsion of external objects,” for these do not merely hijack the will and impel its assent to them. More significantly, according to Rousseauian psychology, they have a cumulative effect on judgment. Rousseau’s picture of the mind thus differs in one substantial respect from Locke’s. Locke envisioned an enormous tabula rasa that would never suffer from crowding. As is the case in Locke’s mythic America, so in the Lockean picture of the mind: there will forever be “room enough” (§115) on the “white Paper” of the mind such that external objects (as received through our senses) can make imprints on it endlessly. Because it is infinite, there is neither means nor measure by which to mark a process of crowding. The internal eye sees the cumulation of imprints made by external objects as a “succession” or a “constant train of Ideas,” but Locke gives no sense that these build on and affect one another. They merely succeed one another discretely or else compound one another additively in the construction of complex ideas. By contrast, Rousseau worried intensely that these imprints not only built on and affected but moreover infected one another, and (typically) he imported his anxiety about corruption into the materialist, sensationalist psychology elaborated by Enlightenment philosophers and espoused by Jean-Jacques. If Rousseau, as Christopher Brooke has argued, “attempts, more strenuously than any other thinker of the period, . . . an extraordinary synthesis of Epicurean, Augustinian, and Stoic argumentative currents,” he does so by endowing human beings not only with a faculty of amour de soi-même and, at least in nascent society, a disinterested amour-propre (which together have Hellenistic analogues), but also with a fallen and perverted version of the latter, inflamed and interested amour-propre or vain selflove (which Augustine had diagnosed as the supreme emanation of Pride). When primarily self-directed, amour de soi-même and independent, disinterested amour-propre together parallel both the Epicurean drive to reach or

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maintain equanimity, ataraxia, and the self-preservative aspect of the Stoic oikeiosis. When other-inclusive, analogous roughly to Epicurean pleasure in friendship as a culmination of ataraxia or Stoic natural sociability as a derivation of oikeiosis, amour de soi-même and now interdependent, disinterested amour-propre condition the possibility of what Rousseau calls the moi commun (common self ). As for the fallen, interested version of amour-propre, the Rousseau of Émile theorizes its origin as a product of “modifications” on the former faculties: most of these modifications have alien causes without which they could never have come to pass; and these same modifications, far from being advantageous for us, are harmful. They alter the primary goal [of amour de soi-même] and are at odds with their own principle [viz., selfpreservation]. It is then that man finds himself outside of nature and sets himself in contradiction with himself. (É 213; OC IV.491)

The effect of this modification is not merely ontogenetically cumulative, but phylogenetically progressive. Whereas the temporality of Lockean epistemology is individualist, Rousseau’s picture of the mind is social and historical: each generation’s members are even more massively “denatured” by progressive accretions of vice in social institutions, or, in the best possible case, this denaturing sustains a common civic unity in perpetual social equilibrium (SD 124; É 40; OC III.122–23, IV.249). In the first case, however— that is, that of vicious disequilibrium—the modifications to the judgment are “alien”—they come from outside—and these alien modifications build up, ruin by ruin, an increasingly disfiguring edifice. In an otherwise unremarkable passage of the Confessions, Rousseau offers a retrospective précis of a project on moral psychology that he never undertook as such. He describes the terms of his psychological puzzle as follows: most men, in the course of their lives, are frequently unlike themselves, and seem transformed into quite different men. . . . While examining myself, and endeavouring to find, in the case of others, upon what these different conditions of being depended, I discovered that they depended in great part upon the impression which external objects had previously made upon us, and that we, being continually modified by our senses and our bodily organs, exhibited, without perceiving it, the effect of these modifications of ourselves, in our ideas, our feeling, and even in

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our actions. . . . From how many errors would the reason be preserved, how many vices would be strangled at their birth, if mankind knew how to compel the animal economy to support the moral order, which it so frequently disturbs!

Though unwritten as described, this project, La morale sensitive, ou la matérialisme du sage, stands as the absent center of Émile. For one can easily interpret Émile’s negative education as Rousseau’s internal monologue about self-improvement qua vice-avoidance, a thought experiment about being able to have corrected from birth the enchainment that had often made him unlike, and unlikable, to himself. It is possible even to interpret the sage of the proposed title as the Stoic sage , who would achieve heightened self-possession not only through ethical self-cultivating exercises but also through the help of a non-Stoic, materialist epistemology qua sensationalist psychology. Whereas Locke’s version of the mind never suffered from crowding—the white Paper would always somewhere be fresh for new imprints—Rousseau saw that the crowding and interference of sense impressions was constitutive of judgment and bodily action. Previously made impressions did not come laterally in trains but willy-nilly on top of one another. Modifications reinforced modifications until ultimately we “seem transformed into quite different men”—slaves, even. Reason, too, is affected by the continual accumulation of these effects. Error is not so much the internal product of a premature or faulty operation of judgment as in Locke; it is not just a misjudgment, a discrete malfunction of an otherwise operable faculty. Rather, it comes from a warping of the faculty of judgment itself: for Rousseau, error does not confine itself to a local, infelicitous operation of judgment but instead characterizes the faculty globally on the whole. It becomes defective in being corrupted by an overcrowding of impressions on impressions. The problematic is not merely epistemological but moral; it describes not merely the space of the mind but the space of the globe: “Men are made not to be crowded into anthills but to be dispersed over the earth which they should cultivate. The more they come together, the more they are corrupted. The infirmities of the body, as well as the vices of the soul, are the unfailing effect of this overcrowding” (É 59; OC IV.276–77). (Locke too characterized mental and global spaces as consonant, but for him both were endlessly extensible.)

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We already saw, in the section “Predestination: How to Govern Travels,” that travel needed to be governed by a rigid structure and predestined goal because global errancy generates mental error. In view now of Rousseau’s picture of the human mind, we can make two rather more precise statements. Errancy in global space impresses itself on the mind to produce error; vice versa, error in the faculty of judgment expresses itself as errancy in space. And if the latter is so, then so much rides on the anterior moral status of the person who will have traveled: “But once the utility of travel is recognized, does it follow that it is suitable for everyone? Far from it. It is suitable only for men sure enough about themselves to hear the lessons of error without letting themselves be seduced and to see the example of vice without letting themselves be carried away” (É 455; OC IV.832). The tutor’s declaration presents a self-reinforcing dynamic here. Only an already mature judge will stand up to mental seductions and moral distractions. At the same time, an already mature judge will have chosen a mentally and morally fortifying itinerary, from which she will have foreclosed those seductions or distractions that present genuine challenges. What of Émile’s anterior moral status, then? Would he be secure by the time he would have embarked? Seneca, who provides the epigraph to Émile, would express no inconsiderable doubt: When a mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd: it is so easy for it to go over to the majority. A Socrates, a Cato, or a Laelius might have been shaken in his principles by a multitude of people different from himself: such is the measure of the inability of any of us, even as we perfect our personality’s adjustment, to withstand the onset of vices when they come with such a mighty following. A single example of extravagance or greed does a lot of harm . . . what then do you imagine the effect on a person’s character is when the assault comes from the world at large?

Although the passage comes from a letter about crowds and is not primarily about travel, Seneca nonetheless asks a question pertinent to Émile’s travels: if even Socrates, that paragon of virtue, is left “carrying the imprint of [vice] or [gets] bedaubed unawares with it” as soon as he encounters “a multitude of people different from himself,” how could Émile hope to fare amidst modern corruption? The answer is that he cannot hope to emerge morally “unbedaubed” in his contact with others. Realizing this, the tutor must rescue him from travel’s ill effects.

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the conquest model of impurity Yet it is not only the traveling nontraveler Émile who must be protected. The obverse side of Rousseau’s antitravel ideology of travel is nativism. Natives and locals, too, must be protected because, according to Rousseau’s conception, travels blaze paths for other travelers and thus occasion precisely those intercourses that would make provinces like Touraine no longer remote. Hence, the moment travelers will have accessed Touraine, it will have ceased being an organically local culture. Touraine’s people and culture and therefore its future will have changed forevermore by the contacts that outsiders’ travels will have facilitated. According to Rousseau’s sensational psychology, external contacts and alien modifications will accumulate progressively, and so this island of culture will grow increasingly overcrowded with their indelible imprints. Touraine will get “bedaubed unawares” with the vices carried there by a multitude of alien persons. The problem with travels is that their transformative effects go far beyond present and therefore future modifications. They can alter what precious little the past makes available; they modify memory in modifying judgment. Rousseau worries about travels so much because they expose persons, places, and even histories to change. Specifically, travels expose persons, places, and histories to impurity and hybridity. Strangely, Rousseau cannot conceive that travels might be edifying to those heretofore middling in their moral practice. In what will become something of a refrain (cf. PN 96n; OC II.964n), Rousseau puzzlingly declares: Travel pushes a man toward his natural bent and completes the job of making him good or bad. Whoever returns from roaming the world is, upon his return, what he will be for his whole life. More men come back wicked than good, because more leave inclined to evil than to good. In their travels, ill-raised and ill-guided young people contract all the vices of the peoples they frequent and none of the virtues with which these vices are mixed. (É 455, emphasis added; OC IV.832)

What degree of agency does Rousseau impute to travels? On the one hand, travels court moral deformation. They imperil and seduce; were the activity impotent, neutral, or harmless, he would not feel compelled to warn people away from it. On the other hand, travels confirm truly moral formation. They continue work already in progress; they reinforce a path already taken

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and seem not to do anything that has not already been done or that will not eventually happen in any case. In order to reconcile these two appraisals of travel, could one assert that travels as Rousseau understands them provide only force but not indirection on one’s moral path? Travels encourage an intensification of vice in persons already disposed to it. But why warn virtuous people away from travels if their reiteration might give more motor force to their virtue? And, while force could account for the idea of getting “carried away” by a preexisting movement, it would never adequately explain letting oneself be “seduced,” which implies a change of direction. For what would “travel” mean if it involved only force and never the possibility of its own direction—that is, of indirection? Would such a thing be recognizable as “travel”? If Émile’s purity has been predestined from the start, if his supposed purity and (as we see in the next chapter) that of the inhabitants of cultural islands like Touraine have not been risked in their mutual contact, if purity can even be presupposed, if his negative education has always been screening out suspect sense data so as to rescue Émile from unacceptable alien imprints, then the answer to the latter question must be negative. And here we must assess two related problems in Rousseau’s antitravel ideology. First, Jean-Jacques has drawn a map of Europe divided between, on the one hand, corrupted, impure, colonizing cultures of travel, and, on the other, peoples who are uncorrupt, pure—natives to be colonized. Underlying his reservations about travel is a conquest model of cultural encounter, in which his greatest fear is that an eminently dependent sociable people, afflicted through and through by modern interested amour-propre and existing “always outside” itself (SD 187; OC III.193), effectively conquers via vice an autarkic quasiprimitive/quasinatural people, heretofore enacting a collective yet still disinterested amour-propre by relating only to itself in itself. Rousseau, bearing witness to the severe violences of imperial monarchs of France, England, and Spain in Africa and the two Indies, had good reason to be wary of at least certain cosmopolitan (qua intercultural) contacts as barely masking vile pillage and vainglorious domination. Nevertheless, the conquest model oversimplifies alien encounters in its unidirectionality and refuses to acknowledge Rousseau’s own position as one who learned how to reconstruct virtue from primitives and natural men (of his own fantastical invention, to be sure). In other words, the model’s starkness belies its own practical and salutary ambivalence. The consequence is that, in order to manifest the inequalities of power in contacts between traveler and native,

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between hybridity and purity, he must veritably efface the representation of native agency—or, more precisely, he surely impoverishes native agency by presuming that it operates only as self-present, self-sufficient purity— eternal, self-enclosed primitive being—rather than as a live and mongrel faculty of adaptation. I focus on this first problem and Rousseau’s strategies for overcoming it in the following chapter, where I elaborate a critical diagnosis of Rousseau’s nativism and isolationism. Here, though, I want to pursue an analysis of a second problem, which is entwined with this question of autarkic purity against hybridity: Émile’s supposed autonomy. One (Stoic) prong of the pedagogical undertaking in Rousseau’s treatise had purportedly been in the service of constituting a man in conformity with nature whose will would never be subject to externals because it would independently will what necessity required (cf. É 280; OC IV.586). He would achieve the supreme freedom of obeying a law he legislates for himself. Ultimately, Jean-Jacques intends that Émile enjoy precisely such autonomy. Yet, in the end, the supposed autonomy that Émile perceives and practices appears as nothing other than heteronomy, the nomos constituted by another (named Jean-Jacques) and imposed on him unwittingly. If autonomy is the end goal and heteronomy the means without end, then Émile’s education would thus be rendered miseducation, his travels not per se travels, his maturity a mental and moral immaturity, his freedom not freedom, his choices really the providence of another. Because Rousseau recognizes something within travel that he fears— namely, risk of and vulnerability to alien corruption—he must torture such qualities out of travel to make it morally acceptable. Yet he must, after all, make travel acceptable rather than avert it altogether if it is indeed necessary for informed political consent and maturity—the Lockean project that Rousseau broadly accepts and that he endeavors to improve. Especially in the sensitive case of the raising of a virtuous man from an impressionable boy in a vicious world, Rousseau cannot permit anything to escape JeanJacques’s gaze. However, because travel avails itself to errancy and error— both within limits, to be sure, but limits whose continual shifts one can only ever tacitly consent to, since these contingent shifts could never be explicitly prespecified (and therefore never explicitly consented to in advance)—the tutor must exert such draconian control over it as to negate it entirely. Even if the tutor could map an absolutely predetermined itinerary, Jean-Jacques would have to be the god he denies being (“. . . since Émile is not a king and I am not a god . . .” [É 467; OC IV.849]) in order to reign with the

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omnipotence and omniscience necessary to “rescue” Émile and to control absolutely his reception of and impression by alien sense data. Thus does Rousseau reverse the emphasis between education and travels. It is not that travel merely supplements the pedagogical cultivation of what Rousseau believes to be a “natural bent”; rather, education would prepare a pupil for travel and all it entails: negative education exists for travel, not vice versa. But if Émile’s education exists so that he may travel in moral security, then the pedagogy’s negative status destroys travel by reducing to degree zero the play that would grant its status as an independent activity. If, as one critic notes, the “voyage is only undertaken . . . after Émile has already been sufficiently educated so that the voyage will only have those effects intended by Émile’s tutor,” then the negative education has continued into the voyage, thereby nullifying it. Education that effectively elicits autonomy does not consist in the robotic application of formulae to familiar situations but rather in learning (as well as one ever can) the contingent play of judgment—that it can never fully capture the vague relationships or situate itself in the ambiguous contexts of everyday life without ceasing to be a live adaptive faculty. Only a flexible and extensible, thus critically hybrid, faculty of judgment could provide the resources necessary for cognizing the disorientation of place, history, self, and other that travels inflict. As Montaigne, quoting Seneca, could have reminded Rousseau, “It makes a great difference whether a man does not wish to sin, or does not know how.” Émile could not sin to save his life and knows nothing of judgment’s errancy because, in an endless series of bizarre instances of pedagogical deus ex machina, his omniscient tutor intervenes to set “natural,” negative education on the correct route—though with the effect that he more firmly roots Émile in the tutor’s omnipresence rather than a world of unanticipated experience. What Rousseau does to travel in “On Travels” stands in for what he does to education in the rest of Émile. He still grounds us in the sensible and material, but in the case of his wunderkind he shifts the temporality of sensationalist psychology from the past impressions that normally constitute the rest of us to a complete future good that envelops and subordinates present and past. Rousseau’s Jean-Jacques interminably anticipates Émile’s ultimate destination, unbeknownst to him, so that the pupil never thinks about it himself. By orienting travels to a predestined future good, negative education domesticates travel as an activity—disarms its potential for errancy.

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Constant tutor, sage friend, Jean-Jacques sustains a perverse, enslaving symbiosis with Émile. Consequently, Émile’s education is so total that its process can never terminate. One of Rousseau’s descriptions of Émile’s foil, the non-Émile, confirms the paradox. “Seeing that you [the tutor] take the responsibility for his preservation, for his well-being, he feels delivered from this care. His judgment rests on yours” (É 118–19; OC IV.360–61). Young non-Émiles know truly that their judgment rests on that of their tutor, while late adolescent Émile believes falsely that his judgment is wholly his own. His belief is false because the tutor always elaborately stage-manages his education such that Émile is protected from exposure to corruption until he can utilize mature reason. If, however, the characteristic feature that defines mature reason is the ability to act autonomously from it unprotected, especially in the face of contingent unknowns, then Émile can never achieve rational maturity. Neither Émile nor the non-Émile manifests the ability to function independently as a self to determine himself truly. Both equally perchance fall victim to moral slavery, one wittingly, the other unwittingly. Here, then, in Émile, is Locke’s pedagogical exhortation come to pass: “And in this way of living abroad they are not much different from being at home; for depending from home for supplies, and being under the shelter of their governor’s wing, there be few of them that stand on their own legs, and make their thought and consideration of the ways of mankind.” At the end of the travels with his tutor, Émile is neither educated nor mature; freedom as he perceives it has been the constant providence of his tutor; he has never left “home,” since he has never left the environment that Jean-Jacques has prescreened for him; and, as such, he cannot be said to have traveled at all. “Form an enclosure around your child’s soul at an early date,” the tutor urges early on in Émile (É 38; OC IV.246). “On Travels” manifests in spite of Rousseau’s intentions that this enclosure negates travel as political education. Kept by peculiar symbiosis with Jean-Jacques from maturity, freedom, and the indeterminacies of travel itself, Émile fails as an autonomous subject. The tutor’s conduct and administration of his pupil is so total that Émile cannot even conceive a counterconduct for himself. To develop a critique, to think “how not to be governed” by principles of negative education, even to be able to take account of how he has heretofore been conducted—these acts of resistant self-knowledge and self-empowerment are all rendered impossible by the totality of his subjection.

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Let him always believe he is the master, and let it always be you who are. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom. Thus the will is made captive. . . . Do you not dispose, with respect to him, of everything which surrounds him? . . . Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it. (É 120, emphases added; OC IV.362–63)

Secretly and totalizingly predetermined thus, what can Émile’s (incorrectly perceived) self-determination mean? If “consensual nonconsensualism” pervades Rousseau’s oeuvre in that the men and women whom he describes consistently consent to being dominated by others, then Émile both confirms the rule and stands as its exception. Vis-à-vis the tutor, Émile suffers only a nonconsensualism that he can never properly consent to or dissent from because he is made to develop no critical awareness of it. Vis-à-vis le pays and political regime he finally settles on in the end, though, he does seem to consent to nonconsensualism in voluntarily binding himself to filial piety. Yet even here consent and nonconsensualism are confounded. In this heteronomy that is falsely perceived and practiced as though it were autonomy, he takes the foreseen step, the supposedly autonomous decision: he chooses the predestined home, consents to the civil government of his fathers. If, by pronouncing that a person is “born . . . Subject of no Country or Government” (§118), Locke had opened up the gap between one’s natal polity and the one that one ultimately chooses to give one’s consent, then Émile decides to weld it shut. As his two years of travel draw to a close, the tutor Jean-Jacques captures Émile’s newfound wisdom in a condensed act of ventriloquism. Like most (if not all) of the speeches attributed to Émile, the following speech is hypothetical, a product of what, within the frame of the narrative-treatise, the tutor anticipates Émile would say. “Either I am mistaken in my method,” declares the tutor, “or he will answer me pretty nearly as follows”: “What course have I chosen! To remain what you have made me and voluntarily to add no other chain to the one with which nature and the laws burden me. The more I examine the work of men in their institutions, the more I see that they make themselves slaves by dint of wanting to be independent. . . . In order not to yield to the torrent of things, they involve themselves in countless attachments. Then as soon as they

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want to take a step, they cannot and are surprised at depending on everything. . . .” (É 471–72; OC IV.855–56)

Because no patrie exists unblemished by civil men’s slavishness and because all extant polities overwhelm by their sheer indifference, Émile seems anxious to declare his own indifference to place. Perhaps revealing himself all too perfect a denizen of civil society and so flawless a product of that order of private property that depends on limitless spatial substitutability, Émile yens for no rooted abode. Yet the tutor reprimands the boy’s remarks as too hasty: “Do not ask me then, ‘What difference does it make to me where I am?’ It makes a difference to you that you are where you can fulfill all your duties, and one of those duties is an attachment to the place of your birth. Your compatriots protected you as a child; you ought to love them as a man. You ought to live amidst them, or at least in a place where you can be useful to them insofar as you can. . . .” (É 473–74; OC IV.858)

Moral duty to one’s fathers effectively trumps a Lockean theory of obligation that had aimed so nobly to sunder sons from their fathers’ constituted and ancient polities and to render their patrimonies alienable. Émile is homeless yet must settle, not indifferently, on a home; attachment to his natal polity and ancestral property will do. So, in the end, filial piety for la patrie is all that remains to Émile after the tutor tries to suppress chimeras and to replace mythic nature with nature as wrested from myth. In the final analysis, though, Jean-Jacques’s—that is, Rousseau’s—bid to wrest nature from myth proves ineffective, for his own enslaved senses inevitably reproduce the nostalgic myth of nature as primitive purity, and these negatively enchanted senses paint a doubled recto-verso image of psychic homelessness and homesick-inducing nativism (PF 57; OC III.534). In sum, disenchanted countercosmopolitanism has merely reenchanted something new: the native. Predetermining and predestining Émile’s travels, Rousseau, bitterly homesick for uncorrupted nature, closes the gaps Locke had opened and ultimately reconciles past and future, the natal home one was born to and the political home one consensually chooses. Home anywhere, Émile perfectly “keeps the appearance of freedom” back in his natal home and under the shelter of his governor’s wing. Never properly unheimlich, never erring because he does not know how, Émile seems never to have traveled at all.

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immobilizations Surely I am being savagely unfair to Émile and the tutor’s negative education in suggesting that Émile has in fact been immobilized. Surely Émile’s travels, though predictably within his mentor’s orbit, count as travel. Surely Émile hardly resembles the eminently soft clay I have made him out to be. Surely he need not be hysterically protected against unanticipated foreign impressions. Surely he has progressed far enough along mentally to develop ideas independent of his tutor, as consonant with the Abbé de Condillac’s picture of a steadily maturing mind in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, another notable source for Émile: Since human beings cannot makes signs for themselves except when living together, it follows that the fund of their ideas, when their mind begins to be formed, consists entirely in their mutual intercourse. I say “when their mind begins to be formed” because it is evident that when it has made some progress, it knows the art of making signs and can acquire ideas without any external help.

Surely by the commencement of his travels Émile can access a fund of knowledge external to omnipresent intercourse with Jean-Jacques. Surely he has achieved the requisite level of autonomy to form his own judgments. Thus surely it is precisely Émile’s fledgling independence—an independence weighty with responsibility—rather than the dangerous lure of the alien that drives the tutor to exercise constant surveillance. And surely all the Stoical self-assessments that Émile utters at the time of his unfortunate enslavement are sincere. For surely he will have learned, as projected, “to preserve himself as a man, to bear the blows of fate” (É 42; OC IV.253). However, these more charitable interpretations fail, I maintain, and the evidence of their inadequacy is not what Émile is made to say in slavery (his avowals of happiness therein) but rather how he is given to act as slave. I will, in closing, critically juxtapose the fact that Émile begins Émile et Sophie discontented with freedom because he no longer enjoys the security of living under his tutor’s wing and ends it as the most powerful and best slave in Algiers with some words from early on in Émile: given the mobility of human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than raising a child as though he

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never had to leave his room, as though he were going to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it. (É 42; OC IV.252–53)

Since the adult Émile’s vicissitudes are so outrageous, the tenor of the passage neither affirms nor contradicts Émile et Sophie outright: for while Émile’s initial complaints of torment and victimage will seem to prove the negative educational project’s failure, his triumph in Barbary captivity surely announces the tutor’s success. Rather, it seems more accurate to say that the passage, far from being obviously wrong, may be right in all the wrong ways. If Rousseau fools himself into believing he has wrested nature from myth but instead replaces one myth of nature with another, then the project of natural education succeeds according to its principles, but the principles themselves may be deformed. Émile’s travels endeavored on a more genuine non-egocentric Stoicism and created a countercosmopolitanism that would reconcile global autonomy and local attachment. Although Émile may not have traveled per se, he reached the correct destination all too well: in the end he advances autonomy only in slavery and attachment only to his chains, and while he seemingly transcends egocentrism, he practices an oddly selfish, though not self-possessed moral freedom that shouts fiat iustitia, pereat mundus. Émile, in the opening pages of Émile et Sophie, believes that his tutor, having rendered him ignorant of sin, had set him up not for autonomy but rather for the heteronomy that defines the Stoic view of moral slavery. Indeed, the man-boy admits in the breach his unwitting dependence on the omnipotent, omniscient superintendence of the tutor. He feels himself a nullity, unequipped to face outrageous fortune alone, and proves his slavish desire for heteronomy by dreaming that the tutor Jean-Jacques could have protected him from the horrors that have befallen him in the latter’s absence. Having before only ever known the shelter of his governor’s wing, he never learned to stand autonomously and on his own: “No, never under your eyes would crime and its troubles have come to my family; in abandoning it you have done me more evil than the good you had done me all my life.” Are these the words of one who has struggled to practice autonomy? Or rather of one who, having once lost them, yearns again for the innocence and ignorance of that “subjection so perfect” that it “keeps the appearance of freedom” to the extent that “the will itself is made captive” (ÉS OC 1V.884;

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É 120; OC IV.362)? Indeed, it will seem that Émile’s descent, far from being an aberration, is the very proof and fruit of negative education qua miseducation, natural upbringing qua denaturing. While it is by now no surprise that Émile feels, as a slave, “more free than before,” thereby epitomizing a good Stoic progressive (if not sage), it most certainly does surprise that he chooses to lead a minor slave rebellion—for which there is no Stoic tradition—however conservative it turns out to be in the end. For, unfortunately, Émile’s little slave rebellion, such as it is, deviates from Stoicism in the name of Stoicism. As exception it will confirm and fortify the general rule. After all, Émile, like the Stoics of antiquity, is not against legal slavery per se. Moreover, just as Seneca commended Lucilius for beneficence toward his slaves and advocated for the reform of abuses with no mention of comprehensive abolition, so does Émile take pains to praise his Moorish masters’ justice in contrast to American slavedrivers. He gives no sense that colonial plantocracy should be overthrown rather than better administered. Accordingly, Moorish slaveowners demonstrate “neither gentleness nor clemency,” but at the same time “one need fear neither capriciousness nor wickedness” from them: “They want only that one do what one is able to do, but they demand nothing more, and in their castigations they never punish incapacity but rather unwillingness [la mauvaise volonté, lit. ‘bad will’].” In this respect North Africans come off as the more favorable slaveowners compared to Europeans in America. In the only other noteworthy direct criticism of chattel slavery in Rousseau’s oeuvre, he writes, “The blacks would be much happier in America if the European treated them with the same equity; but as he sees in those unfortunates only instruments for work, his conduct toward them depends uniquely on the utility that he extracts from them; he measures his justice on his profit” (ÉS OC IV.918). Rather than profiting only from slave labor extraction, the Algerian economy traded on European Christians’ racialized fears. It depended heavily on ransoms paid by European families and Christian organizations, who deemed white Christian slavery unconscionable; in France, moreover, this objection to slavery assumed a narrow territorial aspect in that French agents were keen to liberate fellow French royal subjects even over other Europeans or Christians—much less fellow “humans” in general. Antislavery sentiment was, in other words, driven by patriotism rather than cosmopolitanism qua universalist humanism. Thus, although the source of profit differed between Algerians and European colonists in the Americas, that slavehold-

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ers measured their justice on their profit could be said of one as much as the other. If “the treatment of Christian slaves in Algiers . . . compared favorably with the treatment of prisoners and slaves in Christian society,” it was in part because such just treatment profited masters better than plantation owners’ abuses of their chattel. Hence, the reasons Émile finds nothing to oppose in North Africa’s institution of slavery may in part be historical. According to the text, however, the reasons are primarily philosophical. Like a hard-line Stoic, then, Émile initially disdains a fellow European slave’s dreams of revolt: The young Knight of Malta . . . lost himself in projects for revolt and in conspiracies impossible to execute, and which, always discovered, only worked to aggravate his misery. I tried to rouse him to follow my example and to take advantage of his strength [à tirer parti de ses bras] in order to render his estate more supportable, but he scorned my advice and told me arrogantly that he already knew how to die. “Sir,” I told him, “it would be better still to know how to live.” (ÉS OC IV.919)

Émile scorns the Knight’s dreams of revolt and urges him to answer to grinding necessity with the dignity Émile himself displays. Constant in his attempt to influence the Knight’s character positively (thus by comparison proving himself more worthy of the nobility, courage, and strength of knightly orders), he would prove by example that one can achieve moral autonomy, though legally enslaved. He thus upholds Stoic tradition. Why, and against whom, does Émile finally rebel, then? Émile chafes not against the yoke of slavery per se but at the lashes of a bad overseer specifically—a typical trope in slavery literature. Émile’s frequent conferences with the Knight end up attracting the suspicion of their master, who deems him guilty by association of conspiring to revolt, and the two are sold together to a new master. Rousseau is careful to pin the maltreatment that finally sends Émile past the threshold of tolerance not on his Moorish master, who will turn out to demonstrate great moderation, but on this new master’s overseer who, himself a slave, has it in for the stoical and robust Émile. Reveling in Stoicism’s figurative riddles, Émile et Sophie stages a conflict between a legal slave who is morally free and a moral-legal double slave. Wise and morally free, Émile balances constancy against the stings of the overseer’s terroristic abuse. However, the overseer’s maltreatment and malnourishment of the slaves in his charge and especially of Émile finally sends even stoical Émile over the edge until he can no longer tolerate his lot. He finally “resolved to

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deliver himself at whatever risk.” Although he decides, alone, to rebel by staging a strike—“I had no need of anyone’s help to execute my project” (ÉS OC IV.920)—nevertheless he succeeds in gaining the support of fellow Frenchmen. If the Émile-overseer struggle pits philosophically wise and nonwise legal slaves, what next ensues in Émile et Sophie matches rational master and rational slave. As the strike’s ringleader, Émile draws the attention of the master, who asks him to answer for his rebellious deeds. In reaction the master, rather than exacting violent retribution, astonishes Émile by showing restraint “in a moment when any European master, cut to the quick by his interest, would have begun, without wanting to give me a hearing, by condemning me to a thousand torments” (ÉS OC IV.920, 922). In answering for the work strike to his new master, Émile refuses to blame him for being ignorant of the overseer’s abuses and then advises him on how to get more from his slaves: “Better distributed, your work will not be less productive and you will preserve the hard-working slaves from whom you will extract with time a profit much bigger than that which he [the abusive overseer] would procure in overwhelming us. Our complaints are just; our demands are moderate” (ÉS OC IV.923). When Émile is finally driven to rebellion, he rebels in the interest of being a better legal slave to a better legal master because sagacious slavery profits chattel and owner mutually, though it requires expunging morally-philosophically nonwise elements from the system. In short, Émile proposes moral reforms with immediate economic effects. Justice and profit need not, after all, stand in inverse relation, as they do for the criticized European masters in America: here Émile’s vision of more just slavery efficiently produces greater profit. In response to Émile’s wise counsel, the master nominates him overseer in the stead of the former abusive one, and eventually Émile’s fame as the reasonable slavedriver who struck to improve his slavery earns him the attention of the Dey of Algiers, who commandeers him to rationalize the institution of slavery in Algiers. Yet what Émile most cherishes is not his newfound fame or political influence but rather his newly flourishing moral autonomy. He is thus content in legal slavery; indeed, he feels at home there. In delayed response to his travels, Émile, it seems, has reconciled autonomy and attachment by attaching himself to the slavery that had succeeded in making him an ostensibly autonomous subject. Misprising revolt and assenting to return to an improved regime of slavery, Émile represents that truly contented slave that liberal political phi-

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losophy balks at because it cannot recognize heteronomy as autonomously chosen. In one sense—the one inhabiting the blind spot of liberal political philosophy—it is true that Émile is freer as a slave than he has ever been before. He seems to practice moral freedom. His misadventures after the tutor’s departure have taught him more about the sources and paths of error and sin than he ever would have learned on a thousand more voyages (qua non-travels) with Jean-Jacques. The boy, formerly living in so perfect a heteronomy that it kept the appearance of autonomy, the boy whose “will itself [was] made captive” (É 120; OC IV.362), can finally claim not to be ignorant of sin, even as he wills not to sin. Far from learning virtue and freedom by keeping vice and unfreedom at bay, Émile’s lot in Émile et Sophie proves that the former might only be learned through and by way of the latter. If it is valid that “a willingness to allow the possibility that a slave might autonomously choose to return to slavery, and hence a preparedness to accept the counterintuitive idea that a perfectly contented slave is socially free, are the perhaps rather ironical conditions and consequences of a consistent liberalism having a genuine regard for human freedom,” then I would find myself in agreement with such a genuinely consistent liberalism. Matters are never so easy as that, though. For, as I noted in Chapter 1, when sizing up the thrust particularly of Locke’s theorization of slavery, but also of Hobbes’s objections to self-enslavement, early modern liberal theories regard situations of heteronomy inconsistently. Unable to countenance autonomously chosen heteronomy, they seem to open themselves to criticism. Émile’s choice to remain a slave under a wiser regime of slavery (whose improvement he has instigated) seems objectionable for reasons quite other than the inconsistent liberal’s contention that heteronomy may never be autonomously chosen. I reject Émile’s action for a reason I call fugitive. The nineteenth-century egoist anarchist Max Stirner reveals basic parameters of a fugitive forsufferance of slavery. Expressing full cognizance of the undeniable fact that “[u]nder the dominion of a cruel master my body is not ‘free’ from torments and lashes”—in clear contradistinction to Stoic and Christian disavowals of the salience of external bodily integrity in preference to “inward” or “intrinsic” freedom—Stirner distinguishes “self-liberation” from “emancipation (manumission, setting free).” Only one who effects ownness can liberate herself even within repression and even while another’s slave. The fetters of reality cut the sharpest welts in my flesh every moment. But my own I remain. Given up as serf to a master, I think only of

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myself and my advantage; his blows strike me indeed, I am not free from them; but I endure them only for my benefit, perhaps in order to deceive him and make him secure by the semblance of patience, or, again, not to draw worse [blows] upon myself by obstinate resistance. But, as I keep my eye on myself and my selfishness, I take by the forelock the first good opportunity to trample the slaveholder into the dust. That I then become free from him and his whip is only the consequence of my antecedent egoism.

A slave effecting her ownness asserts herself positively, even in the moment of patient outward obedience, because ultimately she acts for the benefit of her undeniable body and her inscrutable spirit. Even within slavery, even prior to actual bodily flight and thus antecedently conditioning its very possibility, she captures fugitivity for herself by conforming only for the sake of resistance. Like the would-be captive in the state of nature who takes “twenty steps into the forest” (SD 158; OC III.161) as soon as his would-be master relaxes his vigilance, the egoist, too, seizes the first good opportunity to bust her chains. In Algiers Émile experiences, by contrast to such a slave’s fugitive selfliberation, moral self-emancipation. Yet this condition is a mere trick of the will; for Émile’s freedom partakes less of positive self-assertion than mere negation of heteronomy. There is no sign that Émile is fugitive in his slavery; he is instead sincerely Stoic. Fugitivity and sincere Stoicism are incompatible because the latter rejects as willful the self-liberating resistance that fugitive ownness puts into action by dissembling and outright expression in turn. Though Stirnerian egoists are thought to express individualism of the most selfish sort, it is really Stoic Émile who exhibits greater selfishness. A slave effecting ownness endures brutality long enough to resist outright; however, in trampling the master underfoot while liberating herself bodily, the egoist at least opens windows of opportunity for other slaves to liberate themselves and may indeed unite to escape with them. Coldly, Émile exercises constancy in slavery as a proof of his autonomy and thus emancipates himself morally on the backs of all Algerian slaves: he may save their backs from lacerations, but he secures their fetters all the tighter. In excising rather than exercising corporeal terror, Émile’s rational and disciplinary system of slavery burdens individual slaves all the more because it transmutes bodily injury into moral desert. Émile et Sophie may suggest that terror—even a systematics of terror—is an ultimately ineffective means

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in Algiers and the Americas for keeping slaves subjugated and for blocking exit from or resistance to the system, for it can only capture slaves’ bodies, not their wills. Émile’s successful rebellion thus reveals that an uncaptured, self-possessed will can rescue its body. Furthermore, it proves for Rousseau that, first, the onus to seek freedom rests on the individual slave considered morally and, second, a wiser and gentler slavery can capture slaves fully by not overburdening them corporeally but expecting that all labors be willing. Hence, rational slavery rivets bodily labor to moral virtue, thereby making slaves feel they must deserve the moral autonomy they exercise in chattel slavery. Willing the rationally ordered yoke as their own would make it feel lighter. While flawed, Rousseau’s moral-desert view of slavery as built on individual consent to will (legal) unfreedom—an account that he adopts from Stoicism but that does not exhaust his views—when combined with the image from noble savagery discourse of freedom as active bodily escape produces the possibility of fugitivity as a technique of freedom. As we shall see more fully in the final chapter, Rousseau acknowledges in other texts that, because of the structural character of modern unfreedom, resistance, especially fugitive resistance, can never amount simply to an individual’s moral onus to recover freedom from underneath repression. Rather, it is a political project that produces freedom and does so not through demanding cognitive expressions of will grounded in moral desert, but instead through a noncognitive body politics that is culturally informed and that performs freedom as collective practice. Rousseau thus develops a rich, complex account of structures of unfreedom and practices of freedom that seriously troubles any simple or straightforward notion of agency or autonomy as pure self-making. Yet this larger, fuller vision is not in evidence in the story of Émile’s slavery and freedom. The slave Émile’s exercise of constantia may prove his autonomy, but its field is strikingly narrow, and it is not, at least according to Rousseau himself, “natural,” and therefore we must view Émile’s self-declared freedom circumspectly. If “it is not for Slaves to reason about freedom” (SD 177; cf. 131; OC III.182, 132), then perhaps it is not for the adult enslaved Émile, who lived for so long in the most perfect subjection, to discourse about freedom, especially as he endeavors to create the most perfectly rationalized slavery. For Émile’s judgment, though certainly now beginning to err toward some autonomy, still bears the marks and shape of its prior deformation and denaturing. Émile’s slavery, while also quite

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minimally the beginnings of a stealing away from absolute (though not abject) heteronomy, is first and foremost a consummation of the tutored boy’s deformed nature, and in this respect Émile of Émile et Sophie allegorizes the relationship between nature and slavery that Rousseau addresses in the Second Discourse: “just as violence had to be done to Nature in order to establish Slavery, Nature had to be altered in order to perpetuate this Right” (SD 179; OC III.184). In spite of the intention guiding its praxis, Émile’s negative education has rendered him slavish to the very core of his nature such that whatever autonomy he can finally apprehend will never have expressed itself in anything other or greater than maintaining his subordination to another person. Hence, we are invited to view Émile’s contented slavery as a cowardly deformation of Stoicism’s critical edge in that his untraveled, enslaved sense will always have craved to be trammeled. Whereas the charge of moral slavery in legal freedom had before served to indict the denatured and overcultured classes of the Roman Empire, its inverse symmetrical figure, moral emancipation in legal slavery, now appears in the guise of this white slave at Algiers as self-deluded self-indulgence. What served once as a stinging barb that would enjoin Romans to reform their decadent ways now seems a pointless love of subjection tethered to a tacit fear of further liberty. What seems most objectionable in Émile’s autonomous slavery is that his past permits us—and would permit him, too, if only he knew how grandiose was the ruse that his upbringing consisted in—to question whether his presently declaimed autonomy does not in fact entail another ruse, this time self-imposed. Is Émile’s contented enslavement not the continuation of his earlier perfect subjection, the one of his tutelage under Jean-Jacques in which was kept the appearance of freedom? Does Émile not make his own will captive, not so much for the sake of Stoic discipline, but out of an inability to emerge from underneath his tutor’s wing, a wing he has recreated for himself in slavery in Algiers? Is Émile’s supposedly autonomous slavery not another excuse for avoiding new situational contexts for the testing of autonomy? What, after all, is an autonomy that is self-immobilizing, a liberty that consigns itself to a reservation? Is Émile perchance a coward? Has he been denatured by his upbringing to seek out and to reproduce only secure, hemmed-in versions of autonomy forevermore? In Émile et Sophie Émile speaks of his freedom as embodied once and for all, as though more orderly institutionalized legal slavery could better sustain it, but in suggesting this, Rousseau forgets that Émile’s situation could

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very well beget repose and not freedom. It is not that Émile ought never to have experienced heteronomy (a situation that is in any case impossible for any socialized human being [cf. SD 138–39]) or that he ought to have left heteronomy behind in his past in moving on now to purely autonomous subjecthood (also impossible). In the world that Rousseau depicts, of impersonal domination and universally illegitimate subjection, a world in which one must choose either repose or freedom (GP 178; SC III.4, 92; OC III.178, 405), autonomy emerges in and as moments fugitively stolen from a situation of generalized heteronomy without ever fully leaving it behind. One might even say, too, following a distinction the tutor makes between the heteronomy of the peasant and the autonomy of the savage, that these moments are savagely stolen (É 118–19; OC IV.360–61). The Promised Land does not lie at the far side of the wilderness from Egypt; rather, its freedom must be captured inside universal Egyptian enslavement. This is what marronnage and Rousseau’s fugitive Jewry in a sense amount to, as we shall see. Autonomy must maintain a tension with the heteronomy from which it emerges, just as one must tensely know sin even as one wills not to sin. Is Émile perchance a (definitionally) cowardly slave because he will not deign in his repose to acknowledge his attachment to his chains? Is there hidden behind Émile’s newfound autonomy and freedom a cowardly desire not to be rid of fetters? He may be intended to exemplify brave autonomy—indeed, superlative bravery in that he captures moral autonomy from slavery’s supreme heteronomy. Actually, however, he epitomizes a willful heteronomy, preserved out of cowardice and not force. Achieving some autonomy and enjoying it, criticizing another’s rebellious urges and refusing to learn anything from it and therefore refusing to err further in capturing more practical knowledge of the sin of autonomy, unwilling to wrest further autonomy from a generalized heteronomy and resting instead within his localized and particular slavery, Émile willfully stunts his own development. Free, surely, in his North African slavery, freer in fact than ever before, he nonetheless enslaves himself by refusing to press his liberty further in situationally embodied practices that would certainly militate against the very rationalized institution of slavery he had helped to restore to Algiers. To be sure, the tactics of the Knight of Malta whom Émile presses to reform do not impress one as sustainable, because they seem at one and the same time too locally reactive and too broadly, blindly existential (as though this white Knight in Algiers were prefiguring by two centuries the Euro-Algerian Albert Camus’ archetypal rebellious slave). Differently unimpressive, how-

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ever, is Émile’s approach. Deformed by his negative education and thus now cowardly by second nature, he willingly perpetuates his own slavery out of cowardice and willfully narrows the circumference of his freedom. Selfcertainly and not at all self-critically knowing now, finally, an iota of true autonomy, he wills to know not one iota more.

4

Nativism What explains our constant literary evocation of Indian and indigenous themes? Is it just an echo of romanticism? No. In fact we are secretly moved by the sacrifice of those who were our last truly free countrymen. Our Indianist yearnings show a nostalgia for freedom. —juan antonio corretjer, Yerba bruja

Those who had the power to eliminate all fear of their neighbours lived together accordingly in the most pleasurable way, through having the firmest pledge of security. . . . —epicurus, Key Doctrines

So mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realize what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure. —lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

In the previous chapter I explored the ideology of travel that structures Rousseau’s endeavor to reorient the political pedagogy of Émile’s grand tour so it aligns with a more genuine cosmopolitanism. Just as Émile is meant to be the ideal guest-traveler who would purportedly maintain his autonomy in all of his interactions, so would the ideal host-native communities maintain their authenticity by never wanting and so rarely needing to interact with the wider world. This ideology invokes a recto-verso relation between two ideals: to Émile’s autonomy corresponds Touraine’s autarky, its virtuous self-sufficiency. As hosts-natives, idealized Tourangeaux remain as yet uncorrupted by frivolous alien urban values. 159

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Just as Chapter 3 explores whether Émile will really, as predestined, have confirmed his autonomy in travel by having remained (literally) unimpressed by what he experiences abroad, so this chapter serves to explain how these host communities like Émile’s Touraine might maintain—and ultimately whether they can succeed in deliberately maintaining—autarky in the midst of the international flux produced by the encounters with ordinary, thus quite possibly corrupting, foreigners and neighbors. In light of the correspondence between autonomy and autarky, Émile unsurprisingly in the end takes his place alongside natives of the autarkic communities that Rousseau so admires. In pledging to affix himself (with Sophie) to the provincial home of his fathers, Émile virtuously contents himself with life inside a narrow radius, just like his native neighbors—though with this difference: he will by choice have returned, only after having experienced the wider world, to the very locale where they will by inertia always have maintained themselves. This contrast between Émile’s mobility and his native neighbors’ fixity may seem to divide recto from verso within this ideology of travel. However, Rousseau capitalizes on a pattern that Émile’s autonomy and the natives’ autarky hold in common. Rousseau emphasizes a similar practice of intensive self-relation common to both (Stoic) autonomy and (Epicurean) autarky, despite the rivalry between the Hellenistic philosophies that inform them. Furthermore, since both enact intensive self-relation, it would be inaccurate to distinguish autonomy as an individual ethics from autarky as a collective politicoeconomics, for autonomy can be collective and autarky individual. After all, self-legislation by general will in the social contract state is none other than collective autonomy. Moreover, despite the tendency in late modern usage to regard autarky as primarily an economic concept, it is in Epicureanism an ethical and psychological term, and Rousseau’s nearcontemporary Immanuel Kant reckoned with it as such. Indeed, Rousseau, in Jean Starobinski’s classic interpretation, assimilates individual to collective: “In an imaginative flight he [Rousseau] transposes the ideal of the selfsufficient ego into a myth of the self-sufficient community.” Though others have taken Starobinski to task for his psychologism out of a misdirected insistence on enclosing autarky within a strictly economic frame, I situate myself against both Starobinski and his detractors: I contend that psychoethical concerns, though important, are not logically prior to politicoeconomic concerns; rather, these two semiautonomous fields converge, especially in a tradition such as Rousseau’s that conceives natural bodies and

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bodies politic analogically. Hence, whether individual or collective, relations of autarky parallel and advance autonomy, and both autarky and autonomy share a common intention: these more or less Stoic and Epicurean strategies are meant to guard the integrity of the subject in face of alien travails of fortune. In effect, Rousseau counsels small, well-disposed states not to despair of achieving autonomy in a chaotic international environment, but in the interstate system autonomy involves more than simply willing self-legislation: because states, after the closure of territorial space by private property and the consequent supersession of natural liberty, interlock to form a system of mutually affecting units, autonomy necessarily entails intensive practices of ataraxia and autarky. If, like Émile, such states cultivate constancy and strive to remain detached from externals, then they will be able to weather the revolutions of fate. That is, Rousseau—like Justus Lipsius nearly two centuries before him and Cicero long before—preaches constantia in publicis malis, steadfastness of collective or individual self amidst unstable times of public disorder. Although Émile’s political world is purportedly approaching “a state of crisis and the age of revolutions” because everyone but Émile lacks any cognizance of her natural human limits, the boy’s private education, precisely by making him recognize those limits, would render him adaptable to vicissitude and thus able to manage crisis and upheaval. In ideal Stoic fashion, it is not sufferance of outrageous fortune that forces recognition of one’s limits, but recognized limitation that annuls suffering from the experience of fortune. If it is “impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to last,” Émile would nevertheless survive and endure, having already renounced any deep or abiding attachments (except to his tutor) in order to live in accordance only with nature (É 194; OC IV.468–69). It is worth recalling that Rousseau’s remarks on revolution follow shortly after a discussion of what becomes Émile’s favorite book, Robinson Crusoe, as if Rousseau’s audience were to infer that Émile, like Robinson (though ignoring the latter’s distinctly nonindividualist dependence on his slave, Friday), would prove a resourceful survivor of the shipwreck of state. Émile could sustain himself on a desert isle or anywhere else, and indeed the proposed ending to Les solitaires, the sequel to Émile, reportedly abandons Émile on a desert island. He could endure political intrigues, social upheavals, and civic displacements because he can impose a law unto himself without regard to others—or so Rousseau wants to believe.

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Likewise, small states such as Geneva, Corsica, and Poland will persevere through widespread international unrest by seeking peace and tranquility in themselves, within their own limits. In his recommendations Rousseau indicates his conviction that practical arts of collective living, whereby citizens of potentially besieged states learn to rely on and to relate only to themselves, can comprise an effectual form of resistant autonomy to the external realm: resistance by self-sufficiency. As Lipsius or Montaigne did, Rousseau sought concepts and analogues for a steeling and cultivation of self appropriate to a topsy-turvy modern context. Importantly, though, Rousseau’s moi could be commun, not just individual—and, resembling neo-Stoic Lipsius less than skeptical Montaigne, he eclectically borrowed Hellenistic arguments for the adducing and safeguarding of a collective or individual self. I argue, in short, that Rousseau subscribed to the project he observed in common across Hellenistic philosophical schools—namely, a project for self-sovereignty premised on an ethics of self-care, which Michel Foucault describes as “a matter of forming and recognizing oneself as the subject of one’s own actions, not through a system of signs denoting power over others, but through a relation that depends as little as possible on status and its external forms, for this relation is fulfilled in the sovereignty that one exercises over oneself.” Just as Jean-Jacques envisions an imminent public disorder for which Émile must be prepared, as well as a chilly, detached cosmopolitanism that Émile’s patrimonial attachment must contradict, so does Rousseau identify twin dangers for small or marginal states such as Geneva, Corsica, and Poland: on the one hand, they inhabit a Hobbesian international realm, potential prey for other states’ conquests; on the other hand, they may succumb to a cosmopolitan xenophilia that entices them to become conquerors themselves (SD 116; OC III.113). Accepting the premises of international Hobbesianism and cosmopolitanism’s expansionism, Rousseau reacts to both by advocating that small or marginal states safeguard collective autonomy in practices of autarky. Rousseau therefore essentially socializes Émile’s constancy in publicis malis for a body politic and does so fully aware (as his interstate Hobbesianism would suggest) that disorder and anomos, or the absence of law, are constitutive of the international arena rather than only merely aberrant, as they would be in the civil state. Modern sociability may be the root of global enmity, but it also provides, in new associational forms, remedies for ill health: “let us attempt to draw from the ill itself the remedy that should cure it; let us use new associations to mend the internal vice of the general association” (PF 20; OC III.479).

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Having affirmed a Hobbesian system of constitutive interstate dependencies and zero-sum relations of force, Rousseau must then develop strategies by which states can achieve relative independence in spite of the international anarchy. I argue that his texts settle on one approach—what I call patriotic compression—by testing Stoic cosmopolitical theory with mostly negative conclusions. Against xenophilic cosmopolitanism, Rousseau reinforces patriotic compression by extending and socializing the self-cultivating theories of autarky and virtue from the Hellenistic philosophies of the Roman Empire. Finally, though, despite his intentions, the positive reconstruction of political autarky for would-be independent states falls victim to Rousseau’s own overwhelming metaphysics of original purity and external corruption. What could have been a strategic cultivation of the body politic within and by itself, in spite of though not in isolation from others, thus degenerates into something quite close to reactionary isolationism and xenophobia. Typically, Rousseau interprets autarky in extreme terms—by which the expectation of self-absorbed self-sufficiency reaches so rarefied a state that all alien relations become suspect and autarky becomes xenophobic. Ultimately I conclude that Rousseau encounters the same problem in his recommendations on Geneva, Corsica, and Poland (and other such states that find themselves subject to possible international dependencies) that he does in Émile. That is to say, his original and certainly not ignoble intentions— for Émile to confirm his political maturity via travels as a political education; for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland to achieve independence and autarky through ethical-political practices of virtuous self-cultivation—are thwarted by Rousseau’s own extreme anxieties about foreign influences.

the fallen world: hobbesianism At several points in the Second Discourse, Rousseau explicitly rejects Hobbes’s picture of the bellum omnium contra omnes in the state of nature. “Above all,” Rousseau writes, “let us not conclude with Hobbes that because he has no idea of goodness man is naturally wicked, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue. . . .” In his view, Hobbes did not retreat nearly far enough into the state of nature and thus “spoke of Savage Man” while really “depict[ing] Civil man” (SD 151, 132; OC III.153, 132). Rousseau denied that the most primitive humans would adopt toward one another either a naturally hostile attitude or a naturally hospitable one (as Diderot would argue, reactively contradicting Hobbes). Based on his readings of travelers’ reports

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and Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, Rousseau even expressed skepticism toward Montesquieu’s presentation of savages as naturally diffident and trembling at every sound. According to Rousseau, the earliest primitives feared only “new Sights”—anything they had never encountered before. However, they would tame and overcome their fears through long-repeated encounters with that which had previously seemed frightfully novel but in fact presented no danger (SD 136; cf. OL 254; OC III.135, V.381). Rousseau thus rejects Hobbesian aggressivity along with other characterizations of the first humans. In the place of vices and virtues, fear and trembling, he puts asociality: These times of barbarism were the golden age; not because men were united, but because they were separated. Everyone, it is said, considered himself to be master of everything; that may be so; but no one knew or desired anything but what was ready to hand: his needs, far from drawing him closer to those like himself, draw him away from them. . . . (OL 268–69, emphasis added; OC V.396)

Because, in those rude ages, nature was bounteous and needs minimal, savages were not constrained to compete for resources whose scarcity mismatched them to outsized wants. Consequently, savages found every material incentive to disperse widely from one another, and their enjoyment of natural liberty more than encouraged them to do so. This vision of asociality thus strongly contrasts Hobbes’s defensive aggression. However, Rousseau’s particularly strident rejection of an original state of vicious anarchy hardly exhausts Rousseau’s own views on Hobbes. For the passage continues: “. . . Men may have attacked one another upon meeting, but they rarely met. Everywhere the state of war prevailed, yet the whole earth was at peace” (OL 269; OC V.396). This thought may seem puzzling. How can humans be asocial—hence, neither hostile nor hospitable—and yet at the same time be subject to a prevailing “state of war” that, impotently, can never generate anything other than a global peace? How can Rousseau simultaneously disarm Hobbes and reinstate a Hobbesian condition of war? As we shall see, not only is Rousseau being paradoxical; he is also being hyperbolic, for, according to his strict definition, “war” cannot arise among asocial human beings. The answer emerges in the way that Rousseau reconstructs the phenomenon of alien encounters in the state of nature—when alien encounters actually occurred, one should add, since Rousseau emphatically reiterates that the

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first humans “rarely met,” “had no dealings of any kind with one another,” had “no necessary relation[s]” (OL 269; SD 154; SW 168; OC V.396, III.157, 604). “The earth would be covered with men amongst whom there would be almost no communication; our individual worlds would touch one another at some points without being united by a single one” (OC III.283, my translation; GM 78). Separate and discrete worlds would overlap but barely meet, which is to say that any possibility for society is tenuous, and in those rare instances when encounters might occur, Rousseau refuses to believe that either party’s response would be offensive. The novelty of encountering another would have magnified the primitive’s perceived weakness instead of a variety of intrepid aggression: “A savage meeting others will at first have been frightened. His fright will have made him see these men as larger and stronger than himself; he will have called them Giants.” However, “[a]fter much experience he will have recognized that since these supposed Giants are neither bigger nor stronger than he, their stature did not fit the idea he had initially attached to the word Giant” (OL 254; OC V.381). (This may seem fantastical or far-fetched, but Rousseau’s imagination found its counterpart in Amazonian modernity: in the 1960s the reclusive Panará were rumored by other South American indigenes to be a tribe of giants; yet when they were finally contacted permanently and peacefully, their height turned out to reach no taller than average.) Presumably, although Rousseau does not say so, since he presents a discrete point of view and not an omniscient one, he would have agreed with Montesquieu that the reaction to the initial encounter was mutual and each would mutually flee the other, but Rousseau does not make the subsequent and consequential leap that Montesquieu does in claiming that “the marks of mutual fear would soon persuade them to approach one another.” Rousseau retains instead what Richard Tuck has called the “stand-offish” character of Hobbes’s first humans, and he even reserves the possibility of aggression subsequent to the overwhelming fear of the first encounter with another. But the self-preservative instinct of amour de soi-même and the sentiment of pity would work together to render any potential aggression defensive and not offensive. In sum, before recognizing that the Giant is actually a human, the primitive will act toward it as it does toward any other ferocious animal: he has “the choice of fleeing or fighting.” Once the primitive recognizes, after multiple encounters, the faintest outline of shared vulnerability, then the sentiment of pity, while not urging him to associate with the other (pace Montesquieu), will prevent him from causing any pain in the other,

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because he too would inevitably suffer it. “With such sluggish passions and such a salutary curb [viz., pity], fierce rather than wicked, and more intent on protecting themselves from the harm they might suffer than tempted to do any to others, men were not prone to very dangerous quarrels” (SD 136, 154; OC III.136–37, 157). Pity, that salutary curb, would disincline the first humans from anything worse than defensive violence. These self-preservative and not very dangerous quarrels hardly approximate Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes. Indeed, they bear almost no relation to war. In the unpublished manuscript entitled “The State of War,” Rousseau distinguishes war and quarrel, then, as follows: War is a permanent state which presupposes lasting relations, and such relations rarely obtain between man and man, where everything between one individual and another is in continual flux which constantly changes relations and interests. So that the subject of a dispute arises and disappears almost instantaneously, a quarrel begins and ends in a single day, and there may be fights and murders, but never or very rarely extended enmities and wars.

It is not imperative that, at every encounter, one primitive manifest supremacy or sovereignty over another, either by murder or by enslavement. Kill or be killed hardly describes the modus operandi for individuals in Rousseau’s state of nature. Indeed, Rousseau reels at the “strange” notion that zero-sum relations of force were somehow the rule: “imagine the strange position this same man would have to be in if he could preserve his own life only at the expense of someone else’s, and if by virtue of some relation established between them one had to die so that the other might live” (SW 166; OC III.602). Individuals may clash, perhaps bloodily, over a resource that both together cannot have for their self-preservation, but “almost instantaneously” one will depart, defeated, though not fatally so: “He never comes to blows without first having compared the difficulty of prevailing with that of finding his sustenance elsewhere; and since pride has no share in the fight, it ends with a few fisticuffs; the victor eats, the vanquished goes off to seek his fortune, and everything is once again at peace” (SD 199; OC III.203). Quarrels are local, ephemeral—not the widespread bellicose anarchy Hobbes would depict—but even so, they seldom come to pass in those sparsely populated first times. Exit from immediate competition always here avails itself.

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Moreover, quarrels are not dangerous because “there is a limit to man’s force and size, fixed by nature and which he cannot exceed.” “From whatever angle he looks at himself,” Rousseau concludes, the individual “finds all of his faculties limited” (SW 168; OC III.605). War, by contrast to quarrel, designates an institutional relation extended in space and time by force of the state, which, “being an artificial body, has no determinate measure.” In sum, Rousseau is not properly Hobbesian in his view of relations among individuals in the state of nature taken interpersonally because he emphasizes limitedness rather than equality among the denizens of the state of nature (though they may amount to the same thing, in effect) and because he distinguishes quarrel from war, as against the expansive Hobbesian construal that assimilates the two. The two differences from Hobbes are related: because natural humans truly feel their limits, quarrels, not wars, take place among them; anyway, these quarrels are extremely rare in the pure (nomadic) state of nature, though more common in the comparatively more sedentary Golden Age. In regard to the state system proper—the so-called international state of “nature”—however, Rousseau finds himself emphatically agreeing with Hobbes because a zero-sum game really comes to pass there, since humans lose their feeling of limitedness upon reaching civil society. Whereas unnatural man, driven by unnatural arts of acquisition (chrematistics), falsely feels unlimited in his personal capacities, states really can be unlimited. Sociable man develops misperceptions of unlimitedness based on an ideological notion that unnatural material acquisitions (or their lack), especially territorial private property, can stand in for their natural bodies; those bodies politic that are states really can extend without limits because, being actually artificial, they are (almost) nothing more than the force that their material acquisitions exert on those falsely unlimited sociable men. Certainly, not all bodies politic are territorial states, but all states are, in Rousseau’s presentation, territorial bodies politic or, what amounts to the same, at least command fungibles that can be converted into territory itself or force for territorial conquest. The state, then, “is without definite proper size, it can always increase it, it feels weak so long as some are stronger than it. Its security, its preservation demand that it make itself more powerful than all of its neighbors. It can only enlarge, feed, exercise its forces at their expense” (SW 169, emphasis added; cf. SC II.9, 75; OC III.605, 388). Consequently, the international system of states lacks those natural limits that render the

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interpersonal state of nature relatively dangerless. In the state of nature as taken interpersonally, the stakes are lower; there are quarrels and not wars, and one can always flee a quarrel: needs drive individual bodies apart, not together (OL 253; SW 168; OC V.380, III.604), and the abundance of nature and its (ultimately finite) glittering vistas aid and abet this spatial separation; hence, exit prevails. Such fugitive mobility does not characterize territorial bodies politic, however: not only are territorial bodies politic, not mobile, but, moreover, their clashes are not mere quarrels, but rather high-stakes, zero-sum wars for material existence. Except for the exemplary case of the ancient Israelites and a few other peoples (as I explain in Chapter 5), a weak body politic cannot flee when faced with a larger, stronger foe; rather, “the inequality among societies can grow endlessly, until one absorbs all the others” (SW 169; OC III.605). Hence, whereas peace will probably reign in the interpersonal state of nature because individuals are asocial and the globe is sparsely populated, war always remains a quite likely result of an encounter between states. Because global space is finite, states cannot help but crowd one another and enmesh themselves in one another’s doings, and thus the international state of “nature,” according to Rousseau’s terms, could fulfill the definition of a manifest state of war, the resolute “will to destroy one’s enemy,” whose “existence is [judged] incompatible with our well-being” (SW 173; OC III.1902). In regard to the interpersonal state of nature, Rousseau turns Hobbes’s expansive definition of war on its head and excludes from war much of the “actuall fighting” between individuals as well as their “known disposition thereto.” Quarrels and murders there may have been, but almost never “war” per se. However, the definition of war applies all the more intensely to the interstate realm in being banished from the interpersonal realm. For, precisely because Rousseau subscribes to a zero-sum logic in his analysis of interstate relations, what territorial state, after all, does not display a “known disposition” to will a neighbor-competitor into oblivion? Which does not judge another’s existence incompatible with its own well-being when, “regardless of how much it might wish to remain within itself without gain or loss, it becomes small or large, weak or strong, according to whether its neighbor expands or contracts and grows stronger or weaker” (SW 169; cf. SC II.9, 75; OC III.605, 388)? Barring naïveté, a state could not seriously opt for pacifist isolationism in the international system of states, it would seem. Citizens of a state thus find themselves in a particularly vulnerable position. “Man to man we live in the civil state,” and, at least nominally, one

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is “subject to laws” there. However, “people to people, each enjoys natural freedom” and cannot aspire to the legitimacy obtaining within particular civil states. By contrast to domestic civil right, “what is commonly called the right of nations” is “even weaker than the law of nature”: international right lacks enforcement, whereas nature enforces by imposing limits. Individual laws that one might try to adduce from such a right of nations are “for want of sanction . . . nothing but chimeras”—chimères, not unlike the ideal political home that Émile must banish from his thoughts and desires. Living in both the civil state and the state of nature, “we are subject to the inconveniences of both without finding security in either” (SW 163; cf. PE 7, GM 78, SD 174; OC III.610, 245, 284, 178). To be sure, Rousseau admits of the possibility of confederations, in which individual states would unite in a common project based in common interest (SC III.13, 111–12; OC III.427). However, it remains an open question as to whether these could overcome the unscrupulous abandonment by the one member that suddenly perceived particular advantage elsewhere, as did the single savage who left the collective deer hunt to catch the passing hare (which, occurring prior to morality per se, could not count as unscrupulous) (SD 163; OC III.166–67). After the advent of the state, then, the human condition seems worse off, because humans can begin to taste the fruits of stability domestically while continuing to suffer the pervasive insecurity of an international state of “nature.” Insecurity has merely been sublated from the interpersonal to the interstate level, and while Hobbes sees this sublation as an improvement, though not without (bearable) costs, Rousseau judges the juxtaposition between internal security and external insecurity a sharper agony. In any case, domestic stability and civil legitimacy are Hobbesian hypotheses that Rousseau entertains only provisionally for the sake of analysis. After all, his descriptions of civil man’s self- and other-enslavements beg to differ from Hobbes’s schema in De cive that “Man is a God to man, and Man is a wolf to Man”—the former true within commonwealths, the latter holding between them. Indeed, the tenor of nearly all Rousseau’s characterizations of sociable humans, especially those desperate aggressions of the Second Discourse’s closing pages, pushes him much closer to Freud’s understanding that man is wolf to man, homo homini lupus, between civil societies and within them. By resigning himself temporarily to the Hobbesian view of an international anarchy in which an individual state’s welfare is inevitably tied to the movings and shakings of its neighbors, however, Rousseau enables himself to explore strategies by which a state can achieve the

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goals it wishes—namely, “to remain in itself without gain or loss” (SW 169; OC III.605) and to gain a measure of independence even within the state system. Ultimately, Rousseau does not despair of domestic stability or civil legitimacy, but the two conditions would have to result from the recursive, mutual integration of self-limiting civil society relations and a self-limiting territorial state in an overarching strategy of patriotic compression. While there is no overarching solution to the insecurities of the international state of “nature,” there are coping strategies—methods of disengagement, means of lessening vulnerability. I argue that, as in the case of Émile, Rousseau critically adapts Hellenistic philosophies for his purposes. He endeavors to capitalize on the “mixed” quality of the state rather than “cut the Gordian knot of the ‘mixed state’ ” or “avoid” and “suppress” its “contradictions and ambiguities.” Rousseau attempts to use this mixed quality to his advantage, and his argument founders elsewhere—namely, a metaphysical assumption about purity that hinders him from prying virtue apart from innocence and a political oversight that affixes the body politic to a territorial state. Although it is subject to an interstate system, Rousseau’s state remains nonetheless also a social artifact and is eligible for virtue in its way, but virtue, itself an artifact of life after the state of nature, calls for vigilant ethical labors. As such, Rousseau’s writings treat small states as though they were individual moral beings (SW 168; OC III.604) in order to test theoretically the efficacy of cultivating practices of self-relation for bodies politic. He thus explores how and whether Hellenistic ethics might inspire exercises that enable collective bodies to sustain autonomy in spite of international exigencies and external necessity by achieving ataraxia and autarky.

path and aberration: stoic autonomy, stoic cosmopolitanism The previous chapter argues that, although Émile directs its sarcasm at “supposed Cosmopolites” (“ces prétendus Cosmopolites” [É 39; GM 81; OC IV.249, III.287]) from an awareness of modern cosmopolitanism’s potential failures, it nonetheless endeavors to educe in Émile an autonomy that is more genuinely cosmopolitan (in being countercosmopolitan). In intention, though not in effect, Émile’s travels would culminate a countercosmopolitan project whereby Stoicism would correct itself: really Stoical autonomy would reorient cosmopolitanism away from its tendencies toward frosty detachment from actual persons and places. The appropriately traveled Émile could thus, by legislating for himself only in accordance with nature, ultimately make

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himself at home anywhere in the world and yet at the same time legitimately attach himself to a specific place, his natal community. For the targets of Rousseau’s ire, those “prétendus Cosmopolites,” cosmopolitanism held great promise. Some specifically enjoined greater love for the human race than for one’s fatherland as a means to put into practice a natural drive toward intensive sociability they ascribed to humans. For Diderot, such cosmopolitan philanthropy could expunge cutthroat incentives from international relations by disarming an essentially antisocial “Hobbist” cult of conquest that redounded to the glory of patries, their monarchs, and the egos of explorers; he looked to hospitality in particular to perform this neutralizing work. Realizing the xenophilic effects of hospitality presented a promising strategy for navigating the antisocial Hobbesianism of the interstate system and could turn the tide against it. For Diderot xenophilia is the crowning moment of cosmopolitan concentrism: the series that begins with “I prefer . . . my family to myself ” and “my fatherland [patrie] to my family” culminates in favoring “the human race to my fatherland.” For Rousseau it was precisely this xenophilic result that deserved suspicion. As we saw already, he associates cosmopolitanism with the worst excesses of travel. Xenophiles make themselves at home anywhere in the world for all the wrong reasons. They do so not autonomously from within the fixed center of a community (even if, or especially if, that fixed communal center might prove merely temporary because of the inevitable interventions of fortune in political affairs). Rather, xenophiles confuse autonomy with the peculiar egocentrism of an empty self that is the perverse issue of untamed amour-propre. Xenophiles are decentered and dispersed by external dependencies rather than centered and absorbed by self-sufficiency. In the end, then, cosmopolitan concentrism cannot offer a satisfactory counterstrategy to international Hobbesianism because the xenophilia that is cosmopolitanism’s final, finest moment mires itself in illegitimate dependencies and thus ultimately aggravates Hobbesianism. At the same time, Rousseau does not dispute the importance of (near) alliances rippling concentrically outward from the self. Certainly he does not criticize cosmopolitanism in favor of egocentrism. Centered and replete egocentrism would be just as reprehensible for its misanthropy as is concentric cosmopolitanism for its dissolute xenophilia. Rousseau navigates these twin dangers in his engagement with Molière. In the comedy The Misanthrope, Molière’s supposedly misanthropic protagonist Alceste denounces dissolute philanthropy: “Esteem is based on preference of some kind; / He

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values none who values all mankind.” In Rousseau’s view Alceste sincerely adopts a morally righteous stance in favor of cultivating genuine benevolence within a narrower social circle compressed by preference. Rousseau thus condemns Molière as “inexcusable” for casting Alceste as a “ridiculous figure” and defends Molière’s protagonist against the charge of misanthropy: Alceste in fact is “a righteous man, sincere, worthy, truly a good man” (Ld’A 37, 36; OC V.34). Authentic misanthropy could never provide the material for comedy such as Molière’s play was meant to be but instead is more suited to tales of horror: real misanthropy is not a human foible but monstrously unnatural. Alceste’s distrust of indiscriminate cosmopolitan philanthropy distinguishes him from the frigid Stoic sage who unnaturally loves the abstraction “humankind” but, monstrously, refuses to aid a compatriot (SD 153; OC III.156). Defending Alceste against being misidentified as misanthropic, Rousseau identifies with Alceste’s high, not low, evaluation of humanity: “precisely because he loves his fellow creatures, [he] hates in them the evils they do to one another and the vices of which these evils are the product” (Ld’A 37; OC V.34). Like Alceste, Rousseau values social attachment so long as virtue and preference center it. There must be some attachment to members of social circles beyond the self, yet attachment must not degenerate into embracing all humankind. Hence, Rousseau, too, adopts the outlines of concentrism, though he does so without adopting the cosmopolitan scope previously associated with it, and the acuity of his critique of Stoic cosmopolitanism derives from his willingness to explore its limits intimately from within rather than to reject it outright. We see this in the Letter to d’Alembert on Geneva: The most vicious of men is he who isolates himself the most, who most concentrates his heart in himself; the best is he who shares his affections equally with all his kind [le meilleur est celui qui partage également ses affections à tous ses semblables]. It is much better to love a mistress than to love oneself alone in all the world. But whoever tenderly loves [aime tendrement] his parents, his friends, his country and humankind, degrades himself by a dissolute attachment which soon does damage to all the others and is without fail preferred to them. (Ld’A 117; OC V.107)

It is appropriate, indeed virtuous, to be able to share affections with other human beings. Rousseau does not deny that pity is and ought to remain universal in its force (É 253; OC IV.548). Amour de soi-même, in any case, operates such that one can appreciate other persons as selves in need of

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preservation like oneself. One has affection for them insofar as they share basic moral similarities to oneself—most notably vulnerability, an ability to suffer. Yet even this most basic natural impulse, amour de soi-même qua otherrecognizing self-preservation, is only directed toward specific suffering beings. While any sentient being, human or nonhuman, is eligible for pity, it is only elicited in personally witnessed situations. Always concretely induced, amour de soi-même cannot tend toward abstraction. In order to render selfpreservation and pity properly human rather than situationally specific reactions common to all creatures, the impulse behind amour de soi-même, the Stoic oikeiosis, must be transformed. Natural impulsion must become rational sentiment; mere goodness must become virtue; situational particularity must become a general will. Meanwhile, this cultivated sentiment of humanity cannot appropriate or love all humankind: Stoic oikeiosis qua self-preservation / (other-)pity must not degenerate into dissipated cosmopolitanism. Hence, Rousseau judges inappropriate a tender love directed indiscriminately at anyone. To treat an unknown foreigner as one would an intimate friend—with tender love— dissolves and degrades that which is proper to intimacy, amity, or familiarity: namely, the actualized recognition of another person as unique, irreplaceable, and unavailable to abstraction. Surely, to love humanity tenderly as do supposed cosmopolites is to love nothing more than an abstraction. Worse yet is to favor this dissolute attachment to the human race, as Diderot recommends in the Encyclopédie article. For Rousseau a balance must be struck between affections shared with all of one’s kind (semblables in a narrower sense than all humankind or sentient beings) and an appropriate version of tender love. While Hierocles and Diderot might describe concentric cosmopolitanism as a process of drawing outer circles centripetally inward, Rousseau understands the actual effect to be an extension of each circle centrifugally outward so that duties of greater intimacy are showered upon those with whom one has less intimacy. The Stoic term oikeiosis qua appropriation implies the centripetal movement—making distant others proper to oneself, making them one’s own concern. Rather than the centripetal contraction envisioned by Diderot, then, Rousseau infers instead a dissipation of propriety, a centrifugal dispersal of other-directed concern that fritters it away. This outward extension of cosmopolitan concentrism is what strikes Rousseau as most perverse; he would have it the opposite way:

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It would seem that the sentiment of humanity dissipates and weakens as it spreads to the whole earth, and that we cannot be touched by the calamities of Tartary or Japan as we are by those of a European people. Interest and commiseration must in some way be constricted and compressed in order to be activated. Now since this inclination in us can be useful only to those with whom we have to live, it is good that [the sentiment of ] humanity, concentrated among fellow-citizens, acquire in them added force. . . . Do we want peoples to be virtuous? Let us then begin by making them love the fatherland [la patrie]: but how will they love it if the fatherland is nothing more to them than it is to foreigners, and grants them only what it cannot refuse to anyone? (PE 15–16, emphasis added, trans. modified; OC III.255)

Humanity here functions not as a generic collective term for all humankind or an abstracted sentiment one supposedly feels indiscriminately for anyone sharing the most superficial bodily resemblance to oneself. For Rousseau humanity is a substantive sentiment cultivated as a form of legitimate amour-propre through the exercise of a reason that is centered and grounded in regular, interdependent experience of actual others. If extension dissipates fellow-feeling for humans, then, conversely, constriction and compression activate this sentiment of humanity. Rousseau thus finds the appropriate balance between generalized pity and particular preference in patriotism. A kernel of the cosmopolitan affection for humanity may persist in Rousseau’s political thought, but it must emanate from a discrete, bounded locale: la patrie. And la patrie cannot command a concentrated love by way of a promiscuous tendering of favors; it must differentiate and prefer its own. Rousseau does suggest that one might prefer one’s patrie to one’s family, as in Diderot’s Encyclopédie article. However, he does not move beyond that concentric circle in terms of preference or priority, whereas Diderot crowns his series with humanity. Rousseau would justify the love of humankind by love of the fatherland, not vice versa, as Diderot’s cosmopolite would do. One prefers one’s family to oneself, and one’s patrie to one’s family, but not the human race to one’s patrie. For Rousseau, “humanity” only makes sense as a centered and focused sentiment, one properly absorbed by and among near others, with whom one cultivates sufficiency. As is explored more fully in the final two sections of this chapter, in rejecting a general will for all hu-

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man beings (much less all rational creatures) contained in the cosmos and by insisting on local standards of justice wrought by historically conditioned measures of utility rather than Stoics’ teleological moral universalism, Rousseau betrays Epicurean influence. The compression-dissipation contrast links other spatial tropes across Rousseau’s political writings. The metaphors he uses to describe sociable man involve untamed amour-propre’s spatial displacement: “We no longer exist where we are; we only exist where we are not” (É 83; cf. SD 187; OC IV.308, III.193). This vanity is reprehensible in being antithetical to ataraxia; sociable man maintains a constantly perturbed state because he craves others’ fickle evaluations as the limitless measure of his self-worth rather than giving value to himself by thriving within the measure of his own natural limits: “The real world has its limits; the imaginary is finite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other” (É 81; OC IV.305). The other dominant metaphor by which Rousseau indicates sociable man’s pathologies is expansion, which runs contrary to compression. On the one hand, this pathology evinces itself in puffed-up but empty egocentrism; on the other, such pathological egocentrism expresses itself in space as the accumulation of territorial private property: “Man in society seeks to expand, isolated man contracts” (OL 269; OC V.397). Moreover, this verdict applies as much to states as to individuals, as Rousseau duly noted when he claimed that because “the size of the body politic is purely relative,” “its security [and] its preservation demand that it make itself more powerful than all of its neighbors” and “enlarge, feed, exercise its forces at their expense” (SW 169; OC III.605). Without proper measure, sociable man, his private property, and his territorial states will seek to expand infinitely, despite the material reality of natural limits to human forces and to territorial extent. A state that feels too much impulsion, whether desire or aversion, from outside its borders is as much guilty of amour-propre as is the sociable man who lives in the opinion of others. The expansive state’s comparison of itself to others is driven by security as well as vanity, and typically its amourpropre gets expressed as conquest, which mimics the sociable man’s untamed amour-propre. Rousseau even at one point links states’ conquests to individual leaders’ vain ambitions rather than to zero-sum incentives within an interstate system (PE 28; OC III.268). In any case, conquest signifies not only an incapacity for compression but, correlatively, a loss of freedom: “Whoever wants to be free,” Rousseau warns his Polish friends, “ought not to want to be a conqueror” (GP 233; OC III.1013). By relying so much on external

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actors and circumstances, the conquering state sacrifices its independence to external things. Heteronomous, it is neither free nor virtuous nor wise: “A Conqueror would sooner consent to be a Sage”—as Alexander the Great had legendarily wanted to be Diogenes—“than a Sage to be a Conqueror.” True sagacity—based on an autonomy that allows for the formation of communal attachments—shuns the xenophilia of conquest because of the illegitimate dependencies that drive it and that it further entrenches. Drawing out the spatial metaphors of his critique of Stoicism, Rousseau invokes the topos of compression to give logic to the link between cosmopolitanism and imperial conquest. Lack of social compression leads to a loss of commiseration and the demise of benevolence; in turn, lost commiseration inflames vainglorious expansion and vague rootless philanthropy. Rousseau correlates cosmopolitanism to conquest via this lack of patriotic compression: thus both conqueror and cosmopolite trace their pathologies to xenophilia, although the insufficiencies that lead them to seek foreign supplements in the first place express themselves differently. Although a state constantly faces the threat of losing its political autonomy because the external impulsions of neighboring states within a globally finite system of states force it to react in predictably Hobbesian ways, it cannot strategically circumvent the threatened loss through the ethical xenophilia of cosmopolitanism because cure and illness scarcely differ. Both cosmopolitan ethics and interstate conquest in fact share a vicious, rootless drive to appropriate humankind. Hence the proposed prophylaxis only intensifies the very affliction it was intended to evade. Thus the limitless and voracious concentrism of cosmopolitanism may differ from Hobbesianism in content, though not in form: both unleash expansive impulsion, though one calls itself ethical, the other anethical. In critically testing the limits of this concentrism that a tradition of cosmopolitanism proposes, Rousseau ultimately settles on compressed patriotic attachment just as Émile was intended to do. Both the real theorist and the fictional young man could return to the patrie only after traveling through the world. In this sense Rousseau arrives at patriotism by way of cosmopolitanism, even if he wants to believe that the near and familiar always precede the far and foreign. Militating against one thrust of Stoic cosmopolitanism, Rousseau accords special moral status to the local. Hence, he turns his veneration for Touraine into a political principle, as we now see, for Corsica and Poland.

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patriotic compression: autarky in poland and corsica Localized autarky is not cultivated as a direct, defensive reaction to the external world and its impulsions. Its relation to the international realm is somewhat more complex: contra cosmopolitanism, autarky offers a realistic coping strategy for bodies politic to attain relative independence in face of and in spite of their Hobbesian international environment. “All of man’s art cannot prevent the sudden onslaught of the strong on the weak, but it can devise ways to respond . . .” (GP 238; OC III.1018). Rousseau socializes a Hellenistic model of relational self-sovereignty so that it can describe not just a personal and ethical aspiration but more importantly a patriotic and political project for small states in an international environment not conducive to them. It is both defensive and assertive. Before properly scrutinizing why Rousseau found Hellenistic ethical practices salutary for devising ways to respond to Hobbesian motives in the interstate system, it seems relevant to sketch how autarky qua patriotic compression functions. The compression that is the signature of Rousseau’s locally centered politics manifests itself in two ways: as a question of size and as a question of intensity. In terms of size, la patrie’s circle must be bigger than the self alone but smaller than the giant outer ring that encompasses all humankind. In terms of intensity, individuals must develop strong and active bonds to one another and therefore to the fatherland. As for the first, Rousseau is considered today perhaps the most famous pre-Revolutionary exponent of small states, although it was Montesquieu, asserting that a republic’s optimal size is limited, who most influenced other political thinkers of the eighteenth century. It is easy to take demographic or geographic smallness as a straightforward, prudential recommendation about the limited extent of human faculties or about administrative manageability. Many of Rousseau’s statements about size seem to convey as much. For example, he declares, “small States, republics as well as monarchies, prosper simply because they are small, because all their citizens know and watch one another, because the chiefs can see for themselves the evil being done, the good they have to do; and because their orders are carried out within their sight” (GP 193; cf. SD 114; SC III.13, 111–12; OC III.970, 111–12, 427). However, Rousseau’s emphasis on smallness is often not fully understood, I think. My reconstruction of his rejection of cosmopolitanism indicates that the beneficial effect of the patriotic compression of fellow-feeling

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explains Rousseau’s advocacy of small and marginal political units, not vice versa. That is, it is not the case that Rousseau’s republics are bastions of patriotism because they are small. Rather, it is the other way around. The patriotism is prior to the smallness. States like Geneva, Corsica, and Poland will remain small because they are patriotic. They will not seek to expand their tight circles of affection to include outsiders. Indeed, because activated patriotism will not bear expansion, states like Poland will remain relatively small states and will even contract their boundaries as necessary. So Rousseau directs the Poles: “Begin by contracting your boundaries, if you wish to reform your government” (GP 194; OC III.971). Hence, since the crux of Rousseau’s advice is compressed and activated patriotism, it applies not merely to territorial smallness but to geographic marginality—that is, to those states that have managed to avoid expansionist impulsions. This is what justifies speaking of Poland as though it were a small state. By its active compression, it proved able to keep itself outside the regional fray in the states system. Quite unlike its expansionist neighbors, Poland’s patriotism kept it sufficient unto itself and therefore would keep it marginal—if not small, then surely minor in the international scheme of things. Though certainly larger territorially than Corsica, Poland nevertheless remained smaller relative to its Swedish, Ottoman, and Russian neighbors, three empires constantly scheming to meddle in Polish affairs (GP 256–58; OC III.1037–40). Furthermore, the vital resistance with which the Polish Confederates of Bar confronted Muscovite interference convinced Rousseau that, in spite of Poland’s endless eighteenth-century hardships, it “still display[ed] all the fire of youth” and, were it to contract its boundaries by hiving off Lithuanian territory from its dominion, it would boost this vigor all the more (GP 178; OC III.954). In the unpublished fragment “The State of War,” Rousseau observes, “This, incidentally, is also the reason why small states are proportionately more vigorous than large ones, for public sensitivity does not increase with territory. The more it expands, the more the will cools, the movements weaken, and this large body, overwhelmed by its own weight, collapses . . . and withers away” (SW 170; OC III.606). Patriotism and territorial expanse are thus inversely proportional. Relatedly, much of the appeal of the idea of patriotic compression for Rousseau lies not in the static fact of the state’s smallness but in the dynamic tension generated by a potentiality that is constricted—or, in the case of a geographically marginal state, better focused—in order to be better directed (cf. OL 268; OC V.396). In those words of the “Discourse on Political

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Economy” discussed above, “Interest and commiseration must in some way be constricted and compressed in order to be activated” (PE 15; OC III.255). Hence, compression manifests itself in terms of an intensity of productive sociability just as much as in territorial size. For Rousseau, the strongest fortress is not an absence of hatred or a cosmopolitan love of one’s foreign neighbors; rather “the only rampart that will stand ever ready to defend [a people], and which no army could subdue by force” is a people’s patriotism and the distinctiveness of its national institutions that together “establish the Republic in the hearts of the Poles so thoroughly that it endures there in spite of all of its oppressors’ efforts” (GP 183; cf. GP 238, CPC 280; OC III.959, 1019, 903). Such a statement, especially its siege imagery, echoes Machiavelli’s advice that “the best fortress a ruler can have is not to be hated by the people.” Rousseau, however, transforms Machiavelli’s negative admonition to avoid hatred into a positive aspiration for attachment; in doing so, Rousseau thus sublates particular advice for a prince to the level of a general constitution of the people: “All [ancient Lawgivers] sought bonds that might attach the Citizens to the fatherland and to one another, and they found them in distinctive practices,” from religious ceremonies to public games (GP 181; cf. 189, 206, 216–18, 236; OC III.958, 966, 984, 995–97, 1016). Yet again, Rousseau finds in patriotism ramparts that do more than merely contain and constrain commiseration that might otherwise dissolve into cold cosmopolitanism. National distinctiveness incites a love of fatherland in the way that it confers particular benefits (including national particularity itself ) and renders la patrie a special affair, exclusive of foreigners. The fatherland is not, then, “nothing more to [citizens] than it is to foreigners,” and it does not grant them “only what it cannot refuse to anyone” (PE 16; OC III.255). If a people properly cultivates its patriotism and distinctiveness, if it is formed in patriotism, it will be able to withstand any foreign force. The republic will endure in the people’s hearts no matter what may pass. Remarking to Poles his praise of the ancient Israelites, Rousseau sees in “morals and practices [that] could not be blended with those of other nations” a fortress that preserves a people “from being absorbed by foreign peoples” interested in conquest or dominion (GP 180; OC III.956–57). The patrie can thus even thrive in the absence of the external good of territory itself. For this reason Rousseau considers stateless Jews eminently successful patriots in Considerations on the Government of Poland. Nonterritorial peoples are, however, utterly exceptional. As I observe in the next and final chapter, it is a fruitful insight that Rousseau abandons.

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Ultimately, Rousseau centers nearly all his investigations of autarky on territorial states, because he reinforces Aristotelian insights on autarky and economics with physiocratic dogma about wealth’s generation from land. His physiocratic Aristotelianism in politicoeconomic policy falls under three main headings: economy (narrowly construed), territory, and population. In Rousseau’s vision, the resultant autarky would enable a small state to avoid foreign relations almost completely. In the Constitutional Project for Corsica, Rousseau drives home a distinction that appears elsewhere in his oeuvre. Corsica will remain independent if it maintains politicoeconomic self-sufficiency, which in turn is the product of agriculture rather than commerce. Similar—occasionally nearly verbatim—motifs and admonitions appear in the Government of Poland (CPC 280–83, 295–96; GP 224, 229; OC III.903–5, 914–15, 1003–4, 1008–9). This distinction, between commerce and agriculture, is a staple of physiocratic thinking, which saw agriculturally improved land as the only sure fount of wealth. Rousseau skews the distinction further in considering even wealth itself a morally suspect category of modern sociability: “Commerce produces wealth, but agriculture ensures freedom” (CPC 283; OC III.905). In making freedom, not wealth, the actual produce of agriculture, Rousseau telegraphs an entire causal argument—drawn as much from Aristotle as from physiocracy—about the real, and materially narrow, natural limits of economy. “Economy” strictly construed means “the wise management of what one has rather than as the means of acquiring what one has not” (PE 27; OC III.266). Economics refers, then, to a natural, self-limiting form of acquisition that involves production, distribution, and consumption of goods in kind by, among, and within interdependent household units in a circumscribed geographic space. The contrasting term in Aristotle’s Politics is chrematistics, an unnatural form of acquisition that is therefore unlimited because based on monetary exchange. Rousseau follows Aristotle in considering fungible wealth an artifact correlative to overextended association in which fellow-feeling has precisely not been constrained, self-sufficiency has been exceeded, and therefore the possibility of a good life has been overwhelmed by the perversity of mere but horizonless living. Whereas agriculturally grounded economy results in autarky and thus independence, the unmoored commerce of chrematistics leads to excess and illegitimate dependencies. To the former’s self-containment is contrasted the latter’s expan-

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sionism. Rootless movable property, therefore, is something to be suspicious of: it may nourish unlimited dependencies and then flee over the horizon, bringing citizens in its train and thus sapping the polity. Naturally self-limiting because rooted in land, economics is fundamentally a territorial question, and for Corsica Rousseau makes several recommendations that suggest that autarky is the only legitimate policy available after the passing of the state of nature and the advent of private property— particularly fungible, because rootless and movable, private property (PF 51; OC III.526)—because it socially engineers the virtuous exploitation of natural features. Agricultural autarky actually remains within Corsicans’ reach due to their island’s geographic endowments, which are so amazing as to cause Rousseau to effuse that “no people impresses me as being so fortunately disposed by nature to receive a good administration” (CPC 277; OC III.901). Adapting this geographic sensibility, Rousseau takes another cue from Aristotle, on autarky’s basis in the economic plurality of the polis, to argue that the economic independence of Corsica as a whole will derive from the mutual interdependence of internally differentiated parts: “The island itself is fairly large and divided by mountains [that is, into discrete regions]; . . . but the variety of their products keeps these parts in mutual dependence by making each necessary to the others” (CPC 305; OC III.922). Once cultivated by deliberate policy, this necessary intradependence will be politically and morally legitimate because inspired and organized by nature, though virtuously socially engineered. Population, too, must be engineered virtuously from naturally good stock. Corsicans, because of their waterlocked, insular existence, retain their “original” (primitif /primitive) robust physicality and virtuous character (CPC 296, 298; OC III.915, 917). They must guard and increase their population because they themselves—their bodies, constituting a collective body—are greater than wealth; population is strength, puissance, and is more certain and effective than financial capacity (CPC 281; cf. GP 225; PF 52; OC III.904, 1004–5, 527). Consequently, Corsicans can and must depend on themselves alone militarily and demographically; they must— and can—achieve self-sufficiency in matters of security and population on their given territory. Economics proper draws security, territory, and population in a tight circle because agriculture makes hardier fighters who will more fiercely defend the land they till (CPC 283; OC III.905). The beneficial goal of this autarky,

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which combines economy and defense by intensively cultivating landscapes and bodies, is the avoidance of foreign relations. By keeping the total association small while intensifying its internal self-relation, autarkic policy would guarantee that no external intercourse need come to pass. Such alien entanglements are what, after all, must be avoided at all costs in order to preserve Corsican purity because “[w]ith any movement of trade and commerce it is impossible to prevent destructive vices from creeping into a nation” (CPC 309; OC III.924–25). However, if foreign dangers did threaten the autarkic polity, its total unity would secure it, for it could “[resist] foreign impulses with its total mass” (PF 25; OC III.486). Patriotic virtue is generated by practices that bond a small community within itself and make it suffice unto itself. As Rousseau sees it, the volatile but eminently felicitous alchemical mixture consists of amour de soi-même’s self-preservative instinct, enough of amour-propre’s imaginative faculty to activate pity and stimulate fraternity but not so much as to animate conquest or individual aggrandizement, and certainly none of the overrefined and undisciplined amour-propre of spectacular or cosmopolitan sociability. And Rousseau’s philosopher’s stone, making it all come together, is patriotic compression qua autarky.

collective self-care and its discontents Ultimately I contend that Rousseau’s vision of marginal peoples’ paths to freedom is marred by his split vision of primitive nature and that this split resounds with Hellenistic philosophy’s conflicting legacies. Stoicism and Epicureanism advance in common a project of intensive moral selfcultivation, and Seneca and Lucretius, whom I shall take as their primary representatives on the question of human moral progress, would seem to converge in their characterizations of primitive being. Actually, however, the question of primitive being’s availability marks a critical point of divergence between Stoics and Epicureans, and Rousseau’s work fractures from their crossing of purposes. Foregrounding how Stoicism and Epicureanism part ways, though, involves comprehending on what basis, for what Rousseauian purposes, they meet. The dynamic autarky qua autonomy that Rousseau advocates for Corsica and Poland is analogous to what Michel Foucault analyzes as an ethics of the care of the self that arose across philosophical schools in the first two

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centuries of the Roman Empire. The ultimate reason that Rousseau would turn to Roman imperial philosophies for guidance in examining geopolitical problems of his own century stands wide open for speculation, of course. What he may have found in Seneca, Lucretius, and their near contemporaries were analogues to his own contemporaries’ struggles to live decently in the shadows of France’s and others’ bids to empire. If “[t]he function of ancient history” for many philosophes “was to problematise modernity,” then the embodied practical ethics articulated in Roman imperial philosophies could critically inform theoretical programs for the intensive self-care of small or marginal states amidst modern empires. Hence, if in Foucault’s words, “it was not a strengthening of public authority that accounted for the development of that rigorous ethics” found under the Roman Empire, “but rather a weakening of the political and social framework within which the lives of individuals used to unfold,” then perhaps Rousseau was interested in ancient Hellenistic ideas because he perceived an analogous concatenation of forces taking place around the middle of the eighteenth century and wanted to analyze what would be required for small states or marginal peoples to achieve self-determination (by a different order of strength) within the expansive imperial state system centered on Europe. French absolutism, although centripetal and centralizing in its theoretical self-fashioning, often had centrifugal effects, as well. State centralization was accompanied by a weakening and devolution of authoritative frameworks, especially as the crown and private entrepreneurs lengthened France’s imperial reach. While external expansion would mark the real test, especially in Rousseau’s Hobbesian vision, for the absolutist state’s claim to sovereignty and dominion, it was nevertheless the case that “[t]he colonial environment undermined absolutism.” This political dissipation of empires proved, by negation, the thesis of patriotic compression and also produced new possibilities for it in the very interstices of globalizing dominion. Hence, for Rousseau’s France as for Foucault’s Rome, one should not “imagin[e] a reduction or cessation of political activities through the effects of a centralized imperialism”; rather, “one should think in terms of the organization of a complex space” that was “[m]uch vaster, much more discontinuous, much less closed than must have been the case for the small city-states, . . . more flexible, more differentiated.” Consequent to the reorganization of global space that he witnessed and theorized, Rousseau sought philosophical moorings that could encourage a socialized self-reliance and the cultivation of

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community in embodied ethical practices translated into politicoeconomic terms; he sought to unfold zones of autonomy inside a complex space of alternating anarchy and control. Rousseau found Stoic and Epicurean philosophical concepts especially fruitful because of the similarities between the late schools’ Roman imperial context and the imperializing France that was his own context. During the imperial period, Stoic theorists particularly began to show an interest not so much in deducing and extrapolating the character traits and situational codes of conduct of the impossible, infallible (some might say inscrutable) sage. Rather they turned their attention to so-called “progressives,” ordinary persons who, recognizing themselves as fallible, were in the process of training themselves and were well on their way to living in greater accord with virtue or pleasure. Indeed, there was a recognition, most prominently by Seneca, that learning to live well was a life-long project involving continual ethical exercises, not a harmonious, beatific state of being achieved once and for all. The former would entail an unrelenting practice of freedom, not the latter’s condition of being free. Imperial Roman expositions on ethics— those of Stoicism and Epicureanism most notably—imply that the practice of freedom would assume a dominant form, which Foucault describes as follows: “what stands out in the texts of the first centuries . . . is the insistence on the attention that should be brought to bear on oneself; it is the modality, scope, constancy, and exactitude of the required vigilance; it is the anxiety concerning all the disturbances of the body and the mind, which must be prevented by means of an austere regimen.” This ethic, in other words, demanded that one concentrate on oneself, creating a taut relation within oneself as both principal and agent, subject and object of action. The ethic of the care of the self involved, in short, “an intensification of the relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as the subject of one’s acts.” The self, progressing toward living well, practiced freedom on itself in a dynamic tension with itself. Hence, when Rousseau admonished the Poles that “one has to choose” between two incommensurable paths, repose or freedom, he was recapitulating (not wholly unwittingly) a philosophical enterprise from imperial Rome: freedom entailed not rest but continuous exercise; repose not only displayed slavishness but invited enslavement. Similarly, Rousseau enacts (though more vehemently and for different reasons, to be sure) a rejection of the Philosopher, a rejection analogous to imperial Roman Stoics’ passing over the too-much-lauded sage who perfected virtue in godlike isolation. Both Rousseau and the later Stoics embraced more or-

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dinary folk, but whereas the imperial Roman Stoics’ virtuous praxis seems to have been produced by epistolary incitements, instruction by example, and reflection on models of good behavior by individuals in voluntary solidarity with others, Rousseau’s ordinary people achieve virtuous lives in a political project of often institutionalized regimentation. Finding the right balance between the Hobbesian world’s incitements to interested and inflamed selflove and a realistically modern, collective love-of-self is one main task of Rousseau’s version of an ethics of self-care. In settling on a coping strategy for the small state, Rousseau pits Stoic oikeiosis, manifest in both amour de soi-même and disinterested amourpropre, against Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, whose necessary expansiveness errs toward untamed, excessive amour-propre. He also employs Epicurean autarky, self-sufficiency, as a diagnostic to home in on a proper, measured—and therefore absolute—practice of self-care against interested, relativizing amour-propre of the more prideful variety that French Augustinians identified. As Christopher Brooke explains it, though without reference to the international question, as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, the patterns of Augustinian anti-Stoicism often found expression in a more secular, Epicurean register. . . . In common with the modern Epicureans, Rousseau uses claims about self-love to illuminate all areas of human behaviour in modern times. But by presenting that self-love as inflamed amour-propre, Rousseau tilts sharply towards the more critical Augustinians than towards those Epicurean writers who were making their apology for commercial society. For Rousseau and for the Augustinians, there is something pathological about human behaviour in the world with which we’re familiar. We are obsessed with our standing relative to others, and this leads us to engage in courses of action that just aren’t ever going to make us happy, courses of action that have a pernicious, self-reinforcing dynamic.

Autarky gives amour-propre an absolute measure independent of other states or peoples rather than relative to them. Qua independent (though internally interdependent), such collective self-care maintains a sustainable equilibrium rather than veering off into perpetual disequilibrium. Patriotic compression is one means that Rousseau recommends for drawing out amour-propre yet containing it so that it remains relatively disinterested. If amour-propre necessarily develops in sociable human beings—

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beings living after the state of nature and therefore given to morality—then patriotic compression would channel this inevitable amour-propre toward a productive outlet, toward legitimate interdependence in collective selfsufficiency rather than illegitimate dependence. Amour-propre is not vicious through and through. Rather, when channeled properly, it can serve virtuous ends legitimately. In order for a state to achieve some level of virtuous self-sufficiency it must draw out a sociable sentiment that can be generative, but not so undisciplined that it degenerates into statist conquest or empty cosmopolitanism. If there were no fellow-feeling, there would be no moi commun, no state, just mere human atoms occupying the same contiguous space par hasard. If there were too much or the harmful kind of social interest, on the other hand, then the state would be unable to contain it and would rush to its demise in war or global dependencies of untold dissipation and frivolity. Although Kenneth Waltz would have it that Rousseau relegates the problem of war to the anarchy of an interstate system, Rousseau’s concentrism urges us to see that the different Waltzian “images”—war as caused by individual human behavior or internal state structures or interstate anarchy— cannot be artificially separated, for dysfunction can ricochet among circles of association. Unless focused within sustainable limits, amour-propre generates anarchic excesses that can ripple outward from persons or states and inward from interpersonal or interstate milieus. Rousseau urges that a program of autarky realizes, by localizing, those sustainable limits. The very oikeiosis / amour-propre that dissipates and perverts as it assumes global scope can also be concentrated to generate small-scale collective autarky and thus effect autonomy. A patriotic people concentrates fellow-feeling into a localized circle, shunning expansion of its national boundaries, even contracting them as appropriate. The autarky made possible by this concentration depends on intensive internal relations. Embodied in collective practices, autarky secures a measure of autonomy from the competitive pressures of a Hobbesian state system because compressed concentrism, concentrated oikeiosis, promotes community defense while precluding offensive action. Developed internal forces afford a patriotic state ataraxia: it remains unperturbed by foreign powers because it commands population qua puissance to defend itself. At the same time, absorbed in itself, the patriotic state experiences an equanimity, apatheia, that precludes external offensive assertions on its part.

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But what is the status of the move whereby Rousseau assimilates a collective to an individual being—his organismic metaphor? When Rousseau suggests that “[m]an to man we live in the civil state and subject to laws” but “people to people, each enjoys natural freedom” (SW 163; OC III.610), he invokes a distinction that he often makes when trying to explore the conditions of possibility for virtue. He writes as if he could momentarily hypothetically discount the collective nature of the being—a people, a state— said to enjoy this liberty that is “natural,” and he thus deposits this collective being in a state of nature. The analogy renders the collective moral person inhabiting an international state of “nature” as, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to an individual primitive inhabiting the state of nature. However, “natural” implies quite different conclusions depending on how Rousseau understands the international state of “nature.” If more Hobbesian, as consonant with the terminal anarchy of the Second Discourse, then “natural” liberty here is proof and fruit of concentrism in disequilibrium, of the instability wrought by sedentary civil society’s excesses and dysfunction. Thus natural liberty would entail the absence of agreement on right over closed, thus scarce, territorial space—unless by right is meant transient concessions to might (SD 186; OC III.191). If properly Rousseauian, then the passage posits that each people be taken as if a primitive inhabitant not of the first state of nature but of l’age d’or, for it assumes interpersonal contacts that would not occur in the former. Here the natural liberty of exit offsets conflicts from regular contact and fixed settlement to generate a stable equilibrium: each collective being qua individual primitive need not in principle settle here and nativize this territory, yet if it has, then it will defend itself here, even as it remains at natural liberty to pick up and flee at any moment. It seems clear Rousseau intends the more Hobbesian rendering; for he abandons the rich possibilities of the second, fugitive insight and the spatial relations its assumptions about natural liberty imply. (I shall recover and explore it in the next chapter.) Though repressed, the Rousseauian rendering is not foreclosed, manifesting itself in Rousseau’s equivocal deployment of the organismic metaphor of the body politic. Sometimes the people qua collective body takes on organic, corporeal characteristics of a human animal. Sometimes it assumes explicitly artificial, mechanistic features of human constructions. Both shared pride of place in French Enlightenment thought and were not necessarily deemed incompatible or in tension. The equivocation echoes in the

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difference between Hobbesian and strictly Rousseauian readings of the collective body’s natural liberty and provokes a cascade of questions: is this collective being a deliberate (moral) construction, even if the illegitimate issue of the third stage of inequality (SD 186; OC III.191–92)? or is it the product of (amoral) natural aggregation? If Rousseau enjoins a people to engage in a project of intensive internal self-cultivation, then what makes this collective self, this moi commun, eligible for virtue? What would make it a properly moral association acting by justice rather than instinct (SC I.5, 48; I.8, 53; OC III.359, 364)? These questions in turn provoke an inquiry on the other side of the analogy, into the moral status of the individual being at liberty in the state of nature, however conceived. This problem of moral status finally demands an interrogation of autarky: what exactly is its model—how insular is this self-sufficiency, whether individual or collective? All of these questions turn on how Rousseau conceives the denizen of the (interpersonal) state of nature, the figure of the primitive. These questions depend specifically on primitive difference, the primitive’s difference from civil, sociable beings. On a strictly Rousseauian rendering, “our entire happiness” as primitives “would consist in not knowing our misery; there would be neither goodness in our hearts, nor morality in our actions, and we would never have tasted the most delicious sentiment of the soul, which is the love of virtue” (OC III.283, trans. emended; GM 78). The primitive is amoral yet acts as a good person would act. Indeed, with desires perfectly matched to faculties, she could not do otherwise, and therein lies her happiness: ignorant of incapacity or covetousness, she never feels immiserated. Morally ignorant of itself, primitive being cannot even qualify as self-cultivation or self-care but is instead “auto-affection . . . pure autarchy.” The primitive’s state of extreme equanimity could be called, following Jacques Derrida, pure presence. Although Derrida uses the term “autarchy,” it may be inexact to do so—or perhaps perfectly exact, since he adds the qualifier “pure.” For, if autarky is a moral or philosophical category, then the primitive cannot be autarkic, for she is amoral, aphilosophical. Autarky would mean engaging in self-estranging deliberation that splits identity into ethically active subject and acted-on object, thus alienating the self from the harmony of pure, undivided presence. So pure autarky, though not nonsensical in Derrida’s usage, flirts with oxymoron, for the very self that enacts self-sufficiency declares itself divided, impure, unharmonious. The primitive presents perfectly self-enclosed being, so sufficient it escapes self-care, so purely autarkic it surpasses autarky. It thus poses a vexing

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problem that troubles Rousseau repeatedly when invoking Hellenistic philosophical sources. For when Rousseau’s oeuvre accedes to this determination of an autarky beyond autarky, it vacillates between opposite tendencies. One tendency, the Stoic, disjoins hyperautarky qua primitive simplicity from properly virtuous autarky; the other, Epicurean, joins them as equivalent instances of autarky, one by nature, the other by natural philosophy. In other words, Stoicism makes a hard-line distinction between naïve simplicity and virtue proper, where Epicureanism imputes a graduated refinement. The two arguments pull Rousseau’s work in different, even irreconcilable, directions: the Stoic line emphasizes qualitative discontinuity between primitive being and civilized humanity; the Epicurean line identifies continuity across these instances as differing not in kind but by orders of magnitude. The autarky—or not—of primitive being exposes a critical disagreement between Stoic and Epicurean views of moral progress and reveals, too, contradictory impulses in Rousseau’s texts. On the one hand, Rousseau relegates primitive being to a prelapsarian era in decisively disqualifying primitives from virtue: they act in a manner consonant with moral goodness, though they do not merit the distinction; they live in such profound autoharmony, combining repose and freedom, that “ataraxia” would inadequately capture their imperturbability (É 473; GM 78; SD 187; OC IV.858, III.283, 193). Primitive being is closed to civilized humanity, who cannot combine repose and freedom but must, as he warns the Poles, choose between them (GP 178; OC III.955). As the way of repose leads to slavery while freedom commands deliberate practice, Rousseau must therefore counsel moral exercises of relentless self-care. Imputing the critical difference between primitive and civilized to the advent of morality, Rousseau follows the later Stoicism of Seneca, who marks the difference forthrightly in Epistle XC when he holds, “it makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.” Primitives lived excellently in great simplicity, but primitive life owed its fullness to its innocence of immorality. Consequently, “their rude life possessed certain qualities akin to . . . virtues,” yet not morality per se. For, since “it is an art to become good,” then unless one submits to “unremitting practice” guided by moral philosophy, one can boast “the stuff of virtue, not virtue itself.” On Seneca’s view, there is complete discontinuity between the “fortune-favoured period” of plenitude and the time, marked by the invasion of vice and luxury, when morality constitutes itself in artfully battling immoralism. To the former belongs pure simplicity, self-sufficiency by

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nature, while to the latter fell the postlapsarian misfortune of autarky by hard moral labor only. Nevertheless, life’s autoharmony with nature during the “golden age” of primitive simplicity falls short of humanity’s “highest achievement.” One wins the sage’s true freedom only by a “law of life” rigidly aligned to a uniform, universal standard of right reason. Primitives, lacking cognizance of such a rule, enjoy mere natural liberty, which exactly parallels at a lower level, thus never touches, sage living. The gulf of morality forever pries the two asunder. Asymptotically approaching the sage but on the same side of the moral divide labors the progressive, for whom the sage’s lofty remoteness either provokes greater moral striving or betrays, as for Rousseau, a prideful iciness easily transformed into predation. For Rousseau, as arguably for Seneca, the progressive’s humbling, relentless struggles against sin make her the real heroine of human progress. Rousseau would thus seem to make primitive being as solipsistically unavailable as the life of the sage. Yet, on the other hand, despite innumerable assertions of a total, global rupture at the birth of private property and territorial states, Rousseau sometimes considers primitive being spatially and temporally continuous with civilized life and, having rejected the sage, constantly recurs to primitive being as the only presentable model for freedom. Dissolving the membrane of perfect solipsism in the account of amoral innocence, he thereby bridges Seneca’s moral gulf, for Rousseau’s primitives do not inhabit only the impossibly distant past. He notes that the savages known to his fellow Europeans thrived still in the second state of nature. Thus it frequently happened that supposedly discontinuous epochs met contemporarily. Yet “natural men” do not reside only outside Europe, as Rousseau does not exclusively racialize these figures as Africans and American Indians. Indeed, fortuitously overlaying primitive being onto Europe’s own “natural” peoples, he recommends that the Corsicans model themselves on the Swiss of yesteryear: “they had no virtues, since, having no vices to overcome, it cost them nothing to do good; and they were good and just without ever knowing what justice and virtue were” (CPC 296; OC III.914–15). The words recall savages’ stoical predisposition—akin to virtue but not quite— yet crucially, Rousseau here attributes to them the goodness he denies them in the Geneva Manuscript (GM 78; OC III.283). He thus affirms a continuity between primitive and civilized that Seneca had severed. So doing, Rousseau veers toward Epicurean thinking, which, given more to general, graduated moral standards than universal, absolute moral stances, refuses Stoics’ hard-line judgment on goodness or its absence in favor of

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relative empirical comparisons of utility. For Epicurus primitive life would count as just, regardless of observers’ preconceptions about primitives’ ignorance of moral concepts, so long as primitive social affairs really were “most free from disturbance.” Hence, the stable equilibrium that Rousseau attributes to “nascent Society” and that results from primitives’ guarding their (alegitimate) independence accords perfectly with justice, even if they lacked the word (SD 167; OC III.170–71). Likewise, Lucretius avers that primitive social life may not have yielded “perfect unity of purpose,” yet, because “a substantial majority kept faith honestly,” there was relative freedom from disturbance: justice enough, not its absence. Nevertheless, although Epicureans reject a teleological account, which would force them to discount particular instances as somehow failed expressions of a general concept of justice—viz., utility of social relationships—Epicurus and Lucretius do both heed, even despite relativism, the qualitative difference that philosophy makes. Persons or peoples might arrive by trial and error at a self-sufficient and just (qua useful) social arrangement, but philosophy refines this life in common and renders it positively pleasurable, beyond mere negation of fear and perturbation. As natural philosophy positively improves upon natural social experiments, so communities or persons may refine themselves through philosophy to actualize at a higher level what nature has already granted them. Both Seneca’s Epistle XC and Lucretius’s De rerum natura V trace crisscrossing narratives of progress and corruption. For both, the possibility of real moral advancement increases as mental faculties, especially right or philosophical reason, improve. Simultaneously and inversely, technological innovation corrupted humans, degrading them physically, and threatened moral progress by ever stoking their vicious ambitions to supersede the present, necessary, and sufficient and to value faraway, superfluous, scarce things. Rousseau’s first two Discourses betray debts to both texts, which guide his recto-verso interpretations of early modern proto-ethnological literature and European modernity. Indeed, such is the thrust of Rousseau’s first two Discourses: that autarky among dependent sociable men might be a mirage, whereas natural humans really, presently lived it, or at least its premoral analogue. Hellenistic theories of autarky recommended themselves to Rousseau, and he adapted them for his purposes to an epistemological universe vastly transformed by the Age of Exploration. Based on those few travelers’ tales that seemed reliable, Rousseau believed he could confirm Seneca’s and Lucretius’s accounts that primitives in the later state of nature could indeed

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suffice unto themselves alone—that the few natural needs humans exhibited never surpassed their capabilities. Travelogues seemed to prove the philosophical hypothesis that nascent society in the later state of nature practiced autarky or its premoral analogue. However, Seneca and Lucretius disagree on precisely this crucial point: whether to call it autarky or an analogue. Seneca stresses a rupture in moral progress that would allocate to amoral primitives merely simplicity and not autarky, which, as a virtue, would necessitate conscientious overcoming of the “factitious” needs that corrupt societies’ complex dependencies generate and that can neither suffice nor be met. Lucretius allows continuity between practical and philosophically fortified autarky, which differs not by Seneca’s ignorance versus knowledge, but rather by wisdom from usage versus wisdom from reason. There is, in other words, knowledge in both. The answer, then, to the question, “are primitives autarkic?” is, “yes and no.” Yet so is the answer to the more consequential question for Rousseau’s oeuvre, “are true natives primitive?” That is, those untraveled peoples who inhabit less traveled places do and do not remain in the later state of nature. The native must and must not remain naïve. Conflicting analyses thus pull Rousseau’s thinking on autarky at once centrifugally and centripetally. On the Stoic view, native peoples marginalized in a Hobbesian interstate system cannot remain ignorant of sin; they must recognize it and combat it vehemently in order to achieve autarky. The strategy of cognizant, vehement prophylaxis constantly trains natives’ sights on outside dangers; worse, they must become xenophobic, having prejudged anything alien as dangerous before encountering it. On the Epicurean view, natives, far from being ignorant, are endowed already with vernacular moral wisdom; Rousseau advises theoretically systematizing native phronesis to fortify local autarky wrought by long usage. The strategy of emboldened ataraxia urges that natives confirm their inward-directed absorption, unperturbed by the rest of the world; worse, they must obliviate their Hobbesian neighbors, having tranquilly fixed their pleasure in themselves. Though one transforms ignorance into knowledge, while the other transforms knowledge into oblivion, the effect of both is a purist and fixist emphasis on self-enclosure. In both cases the notion of self-sufficiency is driven to extremism: the xenophobic case exhibits a moralizing extremism in resting its virtue, and hence its difference from primitive being, on reacting against what it names sin; the obliviating case interprets self-sufficiency with literalizing extremism in affirming that its harmonious insularity and hence

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its similarity to primitive being really can persist in innocence of international affairs. Hence, although it takes its politicoeconomic bearings distantly from Aristotle, Rousseau’s theory of autarky seems ultimately more given to the anxieties of external influence—especially the fears of heteronomy and external perturbations—in Stoicism and Epicureanism. In the conluding section, I explore the xenophobic and obliviating consequences in turn.

other-anxiety and self-pleasure: from xenophobia to obliviating autarky Though the theme of besieged autarky certainly animates the writings on Corsica and Poland, oddly it is Geneva that comes most to represent the nativeness that must isolate itself against alien corruption. Rousseau would have Geneva remain a well-centered place of virtue and purity. Geneva’s very sovereignty thus precludes any traffic in foreign goods. In the Corsica and Poland writings, Rousseau praised Genevans’ economy and character: its system of public granaries, by preventing imports during years of scarcity, aided it in maintaining properly economic self-sufficiency, and its people, of rustic stock, had led lives of independence and industry (PE 27; CPC 295–96; OC III.267, 914–15). These Genevans from the days of yore showed no need and no curiosity for the lures of the world beyond their borders. Unwittingly, these Swiss collectively heeded Jean-Jacques’s advice in Émile: “Let us measure the radius of our sphere and stay in the center like the insect in the middle of his web; we shall always be sufficient unto ourselves; and we shall not have to complain of our weakness, for we shall never feel it” (É 81; OC IV.305). Guarding this picture of virtuous autarky, Rousseau thus reacted with indignation when Jean d’Alembert, Parisian philosophe, expounding upon this civic republic in the article “Geneva” for the Encyclopédie, criticized its “intolerant” ban on dramatic representation and recommended the founding of a publicly regulated theatre there so that “Geneva would join to the prudence [la sagesse] of Lacedaemon the urbanity [la politesse] of Athens.” The proposed union of these two ancient rivals, Sparta (Lacedaemon) and Athens, horrified Rousseau. Spare and prudent Sparta alone would always capture for him the glory of antiquity, while Athens damned itself by cultivating urbanity. Rousseau had already thematized the opposition of these cities in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts eight years prior to the Letter

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to d’Alembert, when he directed an apostrophe to Sparta: “While the vices, led by the fine Arts, together insinuated themselves into Athens . . . you expelled the Arts and Artists, the Sciences and Scientists from your walls” (FD 11; OC III.12). To Rousseau Athens and Sparta were irreconcilable— respectively, the nadir of decadence and the height of rectitude—as were Paris and Geneva, not incidentally the contemporary incarnations of Athènes et Lacedemone in Rousseau’s eyes (and apparently according to d’Alembert, too, although he did not deem Parisian/Athenian urbanity vicious). So when d’Alembert so flippantly suggested that installing a (Parisian) theater at Geneva would unite the best qualities of those antique foes, Rousseau would object first by radically disjoining them, as in the First Discourse, and then by giving an account of their stark opposition that would lay the groundwork for the Corsica and Poland writings to come seven and fourteen years later. The narrative of Geneva is the narrative, too, of Touraine in Émile, of Corsica and Poland, and is structurally analogous to that of natural man in Seneca’s Epistle XC. It is simple and straightforward. The Swiss were originally like Seneca’s premoral people: equally ignorant of sin and virtue, robust of frame, and thriving in natural simplicity. However, luxury stole in and disturbed this harmonious scene, only to displace nature. As Rousseau has it, the Swiss people’s fatal moment arrived when they began to prostitute themselves as mercenaries for others: “a taste for money made them feel poor.” Yet even by then external contacts had “[i]mperceptibly . . . debased” them, for already “association with other peoples had made them love what they should have feared, and admire what they should have scorned” (CPC 297; OC III.915–16). Nevertheless, their introduction to morality via corruption also facilitated a redemption that threw them back on their former insularity. Now, because small, marginal Geneva is naturally (geographically) isolated from much of the commerce of contemporary urbane Europe, it remains good and will continue to merit its virtue if left to its own devices. In this narrative, all vice, all that is bad—which is to say, all change—can only come from the outside to corrupt this entity once pure of morality, now purely moral. In its present active isolation it would remain autarkic, a self-sufficiently virtuous country. In Rousseau’s vision Geneva is properly economic, not chrematistic; that is to say, it maintains the self-sufficiency of a centered homely agricultural republic, not the expansionism of an unmoored commercial empire. However, a theater at its heart, a bastion of the arts, would bring vices concealed within it, like a Trojan horse. Such is the

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story of Athens, which reveled in the depravities wrought by its arts. Sparta did not succumb, and Geneva would not, if only it could safekeep all arts in quarantine forever and encourage moral-cultural autarky in its citizens. To achieve this feat, though, Geneva must close its borders to the influence of Parisian vice. To resist Parisian cultural imperialism, Geneva would need to insure that its citizens, as did the Spartans, remain psychologically absorbed in la patrie (as by the Genevan men’s clubs and the women’s societies, or by the fête of the regiment of Neuchâtel, which Rousseau so lauds) so that their discontent and idleness never lead them to think to open the borders to “foreign amusement” like the theater. “The spirit of imitation,” offers Rousseau in his advice to the Poles, “produces few good things and never anything great” (GP 238; OC III.1018). This Paris-Athens analogy runs deep here. Athens was known not only for its arts but also for its Hellenic political hegemony (as famously described in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War). By association Paris is guilty of both cultural hegemony in Europe and statist and commercial imperialism abroad. Athens saw its reckoning, and Rousseau implies that Paris, too, will earn its comeuppance if it persists in immoderation. Expansive and interested in conquering savages’ lands, unable properly to compress fellow-feeling, and thus home to dissipated, chilly cosmopolitan philosophers, Paris can only corrupt the peoples it encounters. For Rousseau there could be no doux commerce or international hospitality that Paris could participate in without contaminating and discrediting all parties involved and the practices themselves. However, it is not simply that Geneva/Corsica/Poland/Sparta (and, one should add, the Roman Republic) are opposed to Paris/Athens (and the Roman Empire) as virtue and purity are opposed to vice and corruption. There is something more worthy of our notice in Rousseau’s system here. Crucially, change, vice, sin, and error move only unidirectionally in Rousseau’s world. Decline or degeneration stands as the only rule of human history because virtue is a presumed, would-be, eternal pure presence that any change can only negate. Thus, Rousseau must advise, “Prevent vices from arising, you will have done enough for virtue” (GP 191; OC III.968) and, “All that human wisdom can do is to forestall changes, to arrest from afar all that brings them on.” In such a world, whose center cannot hold, the theater— and, presumably, other arts—end up becoming (relatively) good when even worse and more vicious amusements will tempt the people to greater corruption: “when the people is corrupted, the theatre is good for it, and bad for it

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when it is itself good” (Ld’A 74, 65; OC V.68, 60). Degeneration, moreover, only comes from the outside. An entity maintains its integrity and virtue only by remaining sufficient unto itself—that is, autarkic. Corruption begins the moment that the entity comes to depend on anything outside of itself. As Rousseau so frankly pronounces of the “influx” of foreigners to Geneva, “to tell the truth, for many good reasons I regard this influx as a problem far more than as an advantage; and I am persuaded, as for myself, that never did a foreigner come to Geneva who did not do more harm than good” (Ld’A 132; OC V.120). With each new alien imprint, with so much contact, Geneva becomes less and less marginal, more and more available to foreign contagion. The Letter to d’Alembert rearticulates the conquest model of impurity by way of what we might today call the cultural imperialism of Parisian theater with its displays of false pity—actually amour-propre, acted both on stage and in the audience. However, in order to make his arguments against theater, Rousseau relies on substructural metaphysical assumptions about primitive being and pure presence that he never properly remarks upon. And the effects of this metaphysics can be summed up concisely, although its implications ramify deeply and broadly within and across Rousseau’s remarks on foreign policy: in short, encounters, whether between peoples or individuals, only ever transmit vice. From the standpoint of a people (like Genevans, Corsicans, Poles, or the good people of Touraine) that is in itself fortunately well disposed, only foreigners can be the source of change, and all change is for the worse. Foreigners never transmit virtue, and if virtue is not transmissible (and it is not), then, if it exists (and it certainly does, at least as a potential, for Rousseau), it will already have been inherent. Foreigners only tempt us to sin; only they lead us to seek ourselves falsely in absence rather than in the pure presence that we could give ourselves in autarky. Bluntly put, I am arguing that isolationism and xenophobia pervade the Letter to d’Alembert, the result of a profoundly nativist vision of autarky and a conquest model of impurity: recto, verso. Many political theorists have mined this text recently for arguments about theatricality, representation, and politics. Nominally and in the main, the Letter critically analyzes the psychological structure of reception and representation that the theater effects in its practitioners, its audience, and in the mores of the people, broadly speaking. (“Thus the theatre purges the passions that one does not have and foments those that one does” [Ld’A 22; OC V.20].) Implicitly and

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almost secretly, though, it unfolds as a screed against people-mixing that takes up and expands upon what appears as a mere, though crucial, aside in a footnote to the “Preface to Narcissus”: “Everything that facilitates communication between nations transmits not the virtues, but the crimes of each to the others, and adulterates [for them] the morals appropriate to the climate of each and to the constitution of [its] government” (PN 96n, trans. emended; OC II.964n). In other words, what we usually regard as the literary-critical dimension of the Letter to d’Alembert is also a diagnosis of Parisian vice and, by extension, a goad to Genevans to prove their virtue. It is true that, more generally, spectacle occupies a special place in Rousseau’s demonology, for he seems in agreement with (and may again be drawing on) Seneca that it is “through the medium of entertainment, that vices creep into one with more than usual ease.” But, while Rousseau assesses the effects of the Parisian theater on Parisians, too, the Letter to d’Alembert presents a case more specifically against cultural imperialism abroad. Seen in light of this passage from the “Preface to Narcissus,” it is a diagnosis of the contagious transmission of Parisian vice to other peoples when Parisian culture gets exported. A Parisianstyle theater in Geneva could not possibly convey virtue. Nefariously, it would only transmit Parisian vices. Geneva could learn nothing from this foreign institution, neither truth nor edifying errors. This is because Geneva’s only truth is already within it, though made manifest only in the insular resistance to what its other-anxiety names sin. According to Rousseau, the influx of foreigners and foreignness rings the death knell of that virtue that is intrinsic to Geneva. (“. . . [N]ever did a foreigner . . . not do more harm than good” [Ld’A 132; OC V.120].) So Rousseau would protect what he sees as an authentic (primitive) purity against encroachment and adulteration from modernity outside. While this prophylactic structure—of internal, inherent truth and virtue that can only be assaulted from the outside but never from within, and that contact with the outside can only assault but never improve—subtends the Letter to d’Alembert, it also operates in the Corsica and Poland writings. In Corsica foreigners are the source of vices and prejudices and are associated with money and therefore commerce, hence with factitious needs and superfluous desires (CPC 278, 287, 297, 305, 309; OC III.902, 908, 915–16, 921, 924–25). “If Corsica needed the services of foreigners, she would need money” because trade in kind proves too difficult between peoples of such divergent mores, “but since she is able to suffice unto herself, she does

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not need it . . .” (CPC 304, trans. emended; OC III.921). Foreigners, especially Russians, rudely meddle in Poland’s internal affairs (GP 249, 251, 258; OC III.1030, 1032, 1039). As a consequence, “Everything foreign to the constitution should be carefully banished from the body politic.” Although the immediate context of this remark is a discussion of the imitation of foreign titles of nobility, such as “count and marquess,” titles that “degrade ordinary citizens,” Rousseau does not tailor his remark narrowly: “Tout ce qui est étranger à la constitution doit étre soigneusement banni du corps politique” (CPC 289; OC III.909, emphasis added). Such foreign influence could be thought of as neutral or “indifferent” (to invoke, again, a Stoic idiom as regards external goods). Rousseau, however, prejudges foreign influences as vicious and prejudges change as degeneration: “The Corsican people are in that fortunate condition which makes possible the establishment of a good constitution; they can begin at the beginning, and take steps to prevent degeneration” (CPC 278; OC III.902). Although it might seem that, at least with respect to Geneva, Rousseau judges foreign influence only temporarily bad—only in the bloom of youth before its constitution becomes firmly established—the absolute tone and totalizing scope of his admonitions about and remonstrations against foreignness suggest something more abiding than the passing suspicion of a negative educator. Throughout his writings foreignness and exteriority bear the burden of vice and corruption, while unadulterated and virtuous are those entities that relate to themselves, that have internal and original relations only (É 39; GM 81; OC IV.248, III.287). An autarkic entity remains pure; its virtue will not, indeed cannot, depend on external goods except by negation. Yet Rousseau seems ambivalent; does he wish for the model Swiss never to have known morality at all, since it comes with and becomes what it is only in opposition to: corruption? Or does he want true morality for them precisely because it comes despite the edifying risk of corruption? In the final analysis Rousseau’s perverse Stoicisms foster the impression, best revealed by the question of xenophobia, that he treats goodness in two opposed ways: on the one hand, goodness qua virtue can be achieved by ethical exercises and political arrangements in face of and in spite of vice; on the other hand, goodness, like innocence, is an original, default state of primitive being that can be either guarded and safekept or else lost forevermore. The first makes goodness a positive moral achievement, the second a negative remainder from nature. It is as though Rousseau knows that the path of the moral progressive is the only one that is both realistic and avail-

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able in the Hobbesian world after the passing of the (Rousseauian) state of nature, yet, against his better Stoicizing judgment, though partly abetted by it, he cannot envision goodness but in the guise of primitive solipsism. Apart from the two treatments of goodness, yet tempering and bridging them, lies Rousseau’s Epicurean tendency: altogether sidestepping the necessity of pronouncing on moral ignorance or knowledge, Rousseau sometimes praises native techniques of self and society as worthy of further educement. Natives, insofar as they have sustained a functioning association in stable equilibrium, already practice what goodness they need. “Each country has advantages which are distinctively its own and which its institution ought to enlarge and to foster” (GP 238; OC III.1018–19). As such they already qualify as ethical progressives, though without the universalist teleology imputed to that label in Stoicism. Indeed, local practices may hardly be ideal from a universal moral viewpoint; what trumps any externally imposed standard of efficacy or right is their nativeness: “These ancient practices ought to be preserved, restored, and suitable new ones introduced that are distinctively the Poles’ own. These practices, even if they are indifferent, even if they are in some respects bad, provided they are not essentially so, will still have the advantage of making the Poles fond of their country and give them a natural revulsion to mingling with foreigners” (GP 185, emphasis added; OC III.962). What was before tacit local knowledge, contingently modified, gets crystallized, fixed, as folk wisdom. Meanwhile, nativism flirts with other-anxiety. Rousseau here leaves aside the problem of virtue and makes a collectivized amour de soi-même central in a way that may not contradict Stoic oikeiosis. However, Stoicism’s austere frame of reference cannot account for the collective self-pleasure Rousseau positively advocates in these writings. Infamously, he suggested making the fatherland “the centre of [the Corsicans’] pleasures, desires and tastes, . . . their only happiness in life, and the only goal of their ambitions” (CPC 300; OC III.918). Poles, Genevans, and Corsicans are separately urged to affirm their patrie and one another in public games, ceremonies, and festivals. Not only ought they to cultivate native practices—possibly morally indifferent, maybe slightly bad—but also they should qualitatively refine and lend fresh pleasure to these already functional schemes of living through moments of collective effervescence. Through simple, never extravagant, possibly invented folk activities, aggregated persons are positively transformed into autarkic collectivities. This is not fleeting hedonism in a modern sense but lasting happiness according to the older Epicurean scheme (PF 40–41; OC III.510).

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This mutual pleasure that Rousseau urges would-be patriots to seek posits community, but it also neutralizes: patriotism absorbs the people’s attention so that alien people and foreign vices cannot seduce or distract them. Collective self-pleasure preempts the search for pleasure in external others. After all, short-circuited absorption in self-pleasure is what initially opens the door to foreign influence: “it is discontent with one’s self, the burden of idleness, the neglect of simple and natural tastes, that makes foreign amusement so necessary” (Ld’A 16; OC V.15). Self-pleasure neutralizes xenophilia, then, but it can also neutralize xenophobic other-anxiety, thereby transforming autarky into ataraxia. For it turns out that the line between existing in indifferent ignorance of foreignness (because so patriotically absorbed) and a knowing prejudice against the alien is curiously a fine one. When communitarian self-absorption reaches a certain threshold, then its active internal equanimity renders it impassive to exteriority, even pereat mundus. Indeed, ataraxia qua autarky seems even to strive for oblivion. Small, well-disposed states ought to suffice unto themselves so providently and to pleasure themselves so thoroughly that they can forget the Hobbesian world: “the happiest nation is the one that can most easily do without all the others” (PF 42; OC III.512). Programs of cultural autarky, provoking a kind of amour de soi-même that extends beyond the self but certainly not beyond the boundaries of la patrie (i.e., it is not cosmopolitan), will insure that Corsicans, Genevans, and Poles succeed in ignoring (if not in being ignorant of ) foreigners. In the Government of Poland, Rousseau would wish “the Citizens to be constantly occupied with the fatherland, for it to be made their principal business, for it to be continuously kept before their eyes.” Achieving isolationism by way of full self-sufficiency, economically and otherwise, Poles may thereupon “give little thought to other countries,” to have no sort of intercourse with them (GP 185, 229; OC III.962, 1008). Likewise, Rousseau would found Corsican policy on the following principles: “to make use of their own people and their own country as far as possible; to cultivate and regroup their own forces; to depend on those forces only; and to pay no more attention to foreign powers than as if they did not exist” (CPC 281; cf. GP 237–38, 256; OC III.904, 1017–18, 1038). Even this more Epicurean tendency displays purist impulses, then, though its oblivion of what Rousseau in its behalf would gladly name alien impurity is impassive—calmer by magnitudes than the reactive Stoicizing virtue that issues in xenophobic anxiety. But the odd result of self-pleasurecum-oblivion is that the marginal autarkic body politic, considered as a col-

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lective “moral person” (SW 176; OC III.608), becomes just as solipsistic as the sage or primitive. Unlike the corrupted sociable man’s vanity, “true pleasure” is truly self-absorbed, independent of external opinion (CPC 325–26; OC III.937). Hence, this convergence of solipsisms suggests that the effects of Rousseau’s Stoicisms and Epicureanisms are not irreconcilable, after all. His moralizing and literalizing way of handling autonomy, autarky, and ataraxia careers insistently toward the pure presence in which their solipsisms meet. The traditional view of Epicureans’ and Stoics’ age-old rivalry lends them an aura of irresolute antagonism. Nevertheless, it does not superficially strain sense to place a folksy faith in natives’ capabilities and functional arrangements while simultaneously yearning for either their innocence of morality or their firm practice of it (depending on whether we find Rousseau in a nostalgic or modernist moment). The Epicureanism of the former seems perfectly compatible with the split Stoic vision of the latter. There is, however, one point on which reconciliation breaks down. According to Rousseau’s own analysis, it should be impossible for one people to prejudge other peoples’ practices evil or vicious or even irrational, for it is the nature of the international realm that no universal standard of justice or goodness can be settled on. Nor does Rousseau subscribe to a teleological view of right reason. Thus, peoples cannot be measured for their more or less imperfect accordance with a single standard of rationality, as Stoic universalism would do in regard to orthos logos. As Christopher Brooke puts it, “The citizens’ general will is the functional substitute for the Stoics’ cosmic reason, ordering the parts towards the interests of the whole, but it runs out at the boundaries of the political community.” By what criteria, then, can Rousseau pronounce so surely that “[e]verything that facilitates communication between nations transmits not the virtues, but the crimes of each to the others” (PN 96n; OC II.964n)? If standards marking crime and right are not international, then how can Rousseau certify that a vice to one people will not be received as virtue to another? Even if the assertion of mutual adulteration claimed sociological validity based on historical data of past minglings of peoples, then its assessment would be only probabilistic at best, not exhaustively true in advance. Moreover, it could only claim rational coherence from an Archimedean point abstracted from every peoples’ particular vantage point—in other words, it would arrogate to itself a universal epistemological standpoint to judge neutrally that each people was transmitting to others what it accurately itself considered its own vices—

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but such universalizing rational judgment is what Rousseau’s international Hobbesianism objects to. Ever hewing so closely to a Stoicizing, reactive definition of virtue, even universalizing it instead of cosmopolitan universalism, Rousseau sometimes consigns to its own oblivion his best insight on the general will considered internationally. Despite dismissing Lucretius for his “absurd system” (PN 98; OC II.965), presumably referring to atomic materialism’s supposed antimoral effects—and despite occasionally criticizing Epicurus, too— Rousseau’s relativist conception of the general will and rejection of an overarching uniform cosmopolitan order owes something to Epicureanism. The general will’s justice is not a universal law that is general with respect to all peoples—indeed, Rousseau repudiates such suggestions by others. Rather, the general will structures an association’s justice internally with respect to every particular member and to what constitutes and limits the members collectively as a body. If for Rousseau a people’s general will meets its several members as a generality, though confronts other peoples as an alien particularity, then similarly for Epicurus “justice” considered generally “is the same for all, since it is something useful in people’s social relationships,” even though “in light of what is peculiar to a region and to the whole range of determinants, the same thing does not turn out to be just for all” globally. In sum, if all universalizing rational standards that could apply internationally are rejected, then Rousseau must rely on non-universalist grounds for judging foreigners’ mores as criminal. Yet Rousseau provides no such stable non-universal grounds except from natives’ point of view, in which case they prejudge difference as sin; alternatively, the given practice may be already familiar locally as a crime, in which case it is not alien. His Epicureanizing account of the multiplicity of general wills among peoples promises a relativist theory: what appears natively as a general will confronts foreigners as a particular will because native general wills are mutually particular. However, Rousseau destabilizes its relativist grounds of judgment by importing and universalizing a prejudgment that mutual difference represents mutual vice. It is not simply that “it makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.” The substantive issue is that Rousseau makes all (foreign) ethnocultural differences great sins from each native point of view. It may be the case that, setting aside moralism, Rousseau considers, from within each general will, disturbance itself natively bad. Perhaps he presumes that the collision between two collective bodies’ mutually particular

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wills causes a (temporary) zone of internal and external perturbations. Then, even still, Rousseau could recoil upon only a relativist literalism whereby, in its oblivious ataraxia, every nativism uniformly receives foreign disturbances as unpleasurable. Rousseau would necessarily impute to each an external judgment that disturbances of foreign origin are unpleasurable rather than (temporarily, kinetically) pleasurable, like an unexpected visit from a friend or friend-to-be, or like sexual intercourse. From either the moralist or literalist vantage point, Rousseau’s texts court possible incoherence. From each vantage point, the foreigner’s power is “Giant”: it is always disproportionate in its effects (cf. OL 254; OC V.381).

5

Fugitive Freedom By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? —psalm 137 (King James Version)

Homeland is the state of having escaped. —max horkheimer and theodor adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him. —herman melville, Moby-Dick

In an enticing remark in one of his last published articles, Robert Wokler suggested that “Rousseau’s chief political texts” could profitably “be read as commentaries on the Bible,” with the Second Discourse’s serving to reinterpret Genesis to Of the Social Contract’s Exodus. On the latter score this chapter takes Wokler’s suggestion in earnest in order to ask the following questions: how different would the Social Contract and Rousseau’s oeuvre generally appear if we foregrounded it as articulating an exodus from slavery? How would such fugitivity rewrite our understanding of political freedom? These questions depend on a prior consideration: amidst abundant evidence

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in favor of countercosmopolitan and nativist projects in Rousseau’s writings, what could possibly constitute the archive for such a reconsideration? Certainly, a state’s needing to preserve its original purity in order to profit politically from its good disposition represents only the major and dominant tendency in Rousseau’s oeuvre à propos of how a society constitutes itself against generalized slavery and achieves its particular liberty. Happily, there is a true alternative, though minor—indeed, positively buried. The first chapter that comprises the trinity entitled “Of the People” begins in this minor key: This is not to say that, just as some illnesses overwhelm men’s minds and deprive them of the memory of the past, there may not also sometimes occur periods of violence in the lifetime of States when revolutions do to peoples what certain crises do to individuals, when horror of the past takes the place of forgetting, and when the State aflame with civil wars is so to speak reborn from its ashes and recovers the vigor of youth as it escapes death’s embrace.

However, as soon as Rousseau tempts us with the possibility of revolution’s heroically reconstituting a people, he just as soon closes it off, puts it beyond the reach of hope: “But such events are rare; they are exceptions the reason for which is always found in the particular constitution of the State in question. They could not even happen twice with the same people. . . . Free peoples, remember this maxim: Freedom can be gained; but it is never recovered” (SC II.8, 72–73; OC III.385). Thus does Rousseau consign revolution and rebellion to minor status in his text; thus does he toe again the autarkic-purist line. I want to argue, however, that in spite of this superficial subordination the theme is nevertheless quite significant because it provides a model for understanding how legitimate interdependence—which is, after all, the projected goal of Rousseau’s theoretical researches—might be forged by peoples who do not find themselves well disposed, who are impure, who have been illegitimately subject to others—in short, all those who do not hail from Rousseau’s fantasized Corsica. So while I could not in good faith claim that revolution and rebellion occupy more than a minor place in Of the Social Contract, since Rousseau himself explicitly diminishes them as “exceptions,” I do want to make a case for a reading of Rousseau’s oeuvre that foregrounds them and offers criteria for reconstructing the texts around the haunting presence of insurgent self-determination. Especially since the previous two

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chapters have discredited the autarkic-purist tendency that instills in Rousseau a debilitating anxiety about encounters between alien persons or peoples, it is important to reconstruct the alternative tendency in Rousseau, as it takes for granted peoples’ subjection and impurity, their dispossession and displacement, and especially their slavery. By a more elusive rhetorical register than Diderot’s Black Spartacus, and with more oblique political implications, Rousseau’s fugitives, as we shall see, belong to the same colonial and imperial universe as Diderot’s future prophecy of an avenger of New World chattel slavery, so central to early twenty-first century postcolonial interpretations of the French Enlightenment. Certainly, Rousseau’s Exodus is not revolution, nor is it vengeful abolitionism, despite how inflammatory Du contrat social became for the French and Haitian Revolutions to come. There is a different model of politics in the Jewish people’s flight from Egyptian captivity and into the wilderness, one not assimilable to the invocation of a Black Spartacus. In this chapter I finally make a sustained case for a fugitive conception of political freedom in Rousseau’s work. However, in order to highlight its features, we must confront the evidence in Of the Social Contract that still points to autarky and purity; I discuss these in terms of the account of Rousseau’s political anthropology as I have developed it over the course of the previous four chapters. Against this I synthesize three convergent moments in the Second Discourse (centering on a “Hottentot”) that together foreground the interrelations of slavery, marooning, and “primitive” criticism. This close, speculative reading of the frontispiece, Note XVI, and the reference to the life “best for man” in the Second Discourse serves as the basis for reconstituting themes of insurgent action and collective constitution in Of the Social Contract. Placing resistance to despotic government front and center brings into focus the possibility of flight: marronnage. Juxtaposing Rousseauian fugitive freedom with historiography that presents marronnage and slave revolts as central to the Transatlantic world during Rousseau’s lifetime as parallel iterations of Exodus, I argue that attending to Rousseau’s representations of Jewish political subjectivity can tell us a lot about what it might mean to make fugitive freedom a practice and what its prospects might be if all the world is Pharaoh’s Egypt.

reservation politics Rousseau’s canonized contribution to political theory, Of the Social Contract, condenses many of the concerns of the Letter to d’Alembert, Constitutional

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Project for Corsica, Considerations on the Government of Poland, and Émile and thus culminates theoretically the projects that have gone in for criticism in the previous two chapters—that is to say that, for better and for worse, Rousseau sustains across these late political writings his theoretical interest in solutions I have judged ambivalent at best. For example, Of the Social Contract’s famous civil religion would endeavor at “making the fatherland the object of the Citizens’ worship” and thus would serve to reconcile the subject’s feeling of being at home psychically with her actual political home, thereby finishing and displacing the project of travel as political education (SC IV.8, 147; OC III.464–65). The “Citizen of Geneva” favors a public censor to protect the purity of the people’s mores and cross-references his argument to that effect from Letter to d’Alembert in the seventh chapter of Book IV. Indeed, the three chapters entitled “Of the People” (II.8–10) repeat in condensed form much of the familiar emphasis on individuals’ civic absorption and the community’s moral purity. Recommendations for what I have called patriotic compression pervade these chapters: “The more the social bond stretches, the looser it grows, and in general a small State is proportionately stronger than a large one.” Consequently, Rousseau devalues territorial expansiveness and warns against an overlarge apparatus of administration. There is the same criticism of imperial cosmopolitanism and, later, the further sense that political compression has everything to do with freedom (SC II.9, 74, 75; III.1, 84; OC III.386–88, 397). Finally, Corsica returns as the object of effusion yet again. After enumerating the characteristics of a people truly “fit for legislation”—e.g., “one which can do without all other peoples and without which every other people can do” and that “can be self-sufficient”—Rousseau beams that “[t]here is one country left in Europe capable of receiving legislation; it is the island of Corsica” (SC II.10, 77–78; OC III.390–91). Autarky and autonomy thus remain dominant concerns, to the continued denigration of dependence on externals: “Any people which, because of its location, has no other alternative than commerce or war is inherently weak; it is dependent on its neighbors; it is dependent on circumstances; it can never have any but a precarious and brief existence” (SC II.10, 76; OC III.389). This equation of external dependencies—whether on other nations or environmental forces—with weakness typifies Rousseau’s literalist understanding of self-sufficiency and self-legislation, but it stands in tension with a quasi-utopian vision of the most choiceworthy patrie he dreamed up

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a few years prior. After the requisite mention of smallness, lawfulness, and the identity of people and sovereign, the Second Discourse’s Epistle Dedicatory describes the foreign relations of Rousseau’s own private Geneva in the following terms: I should have wished to choose a Fatherland diverted from the ferocious love of Conquest by a fortunate powerlessness, and protected against the fear of itself becoming the Conquest of some other State by an even more fortunate location: A free City, situated amidst a number of Peoples none of which had any interest in invading it, but each of which had an interest in preventing the others from invading it. (SD 116; OC III.113)

Certainly this Epistle Dedicatory and “Of the People” are not irreconcilable. Both aim to preempt violent foreign entanglements; both desire that a good patrie “have . . . nothing to fear but from itself alone” (SD 116; OC III.113); both suggest that the simultaneity of fortunate position and virtuous disposition effectively dissolves internal or external threats. However, the harsh realism of the former passage calls into question the latter’s soft-focus fantasy—for what could be the wish of the epistle’s dream if not, precisely, dependence on circumstance and neighbors, a desire to make a reservation on which a people will hold itself hostage to its environment? After all, relying on neighbors to check one another merely renders dependence indirect—sublates it. This patrie enjoys independence from any given neighbor but suffers dependence on the interstate system: it becomes prey, startled the moment that the exact balance of powers surrounding it destabilizes. And given that, according to Rousseau himself, international Hobbesianism amounts to nothing but unstable equilibrium, mutual checks always inevitably destabilize. Rousseau, hopeful that the small state’s environment will simply facilitate its project of ataraxia, momentarily forgets this. Oblivion persists even when he defends the Epistle Dedicatory. For, oddly, he protects his patrie by slandering all others (LP 227; OC III.235). Yet, if the calumny of universal instability were found true, would the island of stability not be threatened all the more? The small territorial state, immobile, wedged among larger predatory neighbors, likely dooms itself in cultivating autarky in terms of ataraxia, but Rousseau’s conception of autonomy fares no better, for by its prejudicial moralism Rousseau displays

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pernicious contempt for the foreign qua heteronomizing alien. Where does the problem lie? Although Rousseau’s texts advocate nativism, nonetheless the chauvinist nationalism that some commentators impute to him does not have its provenance in patriotic compression. Even the least compressed human community conceivable—that is, that of all humanity—generates the nonhuman as its foreigner-enemy, as Carl Schmitt noted and Rousseau himself acknowledges (GM 81; OC III.288). Chauvinism does not originate in national difference. After all, one could imagine how a patriotic compression would look, were it neutral with respect to xenoi: namely, hospitality taking the specific form of a love for and commitment to one’s polity—and, consequently perhaps, a desire never to leave it—but nevertheless a generous though guarded hosting of guests from that wider world that one harbors no curiosity or wanderlust to experience for oneself. Indeed, in the world of Homeric Greece, the practice of xenia, or guest-friendship, was maintained and perpetuated exactly because one loved one’s home city. Xenia was seen as necessary for sustaining both a divine and a political order, as hostility to strangers could result in punishment by the gods, in war with the slighted guest’s city and kin, or in the former as the latter. If the problem is not difference per se—since a play of sameness and difference is irreducible in the very constitution of peoples—then what is it? Derrida gets at it in diagnosing Rousseau’s pathology: “Affecting oneself by another presence, one corrupts oneself by oneself. Rousseau neither wishes to think nor can think that this alteration does not simply happen to the self, that it is the self ’s very origin. He must consider it a contingent evil coming from without to affect the integrity of the subject.” Although synchronically constituted with the familiar, although it shares the self ’s very origin, the alien is, on Rousseau’s designation, diachronically secondary and posterior. Not difference, then, but primordiality as purity is where the problem lies. Thus, refining a concluding claim of the previous chapter, I would say that not just any solipsism but only primordial solipsism can be pure and true. Since Rousseau maintains that “vice and error, foreign to [man’s] constitution, enter it from outside,” then the only task he leaves himself is to safeguard primitive, originary truth from encroaching error, corruption. From Émile to The Government of Poland to well-preserved small or marginal states, then, negative education is the key strategy:

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human nature does not go backward, and it is never possible to return to the times of innocence and equality once they have been left behind. . . . So that his [“J.J.’s,” i.e., Rousseau’s] object could not be to bring populous peoples or great States back to their first simplicity, but only to stop, if it were possible, the progress of those whose small size and situation have preserved from such a swift advance toward the perfection of society and the deterioration of the species. . . . He had worked for his homeland and for little States constituted like it.

Error and sin are not just spatially unidirectional as noted in the previous chapter; they progress along a unilinear temporality. As error and corruption unfold, societies grow more complex, and since this development of the species, what Rousseau calls human perfectibility, supposedly advances in unidirectional, unilinear time, then there is no undoing or forgetting complexity or corruption after colonization by it. In a world where perfectibility has undergone uneven development, some peoples have managed to retain primordial innocence. Insofar as they are peoples, they no longer inhabit the pure, solitary state of nature, yet they have managed to avoid modernity’s onslaught. However, once modernity is visited upon them, then they cannot “go backward.” And, having no natural limits but earthly finitude itself, this empire of modernity inexorably will extend to the entire globe unless limits are artificially erected to preserve what islands of natural simplicity remain. To the recto of this unilinear, unidirectional conquest model, then, corresponds a verso. Rousseau understands the appropriate political response to be preservation: removing and protecting peoples from global circulation when their very innocence endangers them. Extending and partly repurposing Sarah Kofman’s term, I call this Rousseau’s reservation politics. In a powerful critique Kofman argued that, because Rousseau sees women as a reservoir of moral virtue when they are pure but also the beings most vulnerable to monumental corruption, he must confine them to a “reservation” so that the tender morality appropriate to them will not be altered by the flux of the fallen world. Kofman’s analysis applies more broadly to any entity whose fixed but fragile goodness requires preservation from its surroundings. In the quasi-fictionalized selfassessment of the Dialogues quoted in the paragraph above, Rousseau states this reservation politics quite baldly. It encompasses the autarkic tendency in his work as well as the tortured pedagogy for autonomy that the tutor

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tries to enact in Émile. Because Rousseau convinces himself that goodness is primitive, originary, he must subject it to a purist and fixist preservation, a confinement and conservation of the primitive on reservations as though primitiveness or goodness were a pure element that must be excluded from circulation in order to retain its extraordinary value. Thus does he inculpate himself for enclosing Émile (especially during his travels), his small autarkic polities, and goodness itself on reservations in order to protect them from the risks of circulation in a corrupt world. In its main thrust Rousseau’s critique of modernity counterfactually occupies the standpoint of what its empire would conquer: because he values them, he prospectively pities primordialist remainders of the second state of nature. If, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau “founded” ethnology and was “no doubt right to believe that it would have been better for our well-being had mankind” stalled at nascent society, then the reservation politics Rousseau articulates in critical response to modernity therefore assumes—indeed inaugurates—the “salvage paradigm” in anthropology, which undertakes as its raison-d’être to represent the “vanishing primitive” in face of obliterating transformation. The salvage paradigm’s finest critic, James Clifford, describes the epistemological and political authority it presumes: “It is assumed that the other society is weak and ‘needs’ to be represented by an outsider (and that what matters in its life is its past, not present or future). The recorder and interpreter of fragile custom is custodian of an essence, unimpeachable witness to an authenticity.” Such is the custodial power-knowledge Rousseau arrogates to himself, not just rhetorical representation of what would be lost but political representation in behalf of salvageable peoples. Absent (his) intercession, le déluge nécessaire. Enfolded in discourses that came to be called the “sciences of man,” this primitivist critique of modernity is itself modernist, even though the salvage paradigm and the reservation politics this critique reactively produces disclaim their genealogy. Rousseau’s insistence that degeneration is unidirectional and unilinear— that is, progressive—precludes any conclusion but pain in innocence lost, certainly not the difficult pleasures of resistance and reinvention. For, as I argued in the previous chapter, even the reactive Hellenizing projects of virtuous autonomy and self-pleasuring autarky end up mimicking the solipsism of primitive being as though modeled on it. Thus the very idea that humans become truly moral beings—that they remain no longer natural in refining their native goodness and/or reacting to vice—could have served

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as the alternative to the primordialism that critics have always leveled at Rousseau. However, primordialism infects even this alternative. As Rousseau handles it, the paradigm of merited goodness or virtue differs little from the salvage paradigm because his reservation politics consistently forgets the Senecan pronouncement (or Montaigne’s citation) that “it makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.” For reservation politics shelters its objects from knowledge (such that there cannot be cause for merit) rather than granting them the mobility and contact with alien and potentially impure entities that would allow autarky or autonomy—in short, political liberty itself—to emerge as tried and tested practices. What would serve as a true alternative to the reservation politics so dominant in Rousseau’s oeuvre? While one approach that a people may take toward legitimate interdependence in a social contract might be that of Corsica (though it remains a question whether Corsicans are free), the other approach—minor, to be sure—is that of marooning slave communities whose association arises from both the cinders of their former slavery and the ashes of the primitive liberty that they long ago were forced to renounce and can never regain. Having suggested that everyone is in chains, Rousseau—inadvertently, it seems, considering his comments about the rarity of revolt—opens the door to rebellion by anyone. And, I emphasize, this rebellion does not take just any form but is rather a slaves’ rebellion, and so the nonreservationist tendency in Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract begins to assume a quite fugitive appearance: it goes underground. On this alternative account, the maroons’ social contract may rise like a phoenix from slavery’s consuming flames: their association is the maroons’ rebirth as a free people.

displacements and condensations of marronnage What could possibly be the proximity, if any, between marronnage and Of the Social Contract? Around the time he was “putting finishing touches to the ‘Contrat Social’ ” in 1761, Rousseau was asked his opinion of a mediocre tragedy, which, he believed was modeled on an English play, recently translated into French (1751). The latter was Oroonoko (1696), by Thomas Southerne, who dramatized Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688). In Oroonoko an enslaved African prince leads a rebellion in

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the (then-British) colony of Suriname against the plantocracy, then flees with his wife, Imoinda. After killing her (with her consent) to protect her from retributive depredation after his certain capture, Oroonoko is caught and dismembered, though he ends up dying stoically (calmly smoking) in a gruesome, punishing final scene. In the Confessions it is unclear whether Rousseau had read the text himself or merely knew its plot. However, according to Edward D. Seeber, it was “among the nine most read English novels in France at the middle of the eighteenth century,” so Rousseau must at least have been familiar with the subplot details of marronnage and stoical death, even if he calls the French translation “little known.” And if the provocative similarities and differences are any indication—royal, princely Oroonoko versus Émile, nonroyal though truly a mirror of princes; Stoicism in death versus Stoicism in slavery—then Oroonoko may have served as a model for Rousseau’s Solitaires. So chattel slave rebellion was proximate to final revisions on Of the Social Contract. Indeed, after that first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book, when Rousseau boldly declares that “[m]an is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau writes, If I considered only force, and the effect that follows from it, I would say; as long as a People is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does even better; for in recovering its freedom by the same right as the right by which it was robbed of it, either the people is well founded to take it back, or it was deprived of it without foundation. (SC I.1, 41; OC III.351–52)

Now that we have seen how something other, and less violent, than force must supplement slavery for it to become institutional, now that we know that the chains of chattel slavery would be impossible without other impersonal forms of subjection even as it in turn metonymizes them, and now that we have also considered Émile’s Stoic, anti-rebellious response to the institution of slavery from a standpoint immanent to the Émilean project itself, we may return to the question of rebellion as it ripples outward from this paragraph of the Social Contract. As I argued in Chapter 1, Rousseau does in fact consider only force in Book I, for he dismisses all attempts to legitimize slavery as force’s myriad false pretenses to law and its forms. Moreover, though, when he does ac-

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count for sustained subjection in the Second Discourse, we find that force never properly transforms itself into right per se; rather, it becomes impersonal and universal, but no less forceful or more rightful thereby. If all forms of social life operate through and as force that is rendered utterly conventional and “consentible” precisely in being impersonal and universal—especially in modernity after primitive independence and liberty are no longer possible or available—then all peoples may be subject to slavery, and many will lack any cognizance of their subjection. Indeed, it may be that they cannot recognize their enslavement from so long being inured to and denatured by it. Hence, even when the “slavery” referred to is not that of the private property in human beings violently kept but rather the more abstract dominations of either despotism (political slavery) or false and illegitimate sociable dependency (moral slavery), and inasmuch as there occurs a kind of semantic traffic in humans among these forms of subjection, then every time that Rousseau discusses slavery he effectively and inevitably does refer to violent force “and the effect that follows from it.” Therefore, his evaluative judgments apply to any people. If everyone everywhere is in chains, and if all chains—even those lost to memory, perpetuated by cowardice, or never known as such (as in that perfect subjection of negative education and its analogues)—are force buried in the temporality of immemorial convention, then any people would do “even better” by shaking off its yoke than by continuing to obey because compelled to do so. What might it look like “to shake off the yoke,” an action so tacit in Of the Social Contract that it never receives full and proper expression? If Rousseau does not ever articulate a coherent theory of rebellion and yet valorizes it under certain limited circumstances, then from what elements—against which limits—might we nonetheless be entitled to piece one together? Furthermore, if chattel slavery’s chains condense and displace the enchaining dominations of despotism and moral slavery, then does slave rebellion similarly work by voracious condensation and displacement, such that it incorporates other possible instances? How can fugitivity stand for freedom? How does flight figure other practices of freedom? I already alluded to a metaphorical/metonymic marronnage above in contrasting Émile’s Stoic slavery with the fugitivity of the savage who would “brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death” to confirm his freedom (SD 177; OC III.182; see Chapter 2 of this volume). The source that may best introduce the writing of rebellion into Of the Social Contract, however, is the frontispiece and accompanying texts of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

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Broadly speaking, the primary elements of the frontispiece are as follows: in the left middle ground a mass of standing Dutchmen surround one sitting with hand stroking beard in a gesture of deliberation; next to, but discrete from them, and in the middle ground at center stands a “Hottentot” male in lambskin loincloth, with a dagger by his side and pendant around his neck; he is gesturing to his left and to the right background of the image, where a mass of native huts contrasts with the square-riggers in the distance and the Dutch outpost’s walls in the upper left; finally, a bundle of Dutch clothing occupies the center foreground (see Figure 3). The image is immensely complex, and much of its grace—and a good deal of its attendant referential risk—derive from its openness to multiple readings. In a provocative interpretation Linda Zerilli has suggested that the frontispiece to the Second Discourse “captures in an image . . . ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation’ that occurred toward the end of the eighteenth century”—that is, the idea that men gave up on Rococo claims of male beauty, rank, and status in their clothing and chose to dress more soberly, functionally, and democratically (i.e., with a mind toward egalitarianism). While she notes, in redescribing the frontispiece, that the central personage is a Hottentot, questions of empire and civilization otherwise play no part in her critical reading. Hence, the following readings of the image can easily coexist with a feminist interpretation such as Zerilli’s. In short, I believe Zerilli is right to focus on renunciation—which is a predominant and indubitable theme of the endnote that the frontispiece captions—but renunciation of male frippery is not the only or even the most obvious interpretation, for the image leads us into the heart of marronnage. The frontispiece’s caption, “He returns to his Equals,” signals that its immediate context is Note XVI, which in turn refers to a passage in the main part of the Second Discourse about the l’age d’or, as the epoch “best for man.” In Note XVI, Rousseau concerns himself with the problem of why, in the many encounters that have ensued between so-called savages and the so-called civilized sociable men, the former never voluntarily renounce their savagery for civilization, “whereas, one reads in a thousand places that Frenchmen and other Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among these Nations, spent their entire lives there, unable any longer to leave such a strange way of life . . .” (SD 167, 219; OC III.171, 220). Countering the standard argument that savages remain savage out of habit, inertia, or ignorance, Rousseau also mentions the cases of those savage children who have been educated and reared since infancy or birth by civilized Europeans

Figure 3. Charles Dominique Joseph Eisen, “Il retourne ches ses Egaux” (“He returns to his Equals”). Frontispiece of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1st ed. (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1755). Engraving by Dominique Sornique. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. Call no. Case JO 758.

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and yet die of homesickness for the unknowable alternate lives they might have led (cf. PF 57; OC III.534). Of these anecdotes at large, he considers “a single well attested example,” cited from Buffon’s Histoire des Voyages and “submit[ted] to the scrutiny of the admirers of the European Political order.” All prior attempts at conversion by Dutch missionaries at the Cape of Good Hope having come to naught, the colony’s Governor Van der Stel had a Hottentot male raised in European mores, language, religion, and high culture since infancy—an inverse quasi-symmetrical analogue to the wild boy of Lithuania raised by bears (see Introduction). Reared within the Dutch colonial enterprise and the trappings of modern European civilization, this Hottentot served the Dutch commissioner in India until the latter’s death, whereupon the young man returned to the Cape to visit his blood relatives. During his visit and a mere few days after returning to the Cape, he divested himself of Dutch dress and girded himself in sheepskin. “He returned to the Fort in this new garb, carrying a package with his former clothes, and presenting them to the Governor, he addressed this discourse to him. Be so good, Sir, as to note that I forever renounce these trappings. I also renounce the Christian Religion for the rest of my life; my resolution is to live and die in the Religion, the ways, and the customs of my Ancestors. The one favor I ask of you is to leave me the Necklace and the Cutlass I am wearing. I shall keep them for love of you. Straightway, without awaiting Van der Stel’s reply, he ran off, and was never again seen at the Cape.” (SD 220–21; OC III.221)

The passage that Rousseau quotes breaks off there, and so does the note. The quotation does not convey its message by itself as though self-evident. For not only is it punctuated by the visual aid of the frontispiece to which the reader is directed in a footnote placed before the Hottentot’s italicized speech, but also endnote and frontispiece are triangulated with the discussion in the body text of l’age d’or. What meanings does this triangulation convey? The wider thrust of Rousseau’s endnote would seem to be that “pure” savages, Europeans who have gone “native,” and even savages transplanted to and raised in civilization prefer the primitive life of nascent society because the latter is “best for man.” It would then affirm the salvage paradigm. However, such a conclusion ignores that the latter two sets of figures express a deliberate preference, and even the “pure” savages may not vegetate in nascent society in pure ignorance of other options. In light of the mention

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of savages who “brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death,” even supposedly pure savages know threatening oppression well enough to guard against it (SD 177; OC III.182). The political implications of the frontispiece and accompanying texts, manifest in all their complexity and near-incommensurability, steer wide of self-evidence. I entertain four different readings in turn. All four, while divergent among themselves, display nonetheless a certain Rousseauism in the sense that each can claim a thematic counterpart in Rousseau’s political theory. First, taken as a straightforward synchronic system of signs, the frontispiece could represent visually that inflammatory aside in the footnote to the “Preface to Narcissus” that I discuss in the previous chapter. Just as the image cleaves relatively cleanly between the Dutch on the left and the Hottentots on the right, so, too, should humanity separate cleanly into discrete peoples who mix only at their peril. It is not only that the savage way of life is best for man but also that it must remain asunder or else lose itself completely. The central personage, while liminal inasmuch as he addresses the Dutch (his unequals), nonetheless remains visually discrete from them and takes sides against them: he points away from them to “his Equals.” Although the left outline of the body of the savage—except for the crossing of his leg with (presumably) Van der Stel’s, a crossing that becomes a metaphor for the crossing and overlap of their lives heretofore—clearly cuts the picture in two halves, acknowledging the crossing of legs and the Hottentot’s cultural liminality already acknowledges, too, that the picture is not Manicheistically, metaphorically black versus white. So the second reading of the image takes into account a diachronic narrative oriented toward the past and suggests that although the Hottentot (like Émile) had received a traveling political education by the Cape’s Dutch governor and had been exposed to other peoples, nevertheless he ultimately chooses a home with the people among whom he was born. Such a reading aligns with the apparent intention of Émile (not with its effect) and minimizes how alien either Émile or the Hottentot is from the people among whom the latter has previously circulated or the people among whom the former was born and will live. This reading implies that at least some savages can and perhaps ought for pedagogical purposes to mingle with those utterly alien from themselves, but they must also have cultivated the fortitude to reject those alien cultures. Having been a liminal figure, the Hottentot may use his knowledge of vice to good effect by shielding his innocent equals from their unequals, the at-once base and superior Dutch. Not unlike Émile, the

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Hottentot has traveled, perhaps even found other places favorable in some ways, but nevertheless deliberately attaches himself to his patrie. He is, as it were, patriotic. The third reading captures well Rousseau’s totalizing and infectious pessimism. Until now we have been ignoring the presence of the square-riggers in the right far distance. From a diachronic future-oriented perspective, the image already represents the ultimate and untimely inundation of the Hottentots by Europeans and their vices. The Hottentots are surrounded and made captive by the Dutch: ships above them, Dutchmen and a walled fortress behind and beside them, and the title with its ominous words Inequality among Men either on the facing page or verso. Compared to the undifferentiated but united front presented by the dubious (at worst) or inscrutable (at best) Dutch mass and its menacing fortress, the lone Hottentot in the center middle ground and his equals in the far distance at right appear puny, and the sole Hottentot’s noble renunciation appears a mere whistle in the dark. The ships looming on the horizon will either capture them and enslave them or else trade them into abject dispossession and inch them off their aboriginal lands. Indeed, the ships interrupt the Hottentot’s line of direction—he must point through the ships in order for his gesture to connect with the equals to whom he would return. Although the image’s contextual anecdote emphasizes renunciation, this third quasi-Hobbesian interpretation disclaims it and proves renunciation to be equality’s saddest swan song. The fourth interpretation draws for its substance upon elements of the previous two. If the previous two interpretations were diachronically oriented to the past and to the future, this last is a diachronic present-oriented reading. Here the Hottentot’s renunciation is a double renunciation. Having been trained a slave for slavish masters, having traveled to India on Dutch colonial business (chrematistics, no less), the unnamed Hottentot renounces his past subjection to civilization and modern sociability. Noting the Hottentots’ eventual hemming-in by the Dutch, their inevitable enslavement by encroaching colonists, a situation that renders them slaves already to a temporality of inexorability—that coming moment that spells the Hottentots’ doom (those ships do not hover threateningly above the Africans’ huts for no reason)—the Hottentot renounces his people’s future chattel slavery by returning to his equals. In the uncanny bundle that lies at his feet, then, the Hottentot renounces two slaveries that Rousseau has elsewhere knitted together: moral slavery and African chattel slavery.

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The bundle serves as a double figure, a Wittgensteinian duck/rabbit. On the one hand, it simply and straightforwardly figures a “literal” bundle of clothes. It displays the belt or tie, the roll of waistcoat and knickers, and, more in the shadows, the low-crowned and medium-brimmed hat with feather. The bundle symbolizes the renunciation of civilization that Rousseau discusses in the accompanying Note XVI. While it is a Hottentot who has cast off these trappings of civilization, it could just as well have belonged to one of those Europeans who “have voluntarily taken refuge among these nations”—and indeed the engraver has scarcely Africanized the Hottentot’s features. (There is, of course, a long tradition in European visual culture and political theory of making the Hottentots the most African, and therefore least human, of all Africans; only “pygmies” go in for as much representational othering. Therefore, the printmaker certainly could have enjoyed further license in making the central figure more alien.) The African’s explicit renunciation of the superfluous garb and of his Christian religion signals that Stoic paradox of moral slavery that Rousseau invokes in Of the Social Contract when he asserts that “the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery” (SC I.8, 54; OC III.365). For these Dutch are impelled by a desire for superfluity, a desire that drives them to the shores of another continent in search of something other than rational nature requires: a superfluity that makes them transport there accoutrements of a civilization that vastly exceeds human necessity—as indicated by the modest huts close to the earth as opposed to the towering fortress reaching to the skies as did that at Babel. Hardly could one describe them as decadent or imperial Roman, yet these modest Calvinist Dutch, combing the world for converts and commodities, have run as far askew of sage liberty as the Romans of the decadence. The renounced “trappings” mean to impugn the Dutch for their amour-propre, which proves all the more perilous in lacking the ostentation and histrionics of those French court and theater societies central to Zerilli’s reading. The Hottentot renounces, too, in his speech, if not quite represented in the frontispiece, “the Christian Religion for the rest of [his] life” (SD 220; OC III.221). In renouncing his Christian upbringing and continued faith, the Hottentot renounces a different kind of slavery. For in the chapter on the civil religion in Of the Social Contract, Christianity tout court gets a tongue-lashing. Rousseau gainsays the possibility of a Christian republic because each half of the proposed concept mutually excludes the other. No earthly republic could come of a devout Christian people because it makes unfreedom an article of its faith: “Christianity preaches nothing but servi-

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tude and dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny for tyranny not always to profit from it. True Christians are made to be slaves” (SC IV.8, 149; OC III.467). Hence, in renouncing the subjection of modern civilized sociability, the Hottentot renounces too the inevitable subjection to despotism that Christianity’s production of a docile populace would certainly generate and that Christians perpetrate on infidels and heathens. The bundle refers to these more abstract, metaphorical versions of slavery, but there is another figure of slavery in the renounced figure. Certainly, the metaphorical senses (slavery qua modern sociability and qua despotism) predominate in the frontispiece and its accompanying text, but the bundle is metonym as well as metaphor. Condensed and displaced in the bundle of clothes is also the body that wore them, one that might still be wearing them. Though it is literally black marks on white paper, figuratively a bundle of clothes, and symbolically the Hottentot’s cast-off ignoble, Europeanized self, does the bundle not indeed also appear to be a crumpled body? Is the bundle not corpsely, with its belt and hat donned in their proper places and thus filling out fleshy buttocks or obscuring a head? Is this corpse possibly missing its legs, a torso hobbled by slavery for transgressions against it and immobilized for future slavery? If it is a body, lying prone and perhaps even in a fetal position from abject pain, then are the distant naked Hottentot torsos—two, possibly three, in a line at the edge of the visual field—also possibly chained, in a row, waiting to be transported to the Americas in the ships looming above them? We may take solace in the historical fact that Hottentots were less often than other peoples on the African continent plundered for chattel slavery abroad, though of course their labor was exploited domestically by Boer settlers. Certainly, these Dutch may look reasonable, and the seated Dutchman especially may embody deliberate thoughtfulness in his pensive pose, but Dutch atrocities abroad were not unknown, and although it comes four years before Voltaire’s caustic representation of slavery in the Dutch outpost of Suriname in Candide (1759), Rousseau’s sober frontispiece is already too available to this later text’s brutality. In Chapter XIX of Candide, or Optimism, the famous title character finally, after a host of misadventures across the Atlantic, renounces his optimism upon seeing a disfigured African slave who tells him plainly, “When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe” (see Figure 4). Juxtaposed with this textual

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Figure 4. Jean-Michel Moreau-Lejeune, “C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe” (“It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe”). Plate from Voltaire, Candide, ou l’optimisme, chap. 19, 1st illus. ed. (Paris: Beaumarchais, 1787). Engraving by Baquoy (fils). By courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

image from Candide, the Discourse’s bundle and the distant naked torsos look less like what they might “literally” be (viz., the renounced trappings, the “Equals”)—but what after all could “literal” possibly mean when we are examining hatchmarks on a white page? Instead, the bundle really does appear as the dismembered, overdressed body of a Europeanized Hottentot who tried to escape. A marker of his past life as a Europeanized colonial native, the bundle would figure, too, the rebel Hottentot’s own fateful future punishment, and it is perhaps because he recognizes this conjured penalty that he must run

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off “straightway” without giving the governor a chance to respond in word or deed. Going native may strain the inner limits of European tolerability, but to return to nativeness, to return to one’s “equals,” after having been (at best) Europeanized or (at worst) enslaved, constitutes high treason to the colonial order. So irrational, so unreasonable an action flew in the face of European narratives of progress and demanded a brutal response: incapacitation or death. The two slaveries encapsulated by the duck/rabbit bundle are mutually constitutive in modernity in spite of the poorly conceived rhetorical flourish that Rousseau nevertheless interjects into Of the Social Contract when he thoughtlessly pens, “As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but are yourselves slaves; you pay for their freedom with your own” (III.15, 115; OC III.431). Surely Rousseau, by invoking those potential slaves that moderns would have if they more resembled their Spartan and Athenian forebears, does not mean to ignore the actual African, American, and Asian slaves that Europeans consumed and trafficked in abroad? The modern chattel slaves may not labor on French soil, intimately in Europe, as Greek slaves lived and worked in the heart of poleis, but moderns certainly do have their slaves and try perchance to hide their own slavishness by exporting chattel slavery to outerlying colonial plantations. Nonetheless, to make his accusation to modern political subjects sting so acutely, Rousseau must diminish chattel slavery without entirely nullifying it. He must evoke the horrors of chattel slavery to lend force to other more abstract and conventionalized forms of subjection, but he must call on the former in such a way as not to steal the particular thunder of the latter. Contemporaneous with this simultaneous condensation-displacement and signaled too by the double figure is this mutual constitution: there is no chattel slavery without modern civilized subjection; there is no civilized subjection without chattel slavery. There is in other words no “need” or desire in Europe for sugar without its attendant cost in freedom, life, and limb. The same could be said for despotism and slavish docility: neither the one without the other. Hence, if the Stoic and antidespotic charges of slavery must rely on the present (represented) horror of brutal chattel slavery for their negative valence, then it may be, too, that this frontispiece image must hide slavery in plain sight in order to dramatize the Hottentot’s renunciation. The bundle of clothes must also be the Hottentot’s other body. That is, the Hottentot occupies two bodies and two moments simultaneously in the

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frontispiece because the double figure animates two related narratives. There is first the renunciation of illegitimate civilizational dependence by which the Hottentot relates to the bundle as his discontinuous past self. But this fourth interpretation of the frontispiece, in viewing the bundle as a double figure, raises the possibility of a second and more radical renunciation. If the bundle is also the body of a maimed and disfigured slave like the one from Candide, then what the Hottentot renounces when he returns to his equals is a violent colonial order that thrives on chattel slavery, and the relationship between him and this tortured body that might be his own is a counterfactual collapsing of two discrete temporal moments: transgression and consequence. There on the ground lies the brutal future reaction to the very action that he is presently taking in renouncing the order. If, in fact, it were not the case that he “was never seen again at the Cape” (SD 221; OC III.221) but had fled and then were caught by the Dutch authorities whom he had defied, as was the slave Candide encounters in Suriname, then the bundle/body represents his punished, crumpled corporeality, made to pay in pain, as was Oroonoko, for having stolen away what it did not and could not own: itself. If the bundle-as-body encapsulates the cruelty that the penal order of colonialism visits upon natives who run awry of it, then the Hottentot’s own whole, hale, and vigorously gesturing body too becomes a double figure, at once collapsing into itself fait accompli and potential, unfinished action, future perfect and present progressive: the sign of successfully having transgressed and that of a transgressing, an action in the process of occurring whose unknown outcome is perilously risked. The Hottentot is suspended in the moment of choosing freedom, not repose, independence by fire, not “European voluptuousness” (SD 177; OC III.182). In short, the Hottentot is not just renouncing civilizational dependence. He is also renouncing chattel slavery. He is, in short, a marooning slave. As such, his transgression of the order becomes much more serious than renunciation. He revolts against the colonial order, against slavery in any of its senses. In marooning against what Rousseau calls “European Political order”—which is to say the territorial statist, colonial, civilizational, Christian order—the Hottentot makes a bid to negate slavery. For, as Michèle Duchet has noted, in French letters after 1730, “the black person is no longer a touching character, he is an heroic figure, whose human dignity is affirmed in nobility of attitude and the rejection of injustice.” Duchet continues, evoking the French title of Camus’ The Rebel (L’homme révolté): “He is a

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man in revolt [un homme révolté], who makes his entrance at once on the stage of history and in collective consciousness. . . . From this point of view, the dominant historical fact is not slavery, it is marronnage, which is its negation.” Certainly, the Hottentot is, in those words from Of the Social Contract, “recovering [his] freedom by the same right as the right by which [he] was robbed of it” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.352). After all, by stealing his own body and self back in marronnage, he merely counters the governor’s original bald theft of him. (“ ‘Van der Stel . . . having taken one of them in infancy . . .’ ” [SD 220; OC III.221].) The character of the freedom that the Hottentot and, by extension, his equals now forge in flight bears little resemblance to manumission or nondomination—which conceive of power as repression and freedom as liberation therefrom. Manumission would restore social subjectivity to thingly chattel by lifting the legal (though illegitimate) status that represses its personhood. With repression now negated, the manumitted slave recovers the supposedly free humanity that had ever persisted underneath power’s surface operations. Likewise, the removal of despotism simply restores a society to its default state of nondomination. Social life may now flourish as it would straightforwardly have done absent repression, as though the neutralization of domination were in itself sufficient to make free association possible. Marooning does not share features with emancipation or abolition, either, which differ from manumission and nondomination. Rather than lifting a legal status so that underneath social death “natural” life is revealed, emancipation transforms one status into another, legal minority into majority. As Marx famously argued, the ruse of institutional political emancipation is that it further chains the supplicant to the institutional authority said to define her and thereby confirms that authority’s hold on her, even when granting her legal majority. In contest, the marooning Hottentot requires no answer from Van der Stel, for his freedom owes nothing to another’s claim of authority. Finally, the Hottentot’s negation of slavery is not equivalent to abolition. This Hottentot maroons and, Moses-like, leads his equals—perhaps only them—beyond slavery’s reach. This “selfish” character of marronnage strikes some critics as reactionary because it takes the form of localized insurgency rather than universalist revolution. According to Eugene D. Genovese, maroons frequently “revealed a willingness to leave slavery itself intact.” However, in his interest to advance abolitionism as the truly revolutionary standard for freedom fighters, Genovese ultimately interprets marronnage as reactionary. In doing so he toes a Leninist line that

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casts universalizing vanguard party-directed movement as properly political action and dismisses what does not rise to this standard as “primitive” rebellion: in sum, provincial, apolitical, rearguard, even obstructionist. Although it does not involve a large-scale coordination of masses or a frontal assault on central authorities, marronnage’s insurgency certainly seems to express power, but its assault on “European political order” is oblique. The Hottentot’s power is his indifference to the choices on offer: in spite of being products of it, he and his equals find political modernity useless. And he is not alone in his indifference, for Hottentots belong to a larger set in which Rousseau includes himself: he mentions “Laplanders, Eskimos, Algonquins, Chickasaws, Caribs who do without our political order, Hottentots who have no use for it, and a Genevan who approves of them” (LP 226; OC III.234). Indifference, however, is not ignorance, for maroons know they cannot afford to entertain the fixist fantasy of a reservation. Maroons’ resistance is shaped by knowledge of sinning, by intimate experience of the authorities they evade. In stealing themselves away from what they find useless but pernicious, they make themselves their own. In authorizing themselves, they practice freedom not as the negation of repressive power but as its positive expression. Among the qualities the marooning slave recovers in returning to his equals, then, are this practical freedom and, what constitutes it and lends it special character, locomobility. For the sine qua non of slavery for Rousseau—whether in its chattel, its vainly moral, or its political versions—is the immobilization at another’s behest, a master, a social mirror, or a despotic authority. (It is for this reason that Émile must be seen as slavish: even if he is not “owned” by the tutor, he is effectively immobilized, chained to him during his travels.) Analyzing the characteristics of marronnage in the French crown colony of Saint-Domingue before the Haitian Revolution, Leslie F. Manigat puts freer locomotion at the center of marronnage: It is the rejection . . . of the institutional orthodoxy and of the cultural norms of the existing social order, which reflect the etymology of the Spanish word cimarron, which means “savage.” The maroon has taken it upon himself to run away from the “order” of the civilized world which for him is “disorder,” contrary to nature. To the master, he is an absconder. The maroon, as a fugitive, is a vagrant. He has achieved the mobility that was forbidden him under the condition of slavery.

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Similarly, as the anthropologist Richard Price notes, “As used in the New World, cimarrón originally referred to domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola and soon after to Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards as well. By the end of the 1530s, it was already beginning to refer primarily to Afro-American runaways, and had strong connotations of ‘fierceness,’ or being ‘wild’ and ‘unbroken.’ ” As Manigat and Price together delineate it, the etymology of maroon refers successively to cattle, to Indians, and to African slaves—all “savages” and all chattel of a sort—but, more importantly, it connotes fugitive status, resistance to captivity and immobilization by Europeans. Manigat’s formulation more specifically supports the interpretation of Rousseau’s Hottentot as a maroon because for him the Dutch colonial world did turn out to seem contrary to nature. Yet he would not return to “nature” in fleeing the Dutch; nor could he repair in innocence to a reservation where absolute natural liberty persists as untainted remainder. He would return to his equals, would make them his equals by associating with them. Of impure knowledge, they would together embark on a riskier, fugitive form of freedom. Yet if would-be maroons are slaves, then how do they—all moral slaves of the senses—come to consciousness of suffering illegitimate dependence enough to resist it? By what power do slaves develop the will to maroon? What conditions support its possibility?

fugitive body politics To answer these questions is to delve into some technical issues, especially in regard to Rousseau’s conception of a body politic, that converge in Of the Social Contract but that are formulated in earlier political writings, as well, especially the “Discourse on Political Economy,” published seven years prior. Rousseau’s conception of fugitive freedom as practical struggle entails the activation of liberty (libertas) by power or ability (potestas). This empowerment is grounded in a complex of relations between land and people and drives a fugitive, decentralizing tendency in a struggle against a forcible, centralizing tendency. The hyperboles about the absence of natural liberty anywhere and the presence of chains everywhere reflect only subjunctively the total domination that masters, private proprietors, and despots would aspire to and anticipate; these overstatements accurately express global structures of territorial domination but not more complex on-the-ground realities. Against the centralizing worldview that represents the earth as aggre-

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gable units of territorial private property and a total system of territorialized states, an opposing drive insists on itself, one that does not represent nature mythically and nostalgically as an “authentic” past but deploys nature poetically as a concept of potential freedom that tactically contests the hegemony of political modernity’s dominations. Singing the poetry of “natural” liberty amidst an englobing political modernity may reinvent political liberty, grounding it in memories of usufruct—the Second Discourse’s “sort of property” (SD 164; OC III.167). When acted on, the reinvented memory of free usufruct riddles the warp of the globalizing structure whose weft consists of the territorially grounded personal, abstract, and political dominations that unfold from “this is mine.” Against despotic, forcible aggregation, fugitive freedom is driven by this possible reconstruction of a legitimate association of interdependence grounded in a community of usufruct. Private property could not have been effected without a captive audience of plural usufructuaries even if, according to the Second Discourse, they were duped into accepting the exclusive, designating claim “this is mine” in the first place. What Rousseau calls governments claim sovereign dominion for themselves, but if sovereignty is grounded in contiguous property, then sovereignty cannot ultimately derive from any authority but that of communities of usufruct—communities that need not be fixed in space but can practice, for example, nomadic stewardship of land. Despotic power consists in part in the claim, backed by force, to aggregate several such communities as one body under one head that claims to voice a unified general will but in fact only voices a particular will. Thus, usufructuary communities persist as plural bodies politic alongside and inside the territorial aggregate that the despotic power claims to govern as a unified body politic. Since it is ultimately these usufructuary communities that can guarantee property in the first place, then they are empowered to enact a poiesis of usufruct to contest despotic domination’s pretense to govern and to represent them as members of a unified body founded on territorial private property. In doing so these communities riddle that falsely centralized body by distancing themselves from it and at the same time assert themselves as bodies politic in flight. This fugitive riddling of a forced aggregation empowers collective freedom on smaller scales and can take place anywhere and at any moment, though, certainly, its feasibility is variably, sometimes highly, constrained by the force that despotic powers have at their disposal, as the opening chapters of Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract insist. Nevertheless, in this fugitive

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practice of freedom, plural general wills seek expression. Because, in face of the despotic forces arrayed against it, fugitivity cannot succeed without the concerted action, the “mutual help” (PF 18; OC III.476), of many person-members, political analysis cannot lose sight of the plural generality that constitutes the general will. At the same time, the overall picture of the fission that occurs in (falsely) unified bodies—of the willful riddling that fugitivity subjects despotic power to—also suggests that we must not overemphasize claims of uniformity within generality. Consequently, the notion of a fugitive general will troubles our received notions about the emphases among generality and volition, general and particular, body and member (especially the head). Thinking the general will in tandem with the risk of radical decentralization that fugitivity effects may have the salutary consequence of urging Rousseau’s interpreters to reset the balance among members in his body politics. Sustained collective flight draws on the competencies of many members, so any vision of the body that subordinates all the body to the head merely reproduces despotic domination’s false claim of generality and enforces ultracentralism. Moreover, sustainable collective flight requires flexibility and adaptability on the part of all; thus, fixing members according to a prescribed schema of location or contribution already hobbles fugitivity. If “a state without movement would be nothing but a dead body” (SW 169; OC III.605), then a people that is both internally kinetic and mobile in geographic space represents superlative vitality according to Rousseauian body politics. A vigorous political body, then, owes more to “the relations among” its members than to their “absolute condition”—owes more to the quality of their dynamic interdependence than the absolute quantity of all of their goods summed severally (PF 41; OC III.511). This interrelation of members is a matter of the general will: one way to understand the latter is as materializing the integrity of the associated members. The general will expresses the body politic’s integral moi commun, thus integrating parts into a whole, uniting members into a body. The general will is distinct from the will of all in the same way that an integral body, “organized . . . alive” (PE 6; OC III.244), is distinguishable from a correct assemblage of organs on an operating table. Elaborating on the relationship between organ and organism, member and body, Rousseau avers that the “life of the one as well of the other is the self common [moi commun] to the whole, the reciprocal sensitivity and the internal correspondence of all the parts. What if this communication should cease, the formal unity vanish, and the contiguous parts

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no longer belong together except by being next to one another? the man is dead, or the state is dissolved” (PE 6; cf. SC I.6, 50; OC III.245, 361). When that which adheres the members and renders them mutually sensible and corresponsible disappears, then their common body has disintegrated. They may still display a cheek-by-jowl contiguity that looks like corporeal-corporate organization, but parts and members no longer share the moi commun that causes each to feel the other’s pain by an integral faculty of generalized pity—that is, that causes them together to “perceive their own existence as . . . only a part” of corporate associational existence (PE 20; OC III.259). What Rousseau refers to by moi commun is a kind of lively, generative tension between a more individualized amour de soi-même and a sociable yet still disinterested amour-propre, whereby each converts into the other. However, when this alternating conversion from amour de soi-même to amour-propre and back ceases and the moi commun disintegrates, then amour-propre is open to perversion by particular interests. Dead membership—dismembership, dismemberment—then replaces the live general will, and sovereignty therefore disappears: the indivisible was subjected to division (SC II.2, 58; OC III.369). Each erstwhile particular member no longer receives as general the will that tended toward the welfare of their common corporate moi. Thenceforth any attempts to claim articulation of the general will are experienced as particular wills: part against member, or more likely and more specifically, head contra body. Two questions follow: what causes disintegration? and what comes after? Major causes of disintegration are rooted in the ignored, denied, or abused integrity of members or in active dismemberment: a part of the body is cut off or as though cut off from the rest, or else it is made to bear a disproportionate burden for the whole. The case of ignored integrity stems from leaders’ capture of persons through the land they occupy. Of the Social Contract, at Book I, chapter 9, muses on the transition from sovereignty by leadership to sovereignty by dominion: It is intelligible how individuals’ combined and contiguous pieces of ground [les terres des particuliers réunies et contiguës] become the public territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from subjects to the land they occupy, becomes at once real and personal; which places the possessors in a position of greater dependence, and turns their very forces into the guarantors of their fidelity. This advantage seems not

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to have been fully appreciated by ancient monarchs who, only calling themselves Kings of the Persians, of the Scythians, of the Macedonians, seem to have looked upon themselves as chiefs of men rather than as masters of the country. Present-day monarchs more shrewdly call themselves Kings of France, of Spain, of England, etc. By thus holding the land, they are quite sure of holding its inhabitants. (SC I.9, 55–56; cf. GM 86; OC III.366–67, 293)

Registering arch astonishment that ancient monarchs so naively settled “only” on leadership, not mastery, of peoples, not territory, Rousseau’s ambivalence is clear (and is even clearer in the Geneva Manuscript’s version). On one hand, he obliquely laments the eclipsing of a tighter, more direct relationship between governing head and people-body. Indeed, as I explore in the final section of this chapter when discussing his admiration for the ancient Hebrews, Rousseau even suggests that territoriality fetters peoplehood. Nevertheless, on the other hand, Rousseau allows that there are “admirable” effects of the new statist regime (GM 86; OC III.294): since state authority legitimates claims of right, all particular members must tender their possessions to the state in order to have them titled as property per se; consequently, (a) particulars’ private forces of defense over their several possessions are combined into a generality so that each benefits from a defensible right to his property in return for contributing his individual force to the defense of fellow members’ properties; but (b) because private properties are titled and become defensible by grace of the community, the community therefore necessarily reserves a right to them all. There are dangers, though, in mixing land and governance—despotic dangers, in fact. By capturing members through territorially fixed occupation (whether as owners, renters, or squatters), governmental power easily neglects the sovereign people for the land. The “admirable” “advantages” of territorialized sovereignty invite two kinds of hypercephaly: expropriation and disjointure. In the first case, the head, so dazzled by the ground its body stands on, abuses the corporate integrity that verily supports it: it exploits all members through the land. In the second, a government more interested in territorial than associational integrity regards the people as a mere aggregation from which some may be ejected so long as territorial contiguity is safeguarded. In both cases, the government embarks on a trend of irresponsibility to the general will. First, the governing few profit at the expense of

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all the rest of the members. Second, the governing few sacrifice particular members, supposedly on behalf of the rest. Hence: first, part starves whole; second, pretended whole dismembers part. Governmental expropriation damages the general will in committing the positive abuse of members for their land, an abuse that territorialized sovereignty makes possible. When governmental power intrudes its particular interests on the general will it ought to safeguard and advance, then it arrogates as its personal private due what the communal public body guarantees together; government thus destroys the integrity that gives it sustenance. Hence, if the governing head arbitrarily decides that “the body’s plumpness is detrimental to the head, the latter will take great care to prevent the body from becoming fat” (PF 23; OC III.484). Refusing to realize that its flourishing is inseparable from theirs, it exploits its members. Substituting its particular for the general will, the government acts hypercephalically against sovereignty. While expropriation pits some particular wills against the wills of all (minus the particulars’ own), then disjointure pretends to pit all the wills against one particular will. Although it may violate one person, whom the governing particulars name the “least” member, despotism really treats all members (except the governing head) as disposable chattel. In “Political Economy” Rousseau asks, “is not the body of the nation committed to provide as conscientiously for the preservation of the least of its members as for that of all the others? and is the safety of a single citizen any less the common cause than the safety of the entire state?” (PE 17; OC III.256). The answer to these rhetorically posed questions is clearly, emphatically affirmative, and Of the Social Contract’s Book I closes with a thought that serves both as key to interpreting the relation between “the least” member and “all the others” and as a principle for fugitivity. The final paragraph, highlighting its own import, reads, I shall close this chapter and this book with a comment that should serve as the basis of the entire social system; it is that the fundamental pact, rather than destroying natural equality, on the contrary substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men, and that while they may be unequal in force or in genius, they all become equal by convention and by right. (SC I.9, 56; OC III.367)

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While the person whose force ranks last, by whatever measure, may count as the “least” member of the body, the rest of the communal body cannot provide less for her without breaking its associational commitment to equality among all members. No organ, no digit in this body politic can be amputated by exclusive decision on behalf of “all the others.” A member may sacrifice herself in the spirit of generality for the rest. She may not, however, be dismembered from the rest by a will that, supposedly for its sake, excludes hers, for such a will fails the test of generality. Generality no longer drives a will that dismembers the body of even its “least” part; rather, a particular will that supposedly amounts to the will of all, minus the least’s will, animates this dismembered body. To call a body absent its least digit dismembered may seem to hyperbolize, but “Political Economy” notes the logical inference behind apparently minor severances: Assume cutting off one person after another from the people, and then press the partisans of this maxim to explain more fully what they understand by the body of the state, and you will see that they will finally reduce it to a small number of men who are not the people but the people’s officers and who, having obligated themselves by personal oath to perish for its safety, claim that this proves that it is up to the people to perish for theirs. (PE 17–18; OC III.257)

Hypercephalic acts of government perhaps inconspicuously dismember the body, cutting off the hand after a finger has been snatched (as in Candide), but may eventually shrink the body politic until perhaps only the head remains. Moreover, the principle of hypercephaly effectively shrinks the body even if no dismemberment actually takes place. In effect, it is not the body, but rather the head, that matters. Body disposable, head despotical is the caption to this thought from Rousseau’s earlier essay, “Political Economy,” and is a fear that motivates important points in Of the Social Contract, too. By expropriation, hypercephalic government thins the body politic. By disjointure, hypercephaly starts with actual dismemberment but tends toward effective disincorporation. Both cases of hypercephaly fulfill Of the Social Contract’s very definition of despotism—namely, the usurpation of the sovereign power of the community by the government (SC III.10, 108; OC III.423). In both cases, governmental interest displaces the interest of the moi commun, and governors’ particular wills replace the general will.

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Government crowns itself sovereign, contradicting the terms of association. Governors believe they enjoy the right to all—to confiscate from all persons on the land or to abject some persons from contiguous land—when in fact only the community, as corporate moi commun and expressing itself through a general will, retains the right to all. Despotism thus mistakes sovereign power itself for government’s delegated power, mistakes “master[y] of the country” for leadership among equals, and finally confuses territorial mastery with mastery of a country’s inhabitants as if they were lessers, if not the “least”—in other words, as if chattel slaves. The political consequence of despotism is the return to a state of war, to the play of forces: “the moment the Government usurps the sovereignty, the social pact is broken, and all ordinary Citizens, restored by right to their natural freedom, are forced to obey but not obligated to do so” (SC III.10, 108; OC III.422–23). This idea was already present in the Discourse on Inequality: “that of Master and Slave . . . is the last degree of inequality, and the state to which all others finally lead, until new revolutions either dissolve the government entirely, or bring it closer to legitimate institution” (SD 182; OC III.187). Despotism dissolves the previous total association so that a mere aggregation of former members occupies the territorial space where a body politic used to be, “the contiguous parts no longer belong[ing] together except by being next to one another” (PE 6; OC III.245). Rousseau distinguishes “ordinary” citizens from members of government because the latter formed a body unto themselves, having developed a common partial interest, general with respect to themselves but particular with respect to the moi commun of the whole political society. When the body of government despotically substitutes its particular will for the sovereignty of the truly general will, it dissolves the political pact, and ordinary citizens no longer need obey it except by force. However, that ordinary citizens are not obliged to obey the despotic body’s particular will does not mean that they will resist it. Indeed, Rousseau’s mordant analysis of the pervasiveness of moral slavery makes any will to resist seem impossible. His texts portray slaves who masochistically luxuriate in interested amour-propre: they revel in their repose, incognizant of their abjection. It may not yet be the case that this “people is well founded to take [its freedom] back” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.352). So although moral slavery itself indexes dissociation, nonetheless, it is a signifier that forgets itself, obscuring all knowledge of the condition it signifies: mere social aggregation. Formally, moral slavery symptomatizes a lack of integrity in the social

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body—that the latter is riddled, not whole; multiple, not one—but the very content of this symptom deters any acknowledgment of what riddling, multiplicity, nonintegration represent: that a state of war persists within states. Whereas moral slaves mistake their repose for the “peace and plenty” that an association ought to provide its members, peoples well founded to retake their freedom refuse to ignore that “tyranny and slavery are manifestly a state of war.” Yet, while “it is easy to show that a slave who kills his master does not sin by doing so either against the natural law or even against the law of nations,” maroons, as we shall note, embody the will to self-liberation by choosing a more oblique course of action (PF 50; OC III.523). Ignoring now the moral slave who no longer knows how to sin in this way in order to grasp instead the different modalities of resistance that such moral slaves consign to oblivion—the many potential responses to despotism and slavery that maroons pursue—we must understand the consequences and effects of the persistent state of war within states.

the will to self-liberation Discussing what Helots owe to the Lacedaemonian masters, if anything, the ambiguous passage that closes the fragmentary “State of War” thematizes a cascade of effects: that aggregation continues after dissociation, that this aggregation is made to persist by dint of war, and that this state of war reveals disintegration to be effectively identical to a case of violent nonintegration. Yet this passage may also point the way out of the stultification of moral slavery and beyond the contest of mights. This final fragment of “The State of War” affirms that because the body politic is “only a moral person, . . . a being of reason,” its dissolution does not “change anything in the physical [constitution] of things” (SW 176; OC III.608). It thus presents a method for diagnosing the people’s body. Underneath the associated moral body of the people a second material body exists. When the association is integral, the second, physical body of the people will be both perfectly coterminous with the body politic and will not perceive itself as an aggregate (PE 20; OC III.259). However, when association dissolves, the second body may persist, morally dismembered but physically contiguous, as an aggregate but disintegrated body. Hence, underneath the despotic fiction of an unbroken general will, the remains of the broken people’s material body may be maintained in contiguity.

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This diagnostic method can likewise be applied to peace: underneath the moral or political representation of peace lies war. At Book I, chapter 4, Of the Social Contract already noted that a peace convention does not end, rather presupposes, the continuation of a state of war between victor and vanquished, and Rousseau states more baldly elsewhere that “the state of war . . . is born of peace, or at least of the precautions men have taken to secure a lasting peace” (SW 163; cf. SC I.4, 48; OC III.610, 358). Considered in the most sinister register, this would suggest that peace betrays a state of war because despots extort civic tranquility by violent repression for transgression—hardly a circumstance for easily overcoming the cowardice and repose of moral slavery. (Recall that “enslaved Peoples . . . incessantly boast of the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains . . .” [SD 177; OC III.181].) It is indubitable, then, that the will of the despotic body will be enforced against disobedient bodies of former members. When the first, moral body dissolves from the violations of despotism, the disintegrated body underneath, the material body of the people, is not somehow no longer subject to force. Rather, it is subject to greater force than ever: its plight now resembles that of peoples conquered and enslaved in war; original nonintegration effectively converges here with disintegration. Ending with a discussion of the “rights” of war in Sparta between the Lacedaemonians and the Helots, “The State of War” alludes to the fact that the latter were never in the first place properly integrated into an association: “They were necessarily in a state of war with one another, simply because they were the masters and the others the slaves. There is no doubt that since the Lacedaemonians killed the Helots, the Helots had the right to kill the Lacedaemonians” (SW 176; OC III.608). The disintegration of an association from despotism does not differ from original nonintegration in political slavery: violence is central to each. The despotic government will use force to maintain and exploit a contiguous aggregation, thus maintaining an optimal state of disintegration—not association, but not dispersal, either. Having foreclosed willing obedience to a legitimate association, it depends in part on terror to achieve all necessary obedience within this aggregation. If the despotic body depended only on terroristic force, then it would not improve on the would-be master at the end of Part I of the Second Discourse, whose would-be slave “take[s] twenty steps into the forest,” never to be seen again (SD 158; OC III.161). So, to maintain a contiguous social aggregation, the despotic body relies too on aggregants’ spatial fixity. By this duplicity of its force and aggregants’ fixity, it can maintain peace. If, however, an inter-

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nal state of war, far from being an aberration of peace, is peace’s very fruit, then underneath this fiction of peace lie war and a second duplicity. For fixity may result as much from slavish moral repose as from decided native preference, as much from former members’ inertia as from their initiative. And absent an integrative general will, preference can easily change its sign: from obedience for the sake of rootedness to disobedience for the sake of freedom. Likewise, the initiative of peoples subject to despotism may take new objects: not complicity, but resistance. Is slave war the only path of resistance for ordinary former citizens no longer willing to obey, no longer being obligated to do so? How could they ever win a war of might against the despotic governing body? How could they achieve exodus from the aggregate, escape from contiguity with masters of the country qua slave-masters, when “[t]here is no longer any region where it is not a crime to dare claim” natural liberty? While peace may lull subjects not to notice war underneath civil society, symptoms of unstable aggregation swarm in the disintegrated remains of the body politic. Thus, if war pulses in the very filigree of peace, one only need perform a sounding on this aggregate body to discover the plurality that riddles it and the new possibilities for resistance that this riddling yields—possibilities not structured by impossible exits or improbable might. First, the despotic power that would master the contiguous space of disintegrated aggregation itself suffers riddling because its governing body can succumb to exhaustion. Despotic governing bodies are just as liable as legitimate bodies politic to Rousseau’s principle of dissipated versus concentrated force. Mastering the country in fact involves greater exertions than serving as leader among equals when the state’s space is large. Although the territorial state, unavoidably obeying Hobbist impulsions, “constantly look[s] outside itself for new members who might give it greater stability” (SW 169; OC III.605), the additional forces of new members can scarcely revitalize an aggregation whose territorial or demographic scale has grown overlarge (see CPC 329–30; OC III.1731n). Ultimately, internal vigor counts for more than a steady center of gravity. Hence, a vigorous integral association, even if dispersed in space, easily commands the identification of its members who will “never . . . look upon their individual [self ] except in its relations with the body of the state, and [will] perceive their own existence as, so to speak, only a part of its existence” (PE 20; cf. PF 57; OC III.259, 534). These background considerations suggest, then, that the insight from the end of Part I of the Second Discourse about the exhaustibility of mastering

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force may apply (with qualifications) beyond the state of nature. Despotic power may authorize itself alone to decide on dismembering individuals from the state or coercing them to leave. Nevertheless, when aggregants escape on their own proper initiative, actively rather than reactively, they expose the exhaustibility of despotic power. A state may lack natural limits as an artificial being, but its governing body’s force is not infinite against friction. And, surely, anytime it is received as particular rather than claimed as a general will, it will encounter friction, quite obviously so in the case of outright resistance. Yet even complicity with despotism will cause passive friction when common integrity is absent: if mutual sensibility guarantees the smooth coordination of parts within a moi commun, then units lacking mutual sensibility can only achieve deferred, imperfect coordination at best. Friction saps despotic power, but its exhaustibility differs from that of the would-be master in the Second Discourse, who must overcome his captive’s infinite access to frictions of space—distance, variable topography—in the state of nature. In contrast, despotic power faces the friction of volitions that are opaque to it. Consequent to this friction caused by the growing divergence between the governing body’s and former members’ own particular wills, the aggregation becomes riddled with, shot through by, absconding wills. To make sense of these fugitive wills, allow me to return for a moment to the contrast I drew at the end of Chapter 3 between the morally selfemancipated slave Émile and fugitive self-liberation, even within slavery. To sketch the latter, I drew on the work of Max Stirner, who agrees with Stoic and Christian thought that even legal slaves may experience (moral) freedom, but who goes further in centering this freedom on assertive ownness rather than on grace or self-legislation by orthos logos. The fugitive slave frees herself by conforming to mastery only for the sake of resistance and only to the extent that, and for as long as, she must accept the latter as a present impediment (due, for example, to the master’s temporarily greater might or as yet unrelaxed vigilance), meanwhile safeguarding her will to resist. This freedom as an effect of ownness would positively and spontaneously enact autonomy against the background of heteronomy, indeed would exceed the latter by riddling its pretensions not only to mastery, but also to right. By contrast the emancipated slave—even when emancipating himself morally in line with Stoic ethics—merely neutralizes heteronomy in accord with the heteronomous authority’s own regulative forces.

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Stirner mocks discourses that make freedom an end in itself for two main reasons. First, they dovetail perfectly well with authoritarianism by placing the agency of liberation into the hands of authorities. Empowered to grant or deny emancipation according to the system of rules they enforce, such authorities give back as discrete liberties the very freedom they usurped. Stirner fumes, “If they nevertheless give you freedom, they are simply rogues who give more than they have. For then they give you nothing of their own, but stolen wares: they give you your own freedom. . . .” It would be as though the sovereign, associated people needed its government officers to free it. Symmetrically, second, freedom as finis ultimus both overshadows the very subject of freedom and presumes her disempowered. Orienting oneself to official authorities, one denies oneself, neglects one’s own powers, competencies, will, assertion. Freedom idealized into a state of being invites the very repose that forgets freedom as the materialized, embodied activity of a willing subject. Is this to suggest that Stirnerian ownness consists in nothing but egocentric self-assertion, misanthropically ignoring surrounding circles of sociability? That it creates its own freedom through a sheer act of will in blind disregard of (possibly repressive, retributive) environmental conditions? On Stirner’s account, egoism always involves a play of freedom, limits, compulsions—for there is neither total freedom nor total unfreedom but rather willed material practice occurring within the context of constraint and cooperation. That a slave may achieve freedom even within slavery is “indisputable and trivial.” Conversely, every assertion of freedom provokes further compulsions, attracts new objects for the will. One feels compelled to strive to surpass a new limit, since every freedom marks new limits (not their absence): “In the measure that I conquer freedom for myself I create for myself new bounds and new tasks.” While freedom qua finis ultimus rages against these limits, Stirner’s ownness takes pleasure in the play of finitude integral to freedom, enjoys the compulsions and limits that freedom invokes and strives to overcome. Unlike discourses of freedom that chain themselves to futurity and blatantly disdain present actuality, ownness “calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment” in the powers one marshals into presence for oneself. Ownness’s self-regard might seem an idealist solipsism that ignores material circumstances. However, its self-enjoyment necessarily draws on unfreedoms as its material. Putting ownness into effect “removes just so much unfreedom as by barring your own way hinders” the present

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objective. Other unfreedoms indubitably remain; one does not submit to them but accepts them at one’s current pleasure: they form a heteronomous background in resistance to which one enacts autonomous assertion. Undeniably, Rousseau is no Stirner. He would be suspicious of the language of ownness as not meticulously enough differentiating the moi commun generated in the tension between amour de soi-même and disinterested amour-propre from interested amour-propre—would suspect that the egoistic flight from all coercive claims on ownness (which regards nearly all claims as coercive) displays inflamed interested amour-propre. However, the basic structure of Stirnerian resistant autonomy and the necessity of selfliberation would strike Rousseau as familiar. And I would argue, further, that there are specifically (nonreservationist) Rousseauian counterparts to Stirner’s foregrounding of the subject of freedom against pretentions to mastery and sovereign right, the joyful will to presence that does not fall into solipsism but rather empowers one to act in the external world, and the plays of empowered freedom against its limits. For if Stirner’s critical anarchist vision nurtures what Banu Bargu has called a politics of exodus, then the relevant Rousseauian counterparts sustain a fugitive autonomy. Furthermore, Rousseau’s corporeal-corporate politics militates against an individualist understanding of fugitive will. The forcibly aggregated body that the government attempts to master is riddled with resistances, which need not remain isolated one from another. The association’s former members do not simply comprise a disconnected series of atomized individuals after disincorporation, for the body politic had always contained smaller bodies, which did not offend its moi commun so long as these partial bodies’ interests never interfered with the expression of the whole political body’s general will. Members who had formed (or been formed into) these organs continue to share interests and so are likely to have shaped and thus to “adopt a general will, good and just with regard to these new bodies, unjust and bad with regard to the whole from which each of them dismembers itself ” or from which each suffered disincorporation by despotic usurpation (PE 7, 8; OC III.246, 247). Resistances, being remnant fragments of a sovereign body politic, themselves can be organized: thus would a people be “well founded to take [its freedom] back” (SC I.1, 41; OC III.352). Hence, this reading of Of the Social Contract articulates the production by fugitive wills of semiautonomous political zones inside the existing contiguous state-space, rather than the exit of absconding bodies in natural-physical space. Coordinated fugitive wills can capture zones of freedom and autonomy within territorial

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states rather than despairing of the impossible, nostalgic myth of escape beyond the system of states to a place of primitive natural liberty. Although Rousseau cleaves primarily to a repressive hypothesis on power, his corporeal-corporate political logics nevertheless open his writing on usurpation to a Foucaultian understanding of resistance, which proposes that the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities.

Foucault’s propositions on resistance fluctuate between corporeal and corporate language, yet it is the notable emphasis on mobility that is more germane here to my reading of Rousseau. For, as soon as a body politic loses its integrity, resistances—deliberate and indeliberate—follow capillary channels across its former unity. When a distribution of resistances establishes a critical mass, the density of swirling forces draws others to this “swarm of points of resistance.” However, far from flaring up only to dissipate (thus rendering resistances ever ephemeral), densifying “swarms” of force may organize themselves strategically to codify a mobile but durable zone of resistance. This fugitive autonomous zone does not antagonize masters-despots directly in a head-on clash of mights but obliquely in the mobile assertion of a moi commun proper to itself. Just as for Stirner there is no possibility of egoistic assertion outside the field of others’ self-assertions, so does Rousseau, despite his reservations, (usually) recognize with Foucault that there is no position of exteriority outside of modern systems of power: “power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network. . . .” Practicing freedom under such circumstances means that exit must assume a novel form—fugitivity—an alternative to the dominant

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reservationist tendency Rousseau presents. Fugitivity refuses the immobility of reservations, yet its mobility differs from that of conquest, expropriation, or master/slave substitution. Yielding to neither the pure impassivity of primitive being nor the remaindered passivity of the salvage paradigm, fugitive autonomy involves active flight, self-liberating marronnage within and across disintegrated bodies politic by bands whose common resistance, mutual help, and integral pitié form a general will.

histories of marronnage The proposition behind the previous sections goes something like this: if the chains and bodily terror of chattel slavery metonymizes the abuses of despotism, then marronnage can teach us something about resistance to despotism. Likewise, if the idea of marronnage can teach us something about how to inflect body politics in Of the Social Contract and related texts, then, recursively, Rousseau’s oeuvre can refract early modern histories of marronnage that are contemporary with it. The practice of marooning can serve as a counterintuitive propaedeutic for speculatively reconstructing and contextualizing in a broad Atlantic frame Rousseau’s frequent theoretical recourse to those famous escaped slaves, the ancient Israelites, discussed in the next section. For those partial to a more existentialist analysis of eighteenth-century slave rebellion, the revolt against slavery and shedding of masters’ fetters amount to a return to personhood or humanity: “The black is a person, and thus a personality, only in and through revolt.” The causes typically given for maroons’ flight from the colonial-plantocratic order indeed bespeak a final, intolerable reduction from bare personhood to full objecthood. Firstperson accounts “almost invariably cited unjustified and excessive punishment, overwork, and inadequate food” as reasons for flight into marronnage. While no doubt true from a personal perspective, the cited reasons are misleading, however, for they suggest that marooning often took the form of individual initiatives or at best isolated collective rebellions. Rousseauian body politics would trace maroon rebellion not to the recovery of individual personhood but to social consequences of forcible aggregation. Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic and immobilized on plantations are violently made to partake in a spatially contiguous aggregation with masters who exploit them, require them to bear a disproportionate burden for the social aggregate, meanwhile deny these slaves the integrity

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of association, just as Lacedaemonians do of Helots. In other words, the body of masters-despots is supported by slave labor within the total social aggregate, yet it mocks any corporate corresponsibility to or mutual sensibility with the slaves. In this sense, slave rebellion derives not so much from denied personal integrity but from denied communal integrity—simultaneously conjured in abusive practice yet ignored in brute fact. Historically, instances of slave rebellions plot a continuous pulsion that bespeaks not multiple separate protests of personal integrity but the constant fugitivity of bodies of slaves. Marronnage in the French Atlantic and Caribbean and beyond was relentless and continuous and endlessly shifting. As for its frequency, sympathetic scholars chant a litany of places and years that flash up in official colonial records: Saint Christophe, 1639; Martinique, 1665, 1671, 1726; Guadeloupe, 1641, 1668, 1737; Cayenne, 1707; Grenada, 1725; Saint-Domingue, 1702, 1704, 1705, 1708, 1709, 1712, 1715, 1717, 1719, 1720, etc. Even the discrete sites and dates mislead in that they can only misrepresent through fragmentation what constituted swarms of resistance: movements, associations, and insurrectionary actions in the “Spirit of Liberty” that, according to historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, intensified just two decades prior to Rousseau’s most important political writings. Much of what we can know of marronnage has to be decoded in the distorted mirror of it that anxious, occasionally hysterical, colonial authorities supply on the basis of (probably real) encounters. Yet there is every indication that these were not the issue of personal indignation, as the noble slave genre—Behn’s Oroonoko and Rousseau’s own Émile and Sophie (aptly subtitled The Solitary Ones)—would indicate. Rather, the history of marronnage limns elementary aspects of slave insurgency as issuing from socially produced crises of forcible aggregation and communal nonassociation. Scholars agree that colonial administrators were obsessed with marronnage throughout the eighteenth century, sometimes desperate to implement safeguards on masters’ brutality so that slaves would not run off to add further numerical and political force to the large bands threatening colonial outposts. In many ways marronnage was the antithesis of the colonialplantocratic order and corroded the institution of slavery. If the plantocracy inflicted its despotic particular will on a contiguous aggregate of subjects and worked to deny and prevent their integration, slaves and maroons, for their part, corresponded with each other, establishing integuments of mutual sensibility. Indeed, maroon bands, acting as vigilantes, would occasionally retaliate against masters who egregiously abused their slaves, especially

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when family members or friends remained still in shackles. According to Eugene Genovese: Everywhere in the hemisphere maroons at particular times and in particular places provoked desertions and slave revolts; they fought and often defeated the troops sent against them. Whatever their relations with the slaves, their success in defeating white military expeditions said more to the plantation slaves about the fighting quality of black people than any abolitionist pamphlet ever could.

Slaves and maroons exposed the state of war they lived in, and the partial bodies they forged together expressed wills that articulated sometimes more, sometimes less, generality. In any case the coordinated opacity of their will produced frictions that the plantocracy could not ignore: to avoid losing their “investments” altogether, masters would curb their own excesses when maroon bands were known to be nearby so as to preempt remaining slaves from marooning. Indeed, the mere presence of maroons encouraged disaffection, desertion, and intense resistance by slaves remaining on plantations. As one Afro-Creole folk song puts it, addressing the master, “If you treat me well, I’ll stay / If you treat me bad, I’ll escape.” The resistances rippling from maroon to slave and back maximized friction in a way that made mastery of aggregated people and contiguous space extremely difficult. Thus some scholars have argued for seeing marronnage as a more radical form of a more general revolt by slaves, themselves participating in the play of resistance alongside their escaped counterparts. The resistance-effects on the plantations became a kind of recursive marronnage, a “ ‘spirit of marronage’ turned inward and finding another expression.” Maroons sustained relationships and colluded often with those who remained slaves. From the latter, the maroons would get crucial intelligence about the colonial authorities and could rely on the slaves’ cooperation for petty thefts or to barter for needed provisions. These slaves in turn used the proximity of maroon bands as leverage for making demands on their masters, thus fleetingly coordinating (masters would say extorting) a fragile balance of mutually particular wills: maroons—slaves—masters. By constantly and relentlessly jeopardizing the European colonial order, maroons were able to exploit the as-yet permeable boundary between colonial law and international outlaw, and consequently, their greatest political achievement—interesting in light of Rousseau—was their ability to take

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advantage of the incomplete extension or perhaps irreducible imperfection of statist government within a designated territory. Indeed, more than taking advantage of it, maroons both proved and contributed to colonial governments’ inability to master their respective territories or to govern social aggregations of contiguous persons. Founding fugitive autonomous bands, maroons were able to give the lie to colonial administrators and metropolitan ministers about the true extent of their governmental reach, and thus, more generally, fugitive autonomous bands gave the lie to territorial statism: the French crown could not ever (or not yet) fully broadcast its power within the territories that it claimed. In spite of its pretensions, the colonial map could not encompass the land. Sovereignty, the maroons proved, was a fragile and continual practice of freedom rooted in a people, a fugitive act of stealing moments of autonomy from a generalized heteronomy—this was as much true of the fugitive autonomous bands as it was of remaining plantation slaves who manipulated masters’ spectral fears of marronnage to win concessions in the spirit of collective self-liberation. Thus sovereignty was never a matter of fact or the state of being a state, nor was it reducible to government. Hence, the maroons’ much-lauded ability to eke out an existence on marginal frontier lands ought to be seen not so much as an economic fact or a sociopolitical effect of their fugitive status. “To be viable, maroon communities had to be almost inaccessible,” Richard Price states in this vein, “and villages were typically located in inhospitable, out-of-the-way areas.” Where most commentators emphasize the geographic or topographic features of the maroons’ abodes, Manigat correctly focuses on their political situation: “the possibility of taking refuge in a space not actually controlled by the ruling authorities and their repressive forces” was critical in order to “escape from the hold of the center by putting [the maroon] himself on the periphery, in a marginal but independent situation.” In an expression resonant with historical insurgency, from the Underground Railroad to the French Resistance to militant groups of the 1960s and 1970s, Manigat concludes, the maroon “goes underground.” Yet even such expressions may still cleave to the colonial officers’ warping mirror image. Fugitive autonomous bands did not simply take what remained—as far as government was concerned, nothing would be left for them. Instead they inventively established, at the very heart of (pretended) colonial mastery, relatively durable freeholds for themselves where they could freely aggregate, even associate. Fugitive autonomous bands construct

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the underground; they do not simply go to one already in existence. They are not free because they choose to occupy deserts, as a friction-of-distance approach would have it; rather, the friction of opaque volition causes masters to view as desert the places where fugitive autonomous bands establish unremitting practices of freedom. They produce what seems to despotic governors a political wilderness rather than simply repairing to a “natural” wasteland. Unable to regain what Rousseau calls their primitive liberty or original independence—because, in fact, colonial states and colonial authorities undeniably existed and did rove over their staked territories without being able to saturate them completely—marooning slaves found themselves in a situation where they resourcefully had to liberate zones internal to contiguous aggregations. To be sure, fugitive autonomy seemed marginal and insecure by comparison to official government. At the same time, maroon bands’ evasion of the purview of colonial-plantocratic authorities revealed the exhaustion of colonial mastery. Maroons combined independence and mobility, and while active in their endeavor, they unsettled the very order they had fled and that wanted to contain them. In the interstices of colonial, plantocratic early capitalism, maroons grew adept enough at projecting their power to be considered sovereign enclaves: they gathered into autonomous bands, but more direly from the vantage point of the territorial interstate system, maroons carved for themselves territorialized fugitive autonomous zones. Their ability to hold colonial authorities at bay proved constant enough that governors across the wider Caribbean, from Louisiana to Guyana, had to suffer them their hard-won communal fugitive freedom. Famously in Jamaica but also on a smaller scale in French Caribbean holdings, officials had to grant sovereign or semisovereign status to maroon bands in suing for peace after prolonged wars. Erin Skye Mackie thus suggests, in assessing the status of Jamaican Maroons after peace treaties with the British, that maroon communities like them “be seen as internal, yet independent African (Caribbean) nations,” for “it is as independent nations within Jamaica that the military government had to treat the Maroons in order to manage their threat to its sovereignty.” However, seeking the official recognition of their former masters turned out to be a dangerously ambivalent business in several respects. First, those maroons who were party to colonial treaties were granted official liberty at the cost of returning all future fugitive slaves to colonial authorities. Those who remained slaves noted the maroons’ concession with some bitterness and irony, though apparently not self-hobbling resignation: those who re-

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mained slaves caused serious economic disturbances and civil uprisings in the wake of the treaty that ended hostilities and granted autonomy to Jamaican Maroons after the First Maroon War. For slaves there was still a state of war, even if Maroons treated with colonial authorities. Also, second, officially recognized quasi-state semi-sovereignty thrust maroon territories into an international order where they certainly could not hold their own if abiding by the interstate system’s norms, assumptions, and imperatives. Although the maroons of Saint-Domingue had proven adept at playing Spanish colonists against the French, such international maneuvers and manipulations were purely small-time, amateurish affairs compared to European states’ and their colonies’ machinations, by dint of whose lumbering self-aggrandizement the maroons were able to achieve their local flashes of sovereignty in the first place. Treating with the colonial powers, the maroons thus simultaneously threaten and reinforce an imperial state system. Maroons’ success in war served as an affront to their former masters. Those who look especially to the Jamaican Maroons for inspiration today thus understand “their complicity with the colonial establishment . . . as a price extorted from them.” However, this success of territorialized maroon communities appears fatally compromised from a third, Rousseauian, point of view. Treating for recognition on the order of territorialized states, maroons may not confirm but rather dissolve freedom. Desiring to see themselves reflected in the amour-propre of states, they lost sight of freedom. The courting of colonial governments’ recognition slides toward vanity and dependence on external assessments of value. It thus indicates the displacement of the risky fugitive practice of freedom for repose—and repose understood not merely as moral laziness but also as spatial inertia, territorial fixity. When they accept terms of peace, do they remain as unremitting in their practice of freedom as the “Savages [who] . . . brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death in order to preserve nothing but their independence” (SD 177; cf. 187, 218–19; OC III.182, 192, 220)? To be sure, I do not wish to assail these maroons for their impure autonomy or attribute to them corrupt motives or acts for treating with colonial governments. I certainly would not demand of them autarky or an impossibly pure autonomy or hold them to a standard whereby they must emerge unmarked by the external Hobbesian realm of imperialist frontier anarchy. Maroon communities do not find themselves well disposed like Corsica. In fact, they derive their greatest strength from their impurity—from having

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been subjected to and known slavery, from having learned to wrest from brutal heteronomy some measure of autonomy. It is the treating maroons’ specific strategy of impurity I question. I criticize them not because they were amateurish according to the norms of an imperial state system, but because they tried to fill the part of a recognizable, territorially fixable state in the first place and thus abandoned what could most challenge the dominant practical and theoretical trends of political modernity and the overwhelming tendency in Rousseau’s political thought. They abandoned fugitive freedom for recognized liberty. If maroon bands’ syncretism—their combination of European, Indian, and African borrowings—was an invaluable asset in reforming societies anew, then perhaps their act of Creole ethnogenesis can teach “the People” of those three chapters in Of the Social Contract, Book II, something about how to associate legitimately—something that impure, mongrel subjects, in between colonizer and colonized and master and slave, cannot learn from the likes of Rousseau’s (fantasy of ) pure Corsica. “[M]aroon societies raise fundamental questions,” notes Eric Hobsbawm in a review of anthropologist Richard Price’s work on maroon societies in Dutch Suriname. “How,” Hobsbawm asks, “do casual collections of fugitives of widely different origins, possessing nothing in common but the experience of transportation in slave ships and of plantation slavery, come to form structured communities? How, one might say more generally, are societies founded from scratch?” If chattel slavery performs a metaphoric-metonymic function in Of the Social Contract and beyond, could fugitive insurgency do the same? What could we glean if we take marronnage as a condensation-displacement, as Hobsbawm begins to do when he abstracts from Guyanese maroons to consider the task of association “more generally” under conditions of massive displacement and then forcible aggregation? What ethnogenesis could they possibly forge from haphazard exoduses, what association from aggregation, what community under circumstances of terror? Historian Steve Hahn offers one account of the mechanics of such a process: The maroon analogy . . . helps us to see fugitive and freed black settlements as important political meeting grounds and as sites for the construction of new black politics. Here, in an almost unprecedented way, people of African descent who had experienced slavery as well as putative freedom, who had lived in the South as well as the North, in the West Indies and other parts of the Americas, in rural and urban en-

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vironments, could encounter one another, share perspectives, exchange ideas, and begin to fashion political languages and political cultures that did not fit easily or readily into mainstream categories.

Could plural persons learn to build themselves into a people, a body politic that safeguarded its members’ plurality, as these maroons finally forced themselves to do, severally, then in unison, by making “the horror of the past [take] the place of forgetting” (SC II.8, 72; OC III.385) and founding in rebellion a social contract, legitimately, on the ashes of its abstract subjection? What would such a people look like for Rousseau? Might not the model for a mobile, unreserved fugitive people be those original Jews whom Moses led out of bondage in Egypt, the archetype for so many escaping African slaves in the Americas and a prototype, so rudely subverted by Rousseau, for his autarkic fantasies? Could a Rousseauian sovereign people model itself after those archetypical maroons, the Israelites “groaning . . . from the depths of their slavery” (Exodus 2:23) and fleeing foreign captivity, who practiced a sovereignty fugitively forged and found the greatest, most wondrous Promised Land not in any territory but in themselves alone, in that association of persons possessing themselves for the first time and depending on one another, finally legitimately, to keep a tense remembrance of the horror of past slavery as a spur to seizing furtive moments of autonomy, fleeting but real?

“des juifs” / plus d’exode: the unremitting practice of fugitive freedom In Michael Walzer’s study of the book of Exodus, the biblical Exodus story retains its appeal for later revolutionary politics because its narrative presents a straightforward linear history “with a beginning, a middle, and an end: problem, struggle, resolution—Egypt, the wilderness, the promised land.” For Walzer the strength and suppleness of Exodus politics is its gradualism. Although Exodus may have inspired millenarian hopes of final, once-andfor-all redemption, especially in its Christian reading, it teaches something else—namely, “the meaning and possibility of politics and . . . its proper form.” Specifically, the only way to reach Canaan from Egyptian bondage is “by joining together and marching” through the wilderness. The Israelite destination is linear but involves struggle on their part. It is not simply presented to the faithful in a bolt from the blue. Nor do they return to a point of origin by an Odyssean circuit, as does Émile in “On Travels.” Walzer’s

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Israelites “do not, as is sometimes said, go wandering in the wilderness.” Nor, above all, do they find themselves somehow already in the promised land and needing only to become aware of its immediacy and to project it into deliberate presence, as do, say, Rousseau’s Corsicans. Rousseau’s Juifs follow an altogether distinct path. They collapse Walzer’s linear thrust, yet their itinerary differs from either the spatial itineracy of travelers (rootless cosmopolitans or well-routed countercosmopolitans like Émile) or natives’ temporally continuous arrival-at-presence (Touraine’s milk and honey). Walzer’s Exodus Israelites leave a place of bondage (also of material allure), pass through wasteland while struggling with threats of mutiny against their difficult new law, and arrive in a Zion that varies in its promise with their own level of discipline: beginning, middle, end. By contrast, Rousseau’s Israelites are rootless, routeless fugitives before, during, and, interestingly, after Exodus. Pace Walzer, then, Rousseau’s Juifs do indeed go wandering—in fact, owe their strength as a people to effects of wandering. Indeed, for Rousseau, the biblical event of Exodus itself is incidental, consigned now to legend. Yet a kind of ceaseless exodus becomes these Israelites’ constant project, a posterior fugitivity more monumental than Exodus. Rousseau’s Juifs experience their fugitivity as plus d’exode, at once Exodus no longer and ever more exodus because, once Zion has been “destroyed” and the Juifs made to wander (PF 34; OC III.499), then Walzer’s beginning, middle, and end overlap: everywhere is Egypt, everywhere wilderness, anywhere the Promised Land. Hence, post-Zionist fugitive Juifs figure a mode of political sociability compatible with chains everywhere, marooning everywhere (because primitive liberty nowhere), fugitive freedom anywhere. As a figuration of a fugitively free people, Rousseau’s “Jews” can stand in for the experiences of the “naked Savages” who enact their freedom by scorning all dangers to preserve it, of nomadic Tartary hordes always beyond the grasp of outsiders, of “Laplanders, Eskimos, Algonquins, Chickasaws, Caribs.” But, above all, the plus d’exode des Juifs refigures the temporal collapse of my fourth reading of the frontispiece, of the Hottentot’s return to his égaux, risking past slavery and future punishment in a moment of transgression (SD 220–21, 177; LP 226; É 304; OC III.221, 182, 234, IV.621). What is the Jewish experience according to Rousseau? It starts, of course, with Moses but quickly exceeds him. As Government of Poland has it, Moses

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formed and executed the astonishing enterprise of instituting as a national body a swarm of wretched fugitives who had no arts, no weapons, no talents, no virtues, no courage, and who, since they had not an inch of territory of their own, were a troop of strangers upon the face of the earth. Moses dared to make out of this wandering and servile troop a body politic, a free people, and while it wandered in the wilderness without so much as a stone on which to rest its head, he gave it the lasting institution, proof against time, fortune, and conquerors which five thousand years have not been able to destroy or even to weaken, and which still subsists today in all its force even though the body of the nation no longer does. (GP 180; OC III.956)

Nothing knit together these individuals whom Moses led out of Egypt, not even their collective enslavement itself. The Jews in Egyptian bondage were not individualized chattels, each fungible among any number of potential Egyptian owners, but were instead a people-chattel closer to the Grotian model. However, whatever ascribed or performed identity may have caused them to be targeted for this collective status, their servility rendered them a swarm, lacking in everything. Mosaic law shaped this mere aggregation into a body politic. Although Rousseau’s lionization of great lawgivers facilitates scholarly focus on Moses, nonetheless Rousseau’s texts place at least as much emphasis on Jewish mobility in shaping Jewish peoplehood. Similarly, it is not Egyptian bondage or even later Babylonian captivity that Rousseau emphasizes in his accounts of Jewish history, but the enduring reality of Christian despotism and the exile of Jews from Jerusalem: “they were punished, dispersed, oppressed, enslaved, . . . none of them comes near that city anymore” (É 305; OC IV.623). Moses may have originally constituted a people in instituting laws of association, and Exodus may legendarily have named Canaan their destination, yet despite personal origin and legendary endpoint, Rousseau’s Juifs thrive anarchistically and nonterritorially: “They no longer have leaders, and are still a people; they no longer have a fatherland, and are still citizens” (PF 34; OC III.499). Severed from origin and destination and thus lacking both telic and autochthonic orientations for their travels, the Jews’ endless flight among foreign nations continuously reconstituted and reconsecrated their common political life. At least five related elementary effects of fugitivity on political sociability come into view when we shift focus from

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Moses and Promised Land to fugitivity itself: (1) it bases relations among peoples in distance, not purity; (2) it initiates new relations to territorial space; (3) it regrounds sovereignty in cultural vitality; (4) it emphasizes pluralism rather than universalism; finally, (5) it intensifies internal relations among particular members and thus retrains the general will. (1) In spite of the centrality of originary purity to Rousseau’s reservation politics, his Juifs present an alternative strategy for marginal peoples’ escaping bondage within (or by) the interstate system. Having neither preserved ethnoracial purity nor been able to conserve an aboriginal homeland, Juifs perhaps for those reasons offer an “amazing spectacle” of an altogether pluckier political vitality. While most peoples have become indistinguishably “intermingled” in being “transplanted” distantly from their aboriginal lands, the Jews, by contrast, cut a unique path across this trend: they, too, are racially mixed yet nevertheless secure their body as a people. While they might seem indistinguishable from other peoples in having “been modified, oppressed, and mingled with foreigners,” they are altogether distinct in that they can “mingle among all peoples and never become confounded with them.” Moreover, they have managed to maintain this people-body even “without either location or land for nearly two thousand years.” Unlike altogether insular Corsicans or the alpine-isolated Swiss, the Jewish people do not find themselves well disposed; hence, they cannot rely on geography for security. Nevertheless, “Zion, destroyed, did not lose [her children]” (PF 33–34; cf. GP 180; OC III.498–99, 956–57). By what means did they maintain themselves, absent homeland and racial origin? They employed diasporic tactics within their overall fugitive strategy. On one hand, enmeshed in cosmopolitan assimilation, they cultivated difference historically. Though no doubt “Jews” before Moses, these aggregated fugitives were knit together as one association by him. Significantly, Rousseau’s Juifs constantly repeated this act of ethnogenesis after Moses, after Exodus, in that, “perhaps without a single offspring of the first races” (PF 34; OC III.499), they thus constantly reincorporated themselves with stray others while still maintaining an integral association. On the other hand, spatially intimate with others, they distanced themselves culturally. Rousseau’s Juifs invert advice he gives to the Poles yet achieve the goal more effectively. Rousseau counsels the Poles to distance themselves culturally as a means to guard against (Russian) aggression while leaving their borders open: “leave your country wide open as did Sparta; but, like Sparta, build good citadels in the Citizens’ hearts.” Whereas the Poles, because still ultimately attached to a territorial homeland, must supplement

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unique national institutions with guerrilla tactics—familiarity with the territory’s “places of refuge” combined with forcing invaders to experience “how difficult it is to leave your country” (GP 238; OC III.1018)—the Jews, by contrast, require no such supplement because they lack land to defend. Poles open their borders; Jews have none. Poles suffer strangers’ roving their land; Jews rove across strange lands. Nonetheless, this “scattered people, dispersed over the earth, subjected, persecuted, scorned by all nations, . . . preserv[es] its customs, its laws, its morals, its patriotic love, and its initial social union when all its links appear broken” (PF 34; OC III.499). Indeed, for Rousseau, the legendary “wandering” Jews are the ultimate limit case of successful patriotism, because their distinctive practices sustain them in the absence of a territorial homeland. These Juifs exemplify the benefits of cultural singularity—the Jewish nation is so “weighed . . . down with distinctive rites and ceremonies” as “to keep it constantly alert and to make it forever a stranger among other men” (GP 180; cf. CPC 293; OC III.957, 913). However, the limit case of the Jewish people illustrates a crucial point. The Jews are self-sufficient in their associative bonds. Their patriotic compression suffers from no slack at all. Thus they can enjoy autarky in the very midst of other peoples: “all the bonds of fraternity [that Moses] introduced among the members of his republic were as many barriers which kept it separated from its neighbors and prevented it from mingling with them” (GP 180; OC III.957). Rousseau’s Juifs maintained integral association through a confederation of scattered communities linked by shared law, and the similarity of mores and practices within and beyond shared law founds the possibility—though never the certainty—of networks of mutual aid. Yet the Jewish confederation of cross-community supports differs from the Polish confederation that Rousseau so admires: the latter, by formally federating small but fixed territorial units, saved Poland by combining the strength of small republics and large defensive organization (GP 208, 220; OC III.986, 998–99); the former is informal, unfixed, mobile, but defensively strong even in the absence of territory. Whereas in Chapter 4 we saw that a state’s geographic smallness follows from the intensity of its patriotic compression, here the compression of fellow-feeling matters more than territory such that the latter becomes altogether and utterly inconsequential. Autarky fortifies, but the Jews’ total unmooring of autarky from land empowers them to “fac[e] conquests, dispersions, revolutions, centuries; . . . [to survive] the customs, laws, dominion of all nations” (PF 34; OC III.499).

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(2) Hence, Jewish fugitivity illustrates that fugitive freedom effects a new relation to space by encouraging mobility and diminishing the importance of contiguity. If love of patrie means attachment to citizens, not to soil (SD 114; OC III.112), then a people-body can cut its ties to land altogether. Rousseau’s Poles would enact mobility within the logic of territoriality: “just as Themistocles carried away Athens aboard its fleet, carry away your cities on your horses if need be” (GP 238; OC III.1018). However, nomadic equitation would serve Poles only as an emergency measure temporarily separating population from territory in order to save both from conquest, whereas for fugitive peoples mobility is a way of life: in “deepest Tartary,” “wandering hordes . . . are never approached by a foreigner” even when on horseback, for Tartars are able by their equestrian supremacy to turn cultural distance into spatial distance (É 304; OC IV.622). Moreover, if Jewish peoplehood thrives above and against states’ dominion, then fugitive freedom generally refuses to hobble an associated people by land-based private property. Imagining another outcome to the catastrophic earthquake at Lisbon, Rousseau urges Voltaire to admit that nature had not assembled two thousand six- or seven-story houses there, and that if the inhabitants of that great city had been more evenly dispersed and more simply lodged, the damage would have been far less, and perhaps nil. All would have fled at the first shock, and the following day they would have been seen twenty miles away, just as cheerful as if nothing had happened; but they were set on staying. . . . Does not everyone know that a man’s person has become his least part, and that it is almost not worth the trouble to save when he has lost everything else? (LV 234; OC IV.1061–62)

Complex modern society endangers the person by indebting him with attachments that, perhaps literally, bury him to death. Sedentary life correlates to enslavement, while ease of flight marks freedom: true ataraxia, if not positive joy. In this regard, far from standing “contra” Rousseau, Nietzsche shares the latter’s concern to pit nomadic peoples against the new idol of the sedentary, private property-based state, which is the “death of peoples.” The material base for this fugitive freedom is not real estate, privately and exclusively held, but communally ordained usufruct, generalized (not particularized) stewardship over land—as though the Exodic errand in the wilderness were cut off from any actual Promised Land present or future, such that no fugi-

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tive people could take any place for granted, none make a livelihood anywhere with the reposeful certainty of permanence. The penultimate paragraph of Social Contract, Book I, and the modest proposal of Corsica (“I should like . . . [the state] to own everything, and for each individual to share in the common property only in proportion to his services” [CPC 317; OC III.931]) have grounded (sedentary) communal property arguments of either a Proudhonian anarcho-mutualist or a Marxian stripe, but fugitivity urges a more radical model, combining a diasporic relation to space with communal usufruct. The right each particular enjoys over a good still remains subordinate to the community’s right to all goods (SC I.9, 56; GM 86; OC III.367, 294), but the relation to the goods in question is not real domain but simple usufruct. Diasporic communalism thus dissolves the necessity of contiguity for sovereignty. A general will fortified by shared practice, rather than made fortress-like in occupying contiguous properties, can legislate particular or common use of goods in a discontiguous body politic such as that of Rousseau’s Juifs, “scattered and apparently destroyed, but ever idolizing its rule” (GP 180; OC III.957). (3) Such cultivated associational bonds are the home a fugitive people everywhere takes with itself. Its members’ shared knowledges and practices vitalize a common body politic, thus sovereignty itself. As Rousseau understands it, sovereignty necessarily varies: “sovereignty, which is only the exercise of the general will is, like it, free, and is not subject to any kind of engagement. Every act of sovereignty, like every instant of its existence, is absolute, independent of the one that precedes it; and the sovereign never acts because it wanted, but because it wants” (PF 24; OC III.485). A sovereignty disanchored from precedent thus enables diasporic fugitive peoples to respond to changing political environments by admitting mutability into the general will itself. Sovereignty on this view derives from popular expression of “wants”: popular pulsions are rooted in past cultural practice but not confined to it. For Rousseau, the robustness of a political body, its ability to evade death, derives from its will’s ability not to be captured or contained by others or by its past enactments. A sovereign will lives from moment to moment except insofar as salutary fundamental laws anchor it to generate new life (SC III.11, 109; OC III.424). Yet if Rousseau’s comparison of acts of sovereignty to instants allows for variability in time, then would it not be more properly sovereign if it varied in space, too, so that a sovereign people enjoyed both mutability and mobility in its acts? Recursively constituted cultural distance and historically

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cultivated group difference, as generated in interaction with surrounding societies (whether themselves fugitive or sedentary), would seem to provide a better ground for sovereignty than the spatial contiguity of real estate. For, considering all Rousseau’s abiding criticisms of those whose only “sensitiv[ity]” is the one they feel “in every part of their Goods” (SD 175; OC III.179), it would seem that the vitality of mobile and mutable practical cultural knowledges provides better integuments for corresponsibility, better nerves for mutual sensibility, better organs of pitié, among particulars than fixed mine and thine. Since shared sensibility and responsibility constitute the general will, of which sovereignty is the expression, then grounding sovereignty in vital cultural practices would make it more supple, more adaptable—more free in space and time, hence, more sovereign. (4) That sovereignty is mutable in time and mobile in space should come as no surprise, for this insight is reinforced by, and also significantly queers the localist aspect of, the Rousseauian pluralism encountered at the end of Chapter 4. Indeed, if “a genuine act of sovereignty . . . is nothing but a declaration of the general will” (PF 23; OC III.484), then sovereignty could not be bound by a constituted form in time or space. Hence, just as sovereign acts vary in time, so do the generalities that declare themselves in acts of sovereignty themselves vary in space: men differ so much according to times and places that . . . inferences from the particular to the Universal are liable to lead to rather contradictory and inconclusive conclusions. A single error in Geography is enough to overturn the whole of this supposed doctrine which deduces what ought to be from what one sees. An Indian will say that as it is the way of Beavers to hole up in dens, man ought to sleep in the open, in a Hammock stretched between trees. No, no, the Tartar will say, man is made to sleep in a Wagon. Poor people, our Philopolises will exclaim with an air of pity, don’t you see that man is made to build cities! When it comes to thinking about human nature, the true Philosopher is neither an Indian nor a Tartar, neither from Geneva nor from Paris, but is a man. (LP 226–27; OC III.234)

The pair formed by this passage and the conception of sovereign acts as mutable at every instant record a striving for an alternative to the salvage paradigm. Paradoxically, a true philosopher, while ultimately still rooted in a particular society, does not consider her own society’s culture of perfectibility the only True one, does not install it as the universal mode of perfectibility,

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but rather sees perfectibility as a generic faculty that defines “human nature” but that, because it does no more than facilitate humans’ adaptation to their surroundings, therefore finds expression in endlessly diverse ways—as diverse as the environments humans find themselves making and inhabiting. A true philosopher, while still a product of specific circumstances of time and place, somehow glimpses generic perfectibility in her own particular cultivated adaptations but discounts as Babel-in-reverse any project of constructing a single culture of adaptation from diverse instances. Neither particularity installed as universal adaptation, then, nor a formal global generality chimerically built from the mutually contradicting contents of diverse particular cultures of perfectibility: a true philosopher will not claim that sleeping in an industrially manufactured bed in what is designated a bedroom in large-scale statecentric society is True sleeping; likewise, she will despair of capturing all diverse practices of sleep in a composite generality. Correspondingly, there is neither a universal form all political associations ought to take nor a general political association able to embrace all societies (GM 78–79; OC III.284). Will any particular culture of perfectibility do, then? Far from being an absolute relativist, Rousseau indeed launched his career with a critique of political modernity and civil society as extremely poor, ultimately unserviceable adaptations. Against natural goodness guarded vestigially in and expressed through conscience, I want to put speculative pressure on the critical relativist pluralism his writings adopt by arguing that they espouse the standpoint of sustainability to judge particular strategies of adaptation. In a complex, searching consideration of the shared impulse animating universality and global generality, Émile’s Savoyard Vicar mocks distinctly unsustainable expressions of perfectibility in regard to worship (É 302–6; OC IV.621–24). Almost plaintively, he wonders how it is that Christian revelation authoritatively claims universal righteous Truth such that all nonbelievers damn themselves to hell. Practically speaking, due to barriers of language and either spatial or cultural distance, revelation cannot have reached literally all human beings living at any given moment, not to mention those deceased: do fugitive Jews, nomadic Tartars, isolated Africans, isolationist Japanese, remote Americans, sequestered women in seraglios, or the heathen dead bear responsibility for their own damnation if their seclusion prevents their gaining or having gained access to proselytizing Christianity, he wonders? Epistemically, adherents of other faiths—infidels—reject or rejected Christianity in a considered way, and Jerusalem’s Christians, else-

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where dominant, elsewhen dominating, find themselves dominated now by “new” Muslim, and formerly by “old” Jewish, inhabitants of the city: can Christianity’s revealed Truth, he asks, securely claim universal validity in light of such considerations? Finally, as a matter of epistemic practice and spiritual urgency—at least according to an Enlightenment notion of religious veridiction as involving empiricist cognition (rather than arational pure faith or deistic idealist rationality)—to require personal verification of revelation for the sake of salvation would induce the end of civilization itself: if there is only one true religion and every man is obliged to follow it under penalty of damnation, one’s life must be spent in studying them all, in going deeper into them, in comparing them, in roaming around the country where each is established. No one is exempt from the first duty of man: no one has a right to rely on the judgment of others . . . all without exception must study, meditate, engage in disputation, travel, roam the world. There will no longer be any stable and settled people; the whole earth will be covered only with pilgrims going at great expense and with continuous hardships to verify, to compare, and to examine for themselves the various forms of worship that people observe. (É 306; OC IV.623–24)

Any revelation claiming universal authority, not just Christianity, becomes ultimately unsustainable because no potential initiate serious about avoiding eternal damnation would risk not validating its truth-claims personally, which would (universally) entail a ceaseless, unsettling search after spiritual truth. The absurd logical consequences of the Savoyard Vicar’s hyperbolic scenario are a parody of the Hobbesian state of nature, but, instead of lacking commodious living from being universally threatened by violent death, these initiates destroy sedentary civil life from being universally haunted by eternal perdition. As with the other instances considered in Chapter 1, Rousseau’s overstatement here—“There will no longer be . . . ; the whole earth will be covered, . . .”—strives to express a truth-effect, in this case not the de facto structuring of global space by the extension of illegitimate social dependence but rather the insupportability of universalizing a given reaction to social dependence. What would, then, serve as sustainable expressions of perfectibility in religious—but also, here, cultural and political—praxis? The Savoyard Vicar names several groups of infidels and heathens as possibilities. None, it turns

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out, will present such prodigies of sustainable perfectibility as Rousseau’s fugitive Juifs—indeed, none but they and the Tartars pursue a live sustainable strategy: Japan makes of itself a reservation in decidedly pursuing isolationist strategies; meanwhile, it is only a matter of time before remote Africans and Americans require reservations to salvage their still uncorrupted natures, just as women’s modesty is safeguarded in “the harems of the princes of Asia” (É 304; OC IV.622). Even if Japan autonomously isolates itself as though it were East Asia’s Corsica rather than having its purity superintended heteronomously as would or as do the others, nonetheless its strategic project recapitulates all the problems of Rousseau’s reservation politics because of its immobility. Also unsustainable is the path of Turks at Constantinople, who do no differently than Catholics in Paris after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes: domineering at home, they cause nonbelievers to abject themselves, yet they would dominate abroad too in conquests for converts. Turks—and Christians, too—fail to adapt, for international conquest and domestic domination are products of and continue to produce unstable equilibrium among peoples. As the “Civil Religion” chapter in Of the Social Contract would have it, Turks and Christians fight offensively for their gods rather than having their gods fight for their own self-assertion: they plant new altars and then fight to keep them, rather than fight in order to be able to deserve to plant new altars (SC IV.8, 144; OC III.462). Jews and Tartars follow a different route—neither defensive reservation nor offensive expansion. Nor do they fight to worship: they do not use force to defend unique cultural expression. Just as forcible confiscation, capture, and displacement prove a good deal more trouble than they are worth in the early and late states of nature (SD 199, 158, 167; OC III.203, 161, 170–71), so do Jews and Tartars find force more trouble than it is worth in late civil society, too, since they cannot outmatch the force of states. Marginal peoples might despair of marshaling enough defensive might to thrive in the midst of large-scale sedentary societies. Hence, rather than fight, they make flight the path to corporate integrity. Precisely because no “hidden recess of the world” remains where “a man would take refuge against oppression,” Jews and Tartars have to capture zones of autonomy in the midst of states and the state system. Through fugitive strategies they are able to riddle the otherwise fettering contiguity of state-spaces. Tartars do so through nomadic, physical distancing. These “wandering hordes” (É 304; OC IV.621) achieve nondomination in making themselves spatially unapproachable by others, but

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they do so not through erecting fixed barriers, relying on fixed geographic borders. They thus improve on isolationism and render this strategy more sustainable by mobility. Tartar fugitivity is non-intimate vis-à-vis other peoples; they “are never approached by a foreigner,” not even the swiftest equestrian (É 304; OC IV.621). By contrast, Rousseau’s Juifs manage an intimate strategy of distance: in the very heart of surrounding host societies, they flee culturally. The Savoyard Vicar suggests that Juifs, “punished, dispersed, oppressed, enslaved” in the age of Christian domination, have been coerced into a new kind of slavery, enslavement not by Egyptians as people-chattel but by Christians who despotize them for unbelief: “The tyranny practiced against them makes them fearful. . . . The most learned, the most enlightened among them are always the most circumspect” (É 305, 304; OC IV.623, 621). Consequently, Jews observe religious rites and cultural practices amidst others’ rites and practices. They develop and renew diasporic tactics of circumspection and aloofness to make themselves unapproachable by the aliens who surround them, the very strangers with whom they may daily interact. Yet simultaneously, in a complementary diasporic tactic of cultural vitality, they intensify relations among members of their own community. At least this seems true so far as outsiders can discern, for the Vicar laments, “I shall never believe that I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk” (É 304; OC IV.621). Intimate now with other peoples, Rousseau’s Juifs adapt to preserve themselves by not speaking freely, not representing themselves, making themselves unavailable by making their collective will opaque to outsiders. They continue to flee because, post-Exodus, everywhere is a new Egypt, yet, post-Zion, everywhere too is the Promised Land insofar as they brave universal wilderness to make promised lands of and for themselves. Yet the Jews do not, by keeping to themselves, have no effect whatsoever on others. For the Vicar’s lament tells us that Jewish fugitivity reveals something profound about the status of truth. If reservations of territorial and academic nondomination could support Jewish parrhesia and if modernity leaves no space of total nondomination, then all must despair of finding any universal Truth in any exclusive revelation. For even the declaredly freest and most candid professions of faith therein not only will be pervaded by circumspections within a shared language, but will face gaps and losses in translations across tongues (É 303; OC IV.619–20). What makes the Savo-

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yard Vicar’s humility toward heathens and infidels, and toward fugitive Juifs above all, so moving is that his humility is driven by a plea to disclaim as impossible any exclusive, perfectionist account of revealed Truth—to disclaim such teleological universalism as is associated with Stoicism: “I find that the method of all those who accept an exclusive revelation closely resembles that of these Stoics” who “maintained . . . that in an adversary proceeding it was useless to hear the two parties” because “either the first has proved his assertion, or he has not proved it” (É 302n; OC IV.618n). The Savoyard Vicar makes a plea for humility, a plea for admitting the fragility and contingency and therefore openness of one’s own claim to truth. This plea disclaims both Stoic universalism and global generality—it discounts both the universalization of Truth from any exclusive revelation and the single generalization from the world’s many partial revealed truths. Both approaches to revelation strive for the extraordinary, the cosmopolitan or at least global. The Vicar holds faith instead in unaided revelation, truth by ordinary means, learning by the truth-effects one generates locally in circumspect interaction with intimate strangers (É 303; OC IV.620). (5) The Savoyard Vicar thus describes an experience of being thrown back on the ordinary and local. And insofar as such an experience is generic—not a universal or general Good, rather a typical response according to the strictures of humble perfectibilities in mutual confrontation—it suggests a collage of ordinary local communities good in themselves, an Epicurean picture of pluralism. Yet fugitive Jews queer this picture further and thus obliquely reorient local general wills (even as they disavow global general will). After all, what can Rousseau’s commitment to the “local” mean for a diasporic people, “scattered . . . dispersed over the earth” yet “still a people” (PF 34; OC III.499)? If locale is no longer identified with closeness in space but instead describes closeness in association, then the accent falls on situated intensity, not proximate contiguity. In short, particulars gain new importance in the diasporic body politic. If the Promised Land is situated in themselves corporately, then the intensity of the several members’ relationships takes the place of a territorial homeland. Particulars must actively connect and constantly reaffirm their connections because they cannot take shared space for granted. They must each strive qua different particular members for mutual sensibility and corresponsibility. What they share instead of contiguity is the vitality of cultural formation in process, the totality of relationships they cultivate member to member, whose result is a general will taut with particularities.

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Though it may risk the fission of the body politic, the mobility of members—their dispersion—is what keeps the general will trembling with integral particularity. For the constant appeal to fugitive freedom rebalances interdependence among members: particulars constantly balance their membership in a larger body while threatening to insurge against any motion in that body that ignores the contribution that their particular difference makes to the general. The art of fugitive body politics obliquates the easy notion of generality offered by Pascal, later “secularized” by Rousseau (via Montesquieu), when the former “think[s] of a body full of thinking members” in the following terms: “If the feet and the hands had a will of their own, they would only ever be well ordered by submitting their own will to the antecedent will which governs the whole body.” If, however, the fugitive body politic is not a nation of sages or a corporate association headed by one who claims divinely ordained righteousness, if Rousseau’s Jews “no longer have leaders” yet “are still a people” (PF 34; OC III.499), then, pace Pascal, whatever will governs the whole is not antecedently clear. Making no exclusive claims to perfection vis-à-vis other peoples and none among themselves, each differently imperfect member of this imperfect body, while recognizing her particularity, also recognizes that no other member can speak for the whole. When none domineers others as though having exclusive access to the truth, especially revealed truth, then their general will’s truth comes as an effect (but not the sum) of their differences. Instead of harkening to an antecedent will, members constantly knit and reknit together a fugitive general will, a body politic in process, a collective masterpiece of the art of politics: “If there were no different interests, the common interest would scarcely be sensible since it would never encounter obstacles: everything would run by itself, and politics would cease to be an art” (SC II.3, 60n; OC III.371n). Contra Pascal and against the more Kantian and proceduralist appropriations of the general will, Rousseau’s fugitive Juifs suggest there is no antecedent promise of corporate will, no voucher of purity, no guarantee of zero friction. Reading fugitivity in Rousseau requires that we cut away the anchor of purity and cast away, too, an antecedent narrative of Exodus, moving temporally with such certainty from slavery through trial to freedom. Even as purity and certainty are lost to us, there are nevertheless greater and lesser degrees of impurity, more and less uncertainty in movement. For perfectibility means nothing less than that absolute impurity and absolute uncertainty are jettisoned, too—that slavery, trial, and freedom are collapsed

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and spatially coexistent. As such, there is no once-and-for-all redemption or total damnation. Freedom is necessarily difficult, an unremitting practice, then, because everything is painted grey in grey. However, contra Hegel of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right and the self-assessing Rousseau of the Dialogues, the shape of this life has not grown old. It may seem that vitality has been drained, but that Rousseau and Hegel may have mistaken the risk of fissiparity for degeneration, the risk of fission for senescence. Rather, on this heretical reading of Rousseau, I want to say that the vitality of political bodies is resurgent, tense with energies that are fugitive, nearly traceless, pulsing between the ordinary and the ecstatic.

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Afterword There are still sons—and daughters—who, unbeknownst to themselves, incarnate or metempsychosize the ventriloquist specters of their ancestors. —jacques derrida, Marx and Sons

One aim of this book has been to show that a heretical reading of Rousseau can offer us an alternative radical politics—a politics of discontinuity, whereby zones of fugitive freedom contradict and counteract the continuous ordering of all global space by the system of private property and the interstate system, and a politics of deformation by which enchained peoples deform the modes of sociability they had been forced to carry on under conditions of domination in order to generate, instead, bodies politic that confirm their freedom by techniques of distancing. Without resorting to nostalgic myths of vestigial natural liberty, the multiple, small-scale exoduses of fugitive freedom riddle global space with zones of autonomy and thus generate a discontinuous political space so that the global structural truth captured by “this is mine” and the territorial statism it gives rise to are proven false as descriptions of actual on-the-ground realities. When the “Hottentot” of the frontispiece and Note XVI of the Second Discourse joins the community of Hottentots, he takes a decision that has important political consequences. Prior to that point (yet after his kidnapping by the Dutch 265

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governor) he had been a liminal figure joining two worlds, but when he “returns to his Equals,” he chooses no longer to be a liminal go-between. He creates a discontinuity between two worlds by making the Hottentots his people and refusing further communication with the Dutch settlers, who might claim colonial government of the Cape territory but cannot govern its fugitive peoples (SD 112, 220–21; OC III.221). The Hottentot’s action ruptures any possible Dutch claim to a smooth and uniform spatial application of government. Yet the Hottentot does so in a way that differs drastically from Émile’s refusal of the cosmopolitan uniformity of the brave new world of intercourses created by a modern sociability underwritten by illegitimate dependency. This modern culture of travel forges a cosmopolitan monoculture that the tutor Jean-Jacques will keep Émile aloof from and that the mature political subject Émile will reject in settling in and pledging himself to the pays of his fathers. However, Émile’s predestined yet still aloof localism hardly has similar implications as the Hottentot’s return to his people (and the nomad patrie he makes with them). Beyond a superficial resemblance between them, the two figures share nothing of political relevance. The kidnapped Hottentot was not, in his educational travels with world-roving Dutch traders, sheltered from what Jean-Jacques would have considered morally suspect contacts—indeed, he was trained in colonial chrematistics. By contrast, the tutor’s meticulous sheltering of Émile calls into question the status of both his travels and his education. This difference in their relations to their educational travels begets another, more consequential difference with respect to their political attachments. Whatever loyalties Émile may form in that native, natal community to which he repairs after having been conducted by Jean-Jacques on political-educational (non)travels will necessarily remain insubstantial. Having been morally and politically formed to live anywhere and occupy any station in life, his commitments to any particular place or position must necessarily be shallow. As a countercosmopolitan he may choose to live in the provinces away from the excesses of cosmopolitan Paris, but he does not sever his contacts with “cette fatale ville,” where, as we learn in Émile and Sophie, he maintained certain private affairs (ÉS OC IV.885). Not quite a go-between who could comfortably dwell in and link two different worlds, Émile instead remains homeless and unattached, no matter what pays or capitale he finds himself in, no matter what social status—except that of slave in Algiers.

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By contrast, the Hottentot refuses cosmopolitanism without falling into Émilean countercosmopolitanism. Rather than keeping even the least part of himself in reserve from local attachments in anticipation of the vicissitudes of political fortune, he decisively makes a home for himself with the native community from which he had been abducted. Doing so, he definitively severs his relations with other communities. Mobile with his new political association, he is nonetheless not homeless or rootless, as is Émile— for even the roots Émile implants in his fathers’ pays cannot run deep if he must always prepare to take route elsewhere, without compatriots, in response to political misfortune. If, even against the uniform space leveled by cosmopolitanism, countercosmopolitan Émile’s fundamental alienation renders the entire world an integrated, continuous space in which he could set up house anywhere, then the Hottentot by contrast makes global space discontinuous, indeed actively disintegrates it by severing his links with the world of European civilization and political order. While Émile is finally at home when immobilized as a slave in Algiers, the Hottentot, deforming his prior political education, makes roots and finds home in fugitive freedom. The Hottentot’s practice of freedom is rooted in a fugitive community, but this is not the same as a “rooted cosmopolitanism,” for his commitment is not to a chimerical general will of humanity but to a local general will. As I suggest in Chapter 5, the Hottentot might be considered a patriot of a sort, but he is not a “cosmopolitan patriot,” for his commitment to his community is not subordinate to universalized liberal ideals of right: perhaps he is able to intuit from having lived with the worldly Dutch that any claim to universalism or to perfectionist teleology is always a question of moral power to enforce a particular stance. Even the argument for cosmopolitan patriotism advanced by Kwame Anthony Appiah, for all its commitment to cultural variability, commits two errors from the standpoint of a fugitive Rousseauism. Against accusations—not unlike Rousseau’s own—that cosmopolitanism amounts to rootless homogeneity, Appiah advocates a cosmopolitan commitment to the availability of cultural difference while maintaining patriotic loyalty to liberal state institutions that promote individual autonomy. This patriotism, then, does not demand that citizens orient their lives on a common cultural center, for this would unduly constrain individual freedom, but rather merely to the “institutions that provide the overarching order of our common life” when these promote individual endeavors. The problem, though, is that, to make this argument, Appiah must distinguish state institutions from culture, a move that has two conse-

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quences: first, the distinction between common institutions and common culture suggests that institutions are acultural, a conclusion that would be anathema to most readings of Rousseau, not just my own fugitive interpretation; second, to suggest that (liberal) states or political institutions stand above or outside local cultures suggests that they materialize an overarching conception of justice, one that could be globally general with respect to the varieties of local general wills, an overarching construct Rousseau rejects. (For Appiah illiberal states, whose institutions constrain individuals, are cultural in the wrong way, attempting to center the state and its citizens on a common, usually national, culture rather than somehow keeping the state agnostic or neutral with respect to culture.) Cosmopolitan patriotism errs from fugitive Rousseauism in a second way: it emphasizes autonomously willed self-invention too much. “The fundamental thought of the cosmopolitanism I defend,” Appiah writes, “is that the freedom to create oneself—the freedom that liberalism celebrates—requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent what we have come to call our identities.” When Appiah recognizes that liberal state institutions “shape” the availability of options for self-making, he makes autonomy a matter of individual choice on the model of “the modern market economy.” Fugitive freedom, however, is not purely a matter of willed choice by a subject softly formed by one socially transmitted option among others, whose liberal political circumstances give her the freedom to choose other options. It is rather a hard-won practice by subjects who have been formed in contexts often of abstract but sometimes of personal domination, which they resist nevertheless because they know, bodily and cognitively, that they are being subjugated to and made dependent on a system of alien particular wills. Deforming the sociability they have developed in the context of illegitimate dependence to strive instead for an interdependent association, deforming, too, the security that chains give them amidst the instabilities of force central to any system of domination, they thus enact freedom in fleeing this forcible repose and thereby generate a more complex political space. The picture of the world that my fugitive Rousseauism presents is not that of maligned cosmopolitanism, Émilean countercosmopolitanism, or cosmopolitan patriotism, then. The homogenizing effects of the first make global space uniform, and the alienated aloofness of the second renders all global space continuous, while the liberal internationalism of the third would generate a global general will, which would reduce to zero any pos-

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sible friction that might be caused by the free circulation of individuals rooted in local general wills. When Rousseau writes, “La terre seroit couverte d’hommes entre lesquels il n’y auroit presque aucune communication; nous nous toucherions par quelques points, sans être unis par aucun” (OC III.283), he is offering— against these influential representations of the world—a complex speculative judgment about radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, and particularity in human experience. He does so, moreover, by way of a rhetorically rich construction. Settling for a translation of “nous nous toucherions” by “we would touch each other” would overlook the convergence of individual experience with Euclidean geometry in Rousseau’s formulation. Geometrically, the image he invokes is of circles that meet mutually at a single point each, such that no two circles can describe a common space. Experientially, this suggests that there are plural worlds of experience that may meet locally but lack sustained commonality between them: “The earth would be covered with men amongst whom there would be almost no communication; our individual worlds would touch one another at some points without being united by a single one” (GM 78, trans. emended). This morsel from the Geneva Manuscript pictures a multiplicity of worlds in the pure state of nature—innumerable individual worlds that intersected at points, perhaps even overlapped occasionally, but that did not establish liaisons (OC III.283) that could suture individuals, unify them into a collective, as parts of a greater whole. The fact of this original multiplicity does not last forever, of course. It ends with the state of nature itself, but Rousseau does discuss a transitional period. In nascent society, there was independence yet social interaction; there was some sedentarization—a “sort of property” in nativized places— yet no ultimate fixity: did family units form discrete worlds whose mutual tangents multiplied, or does nascent society imply also the nascent formation of larger worlds, even if each unit guarded its independence fiercely? In any case, while the Geneva Manuscript passage refers to alegitimate, asocial, thus solitary independence in the pure state of nature, it could also, if collectivized, describe the vision of plurality—emphatically not the despotism of universality—that Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar sketches in regard to fugitive, diasporic Jews. The Jewish community that the Vicar encounters— but with which he experiences only the sparest of communication—does not dominate others, perhaps because it honors its memory of legendary Egyptian slavery. It interacts intimately with other communities but main-

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tains aloofness and even suspicion of them because of the continuing possibility of despotic domination. Its diasporic cultural formation continues to invigorate its associational integrity through techniques of distancing, while still proving malleable enough to respond to new circumstances and other peoples. These pages of Émile (É 302–8; OC IV.621–27), then, describe plural worlds of independent collectivities that touch and necessarily communicate but do not describe a commonly experienced space. This is a vision of a plurality of multiple vital peoples, circulating sometimes widely, their worlds touching and overlapping. Diasporic, fugitive, sometimes even coterminous yet still separate, they stage at their tangent points multiple truth-effects about the wondrous diversity of human perfectibility when it is not warped by interested amour-propre, but they never manifest a universal or teleological Truth, whether of form of faith or content of freedom. Relinquishing the fixity that constantly holds Rousseau’s small and marginal autarkies hostage to their grasping neighbors, these multiple general wills may share much—intimate much—between them and yet still cultivate distinctiveness. Vitally culture-bearing peoples, especially diasporas sustaining traditional yet flexible knowledge of country distant in time or space, may borrow expressive forms from others, may share contiguous spaces, mark correspondent times with others, yet on the fugitive view they always mediate and adapt for themselves what they share or borrow: they deform would-be common things in forming themselves as communities. Thus, even if it appears that two communities seem to perform rituals or use objects that look identical from a tertiary, external perspective, they may belong to mutually particular worlds that code them in dramatically unlike ways. Rituals, objects, times, bodies, languages, spaces may according to the members of each world abide by general logics—the malleable products of specific historical and cultural formations. The community may order these things, its members, and itself expressively in articulations of its general will. Yet vis-à-vis other communities, a fugitive people’s general will and the cultural order that it expresses will nevertheless mark discrete and incommensurable—mutually particular—worlds. These worlds may touch intimately at points yet at the same time be radically distant for reasons intentional, unintentional, and beyond intentionality. The radically discontinuous global space of heterogeneous general wills I derive from a fugitive Rousseauism does not build into one world, whether “one world” is meant constatively or performatively—that is, whether “one world” remarks on a current state of affairs (“in all likelihood things had by

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then reached a point . . .”) or brings a new state of affairs into being by its utterance (as the declaration “this is mine” did under the given conditions in the Second Discourse). Alain Badiou has quite stridently advocated that a new revolutionary Left adopt the position that “There is only one world” in order to forge that single common world and actively to (re)claim it from capitalist globalization. In this strategy of centripetally drawing all oppositional political forces together to one pole, Badiou is not alone. From the perspective of fugitive Rousseauian freedom, Badiou’s position shares important features on the one hand with Jacques Rancière’s polemical universalism and on the other hand with arguments for generalized exodus by Paolo Virno and the team of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Fugitive Rousseauism thus articulates an alternative to these similarly centripetal, unifying trends in recent French and Italian radical political thought as much as it does to Anglo-American liberal theorists’ recent attempts to root cosmopolitanism. When Badiou claims, “There is only one world,” he is hardly making a modest proposition—or, to be more precise, since he does not mean it as a declarative statement, I should say that he is hardly making a modest proposal. As Badiou would have it, this utterance is not the vacuous description of world unification under late capitalist globalization. Rather, Badiou enjoins self-described Leftists to take the statement not as propositional or declarative, but rather as performative, words that do things, as an active proposal to make one world an accomplished fact. By this speech act, “There is only one world,” Badiou would have us decide, here and now, to take the world as unified and continuous in order politically to act on it as a unity, with a logic of appearance and truth proper to itself as a closed, sufficient entity. He writes, “The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world,’ is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration.” This is not hyperbole but somehow in dead earnest. Saying “this is how it is for us” draws a political line in the sand, forces its audience either to agree that “There is one world,” or to take exception now until forced to accept it descriptively as a fait accompli in due revolutionary time, when universal communism finally triumphs. For Badiou the politics proper to this performative utterance is to agitate for what he calls the Communist Hypothesis, which has both negative and positive dimensions. The negative dimension demands that this performa-

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tive one world resist a capitalist globe unified under the sign of the universal substitutability of persons and the infinite reign of things—a world perfectly consonant with Rousseau’s description of the slavery produced by the empire of inflamed, interested amour-propre. For Badiou this is the anarchic “democracy” of global capitalism, which simultaneously concentrates wealth and decentralizes power. Positively, in contrast to such a world, communism redistributes wealth and centralizes power. It is associated with a politics “in the sense of subjective mastery (the mastery of thought and praxis) over the future of humanity,” which “will have independent value” and “not be subordinated to power, to the State.” Though centralist, this communist politics is “the force in the breast of the assembled and active people driving the State and its laws to extinction.” Badiou envisions a mass action by an assembled and actively insubordinate humanity proposed as, and thus made one by, a performative speech act. This vanguard of all humanity contains itself within the single common world it takes as its truth. The specificities of this vision of the final realization of the “Communist invariant” that inaugurates (Badiou’s) political modernity may be unique to Badiou, but from the perspective of fugitive Rousseauism Badiou’s thought belongs to a larger trend in fin-de-siècle radical French and Italian theories of the political. Badiou converges with Rancière, Virno, and Hardt and Negri in making claims of universality and large-scale action central to their visions of Left politics. All share focal assumptions that are anathematic to a Rousseauian fugitive politics of freedom. Broadly, these thinkers articulate an account of politics that is unifying and centripetal in which radical political action draws to itself greater and greater effective force, thus fusing a larger and larger mass that tends toward encompassing one world. This centripetal politics initially speaks normatively in behalf of the universal— that is, all of humanity—and anticipates being descriptively universal as well in the fullness of time through revolutionary action. Certainly, these thinkers are right in striving to theorize political strategies to counteract the varieties of inegalitarian domination that structure the contemporary world of states and private property, and in diagnosing massive global inequality and exploitation they surely run parallel to Rousseau. What Badiou calls “capitalo-parliamentarism,” what Rancière identifies as oligarchies wielding police force, what Hardt and Negri name “Empire,” and what Virno designates simply as post-Fordist capitalism are indisputably illegitimate social dependencies of the Rousseauian type. However, what is worrisome from the standpoint of a fugitive Rousseauian theory is

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that the heroic counterforces that these contemporary French and Italian theorists conjure to meet their designated foes either explicitly call for or implicitly orient themselves to superlocal political activity on a massive scale involving masses of people situated in a unified topography, even if these contemporary theorists may shun this word “mass” for its connotations of uniformity. Calling a new oppositional political center into being, all imagine the fusion or at least unison of multiple bodies, aggregations, horizons against a dominant vision. All center radical political action on the scale of states or multinational forms. In sum, the agendas of these recent French and Italian thinkers could be described as universalizing, even universalist, for they converge in deliberately and militantly appropriating alternative universalities to oppose late modern capitalist or oligarchic universalisms. Rancière makes the universal explicit in his political agenda: “Democracy can never be identified with the simple domination of the universal over the particular. For the universal is incessantly privatized by police logic, incessantly reduced to a power-share between birth, wealth and ‘competence,’ which is at work in the State as well as in society. . . . The democratic process must therefore constantly bring the universal into play in a polemical form.” Rather than renouncing the universal in favor of, say, Rousseau’s multiple general wills that are mutually particular, Rancière would have a demos contest the universal polemically—not as a matter of reasoned argument but of political struggle thinking. Even if the universal sensibility this demos agitates for could never descriptively include all persons in the end, the democratic struggle over the universal would tend to transgress every limit set on it by police powers, and this tendency of democracy would make the universal the most universal possible—a limitless universality— against the hemming maneuvers of oligarchy’s inegalitarian machine. Unlike Rancière, Virno, Hardt, and Negri seem studiously to avoid recourse to the concept of universalism. Nonetheless, the Italian counterpart to Rancière’s politicized and polemical universalism, as well as to Badiou’s communist one world, is the strategy of exodus. By invoking exodus, Virno, Hardt, and Negri would seem to regroup with Rousseau’s fugitively free peoples—indeed, Hardt and Negri even compare exodus to marronnage. However, their centripetal understanding of it decidedly places them far from fugitive Rousseauism. Virno defines exodus as “mass defection from the State” in which the “general intellect” of all workers, the collective social intelligence of workers of all types and not just proletarians, is joined with political action. This common intellect is what is captured and exploited

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by capitalism, especially in its post-Fordist iteration, and so class struggle under these conditions assumes the form of subtracting this general intellect from the capitalist system. However, the general intellect both conditions the possibility of exodus and, when recaptured, is exodus’s designation: for they assert that subtraction from the system clears a new common, a space of common intellect. Mass defection affirms a form of political existence that Virno and others call the “multitude,” which “takes as its starting point a One that is radically heterogeneous to the State: public Intellect.” For this strand of Italian theory, the general intellect forms one network that connects the varieties of intelligence of the many in one multitude form. Even if Virno, Hardt, and Negri theorize the multitude form of this politics of exodus explicitly against “traditional organizational forms based on unity, central leadership, and hierarchy,” the reference to a “One” is revealing, for the multitude form, even if it lacks centralization, still results from a largescale agglomeration. Even if not unitary like Badiou’s “assembled and active people,” it nevertheless unifies centripetally. Virno, Hardt, and Negri do not envision multiple overlapping networks of multiple, incommensurate general intellects that manifest a plurality of mutually particular commons, but rather one vast continuous multitude that will reclaim its intellect as the common. Hence, even if Rancière, Virno, and Hardt and Negri might look askance at the centralist tendency that Badiou renovates from Lenin and Mao, all together share a casting of resistance in terms of unifying and universalizing. With these emphases on universality—an alternative universality adopted and advanced strategically against the dominating, objectifying, and universalizing logic of late capitalism’s network of oligarchies—might Badiou, Rancière, and Hardt and Negri be situating themselves in a Stoic lineage of the universal, rather than, say, an Epicurean one that refuses the teleology of universality and envisions a field of plural generalities that are mutually particular? That is, might they be situating themselves against fugitive Rousseau in casting critical Left politics as centripetal—as integrating or orienting movements of resistance to a center—rather than as centrifugal, as drawing movements away from any would-be center and thus disintegrating political space? From the standpoint of fugitive Rousseauism, local general wills of clustered particularity can only be made commensurable by being dominated. In this respect, recent theorists’ oppositional unification and polemical universalism, whether centralized as one people or massed as one internally

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differentiated multitude, subjugate just as much as do the foes they target. Fugitive Rousseauism, then, would have every reason to be suspicious of Badiou’s one world as much as of capitalist globalization’s one world, just as Rousseau was suspicious as much of the claim to a general will for all humanity as of the way that “this is mine” obliterates multiplicity and effectively makes one world in its image, a world of illegitimate dependency. By enormous labors, Rousseau’s fugitives would brave fire and sword to riddle any one world so as to make a plurality of others possible in its shadows. Badiou, with his militant tone, would no doubt find this articulation of a fugitive Rousseau—a Rousseau for a radically diverse plurality of fugitive, incommensurable worlds—quaint, parochial. Badiou has in fact leveled a comparable charge at those whose “democratic materialism” allows for multiplicities of bodies and languages but no manifestations of a singular Truth and who consequently refuse to orient themselves to his concept of an Idea, by whose necessity and sufficiency one can organize determined thought and action. No doubt Badiou would criticize my position in the same way that the political theories of Rousseau and others have been criticized: for purportedly taking wing at dusk like Minerva’s owl. Sheldon Wolin notes that Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau were made to “appear hopelessly municipal in an era where the conditions of existence were imperial,” though he insists that “this kind of easy criticism misses the mark.” For Wolin these thinkers “suffered not so much from being parochial as from being strongly political.” Wolin knows a lot about revaluing charges of parochialism into strongly political theories, for not only was this the very procedure he undertook in order to reconstruct an unrelenting fugitive democracy from the funhouse mirror image of it reflected by its ancient Greek critics, but also Wolin’s own theorization of a localist fugitive democracy that pulls force centrifugally away from a political center no doubt strikes some critics as a parochial, municipal throwback for opposing—in the most strongly political way—the large-scale administrative and managerial orders of and consequent depoliticization within the latest age of empire. I take Wolin’s fugitive democracy as inspiration for fugitive Rousseau, then, not only because I adopted a comparable transvaluing and reconstructive procedure in reading Rousseau’s political corpus for traces of fugitive political freedom, but also because Wolin and my reconstructed Rousseau are allies in resisting the advocacy of imperial forms on the contemporary Left, such as Badiou’s one world.

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I would go even further and suggest that Wolin’s own eventual articulation of fugitive democracy owes more than a little (though certainly not everything) to his reading of Rousseau. Most critical in this respect is that Wolin associates Rousseau with a political “tradition of close communion,” a tradition that includes “other writers who have been appalled at the consequences of large-scale, impersonal aggregates, who prefer the pulsating life of the small group to the cold, exterior unity of massive institutions.” Although Wolin’s Rousseau cultivates the close communion of a moi commun as an enduring subjectivity within the quasi-secularized “common spirit” of the medieval Christian corpus mysticum tradition, Wolin could have been describing his own account of fugitive democracy in writing those words. For Wolin, democratic constitutionalism and then fugitive democracy refuse the routinization and professionalization, the killing of spontaneity and improvisation, that massive constitutional democracies institute over vast territorial spaces. Against this managerial and bureaucratic trend, fugitive democracy instigates “the idea and practice of rational disorganization,” which riddles large-scale state-administered spaces so that dynamic and developing political cultures can take back popular powers in rebellious moments. In Wolin’s conception the rebellious impulses of fugitive democracy do not signal a revocation of legitimacy from state regimes but rather an altogether antigovernmental, aconstitutional predisposition: “any conception of democracy grounded in the citizen-as-actor and politics-as-episodic is incompatible with the modern choice of the state as the fixed center of political life and the corollary conception of politics as continuous activity organized around a single dominating objective, control of or influence over the state apparatus.” Neither Wolin’s Rousseau nor fugitive Rousseauism’s Wolin shy away from a strongly political anarchy and a strongly political community. Fugitive democracy and fugitive freedom share these broad parameters of a simultaneous inclination to anarchism yet a pursuit of communal action in an infrastatal arena: both of them upsurge from within the very heart of the state against statecentric orderings of modern politics. At the same time, there are substantive differences between them along the axes of time and space. First, Wolin’s radical democratic vision of the political is fugitive because it is fleeting, evanescent. Its upsurges are temporary and bring together active citizens only momentarily to address objects of immediate common concern: so fugitive democracy flees in both time and object. By contrast, what I have tried to articulate is a necessarily enduring fugitive practice of

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freedom: because the forms of domination that would cramp, annihilate, or enervate freedom are constant, so must the cultivation of fugitive practices never relent, never remit, never repose. In this respect my fugitive Rousseauian freedom finds itself closer to Stephen Best’s and Saidiya Hartman’s representation of “fugitive justice”: even after a slave’s flight to freedom, even after the abolition of American chattel slavery, fugitive justice, like fugitive freedom, exists in a temporal present that stretches continuously, endlessly, because both inhabit “the interval between the no longer and the not yet,” between repose in slavery and repose in freedom. Because Canaan conterminates with Egypt, the wilderness lasts forever. Second, although Wolin warns that fugitive democracy’s “localism cannot surmount its limitations except by seeking out the evanescent homogeneity of a broader politics” in face of “a range of problems and atrocities . . . that a locally confined democracy cannot resolve,” this localism/translocalism remains quite literal such that locale refers to a fixed point in space around which quotidian local affects develop that are then revealed and renewed by fugitive democratic upsurge. However, a conception of freedom that arises from the fugitive practices of nomadic and diasporic communities maintains a common affect—the corresponsibility and mutual sensibility of Rousseauian body politics—across points in space. Against Wolin’s more conventionally rooted communal fugitive-democratic action, against Rousseau’s small or autarkic states, and yet against Appiah’s cosmopolitan patriotism, too, the conception of politics I reconstruct in Rousseau is a routed fugitivity: its roots are mobile. Free fugitive bodies can form bodies politic across discontiguous spaces. The bodies politic of migrants, nomads, and displaced peoples create and sustain “cultural patterns of commonality [not only] at any moment” but also across far-flung points of geography. Rural Yupiit in Alaska, though differently buffeted by “the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” than their urban counterparts, nevertheless cultivate common concerns, practices, and alliances with them. The dispersed Yup’ik social body connects points vastly separated across Alaska and Siberia, yet members of these communities circulate in seasonal or less frequent rhythms to coordinate and sustain their association. Thus James Clifford concludes that “claims to ethnic identity or peoplehood can be profound yet not nationalist in a bounded, territorial sense.” A fugitive body politic could maintain its freedom and sustain corresponsibility and mutual sensibility among members between Chicago, San Diego, Oaxaca, and beyond—for cultivated associative links and renewed

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cultural formations qua deformations matter more for political integration than the fact of spatial discontiguity. The body politics of fugitive freedom extends the locale of Wolin’s fugitive democracy in ways he may not have anticipated in calling on a broader “evanescent homogeneity,” then. Even this latter term, if tending toward closure and fixity, if imposed too strenuously might threaten members of a fugitive body politic to seek fission. Yet the very possibility of fission is central to a fugitively free body politic, for along with fugitive freedom goes the constant need for deformation, the ceaseless possibility of a reorganization of the body in order to encourage the pluralism of contributions necessary for a living community to adapt to its intimate sociability with the persons and peoples it intersects and overlaps beyond itself. To expect or to prerequire that a body always keep a given form does not do justice to the fugitive body as a perfectible living being in a developing process of refining sustainable practices of freedom. It owes its liveness to a play between commonality and discontiguity and not to despotic, antecedent fixity on either term in isolation. If Wolin, despite these divergences, remains nevertheless a descendant of fugitive Rousseau, then might he not take his place alongside other kin, distantly related but available to conscious, strategic liaisons across space and time? In an odd fragment Rousseau considers his own legacy in a tone that typically layers self-exaltation with self-marginalization: “After several years have erased my name from the annals of literature may it be able to live again in some nation that is poor and unknown but just, wise, and happy, which—preferring peace and innocence to glory and to conquests, sometime will read with pleasure . . .” (PF 17; OC III.474). Though he had hoped someday to be lost, almost without a trace, to the mainstream of history but then refound by a marginal people, and though, along these lines, Frantz Fanon had been called “the Black Rousseau,” fugitive Rousseau’s best followers might be those who never read him or could not. I think here of aboriginal and indigenous peoples, especially those most marginalized by the mainstream political societies in whose midst they find themselves—for such Fourth World societies are just as marginalized when those aggregations of people surrounding them trip over themselves to “recognize” or “intervene” in their communities, as when citizens of surrounding societies violate them outright. Many such peoples cannot “read [Rousseau] with pleasure,” as Rousseau may not be translated into the languages they may speak, or they may not be literate at all. Nevertheless, against all odds, these peoples, clustered in some cases in small-scale societies of close communion,

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develop and refine techniques of cultural and possibly also spatial distancing from the states that contain them or societies that envelop them. Yet I want to make a heretical case—hyperbolic, metaphoric, metonymic —that perhaps fugitive Rousseau’s best and most emblematic follower playacted being unable to read him. I speak of Josephine Baker—diasporic Baker of the banana skirt, of the electrifying “Danse sauvage,” in short, of metropolitan French imperial fantasy. This descendant of three (voluntarily and coercively) displaced peoples—Euro-, African, and Native American—Baker had this to say upon embarking from a segregated United States: “When the Statue of Liberty disappeared over the horizon, I knew I was free.” Baker, “fully aware,” Michael Rogin notes, “that the huddled masses yearning to breathe free had (like the statue itself ) made the crossing in the opposite direction,” faced not race hatred in Paris, but a novel reality—namely, racialism instead: the fact that metropolitan France was not virulently racist but not color-blind either—that it was colonialist and exoticizing—ignited Baker’s launch to diva heights. Was her departure for France an act of marronnage? Certainly, she had not personally been another’s chattel, had even met with some financial success in New York show business, even within the confines of racial segregation. However, the white supremacist legacy of slavery and the institutionally sanctioned terror of Jim Crow, in contrast with a perception of greater opportunity in Europe, had spurred so many African Americans to emigrate to France that they comprised a community in Paris. Qualitatively other than a mere aggregation of expatriates, the Transatlantic diaspora was recognizable for having “its own institutions, traditions, and presence within the larger city.” More importantly, with so much creative talent and allegedly fewer (or at least differently coded) constraints on its expression, its members cultivated a Transatlantic black modernist cultural formation—in literature, the visual arts, music, and dance—that was simultaneously also a deformation of both vernacular black American cultural expression (themselves “repositories for African retentions and transformations”) on the one side and metropolitan European and white American modernism on the other. As far as critic Houston Baker Jr. is concerned, such deformation undoubtedly constituted marronnage, a cultural marronnage that enacted fugitivity by cultural distancing. In sharing this emphasis on the fugitive’s powers of deformation, Baker could be said to think aesthetics in political terms just as Wolin thinks the political in aesthetic terms when he theorizes “the idea and practice of rational disorganization.” (White) European and

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American modernism may have politicized “culture” by forming itself in reaction to academicism and repression in elite “high” culture or civilisation, and even though it was eventually, if perhaps ironically, elevated in the academy to “high” modernism, it had originally reacted in part by incorporating and recoding exoticized “low” or “primitive” cultural forms. By contrast, Afro-American modernism politicized and recoded black vernacular expression against the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, which devalued African Americans as cultureless, culturally backward, or, at best, culturally annihilated. Afro-American modernism’s task involved innovating cultural forms beyond master and slave, high and low. Hence, quoting Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Houston Baker offers: In a world of murderous exclusion, the mass spirit—articulated through the voices of a younger, expressive generation—demands an inversion that converts “a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into an incentive.” . . . In short, the discourse of lordship and bondage, controlled by the master, will be taken up and transmuted—deformed, as it were—by the maroon. . . . For the very sufferers imaged are a people of will and strength who convert marronnage into song, story, arts of liberation, and guerrilla war.

Keeping his focus on the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, Baker does not mention the Transatlantic Afro-American modernist connection so important to other scholars, but the marronnage he describes did have its Transatlantic wing made up of diasporic figures who gained not only cultural distance by creatively deforming surrounding and past cultural forms, but also geographic distance, often by migrating first from rural South to urban North and then from the North to France. Josephine Baker is a focal figure in grasping both forms of fugitive distancing. Although too often dismissed as merely an “entertainer” and especially one who pandered to an exoticizing, primitivizing Parisian audience, Josephine Baker cultivated a dance practice that has undergone critical reconsideration in recent years. As one scholar notes, her “dance practice was firmly rooted in African American vernacular dance traditions. . . . She had consequently built up a substantial repertory of moves, including the Charleston, Black Bottom, Mess Around, Shimmy, Tack Annie. . . .” Nevertheless, she found herself deforming those very traditions, that very repertory, not only to distance herself from what her Parisian audiences (inaccurately) perceived as too Southern, too folk American, thus somehow inauthentic

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because not authentically African enough. But, also, she deformed them to advance positively new bodily expressions. Were these primitivist? Undoubtedly. Indeed, they were panprimitivist. The legendarily sensational “Danse sauvage,” which somewhat dissonantly closed La Revue nègre on 2 October 1925, inaugurated a storied career that had her engaging in a form of citationality that connected Haiti and Caribbean créolité, tropical Africa and the Maghreb, French Indochina and Arctic peoples through her “black American expatriate Parisian exotic dancer[’s]” body. However, these performances’ reception as tribal and susceptibility as primitivist do not exhaust their significance. Although some critics would have it that Baker’s hip, stomach, and especially butt movements link her in the European imagination to the racialized, ethnicized, primitivized view of the steatopygy of Saartje Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus” who died under the ownership-entrepreneurship of a French animal trainer in December 1815, the poet Elizabeth Alexander imagines Baartman’s and Baker’s bodily displays otherwise: But there are hours in every day to conjur my imaginary daughters, in banana skirts and ostrich-feather fans. Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private.

Ostensible intimacy and corporeal presentation can enable strategies of self-absconding, since bodies exceed their apparent surface. Such insurgent moments may be forced, circumstanced by personal and impersonal dominations, but a fugitive political theory limns the basic principles for enacting those techniques of distancing that put freedom into practice and make marooning and deformation effective. Indeed, fugitive politics—especially when “racialistically compelled”—shows that no moment of pure, uncompromised autonomy exists. Michael Rogin thus wonders, “When Baker acquired her own menagerie, when she walked the streets of Paris with a cheetah, was she playing to white fantasies or playing with them?” If compelled not to evade the question (though her political disposition would impel her to answer obliquely, circumspectly), the advocate of fugitive political freedom would intimate that Baker nimbly stepped among white metropolitan fantasies without beliming herself in them. Withhold-

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ing herself, she captured spaces, moments, embodied practices of freedom for herself, which in turn opened windows of opportunity for others to associate fugitively, as well. At one moment a glistening statue, the next an aggregate of dissociated body parts—hips, breasts, feet all seeming to obey different logics—Baker could appear to her audience either the overorganized art object of a protominimalist aesthetic or disorganized animal excess. But this body, though lending itself to sociabilities and imputed significances, always remained her own, always resistantly her own organism. Fluctuating between the sculpturesque inorganic black body of high European modernism and the vital organ-bound body of colonialist primitivism, Baker foregrounded a transformability from black American to cosmopolitan Parisian high culture to African primitive. In performing these positions Baker underscores the inessentiality of these terms: that there is no unilinear progress narrative from primitive to civilization, from low to high culture, no fixity, no purity. So while Baker may not seem to rise above previous codes of femininity, racialism, colonialism, primitivism—and while she does not simply negate these directly by dialectical antithesis (much less by Badiou’s materialist dialectic)—she nevertheless undermines them. She does not deconstruct any position from within or inside but by constantly dancing among them, evading each in turn and absconding herself all the while. Her Parisian audience may have tried to fetter her with the onus of causing “the downfall or redemption” of European civilization, but while allowing her body to iconize public responsibility for the future of a self-important humanity, Josephine Baker made other parts private: her freedom. Instead of universality emblematized in the end of civilization or in a primitive origin, Baker’s fugitive body figures instead a counterprimitivism, which deforms, as a political principle, a modernity that normatively presents itself as a universal totality but that is instead descriptively shot through with discontinuities. As such, Baker’s body figures fugitively free bodies politic. Thus, although in movies and in “colonialist sexual fantasy skits” onstage, Josephine Baker acted the part of one who could not read Rousseau (vis-àvis colonial male characters who presumably had); nevertheless, she was by an oblique genealogy Rousseau’s daughter, descendent perhaps of one of his forsaken children by Thérèse Levasseur. And, although Baker enacted the strategy of fugitive freedom by deformative cultural marronnage in constantly visible proximity to her audience, rather than the Hottentot’s free flight by a spatial distancing whose effect was that he was, according to the Second Discourse, “never again seen,” Baker is nonetheless, too, an avatar of

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that Hottentot who returns to his equals and refuses the enchainments of the “European Political order” (SD 221, 220; OC III.221, 220). In the closing shots of the film Princesse Tam Tam (directed by Edmond T. Gréville, 1935), the spontaneous, unsophisticated, and vivacious Alwina, played by Baker, smiles with satisfaction upon noticing something happening offscreen. The countershot then presents what presumably she has just witnessed: a close-up of an ass munching at a pile of straw and then tearing off and chomping at the cover of a paperback book, visibly titled Civilisation, lying in the middle of the pile of hay. It turns out that this book was written by the French novelist Max de Mirecourt (actor Albert Préjean), who had retreated to Tunisia to escape Parisian society and his wife in order to reenergize his writing. On an uncomplicated reading of the film Alwina is written into the plot of Civilisation as a Pygmalion figure, a Maghrebien tribal native turned into a civilizing project by the novel’s Max-counterpart so that she can be passed off as an elegant and enchanting local African Princesse, by which ruse the novel’s male protagonist can get back at his wife for courting rumors in the society pages of being involved with a visiting Maharaja in Paris. In the end the story depicted on film is passed off as the contents of Max’s novel, while the “real” natives of the film, not the ones of the novel within the film, prove inscrutable. The butler Dar withholds himself by stiff aloofness, Alwina by disarming naiveté: we do not know for certain of their romantic bond until the end, when we see their infant daughter. In the closing minutes of Princesse Tam Tam, we learn that Max has left them the stately residence he had taken up in Tunisia. Dar and Alwina give their menagerie the run of this estate’s ground floor and its objects. Max has also dispatched to their home, as though to a foundling hospital, the literary offspring of his encounter with Alwina, the book Civilisation, a testament she does not read. What better tribute to her acquaintance with Max than to have radically deformed what he gave her, objects that formed the tangent between two worlds but whose uses in each were so incommensurable that they could not unite them and had to be repurposed? It is inside this home that the ass eats Civilisation in the final shot, causing Alwina to beam.

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Notes introduction 1. Along these lines, Rousseau’s critics include Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Laurent Estève, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot: Du genre humain au bois d’ébène; Les silences du droit naturel (Paris: Éditions UNESCO, 2002); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 26–34; Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), chap. 3; and Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 2. My account of Rousseauian “fugitive freedom” in Chapter 5 and my orienting in Chapter 2 of Rousseau’s concepts of slavery both to his contemporary Atlantic world and to his reception of Hellenistic philosophy take this project in an altogether different direction from Matthew Simpson, Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom (London: Continuum, 2006). The project for freedom I am most concerned with, fugitive freedom, and the account of Rousseau’s rich understanding of slavery (and therefore his conception of freedom) together trouble Simpson’s typology of natural, moral, civil, and democratic freedom. 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no trans. (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 623; OC I.600. 4. C. L. R. James, “Rousseau and the Idea of the General Will,” in You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009), 105–20; Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts, eds., “Creolizing Rousseau,” special issue, CLR James Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2009); Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University 285

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Press, 2014); see also Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 3. 5. Contra Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), among others. 6. Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Fall 1985): 62. 7. Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 8. Christopher Brooke, “Rousseau’s Second Discourse: Between Epicureanism and Stoicism,” in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44–57; Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), chap. 8. Srinivas Aravamudan traces a broadly “Stoical” rather than “strictly Stoic” voice in British anticolonial literature in the early eighteenth century in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), chap. 3. 9. Albert O. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the State,” World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978): 90. 10. Ibid., 92 (orig. emphasis), 90, 94, 93; cf. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley, with Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1987). 11. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 3–5, 21–29. 12. On the last point, see Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History,” World Politics 45, no. 2 (January 1993): 173–202. For early applications of exit/voice to the development of the European state system in the late medieval and early modern period, see Stein Rokkan, “Dimensions of State Formation and NationBuilding: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 562–600; Samuel E. Finer, “State-Building, State Boundaries and Border Control: An Essay on Certain Aspects of the First Phase of State-Building in Western Europe, Considered in the Light of the Rokkan-Hirschman Model,” Social Science Information 13 (August–October 1974): 79–126. 13. Hirschman is responding to Milton Friedman’s writing on school choice: Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the State,” 96; Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 16–17.

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14. Although she discusses neither Hirschman nor this Foucaultian view of power I am referring to here, see Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 15. Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush et al. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990), 1:214; PF 70–75; OC I.936, III.554–60. 16. Rousseau, “Fragment on Freedom,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Masters and Kelly, trans. Bush et al. (Hanover N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 4:12. This fragment does not appear in the Pléiade OC but rather in Jean-Jacques entre Socrate et Caton, ed. Claude Pichois and René Pintard (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1972). 17. On the difficulty of the terms “freedom” and “liberty” in English, with reference to French and other languages, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?” Political Theory 16, no. 4 (November 1988): 523–52. 18. Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 7. 19. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 88–89. Condillac uses the case of the feral child as evidence of memory’s dependence on ideas (and therefore signs); the boy’s quadrupedalism does not interest Condillac. 20. I leave the endnote reference (XVI) in place. I discuss it at length in Chapter 5. 21. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 403. 22. Seneca, Letter XC, in Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 2004), 164. I cite Campbell’s translation here as more user-friendly, though less literal; see Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles 66–92, 398–401. This passage in particular resounds strongly in Rousseau’s “Letter to Voltaire” (LV 234), which I discuss in Chapter 5. NB: in the remainder of the book, I shall frequently switch between the Gummere and Campbell translations, choosing by greater fluidity and suitability to the context at hand. Following the translators, I refer to pieces from the Gummere translation as Epistles and from Campbell as Letters. 23. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles 66–92, 423. 24. Ibid., 429 (emphasis added). 25. Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 188–89. 26. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Virtue a Hero Most Needs,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 316; OC II.1274.

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27. A. A. Long, “The Stoic Concept of Evil,” Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 73 (October 1968): 330. 28. Ibid., 340. 29. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 2002), 221. 30. Terrence E. Cook, “Rousseau: Education and Politics,” Journal of Politics 37, no. 1 (February 1975): 111–13. 31. Long, Stoic Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 182. 32. Long, Epictetus, 221. 33. Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 180. 34. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 35. Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 115. 36. Cf. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37. 37. Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”; Daniel Whitman, “Slavery and the Rights of Frenchmen: Views of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Raynal,” French Colonial Studies / Études coloniales françaises (1977): 1:17–33; Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light; Estève, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot; Jonathan D. Marks, “Rousseau’s Use of the Jewish Example,” Review of Politics 72, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 463–81; Bronisław Baczko, “Moïse, législateur . . . ,” in Reappraisals of Rousseau: Studies in Honour of R. A. Leigh, ed. Simon Harvey et al. (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 111–30. 38. My phrasing alludes here to Maurice Cranston’s The Solitary Self: JeanJacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 39. Rousseau, Confessions, 670, 671–72; Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979), 82; OC I.644, 645–46, 1041. 40. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fifth Walk,” 81–92. 41. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 248–49. 42. Cranston, Solitary Self, chap. 6. 43. Stilz, Liberal Loyalty; Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Melissa Schwartzberg, “Voting the General Will: Rousseau on Decision Rules,” Political Theory 36, no. 3 (June 2008): 406–9; W. G. Runciman and Amartya K. Sen, “Games, Justice and the General Will,” Mind 74 (October 1965): 554–62.

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44. Bernard R. Boxill, “Rousseau, Natural Man, and Race,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Francis Moran III, “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second Discourse,” in Philosophers on Race, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommie Lee Lott (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002); Robert Wokler, “Deconstructing the Self on the Wild Side,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sources of the Self, ed. Timothy O’Hagan (London: Avebury, 1997). 45. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 109.

1. displacements 1. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 128. Scott is discussing C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989). See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), chap. 6; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37. 2. Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in Fundamentals of Language, by Jakobson and Morris Halle (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 90–96. 3. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 412–41. 4. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage and Hogarth Press, 2001), 14:186. 5. For an exploration of chain imagery in Rousseau, see David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chap. 5. 6. Cf. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 1; and the critique by Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-Domination,” Political Theory 36, no. 9 (February 2008): 9–36. 7. Cf. Arthur Melzer’s attribution of “revolutionary simplification” to Rousseau in his The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 84–85. I think that “simplification,” even if qualified by “revolutionary,” does not do justice to Rousseau’s subtlety.

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8. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003), 100. 9. Two essays that question the purported unmediated presence of nature or the “natural man” are Denise Schaeffer, “The Utility of Ink: Rousseau and Robinson Crusoe,” Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 121–46; and Jennifer Einspahr, “The Beginning That Never Was: Mediation and Freedom in Rousseau’s Political Thought,” Review of Politics 72, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 437–61; cf. Jonathan D. Marks, Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 3. 10. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 249. 11. On state-of-nature theories as sometimes disclosing buried democratic experience, see Sheldon S. Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 57; “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 39, 41. 12. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 197; see also Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 227. 13. Cf. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 137 (discussing the Second Discourse specifically): “Rousseau seems to want to have it both ways, giving himself the freedom of the fabulator but . . . the authority of the responsible historian.” 14. James, “Rousseau and the Idea of the General Will,” in You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009), 109. 15. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7. 16. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–4. 17. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 249 (emphasis added): “Any Rousseau text . . . will therefore have to set up the fiction of a natural process that functions both as a deconstructive instrument and as the outcome of the deconstruction.” 18. Carole Pateman analyzes this relation (to a different end) in “Contract, the Individual and Slavery,” The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 39–76; cf. Charles W. Mills, “Rousseau, the Master’s Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism,” in special issue, “Creolizing Rousseau,” ed. Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts, CLR James Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 92–112. 19. Patterson asserts as quite probable that before c. 1700, many slaves sold to European slavers off West Africa were taken as captives in war; Slavery and

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Social Death, 106–15. David Eltis notes that, despite the prominence of this supposed right of enslavement, European powers extremely rarely enslaved European prisoners of war, even when it might have been economically “rational” to do so; Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (December 1993): 1399–1423; esp. 1412–13; see also Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 4. 20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, rev. student ed. (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 141. 21. Rousseau is referring to Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:3; cf. 2:5; see also Grace G. Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), chap. 2; Daniel Lee, “Popular Liberty, Princely Government and the Roman Law in Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no. 3 (2011): 371–92; Melissa Schwartzberg, “Voting the General Will: Rousseau on Decision Rules,” Political Theory 36, no. 3 (June 2008): 406–9; Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 71–78. 22. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, rev. student ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), §24. Peter Laslett’s editorial notes helpfully specify that “[t]he Instructions to Governor Nicholson of Virginia, which Locke did so much to draft in 1698 . . . , regard negro slaves as justifiably enslaved because they were captives in a just war, who had forfeited their lives ‘by some Act that deserves Death’ ”; Second Treatise of Government, §23, 284n; see James Farr, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” Political Theory 36, no. 4 (August 2008): 495–522. 23. Hobbes, Leviathan, 141. 24. Cf. Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Englightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 158n7. 25. In contrast, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 26. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 9 (emphasis added). 27. Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665–1740,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 287. 28. Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–1762 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 11.

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Notes to pages 52–69

29. Cf. Albert O. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the State,” World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978): 90–107. 30. Dena Goodman, Criticism in Action: Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 118, 119. 31. Stephen Condit, Anarchist Studies: Two Inquiries into the Ideal and Material Purposes of Philosophical Anarchism (Joensuu: Joensuun yliopiston keskusmonistamo, 1987), 105–36. 32. In regard to vengeance, cf., by comparison, Rousseau’s “Le Lévite d’Éphraïm,” OC II.1205–23. 33. Victor Goldschmidt arrives at this same notion of “l’amour-propre désintéressé” by negating Rousseau’s reference to “l’amour propre intéressé” (see OC III.174; SD 170) in his Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 457. As I explain shortly, by endorsing Goldschmidt’s distinction I hold, in contrast to Frederick Neuhouser and Nicholas Dent, that amour-propre does not always require recognition by others. The socalled Golden Age, by accommodating mutually incomparable self-estimates, encourages a plurality of solipsisms. For amour-propre as “a need or desire to secure recognition and acknowledgment for one’s person from others, as others have a like need for recognition from one,” see Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005), 68; see also Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of SelfLove: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 34. Dent, Rousseau; Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy; again, see Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique. 35. On the logic of the supplement as revealing prior lack, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 144–52. Derrida’s critique goes further, calling into question the possibility of prior self-adequacy: if a supposedly self-adequate entity will ultimately have required supplementation, then it cannot properly be said to have been autarkic. 36. Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace in Practical Philosophy, trans., ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 329. 37. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace 1:3, 2:5; Lee, “Popular Liberty”; Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau, chap. 2. 38. Cranston, Noble Savage, chap. 11. 39. Note that this almost negatively dialectical rhythm, whereby one unsustainable equilibrium replaces another, is central to Lucretius’s rhythmic account of simultaneous progress and regression; see Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura), trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1994), 5:925–1457; for a reading of Lucretian-Epicurean disequilibrium, see Michel

Notes to pages 69–77

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Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2000), 172–91. 40. Hobbes, Leviathan, 125. 41. Locke, “Second Treatise of Government,” §§ 27, 28, 32. 42. See ibid., §23; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chaps. 6, 8. 43. James, “Rousseau and the Idea of the General Will,” 109.

2. . . . and condensations 1. For explorations of Rousseau’s imagery of subjection, see David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chap. 5; Marius Hentea, “ ‘Toutes mes idées sont en images’: Rousseau and the Yoke of Necessity,” in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 174–92; see also Lynn Festa, “Tropes and Chains: Figures of Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Depictions of the Slave Trade,” in Interpreting Colonialism, ed. Byron R. Wells and Philip Stewart, SVEC 2004:09 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004), 322–44. 2. Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 96, italics in original. 3. Ibid., emphasis added; see also Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (February 2006): 1–14; Daniel Whitman, “Slavery and the Rights of Frenchmen: Views of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Raynal,” French Colonial Studies / Études coloniales françaises 1 (1977): 17–33; Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Laurent Estève, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot: Du genre humain au bois d’ébène; Les silences du droit naturel (Paris: Éditions UNESCO, 2002), part 2; Charles W. Mills, “Rousseau, the Master’s Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism,” in special issue, “Creolizing Rousseau,” ed. Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts, CLR James Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 92–112; and, more generally, Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Two otherwise important studies that uncritically adopt the indignant tone of Sala-Molins on Rousseau are Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 26–34; and Christopher L. Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), chap. 3. Two recent works that do not cite Sala-Molins but mention Rousseau’s “metaphor” of slavery are Christie McDonald, Introduc-

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tion, in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. McDonald and Hoffmann, 3–4; Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 175–76, 302. 4. “Expansion overseas made for the multitude of Utopias that marked temporal progress . . . , the ideal world which furnished the yardstick for the indirect political criticism of the Absolutist States”; Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 176n; see also Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France,” chap. 6; David Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review 94, no. 5 (December 1990): 1290–308. 5. Some contemporary critics go further and argue that metaphorical references to slavery are dangerous and disrespectful. Undue extension of the term “slavery” disrespects the memory of victims of the Atlantic slave trade and therefore endangers projects for reparations; see Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen, The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation (London: Pluto Press, 2011); Nimako and Stephen Small, “Collective Memory of Slavery in Great Britain and the Netherlands,” in New Perspectives on Slavery and Colonialism in the Caribbean, ed. Marten Schalkwijk and Stephen Small (The Hague: Amrit/Ninsee, 2012), 92–115. I thank Jane Anna Gordon for bringing these to my attention. 6. See Daniel Lee, “Popular Liberty, Princely Government, and the Roman Law in Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no. 3 (July 2011): 371–92; “Private Law Models for Public Law Concepts: The Roman Law Theory of Dominium in the Monarchomach Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty,” Review of Politics 70, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 370–99; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1621 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 7. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). 8. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 339. 9. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 10. “Chat,” from a French Revolutionary-era Iconology, quoted in Michel Launay, Une grève d’esclaves à Alger au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 1998), 23. Launay misidentifies the cap as Phrygian.

Notes to pages 78–90

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11. Yvonne Korshak, “The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1987): 53. Moreover, the symbol today associated with French liberty, the Phrygian cap, originally served as a marker not of manumission in Greek art but of foreign status, usually for captives or prisoners. The blurring of associations occurred in the later eighteenth century in America and France. Interestingly, the liberty cap reentered French iconography by way of America, but it largely dropped out of the American symbolic imaginary due to the impending conflict over chattel slavery in the South. The pileus was too inflammatory a symbol for a nation that hosted chattel slavery on its own soil. Hence, in spite of France’s own reliance on slave labor in the colonies, the cap appears specifically and uniquely “French,” its American precursor now effaced from historical memory. See also the critical discussion on the sexual conflatability and psychohistorical confusions around the pileus and Phrygian cap in Neil Hertz, “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” Representations 4 (Fall 1983): 27–74, esp. 40–45. 12. On the Dutch influence in French political thought (and specific reference to Rey’s publishing French lumières’ works), see Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), chap. 1. 13. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 321n26. 14. Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light, 49, 73, 81, 155–56n34. 15. Again, I owe a debt to analyses of the frequency and function of chainand yoke-imagery in Rousseau’s oeuvre by Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, chap. 5; and Hentea, “ ‘Toutes mes idées sont en images.’ ” 16. Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Part IV, letter iii, OC II.414. 17. Cf. SC 42, 45 (despotism of leaders/warlords); 114, 115 (despotism condoned by people’s disinterest); 148 (despotism aided by Christian meekness); SD 115, 171, 173, 176, 182, 185; OC III.353, 355, 430, 431, 466, 113, 175, 177, 181, 187, 191. Neither this list nor the one in the next note claims to be exhaustive. 18. Cf. SC 53–54, 110 (rule by appetites is slavery); 129 (slavishness of cities); SD 138, 167, 170, 171, 173, 187, 199; OC III.364–65, 425, 446, 139, 171, 175, 177–78, 192, 203. 19. Whitman, “Slavery and the Rights of Frenchmen,” 25. 20. In his editorial notes, Gourevitch informs us that “Bk. 2” seems to have been a typographical error; Gourevitch, Editorial Notes to Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, SD 351. The quotation comes from Book I.5, 1254a. 21. Seneca, Letter XLVII, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 2004), 90. My assessment not so much of Seneca’s views of slavery specifically as of the contradictory effects of Stoics’ views on slavery in

296

Notes to pages 90–98

general differs markedly from Miriam Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chap. 8. 22. Seneca, Letter XLVII, Letters, 95. 23. David Sedley, “The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius,” Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1991): 50. 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Virtue a Hero Most Needs,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 316; OC II.1274. 25. Epictetus 4.1.128, quoted in A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 2002), 221. 26. Works on Émile and Sophie that analyze its Stoic themes are MarieHélène Huet, “On the Uses of Negative Freedom,” in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. McDonald and Hoffman, 257–73; and Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 199–202; see also Thomas Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chap. 4. 27. See Judith N. Shklar, “Rousseau’s Images of Authority” (1969), repr. in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 174; Pierre Burgelin, Introduction to Émile et Sophie, OC IV, cliii–clxvii; Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 200. 28. C. E. Manning, “Stoicism and Slavery in the Roman Empire,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, part 2, vol. 36, no. 3 (1986): 1531. 29. Ibid., 1523, 1529. 30. Paul A. Vander Waerdt, “Politics and Philosophy in Stoicism,” review of The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action, by Andrew Erskine, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 9 (1991): 185–211. 31. Sedley, “Ethics of Brutus and Cassius,” 50; but cf. Griffin, Seneca, 192–94. 32. According to Tacitus, Seneca’s (demanded) suicide à la Socrates took a tragicomic turn; Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1989), 376–77. 33. Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Vintage: New York, 1978), 94–95. 34. On the fortunes of the term despotique in eighteenth-century France, see Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 5–6. 35. See Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 1; Brooke, Philosophic Pride, chap. 1. 36. Cf. Seneca, Epistle CVII.

Notes to pages 98–106

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37. Sedley, “Ethics of Brutus and Cassius,” 50. 38. Ibid.; in contrast, see Griffin, Seneca, 192–94. 39. Seneca, Epistle CVII, Epistles 93–124, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 227. 40. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 175–203; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993); Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–31. 41. Dumarsais, “Philosophe,” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers par une société de gens de lettres (Neufchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1751–65), 12:510. 42. Diderot, “Stoicisme,” Encyclopédie 15:526, 530. Diderot inserts other criticisms of Stoicism in his article “Épicuréisme, ou Épicurisme,” Encyclopédie 5:779–85. 43. Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 88. 44. Cicero, On Duties, trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.158. 45. Hulliung, Autocritique of Enlightenment, 88. 46. Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 58–63; but cf. Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 187, 189. 47. I recognize the debate among Rousseau scholars about whether he develops plural distinct conceptions of pity, one natural (animal), one social (or properly human). I treat them as one, though the social form is directed—and possibly perverted—by reflection. On pity generally, see Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 125–26; Force, “Self-Love, Identification, and the Origin of Political Economy,” Yale French Studies 92 (1997): 46–64; Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 171–92; cf. Nannerl O. Keohane, “ ‘The Masterpiece of Policy in Our Century’: Rousseau on the Morality of the Enlightenment,” Political Theory 6, no. 4 (November 1978): 457–84. For a contrasting view, see Richard Boyd, “Pity’s Pathologies Portrayed: Rousseau and the Limits of Democratic Compassion,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (August 2004): 519–46. Although “pity” does not convey all of the richness of the French pitié, I follow standard translations here. 48. On the relationship between Rousseau’s amour de soi-même and the Stoic concept of oikeiosis, see Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 198–99; Amélie Oksenberg

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Notes to pages 106–15

Rorty, “The Two Faces of Stoicism: Rousseau and Freud,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, no. 3 (July 1996): 335–56. 49. See Malcolm Schofeld, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 50. The boundaries of what counted as human were hotly contested, and Rousseau offered his own contributions to this debate; see Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Paul Thomas, “Among Prelates and Primates: From Darwin to Rousseau,” Political Theory 37, no. 4 (August 2009): 455–81; Bernard R. Boxill, “Rousseau, Natural Man, and Race,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Francis Moran III, “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second Discourse,” in Philosophers on Race, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommie Lee Lott (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002); Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert Wokler, “Deconstructing the Self on the Wild Side,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sources of the Self, ed. Timothy O’Hagan (London: Avebury, 1997); Geoffrey Symcox, “The Wild Man’s Return: The Enclosed Vision of Rousseau’s Discourses,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); see also Matthew D. Mendham, “Gentle Savages and Fierce Citizens against Civilization: Unraveling Rousseau’s Paradoxes,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 1 (January 2011): 170–87. 51. On commercial interconnections as cosmopolitan, see Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), chap. 3. However, in pitting cosmopolitan sentiment against expansion of European empires, Jacob ignores that they may be consonant. 52. Cf. A. A. Long, “The Concept of the Cosmopolitan in Greek and Roman Thought,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 50, 58. 53. See David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chaps. 2–5.

3. cosmopolitanism 1. James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840),” Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37–52; John Towner, “The Grand Tour: A Key Phase in the History of Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 3 (1985): 297–333; Roger Mercier, “Voyages et réflexion politique: Le relativisme vrai ou

Notes to pages 115–19

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supposé des lumières,” Modèles et moyens de la réflexion politique au XVIIIe siècle, Actes du Colloque international des Lumières, l’Université de Lille 3, 16–19 October 1973 (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Université de Lille 3, n.d.), 1:34. Mercier claims that “most” eighteenth-century travelers hailed from the middle class. 2. József Böröcz, “Travel-Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (1992): 709. 3. Denis Diderot, ed., “Voyage (Commerce),” “Voyages de Long Cours, (Marine)” and “Voyage (Jurisprud.),” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers par une société de gens de lettres (Neufchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1751–65), 17:476, 477. Translations are my own. 4. Louis le Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Voyage (Education),” Encyclopédie 17:477; cf. the first sentence of Bacon’s essay “Of Travel”: “Travel in the young sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience”; Francis Bacon, The Essays (London: Penguin, 1985), 113. 5. De Jaucourt, “Voyage (Education),” Encyclopédie 17:476. 6. On the social contract citizen as male, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 7. If the list of topics in Rousseau’s “Political Fragments” actually can serve as an indication of what his abandoned Institutions politiques might have contained, then travel would have been discussed therein; see PF 16; OC III.473. 8. Bloom chooses to translate “Des Voyages” as “On Travel”; but to reflect the original, I shall refer to the plural; compare É 453 to PF 16; OC IV.826, III.473. 9. References to “Jean-Jacques” identify the utterances of the tutor in Émile or are meant to represent the tutor’s point of view as based on utterances identified as his. For interpretive reasons, I distinguish Jean-Jacques from the historical person and political writer Rousseau. Insofar as we can interpret them, the compositional and representational choices that the author Rousseau makes are distinct from how the tutor-figure Jean-Jacques is given to act or what he is made to say. 10. Rousseau was familiar with a truncated version of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, in French translation published in Holland in 1691. Quite unlike the seventeenth-century English editions, as Peter Laslett explains, “Locke’s Preface, the entire First Treatise, the opening chapter of the Second connecting it with the First, were all left out. An Advertisement was prefixed, a fair enough statement of the drift and purpose of the text”; Laslett, Introduction, Two Treatises of Government, by John Locke, rev. student ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12. Rousseau, as well as Montesquieu and Voltaire, read this originally anonymous version, entitled Du Gouvernement Civil. Laslett

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Notes to pages 119–24

speculates that Locke himself may have had a hand in the truncation. Further references will be to Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, cited internally by section. 11. Cf. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–3. 12. Ian Rutherford, “Theoria and Darśan: Pilgrimage and Vision in Greece and India,” Classical Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2000): 133–46; Clarence P. Bill, “Notes on the Greek qewrov~ and qewria,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 32 (1901): 196–97. 13. Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 2. 14. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), chaps. 1–3; Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, by Talal Asad et al. (Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009), 64–100. 15. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), IV.76–77; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 1:101–4. 16. Herodotus, Histories IV.76. 17. Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chaps. 3–5. 18. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 2. 19. Clifford, Routes, 36. 20. On Rousseau as striving for a more “genuine, moral cosmopolitanism,” see Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 229. I differ in my interpretation from Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), chap. 2; see also Jason Neidleman, who surveys the positions on Rousseau’s “anti-cosmopolitanism” in “Rousseau’s Rediscovered Communion des Coeurs: Cosmopolitanism in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” Political Studies 60, no. 1 (2012): 76–94. 21. Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1997): 6. I have modified Nussbaum’s quotation of Seneca to match that of Hierocles, in The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. and trans. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), doc. 67K. It seems to me that Nussbaum distorts the place, function, and

Notes to pages 124–35

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effects of benevolence in Stoic cosmopolitan concentrism by interpreting it too much within a liberal-internationalist frame. 22. Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 2, VI.63; see Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 5; “Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 176–206; Francis Edward Devine, “Stoicism on the Best Regime,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 3 (1973): 323–36. 23. Hierocles, Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. Long and Sedley, doc. 57G. 24. Diderot, “Cosmopolitain, ou Cosmopolite,” Encyclopédie 4:297. 25. Cicero, On Duties, trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.53. On Montesquieu, see Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 142–43. 26. Rousseau’s assessment on travelers as liars is not entirely heterodox: cf. Le Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Voyageur (Hist. particul. des pays),” Encyclopédie 17:477. 27. Distrust of traveler-writers is thus consonant with Rousseau’s devaluation of writing in favor of speech; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 28. In contrast, see Helena Rosenblatt, “Rousseau, the Anticosmopolitan?” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 59–67, esp. 65–66. 29. See the discussion of these issues (and this section of Émile) in Matthew W. Maguire, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), chap. 3. Maguire takes note of Rousseau’s frequent invocation of chimères, which appear as well in Julie. However, Maguire does not read them in reference to Lucretius or Hellenistic philosophy (as scientifically and materially impossible creatures) but instead treats them as fabulations in general. Likewise, Maguire offers no sustained contextualization of Rousseau’s suspicion of imagination as a unique intervention in the development of early modern sensational psychology. 30. E.g., Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, in Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. and trans. Long and Sedley, vol. 1, doc. 21B; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura), trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1994), 6:20–25. 31. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 5:890–95. 32. Ibid., 3:1068, 3:1054–57. 33. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” Essays, trans. George B. Ives (New York: Heritage Press, 1946), 282. 34. Seneca, Epistle LIV, Epistles 1–65, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 365.

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Notes to pages 135–43

35. Galen, On Hippocrates’ and Plato’s Doctrines, in Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Long and Sedley, doc. 65J. 36. A. A. Long, “The Stoic Concept of Evil,” Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 73 (October 1968): 337, 341. 37. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.i.2; see Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Room Enough: America, Natural Liberty, and Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 3 (August 2007): 766. 38. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xiv.16. The image of the internal eye comes from Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 144. 39. Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 200. 40. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 421–22 (emphases added). Victor Gourevitch claims that “Rousseau illustrates this morale sensitive in all his works”; “The Religious Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 243n76. David Lay Williams points out the resonance of this passage with Montesquieu’s account of climatic environmental influences in “Political Ontology and Institutional Design in Montesquieu and Rousseau,” American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 2 (April 2010): 525–42. 41. Cf. David W. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 49, 50, 64n. 42. From Seneca, On Anger: “We are sick with evils that can be cured; and nature, having brought us forth sound, itself helps us if we wish to be improved” (É 31, 481n2; OC IV.239); see Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 189. 43. Seneca, Letter VII, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 2004), 42–43. 44. Ibid., 41. 45. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor from Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 93. 46. In contrast, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), who finds no autonomy proper before Kant. 47. Jean-Jacques is referring to the similarity of relational structure between himself and Émile and between Mentor and Telemachus in François de Fénelon’s Télémaque (1699). Patrick J. Deneen has explored the relationship in The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), chap. 3. Ultimately, Jean-Jacques’s method re-

Notes to pages 143–53

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capitulates Mentor’s: Alfred Adler, “Fénelon’s Télémaque: Intention and Effect,” Studies in Philology 55 (1958): 591–602; Filisha Campbell Camara, “From the ‘Divine’ to the ‘Diabolical’: Mentor in the 18th Century,” in Actes de Baton Rouge, ed. Selma A. Zebouni (Paris et al.: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature and Biblio 17, 1986), 395–404. 48. Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, 86, emphasis added. 49. Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” Essays, 224. 50. Locke, letter to Edward Clarke of 6 February 1688, in The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 383. 51. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), lecture 9; “What Is Critique?” trans. Lysa Hochroth, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1997), 23–82, esp. 28–29. 52. Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 53. “Novalis’s definition according to which all philosophy is homesickness holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost original state, but homeland, and nature itself, are pictured as something that have had first to be wrested from myth”; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1946; repr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 61. 54. Cf. Van den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, 93. 55. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 90. 56. David Sedley, “The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius,” Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1991): 50. 57. Gillian Weiss, “Barbary Captivity and the French Idea of Freedom,” French Historical Studies 28, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 231–64. 58. Ellen G. Friedman, “Christian Captives at ‘Hard Labor’ in Algiers, 16th–18th Centuries,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 13, no. 4 (1980): 618. Friedman notes, “while cruelty toward captives undoubtedly did occur . . . a conscious effort was made by the Algerians to keep their slaves alive and healthy” (618). 59. G. W. Smith, “Slavery, Contentment, and Social Freedom,” Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 108 (July 1977): 246, emphasis added. 60. For similar issues in Rousseau, see Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance; cf. Sarah Kofman, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” trans. Mara Dukats, in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 229–44. On the vexed history

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Notes to pages 153–61

of issues of liberal consent, see Don Herzog, Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 61. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. Steven Tracy Byington, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143. 62. Ibid., 151. 63. Ibid., 143. 64. On terror’s centrality to the system of slavery, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–112. 65. For similar issues in the American context, see François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March 2003): 1295–1330. 66. “It is not by accident that Camus opens his great work, The Rebel, by citing the slave rebel as the archetypal existential rebel”; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 204; see Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage International, 1956), 23–25.

4. nativism 1. See Christopher Brooke, “Rousseau’s Second Discourse: Between Epicureanism and Stoicism,” in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43–57. 2. On individualist autarky in Kant’s moral philosophy, see Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Theory and Practice of Autonomy,” Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2003): 90–91; see also David Miller, “ ‘Autonomous’ v. ‘Autarchic’ Persons,” review of Stanley I. Benn’s A Theory of Freedom in the journal Government and Opposition 24 (1989): 255–58; Raphael Woolf, “Pleasure and Desire,” in Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. James Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 158–64. 3. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 109. A classic general account of small communities in Rousseau is Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chap. 1; see also Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Rousseau the Pessimistic Evolutionist,” Yale French Studies 28 (1961): 83–96. 4. Bertil Fridén, Rousseau’s Economic Philosophy: Beyond the Market of Innocents (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998). 5. See Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 1;

Notes to pages 161–69

305

Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), chap. 1; cf. Cicero, On Duties, trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), e.g., II.1–5, III.1–3. 6. See Pierre Burgelin, Introduction to Émile et Sophie, OC IV.clxiii–clxv. 7. Émile may thus qualify as a Robinsonade in Marx’s sense, inviting again a strong charge of individualism against Hellenistic ethics; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 83–85. 8. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage–Random House, 1986), 3:85. 9. Denis Diderot, Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, in Political Writings, ed. and trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 31–75; “Compte rendu du Voyage autour du monde,” Oeuvres complètes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann et al. (Paris: Editions Hermann, 1975–1995), 12:509–19; see also Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Of Hobbes and Hospitality in Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville,” Polity 37, no. 2 (April 2005): 167–92. 10. Fiona Watson et al., Disinherited: Indians in Brazil (London: Survival International, 2002), 40. 11. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), I.2. 12. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 205. On Rousseau’s Hobbesianism more generally, see ibid., chap. 7; Grace G. Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), chap. 1; Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 100–13. 13. Cf. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 256–57. 14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, rev. student ed. (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88–89; cf. SW 172; OC III.1902: “it is possible to interrupt and to disturb peace in various ways without going as far as war.” 15. Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans. and ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–4. 16. Compare SD 183–86; OC III.188–92; and Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 69. Pace the Freud/Rousseau comparison in Laurence D. Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 79–80.

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Notes to pages 170–80

17. Pierre Hassner, “Rousseau and the Theory and Practice of International Relations,” The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 204. 18. See Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 229, 284–306. 19. See Klausen, “Of Hobbes and Hospitality.” 20. Diderot, “Cosmopolitain, ou Cosmopolite,” Encyclopédie 4:297. 21. Molière, The Misanthrope I.i, as quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 44n7. 22. See Chapter 3 of this volume. 23. See Cassirer, Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 101–5. 24. See A. A. Long and David N. Sedley, commentary to sec. 22, in The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. and trans. Long and Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:135. By emphasizing historical and local specificity in regard to “utility” I mean to distinguish Rousseau and Epicurean social thought from the zealous universalism of Benthamite and early Millian utilitarianism. 25. Cf. Matthew W. Maguire, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 81: “In Rousseau’s political writings . . . , imagination as a generative faculty of collective accord through opinion is to be preferred to imagination as a faculty of individuating desire.” I hesitate, however, at the invocation of “opinion” in regard to Rousseauian group formation. 26. But cf. Cooper, “Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and ‘The Desire to Extend Our Being,’ ” American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (2004): 105–19. 27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Virtue a Hero Most Needs,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 305, trans. emended; cf. OC II.1262. 28. See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1978), 279–98. 29. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 75. 30. For an account that focuses on the importance of law (rather than mores) in small states, see Ethan Putterman, Rousseau, Law, and the Sovereignty of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 5. 31. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1257a5–18.

Notes to pages 181–87

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32. Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws XX.23. 33. Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1252b. 34. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 349. The immediate context for Pocock’s remark is Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). 35. Foucault, Care of the Self, 41. 36. James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670– 1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 263. 37. Foucault, Care of the Self, 82. 38. Cf. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63. 39. See Long and Sedley, commentary to sect. 66, Hellenistic Philosophers, esp. page 1:427: “sensitivity to human fallibility, prompted perhaps by the success Stoicism was now enjoying in its diffusion beyond the Greek world, is a notable feature of Stoics writing under the Roman Empire”; cf. Foucault, Care of the Self, 39–68. 40. Foucault, Care of the Self, 41. 41. Brooke describes “Rousseau’s modified Stoic project” in potentially collective terms as one that “explor[es] the conditions under which not only individuals but also whole populations might live together in freedom, understood as a certain kind of autonomy, self-mastery, or lack of dependence on the wills of others”; Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 190. 42. Brooke, “Rousseau’s Second Discourse,” 50–51. 43. Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 200–1. 44. Aristotle, Politics III.3. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Rousseau’s distinction between aggregations and associations. 45. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), chap. 6. 46. Waltz, Man, the State and War, 167, 173; Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 29–31; cf. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 120. 47. Exemplary in this regard is Julien Offray de la Mettrie, “Machine Man,” Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a study of the mechanical and organic body in the Enlightenment, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). A

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Notes to pages 187–92

helpful overview is Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 75–97. 48. Here I follow Victor Gourevitch’s translation of Book I, Chapter 2, of GM, as published in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 155. 49. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 154; cf. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 25–26. I diverge from Denise Schaeffer, “The Utility of Ink: Rousseau and Robinson Crusoe,” Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 121–46; Jennifer Einspahr, “The Beginning that Never Was: Mediation and Freedom in Rousseau’s Political Thought,” Review of Politics 72, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 437–61. 50. Seneca, Epistle XC, in Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 429 (emphases added), 431. 51. Ibid., 423. 52. Ibid., 397, 429. 53. Cf. Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500– 1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), chap. 2. I insist, in contrast to Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 68, that Rousseau does have an image of white savages, not necessarily consigned to the distant past and not accidental singularities like the feral youths he discusses; see also Pierre Saint-Amand, The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 101. 54. Cf. Epicurus, Key Doctrines 34, doc. 22A4, in Hellenistic Philosophers 1:125. 55. Ibid., 36–37, 17, doc. 22B, in Hellenistic Philosophers 1:125. 56. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura), trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1994), V.1024–25. 57. E.g., Epicurus, Letter to Monoeceus 122, doc. 25A; Key Doctrines 12, doc. 25B2; Vatican Sayings 27, doc. 25I1; all in Hellenistic Philosophers 1:154–55, 156; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe V.1451. 58. Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 240–42, 274; Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 184–85; Eric Baker, “Lucretius in the European Enlightenment,” in Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 281–82. 59. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles, 66–92, 409; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe II.22–23.

Notes to pages 192–96

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60. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles, 66–92, 409. 61. See Saint-Amand, Laws of Hostility, 99–103; Nicholas Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005), chap. 6; Bronisław Baczko, Lumières de l’utopie (Paris: Éditions Payot, 2001), chap. 2. For more comprehensive analysis of Rousseau’s relationship to Geneva, see Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On his reception by Swiss thinkers, see Béla Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Humankind (Basel: Schwabe, 2006). 62. However, compare Rousseau’s more critical attitude in “History of the Government of Geneva,” trans. Christopher Kelly, in Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001), 9:118; OC V.517: “The Genevans, as if imprisoned in their walls, depended on their neighbors for their subsistence; these neighbors, being precisely the ones who had undertaken to enslave them, were not inclined to facilitate the extraction of commodities for them. . . . It is not possible for Geneva ever to be truly free because it cannot be self-sufficient. . . .” 63. Jean le Ronde d’Alembert, “Geneva,” quoted in Ld’A, 4; OC V.4. 64. See Rousseau, letter to Moultou, 6 April 1770, quoted in de Jouvenel, “Rousseau the Pessimistic Evolutionist,” 87. 65. Shklar, Men and Citizens, chap. 1; but cf. Christopher Kelly, “Rousseau and the Case against (and for) the Arts,” in Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Orwin and Tarcov, 20–44. 66. Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 25. 67. Cf. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles, 66–92, 409. 68. Zev M. Trachtenberg, Making Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), chap. 5. 69. Cf. Rousseau’s La Découverte du nouveau monde, OC II.811–41. 70. For one view on Rousseau’s xenophobia, see Todorov, Frail Happiness, 26. For a contrasting view of Rousseau’s desire for the foreign, see Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18–25. 71. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), chap. 1; Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary, new ed. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2002), 59–64, 90–94; Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 3; Richard Boyd, “Pity’s Pathologies Portrayed: Rousseau and the Limits of Democratic Compassion,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (August 2004): 519–46.

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Notes to pages 197–203

72. Seneca is discussing gladiatorial contests specifically: Letter VII, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 2004), 41. 73. The passage begins, “It is a question of causing the people to adopt these practices, to love the way of life we want to give them . . .” (CPC 300; OC III.918). On the extent of this motif of self-absorption qua (erotic) love of self and autarky in Rousseau, see Derrida’s analysis of “auto-affection” in Of Grammatology, 154: “What is touching is touched, auto-affection gives itself as pure autarchy.” 74. While I am not fully convinced by Wolin’s comparison between Rousseau and Émile Durkheim, I detect some resonance on this specific point; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 332–34; Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1915); see also Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chap. 5. 75. Cf. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, doc. 21B, in Hellenistic Philosophers 1:113–14. 76. Rousseau continues, “. . . and the most flourishing is the one others can least do without” (PF 42; OC III.512). For another view on Rousseau’s autarky and a commentary on this passage, see de Man, Allegories of Reading, 253–55. 77. See Waltz, Man, the State and War, 170. 78. Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 202. 79. As, for example, in his response to Diderot’s notion of a general will applicable to all humanity (GM 78; OC III.284); see Diderot, “Droit naturel,” in Political Writings, ed. and trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17–21. But cf. Rousseau’s use of the term “general will” at PE 7; OC III.245. On how “general will” is used differently by each, see Robert Wokler, “The Influence of Diderot on the Political Theory of Rousseau: Two Aspects of a Relationship,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1975): 55–111; Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 202–11. I differ firmly from Todorov, who wants to claim universalist thinking for Rousseau; see Frail Happiness, 28; On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), in passing. 80. Epicurus, Key Doctrines, 36–37, doc. 22B1–2, in Hellenistic Philosophers 1:125. 81. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles, 66–92, 429; cf. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” Essays, trans. George B. Ives (New York: Heritage Press, 1946), 224. 82. Epicurus allowed for static (or katastematic) and kinetic modalities of pleasure, and many of his followers adopted and elaborated this distinction; see Long’s and Sedley’s commentary in Hellenistic Philosophers 1:123.

Notes to pages 204–9

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5. fugitive freedom 1. Robert Wokler, “Rousseau’s Reading of the Book of Genesis and the Theology of Commercial Society,” Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 1 (2006): 86. 2. Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in EighteenthCentury French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 239–41; David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 98–102; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 199; Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 300–17; see also Sunil M. Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1–66, 177–90. Of course, the classic account of how Toussaint L’Ouverture assumed the role of the prophesied Black Spartacus is C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989); see the excerpt of Denis Diderot’s contribution to Book XI, Chapter 24, of Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes, in Oeuvres: Politiques, by Diderot, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), 738–43. This excerpt does not, however, reproduce the exact “Spartacus” passage. 3. Cf. the comment criticizing constitutional federation at III.13; the comment in praise of a fast circulation of public goods at III.8; and the suggestion that patriotic compression is lost when a people embraces political representation from being dissipated by conquest, commerce, etc., at III.15. Note, moreover, that Rousseau repeats the repose versus freedom theme in III.4: “. . . a virtuous Palatine said in the Diet of Poland: ‘I prefer a perilous freedom to quiet servitude’ ”; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, SC III.4, 92; OC III.405. 4. Rousseau, Social Contract, SC II.10, 75; OC III.388: “for all peoples have a kind of centrifugal force by which they constantly act against one another and tend to enlarge themselves at their neighbors’ expense, like Descartes’s vortices. Thus the weak are in danger of being swallowed up before long, and none can preserve itself except by establishing a kind of equilibrium with all the others, which would more or less equalize the pressure all around.” Even when Rousseau considers a solution to the problem of the weak state in a hostile environment, it is as if in the spirit of absurdity, for his own Hobbesian premises and his pessimism about the (nearly) insuperable quality of interested amourpropre would make this equilibrium of well-balanced states’ well-balancing one another highly improbable. Such a state of affairs would require the achievement of autarky by all in unison. A different solution altogether must be found, then—an alternative equilibrium. 5. See Marc F. Plattner, “Rousseau and the Origins of Nationalism,” and H. D. Forbes, “Rousseau, Ethnicity, and Difference,” in The Legacy of Rous-

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Notes to pages 209–11

seau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 183–99, and 220–45, respectively; Kennedy F. Roche, Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic (London: Methuen, 1974), chap. 14. 6. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7. Bernard Knox, Introduction, Homer’s Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1996), 3–64; David J. Bederman, International Law in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 4; cf. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), VI.255–85. 8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 153. 9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush et al. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990), 1:213; OC I.934. 10. Ibid.; cf. GP 191; OC III.968: “I cannot repeat often enough that good education has to be negative.” 11. Kofman identifies a slide in Rousseau’s attitude toward women “from an insistence on women’s reticence to a demand for female seclusion, from feminine reserve to the confinement of the feminine on a reservation”; Sarah Kofman, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” trans. Mara Dukats, in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 237. 12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Monique Layton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 2:35. 13. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Penguin, 1976), 513. 14. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 113. 15. Cf. Clifford, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 121; George E. Marcus, “Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System,” in Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 165n1. 16. See Virginia R. Dominguez’s contribution to the “Of Other Peoples” panel, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, 131–37; and Clifford, Dominguez, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, et al., “Discussion,” Ibid., 142–50.

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17. Seneca, Epistle XC, Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 429; cf. Epistle, XVIII, “On Festivals and Fasting,” Epistles 1–65, trans. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 117–19: Michel Foucault discusses this passage in The Care of the Self, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (1984; repr. New York: Vintage–Random House, 1986), 3:60. 18. Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no trans. (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 574; OC I.554. 19. Edward D. Seeber, “Oronooko in France in the XVIIIth Century,” PMLA 51, no. 4 (December 1936): 955; see also Seeber’s Anti-Slavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1937); cf. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, chap. 1. 20. Rousseau, Confessions, 575; OC I.555; cf. Seeber, “Oroonoko in France,” 956n12. I follow Seeber’s assessment that Rousseau was referring to the French translation, not the English play or Behn’s work. 21. There may be some historical inconsistency to Zerilli’s reading of the image. The colonial Dutch whose finery the Hottentot is renouncing already bear the marks of an already prior renunciation by largely Protestant burghers of Catholic Spanish absolutist court dress. For the image to do fully the kind of work that Zerilli’s reading would require, the European men would need to be dressed in Louis Quatorze court finery or the Hapsburg analogue; see Linda Zerilli, “ ‘Une Maitresse Imperieuse’: Woman in Rousseau’s Semiotic Republic,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lange, 277–314; esp. 280–81. 22. See Nicholas Hudson, “ ‘Hottentots’ and the Evolution of European Racism,” Journal of European Studies 34, no. 4 (2004): 308–32; J. M. Coetzee, “Idleness in South Africa,” in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Klausen, “Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism,” Political Theory 38, no. 3 (June 2010): 394–423. 23. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (San Diego: Harvest–Harcourt Brace, 1973), 191–97; see also Klausen, “Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism.” 24. Voltaire, Candide, trans. anon. (New York: Dover, 1991), 48, emphasis added. For a reading of this particular image, a description of the circumstances of its production and distribution, and a helpful analysis of representations of dismemberment of and violence toward black bodies, see Mary L. Bellhouse, “Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers: Representing Black Men in EighteenthCentury French Visual Culture,” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (December 2006): 741–84.

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Notes to pages 225–28

25. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (1971; repr. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 139. 26. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 26–52. 27. Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 56. 28. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 57, 82–84; E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959). 29. Cf. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. Steven Tracy Byington, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 30. Leslie F. Manigat, “The Relationship between Marronage and Slave Revolts and Revolution in St. Domingue-Haiti,” in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 420–38. 31. Richard Price, Introduction: “Maroons and Their Communities,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Price, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–2. 32. Although a scholarly consensus has developed around the idea that the “general will” as it appears in “Political Economy” differs from its elaboration in Of the Social Contract, I am in agreement with G. D. H. Cole’s claim that there is substantive continuity, and therefore significant similarity, between the two; see Cole’s 1955 Introduction to The Social Contract and Discourses, by Rousseau (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), xxxiii. The evolution of Rousseau’s conception is explained as a movement away from an earlier affinity with Diderot in, for example, Wokler, “The Influence of Diderot on the Political Theory of Rousseau: Two Aspects of a Relationship,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1975): 55–111. See generally Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 33. Even as he criticizes Grotius on the very question of political domination and the collective slavery of a people, Rousseau may have absorbed Grotius’s deep connection between libertas and potestas. After all, Rousseau recalls (perhaps apocryphally) that, in his youth, the books of Grotius were mingled in his father’s workshop with tools (SD 120). On liberty as potestas in Grotius, see Daniel Lee, “Popular Liberty, Princely Government, and the Roman Law in Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no. 3 (July 2011): 376–79. 34. Cf. Sheldon S. Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cor-

Notes to pages 228–40

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nell University Press, 1994), 57; “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 39, 41. 35. This is “mutual help” grounded in legitimate interdependence; see Chapter 1. 36. For one view on the matter of the collective distribution of property in Rousseau, see Jeremy Waldron, “The Advantages and Difficulties of the Humean Theory of Property,” Social Philosophy and Policy 11, no. 2 (1994): 85–123. For a sensitive and critical discussion of Waldron, see Burke Hendrix, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), chap. 3. 37. Cf. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley, with Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1987). 38. Cf. Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4, 9. 39. Cf. Michel Foucault’s comment on the kind of “war analysis” Boulainvilliers forged at the beginning of the eighteenth century: “we have gone from a history that established right by telling the story of wars to a history that continues the war by deciphering the war and the struggle that are going on within all the institutions of right and peace”; Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 171. 40. Again, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–112. 41. Rousseau, “Fragment on Freedom,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush et al. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 4:12. 42. See Albert O. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History,” World Politics 45, no. 2 (January 1993): 173–202. 43. Cf. James C. Scott, Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), chap. 2. 44. Stirner, Ego and Its Own, 151. 45. Ibid., 142. 46. Ibid., 144. 47. Ibid., 142. 48. Ibid., 148. 49. Ibid., 148, 150. 50. Banu Bargu, “Max Stirner, Postanarchy avant la lettre,” in How Not to Be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left, ed. Jimmy

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Notes to pages 240–44

Casas Klausen and James Martel (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2011), 114–18. Bargu seems to be gesturing to Paolo Virno’s and other recent Italian theorists’ deployments of the concept of exodus; see esp. Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 189–212. I distinguish my own position on exodus explicitly from recent Italian theory in the Afterword. 51. Arguably, Stirner need not be interpreted strictly as individualist, especially since he allows that egoists coordinate their activities in “unions” occasionally; see Stirner, Ego and Its Own, 160–61, 189–211, 271–78. 52. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the State,” World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978): 90–94. 53. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Vintage: New York, 1978), 96. 54. On a Foucaultian view, resistance would be integral to corporate integrity itself. I will return to this point when I refract fugitive politics into Rousseau’s conception of the general will. 55. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1:96. 56. Foucault, “Power and Strategies,” in Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 142. 57. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 168; cf. Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” in Maroon Societies, ed. Price, 276; Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), xliii–lxii. 58. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 142. On the French Caribbean more generally, see Gabriel Debien, “Marronnage in the French Caribbean,” in Maroon Societies, ed. Price, 107–34. 59. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 193–98. 60. My phrasing is an homage to Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Guha criticizes social histories such as E. J. Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels—and I would include Eugene Genovese’s From Rebellion to Revolution too—that belittle rebellions, revolts, or insurgencies that do not follow a central-party model of direction or goal-orientation. 61. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 52. 62. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 142:

Notes to pages 244–47

Moluron! Hé! Moluron! Hé! C’est pas ‘jordi mo dans moune. Si yé fait ben avec moin, mo resté. Si yé fait mo mal, m’a-chap-pé.

317

Moluron! Hé! Moluron! Hé! It’s not today I’m in the world. If you treat me well, I’ll stay. If you treat me bad, I’ll escape.

Moluron was a Louisiana Afro-Creole folk hero, “a nègre maon . . . who feared nothing.” 63. Manigat, “Relationship between Marronage and Slave Revolts and Revolution,” 435; cf. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 203; Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 279; for related questions in the American context, Steve Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), chaps. 1–3; and especially his consideration of fugitive slave enclaves in the American North as maroon communities in “Slaves at Large: The Emancipation Process and the Terrain of African American Politics,” in The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), chap. 1. On the resistance at the heart of “the infrapolitics of subordinate groups,” see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 7. 64. On the notion of “broadcasting” power as a requirement of successful statehood, see Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 65. Price, “Introduction,” in Maroon Societies, 5. Patterson, too, in his concluding analysis of the First Maroon War in Jamaica, comes to a general assessment that a maroon movement will only succeed “[w]here geographical conditions favor guerrilla warfare”; Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 288. 66. Manigat, “Relationship between Marronage and Slave Revolts and Revolution,” 422. 67. David Lowenthal, “Free Colored West Indians: A Racial Dilemma,” Racism in the Eighteenth Century, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 3:335–53, 336; see also Yvan Debbasch, “Le Maniel: Further Notes,” in Maroon Societies, ed. Price, 143–48; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 51. My interpretation draws on Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003). 68. Erin Skye Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Counterculture,” Cultural Critique 59 (2005): 41. 69. See Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 273.

318

Notes to pages 247–50

70. Debbasch, “Le Maniel,” 143–45. The border between Saint-Domingue and Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic) was considered by French colonial authorities a “chronically open wound” that maroons learned to exploit in their own interest. 71. Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 42. 72. Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 73. E. J. Hobsbawm, “Escaped Slaves of the Forest,” review of Alabi’s World, by Richard Price, New York Review of Books 37, no. 19 (6 December 1990), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3420, accessed 17 October 2011. 74. “Thus, as it is traditionally invoked, community offers us a romance in place of complex and contentious social relations. However, to reify the social relations of enslavement via the romance of community is to fail to recognize both the difficulty and the accomplishment of collectivity in the context of domination and terror”: Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 60; more generally, see ibid., 61–70. 75. Hahn, “Slaves at Large,” 43–44. 76. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chap. 1. 77. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (n.p.: Basic Books, 1985), 10–11. 78. Ibid., 149. 79. Ibid., 12. 80. Occasionally but not exhaustively, I refer to Juifs as a reminder that I am taking the standpoint of Rousseau’s representation of Jewish flight. I retain the French word to underline the fact that this is a complex theoretical construction specific to Rousseau rather than a descriptive representation of Jewish history. He does not consistently capitalize Juifs, but I shall do so. 81. For Rousseau’s Juifs, see Jonathan D. Marks, “Rousseau’s Use of the Jewish Example,” Review of Politics 72, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 463–81; Bronisław Baczko, “Moïse, législateur . . . ,” in Reappraisals of Rousseau: Studies in Honour of R. A. Leigh, ed. Simon Harvey et al. (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 111–30; Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 54–56. Although it combines themes of dismemberment and Jewish peoplehood, I refrain from discussing Rousseau’s “Le Lévite d’Éphraïm” (OC II.1205–23) here; it depicts the violent friction within a sedentary Jewish nation long established in its community and disunity rather than a fugitive people newly forming. I hope to treat the representation of sexual hospitality in “Lévite” in a separate work at a later date. For a recent examination of “Lévite” in terms of Jewish nationality, see Mira Morgenstern, “Strangeness, Violence, and the Establishment of

Notes to pages 250–62

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Nationhood in Rousseau,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 359–81. 82. Walzer insists, “They were not victims of the market but of the state, the absolute monarchy of the pharaohs.” The distinction between market and state is helpful, but this does not make them any less a collective chattel: had Pharaoh wanted money and found a buyer, the Jews would have been sold en masse; see Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 30. 83. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18–32; Baczko, “Moïse, législateur. . . .” 84. Cf. Michael Brenner, A Short History of the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), chap. 1; Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 693–725; Harry Berger Jr., “The Lie of the Land: The Text beyond Canaan,” Representations 25 (Winter 1989): 119–38. 85. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes, Part 1, “On the New Idol” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43–45 (quote at 43); cf. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche contra Rousseau: Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Ansell-Pearson does not, however, compare Rousseau and Nietzsche specifically with regard to this theme or section of Zarathustra. 86. Stephen Condit, Anarchist Studies: Two Inquiries into the Ideal and Material Purposes of Philosophical Anarchism (Joensuu: Joensuun yliopiston keskusmonistamo, 1987), 131–36; Franz Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), 136–37. 87. Cf. Hendrix, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination, chap. 7, for an analysis of the possibilities for community separation and establishment of internal enclaves (from a sedentarist perspective). 88. For one view on the different approaches to variability in Rousseau and Montesquieu, see David Lay Williams, “Political Ontology and Institutional Design in Montesquieu and Rousseau,” American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 2 (April 2010): 525–42. 89. Rousseau, “Fragment on Freedom,” 12. 90. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), fragments 401, 406; pp. 90, 91–92. On the argument of gradual secularization from Malebranche and Pascal through Montesquieu to Rousseau, see Riley, General Will before Rousseau. 91. E.g., among others, Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Melissa Schwartzberg, “Voting the General Will: Rousseau on Decision Rules,” Political Theory 36, no. 3 (June 2008): 406–9; Zev M. Trachtenberg, Making

320

Notes to pages 262–71

Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993); W. G. Runciman and Amartya K. Sen, “Games, Justice and the General Will,” Mind 74 (October 1965): 554–62; Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963); see also Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chap. 6. 92. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 13; Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, 213; OC I.934. I discuss this passage earlier in this chapter, in “Reservation Politics.”

afterword 1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 618. Appiah extends these arguments in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006). 2. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” 629. 3. Ibid., 625. Appiah’s position shares features with Jeremy Waldron’s refinement of his own earlier position on cosmopolitanism. In his later restatement Waldron lends cosmopolitans a certain rootedness in communities’ traditions while still committing them to liberal principles in a common legal framework; see Waldron’s “Teaching Cosmopolitan Right,” in Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, ed. Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23–55; and “What Is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 227–43; cf. his earlier position in “Minorities Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (1992): 751–92. 4. If nascent society does imply the initiation of larger worlds, then this may add to the background conditions for “things [having] by then reached a point where they could not continue as they were”; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, SD 161; OC III.164; see Chapter 1 of this volume. 5. E.g., James F. Weiner, “Diaspora, Materialism, Tradition: Anthropological Issues in the Recent High Court Appeal of the Yorta Yorta,” Land, Rights, Law: Issues of Native Title 2, no.18 (October 2002): 1–12; series editor Jessica Weir. 6. Cf. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 319–34. 7. The locus classicus of the distinction between constative and performative is J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), lecture 1.

Notes to pages 271–75

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8. Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 (January–February 2008): 38–39. 9. Badiou, “The Democratic Emblem,” trans. William McCuaig, in Democracy in What State? by Giorgio Agamben et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 10–11; “Communist Hypothesis,” 38; cf. The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2010). chaps. 2, 4. 10. Badiou, “Democratic Emblem,” 14. 11. Badiou, ibid., 15; “Communist Hypothesis,” 39. 12. Badiou, “Communist Hypothesis,” 35. 13. In addition to the Badiou texts already cited, I am thinking specifically of Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006), esp. “Democracy, Republic, Representation,” 51–70; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 205–413; Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 101–18. 14. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 62. 15. Ibid., 55, 72. This is not to say that this radically political tendency succeeds in expressing itself fully. For Rancière, politics proper is an unlikely event. Nevertheless, I insist that, from the standpoint of fugitive freedom, the political tendency toward polemical universalism itself should be repudiated. 16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 152. 17. Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 197; see also Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (Los Angeles: Semiotexte(e), 2004), 66–71. 18. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 152. 19. Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” 201. 20. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 166. 21. Badiou, “Democratic Emblem,” 14; in contrast, see Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” 202; see Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 168–69. 22. Choosing Stoicism above Epicureanism, universality above multiple generalities, puts in other terms Badiou’s insistence on a materialist dialectic above a democratic materialism in his Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 1–10, 20–27. The latter for him promotes diffusion and thus lacks the rigorous, focal logic of the former. 23. Badiou criticizes the democratic presuppositions of plurality and diversity in Logics of Worlds (2): “the contemporary consensus, in recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. Hence, the assimilation of humanity to animality culminates in the identification of the human animal

322

Notes to pages 275–77

with the diversity of its sub-species and the democratic rights that inhere in this diversity”; cf. Badiou, Communist Hypothesis, 229–37. 24. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63. 25. Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 29–58. His project of recovering a political formation out from underneath the dominant representations that distort it shares features with Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 333: “the historical phenomenon of insurgency meets the eye for the first time as an image framed in the prose, hence the outlook, of counter-insurgency—an image caught in a distorting mirror. However, the distortion has a logic to it”; see also James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 26. Wolin began to articulate these questions long before he placed “fugitive” next to “democracy.” It is discernible in the passage on Rousseau’s, Plato’s, and Aristotle’s perceived parochialism cited above in Politics and Vision, and it is solidly set forth in Wolin’s “The People’s Two Bodies,” democracy 1, no. 1 (January 1980): 9–24; see Nicholas Xenos, “Momentary Democracy,” in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 25–38. 27. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 332. 28. Ibid., 120. 29. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 37 (quoted), 43, 56. 30. Ibid., 56; Politics and Vision, 603. 31. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 42. 32. Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy, and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 10: “the anarchy I am interested in is not far from the political association which Rousseau’s ‘social contract’ was to found. Only in a participatory political order of this kind do individuals owe political obligations and they owe them not to a state but to each other.” 33. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 604. 34. Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” Representations 92 (Fall 2005): 3. 35. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 44. 36. Ibid., 43.

Notes to pages 277–80

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37. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 225. 38. James Clifford, “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 209; on Yup’ik circulation, see 207–9; see also Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 244–78. 39. François Bondy, “The Black Rousseau,” review of The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, New York Review of Books 6, no. 5 (31 March 1966): 26–27; see also C. L. R. James, “Rousseau and the Idea of the General Will,” in You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009), 110, 116; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality in the Human Sciences,” and Jane Anna Gordon, “Of Legitimation and the General Will: Creolizing Rousseau through Frantz Fanon,” in “Creolizing Rousseau,” special issue, CLR James Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 113–34, 17–53 (respectively); and Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 40. To take only the case of Australian Aboriginal communities since the late nineteenth century, see Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); “Indigenous Politics in Late Liberalism,” in Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, ed. Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 17–31; Tess Lea, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008). 41. Quoted in Michael Rogin, “Mon Pays” (review essay), London Review of Books 23, no. 4 (22 February 2001): 21. 42. Rogin, “Mon Pays,” 21. For an analysis of the “myth of color-blind France” as “complex and flawed,” see Tylor Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), xiii and in passing. 43. Stovall, Paris Noir, xv. 44. Anthea Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (October 2003): 440. 45. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 37. 46. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 101. 47. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 79–80, 95. 48. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Stovall, Paris Noir; Sieg-

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Notes to pages 280–83

linde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For an extremely critical view, see Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Rogin, “Mon Pays” (esp. 22), approaches some of Archer-Straw’s conclusions in Negrophilia skeptically. For a survey of recent positions, see Michelle Smith’s review essay, “Blackening Europe / Europeanising Blackness: Theorising the Black Presence in Europe,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 3 (August 2006): 423–39. 49. Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora,” 437. 50. Rogin, “Mon Pays,” 21. 51. Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 122. 52. Elizabeth Alexander, “The Venus Hottentot,” The Venus Hottentot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 6. 53. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 81. 54. Rogin, “Mon Pays,” 22, emphases added. 55. Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora,” 438. For the war over the significations of Baker’s body in “La Danse sauvage,” see Patrick O’Connor and Bryan Hammond, Jospehine Baker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 19–20, 35; Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), chap. 1. 56. Stovall, Paris Noir, 90. 57. Starobinski associates Rousseau’s abandonment of his children with his difficulty envisaging contingent consequences of free action; Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 231–32. 58. On Josephine Baker’s film work, see Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Fatimah Tobing Rony, Conclusion, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and for a critical view, Rogin, “Mon Pays,” 22. 59. That it is her daughter with Dar, rather than with Max, of course is not entirely certain. Nevertheless, that Dar tenderly embraces the infant suggests paternal recognition.

Index abolition of slavery, 95, 150, 206, 225, 244, 277 absolutism, 77, 183 Africa: continent of, 142; peoples of, 16, 28, 34, 44, 77, 84, 150, 190, 212, 218–21, 223, 226, 242, 257, 259, 265–66, 281, 290n19 African Americans, 2, 24, 279–82 agriculture, 180–81 Alexander the Great, 110, 176 alienation: natal, 39, 82, 107, 110; personal, 92, 125, 267; of property, 119; social, 40–41, 85, 110, 111 Americas: continents of, 1, 137, 150, 152, 155, 213, 221, 224; peoples of, 16, 23, 24, 25, 29, 77, 165, 190, 223, 226, 227, 248–50, 256–57, 259, 279–81 amour de soi-même, 17, 106, 134–35, 137–38, 165, 172–73, 182, 185, 199, 200, 230, 240, 297n48 amour-propre, 12, 17, 103, 105, 108, 174, 182, 186, 220, 247, 292n33; disinterested, 58–59, 60, 106, 137–38, 142, 185–86, 230, 240; inflamed, 60, 185; interested, 34, 58–59, 60–61, 63, 66–67, 72, 87, 89, 96–97, 106, 108, 128, 137–38, 142, 171, 175, 182, 185, 196, 234, 240, 270, 272 anarchy: international, 163, 169, 186, 247; as political position, 153, 240, 251, 255, 276, 322n32; as vicious absence of government, 164, 166, 187, 272 antidespotism, 77, 80, 223 appetite, 83, 86–87, 90, 92–93, 220

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 266–67, 277 Aristotle, 87–89, 101, 180–81, 193, 275 Asia: continent of, 174, 254, 259; peoples of, 223, 250, 257, 259, 277 association, 5, 13, 27, 38, 57, 92, 109, 162, 180, 182, 199, 202, 212, 225, 228, 230, 233, 235, 237, 240, 249, 251–53, 255, 257, 261–62, 267–68, 270, 277; versus aggregation, 7, 23, 57, 84–85, 188, 228, 231, 234–38, 242–43, 245, 246, 248, 251, 273, 279 ataraxia, 16–20, 27, 103, 108–9, 132, 138, 161, 170, 175, 186, 189, 192, 200–1, 203, 208, 254 Augustine, 137 Augustinianism, 128, 137, 185 autarky, 8–9, 17, 21–23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 58–61, 142–43, 159–63, 177–82, 185–86, 188–201, 205–8, 210–12, 247, 249, 253, 270, 277, 292n33, 311n4. See also autonomy; self-determination authenticity, 102, 159, 197, 211, 228, 280–81 autonomy, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 18–19, 21, 23, 28, 29, 71, 92–93, 98, 100, 102, 111, 116, 118, 121, 135, 143–46, 148, 149, 151–62, 170–71, 176, 182, 186, 201, 207–8, 210–12, 238, 240–42, 245–49, 267, 268, 281; zones of, 184, 259, 265. See also autarky; self-determination Baartman, Saartje, 281 Bacon, Francis, 116, 299n4 Badiou, Alain, 271–75, 282, 321n22, 321n23 Baker, Houston, Jr., 280

325

326

Index

Baker, Josephine, 30, 279–83 Bargu, Banu, 240, 315–16n50 Best, Stephen, 277 Boas, George, 9 body, 11, 18, 22, 62, 72, 94, 99–102, 115, 118, 121–22, 131, 139, 153–55, 181, 184, 191, 221–25, 241, 281, 282; exhaustibility of, 7, 42, 52–53. See also cognitivism body politic, 23, 28, 155, 161, 163, 167–68, 170, 175, 177, 187, 198, 200, 227–38, 240–43, 249, 251–52, 254, 255, 261–62, 267, 277–78, 282 Brooke, Christopher, 17, 137, 185, 201, 307n41 Buffon, Comte de, 164, 217 Camus, Albert, 157, 224, 304n66 capitalism, 29, 246, 272, 274 Caribbean: peoples of, 226, 242–49, 250, 281; region of, 2, 29, 33, 82, 213, 221, 224, 226 chains, Rousseau’s imagery of, 28, 34–35, 37–38, 42, 51–52, 68–70, 71, 74, 75, 75, 78, 80, 85, 88, 93–95, 99, 111, 213–14, 236. See also yoke change, ontological, 63, 141, 194–96, 198. See also corruption; degeneration; progress; purity chimera, 129–31, 133, 147, 169 chrematistics, 167, 180, 194, 219, 266 Christianity, 70, 78, 104, 150–51, 153, 220–21, 224, 238, 249, 251, 257–60, 276, 313n21 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 104, 125, 161 cities, 128, 193–94, 208–9, 254, 256. See also urbanity civilization, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 12, 16, 18, 25, 37, 51, 56, 69, 128, 136, 189–90, 215–17, 219–21, 223–24, 226, 258, 267, 282–83 civil religion, 207, 220, 259 Clifford, James, 21, 123, 125, 211, 277 cognitivism, 22, 96, 121, 155, 268. See also body; reason; soul commerce, 2, 78, 83, 85, 104, 127–28, 180, 182, 194–95, 197, 207. See also chrematistics communitarianism, 1, 4, 200 concentrism, cosmopolitan, 124–25, 171–74, 176, 186, 187, 300–1n21 Condillac, Abbé de, 11, 13, 148

conquest, 8–9, 21, 25, 39, 40–41, 45, 65, 67, 78, 96, 103, 105, 109–11, 117, 141–42, 162, 167, 171, 175–76, 179, 182, 186, 196, 208, 210, 242, 253–54, 259, 278 consent, 48–49, 51, 70, 71, 74, 88, 116–17, 119–23, 126, 129, 143, 146–47, 155, 176, 214 constancy, 98, 101, 103, 151, 154–55, 161–62, 184 convention, 42, 44–45, 47–50, 71, 74, 214 corresponsibility, 22, 23, 243, 256, 261, 277. See also moi commun corruption, 3, 21, 22, 69, 101, 117–18, 122, 126–28, 136–45, 159–60, 163, 191–203, 209–11, 247, 259. See also purity cosmopolitanism, 1, 5, 8–9, 23, 39, 105, 116–17, 122–23, 124–26, 128, 134, 142, 149, 162, 177, 179, 182, 185–86, 195, 200, 202, 207, 250, 261, 266–68, 298n51, 300n20, 320n3; disenchanted, 131, 133, 147; rooted, 117, 159, 267, 271; Stoic, 40, 95–96, 103, 108–11, 123–25, 163, 170–76, 300–1n21. See also concentrism, cosmopolitan countercosmopolitanism, 8–9, 23, 25, 39, 125, 130–31, 133, 147, 149, 170, 205, 250, 266–68 counterprimitivism, 3, 4, 30, 282. See also primitivism cowardice, 88–89, 101, 156–58, 214, 236 Cranston, Maurice, 28, 49, 68 creolité, 2, 244, 248, 281, 316n62 critique, 25, 77, 85, 89, 105, 111, 172, 176, 211, 257; faculty of, 118–22, 144–46 culture, 3, 22–23, 115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127–28, 141–42, 155, 197, 200, 202, 217, 217, 253, 256–57, 258–59, 261, 266, 267–68, 270, 276, 277, 278, 279–80, 282; imperialism of, 21, 80, 195–97; vitalism of, 252, 255–56, 260 deconstruction, 26, 36, 41, 50, 102 deformation: as deformity, 75, 135, 141, 149, 155–56, 158; politics of, 265, 267 degeneration, 128, 135, 195–96, 198, 211, 263. See also change, ontological; progress de Man, Paul, 30, 36 democracy, 215, 272–73, 275; fugitive, 29, 275–78, 290n11, 322n26

Index denaturing, 14, 21, 75–76, 85–87, 94, 97, 134, 138, 150, 155–56, 214 Dent, Nicholas, 60, 292n33 dependence, 97, 161, 163, 207; illegitimate, 9–11, 18, 38, 40–42, 43, 49, 51–52, 58, 61–62, 66, 74, 80, 82–83, 84–87, 89, 95, 97, 102, 111, 142, 149, 171, 176, 180–81, 186, 191–92, 207, 208, 214, 221, 224, 227, 230, 247, 258, 266, 268, 272, 275 Derrida, Jacques, 188, 209, 292n35, 310n73 desires, 15, 19, 34, 86, 91, 129–34, 136, 149, 169, 175, 188, 197, 199, 220, 223 despotism, 3, 8, 25, 28, 34, 44, 48, 69, 77, 80, 82–83, 84, 86–87, 96, 97–98, 101–3, 11, 206, 214, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227–29, 231–38, 240, 241, 242, 243, 246, 251, 260, 270, 278 diaspora, 2, 23–24, 38–39, 252, 255, 260–61, 269–70, 277, 279–80 Diderot, Denis, 104, 124–25, 163, 171, 173–74, 206 Diogenes the Cynic, 124, 176 discontinuity, 23–24, 60, 183, 189–90, 269, 270, 282; politics of, 265–67 disequilibrium, 138, 185, 187, 292n39 displacement: rhetorical, 3, 77, 80, 214, 223, 248; spatial, 2, 37, 38–41, 51, 56–57, 59, 62–66, 83, 86, 87, 111, 123, 125–26, 161, 175, 206, 248, 259; unconscious, 34 dispossession, 64–69, 74, 206, 219 distancing, 5, 228, 238, 246, 252, 265, 270, 281; cultural, 7, 9, 23, 252–54, 255, 257, 260, 279–80; geographic, 7, 254, 257, 259–60, 279–80, 282. See also fugitive freedom domination, 23, 38, 76, 80–82, 91, 101, 123, 142, 225, 227–29, 258, 259, 260, 270, 272, 274; abstract or impersonal, 28–29, 34–35, 39–40, 50, 51, 62, 97, 102, 111, 157, 214, 228, 265, 268, 277, 281; personal, 34–35, 39, 65–66, 77, 87, 146, 214, 268, 281 Douglass, Frederick, 37 Du Bois, W. E. B., 37 Duchet, Michèle, 224–25 Dumarsais, César Chesneau, 104 Dutch: colonization by, 215, 217–21, 224, 227, 248, 266, 267; republicanism of, 78

327

duty, 42–43, 45, 74, 92, 95, 116, 124, 147, 173, 258 Edict of Nantes, 259 education, 16, 115–16, 118, 132, 135, 149, 161; negative, 24, 29, 88, 93, 94, 117–18, 121–23, 126, 135–37, 142, 144–45, 148–50, 156, 158, 209–10, 214; political, 8, 116, 117, 120, 122, 129, 136, 143, 145, 163, 207, 218, 266–67 egocentrism, 102–10, 116, 118, 123, 149, 171, 175, 239 emancipation, 153–54, 156, 225, 239 empire, 1–2, 78, 110, 142, 176, 178, 183, 194–95, 207, 215, 247–48, 272, 275; French, 5, 77–78, 80, 104, 142, 183, 206, 279; Roman, 5, 17, 77–78, 84, 90, 91, 94–95, 103, 110, 156, 163, 182–85, 195, 220 Encyclopédie, 104, 116, 124–25, 173–74, 193 Enlightenment, 77–78, 104, 123, 125, 137, 185, 187, 206, 258 Epictetus, 17, 20, 91, 94, 131. See also Stoicism Epicureanism, 3, 13, 17, 27, 29, 117, 129, 132–34, 137–38, 160–61, 175, 182, 184–85, 189–93, 199–202, 261, 274. See also Lucretius equilibrium, 7, 13, 65–66, 68–69, 132, 138, 185, 187, 191, 199, 292n39; international, 208, 259, 311n4 error, 20, 127, 139–40, 143, 153, 195, 197, 209–10 esteem, 58–60, 108, 292n33. See also worth ethnology, 5, 7, 211 exit, 4–9, 21, 23, 25, 26, 29, 35, 39, 52–53, 55–56, 62, 65, 66, 67, 72, 96, 99–100, 119–20, 131, 154–55, 166, 168, 187, 206, 214, 23738, 240–42, 244 exodus, politics of, 240, 271, 273–74, 315–16n50 Exodus, 23, 204, 206, 249–62, 277 expansionism, 66, 109, 110, 162, 175–76, 178, 180–81, 183, 185–86, 194–95, 207, 259 Fanon, Frantz, 278 fear, 163–65, 260 Fénelon, François de, 302–3n47 fission, social, 4–5, 229, 262–63, 278

328

Index

fixity: as material attachment, 25, 269–70; ontological, 192, 211, 226, 229, 270, 278, 282; in space, 111, 122, 125–26, 129, 160, 236–37, 247, 269–70 force, 23–24, 38–40, 41–48, 51–52, 56–57, 63, 66–72, 73, 82–83, 88–89, 98, 157, 163, 166–67, 169, 172, 174–75, 179, 186, 187, 200, 213–14, 228–29, 230–31, 233–34, 235–39, 241, 243, 259, 268, 271–73, 275. See also quarrel; war foreignness, 22, 29, 12, 124, 127–28, 136, 138, 141–47, 148, 159–60, 163, 164, 173–74, 176, 179–80, 180, 182, 186, 192–203, 206, 208–9, 212, 218, 249, 251, 252, 254, 260, 268 fortune, 8, 15–16, 90–91, 95–98, 100–1, 107, 111, 127, 131, 149, 161, 171, 189, 251, 267 Foster, Hal, 3 Foucault, Michel, 162, 182, 184, 241, 315n39 Freud, Sigmund, 34 fugitive freedom, 4, 24, 72, 206, 227–42, 246, 248, 249–63, 265, 267–68, 276–78, 282, 285n2, 321n15. See also distancing fugitivity, 5, 7, 9, 28, 29, 154–55, 204, 214, 229, 232, 241–42, 243, 250, 251–52, 254–55, 260–62, 277, 279 Galen, 135 general will, 23–24, 30, 92, 160, 173, 178, 229–35, 237, 240, 242, 252, 255–56, 261–63, 267–70, 273, 274–75; distinct from particular wills, 202–3, 228, 236, 238, 243–44 Genovese, Eugene D., 225, 244 Gilroy, Paul, 37 globality, 1, 7–8, 28–30, 35–37, 40, 61–64, 66–68, 70–72, 74–75, 97, 102, 109–11, 124–27, 139–40, 149, 162, 168, 183, 186, 190, 210, 227–28, 257–58, 261, 265, 267–68, 270, 272 going native, 215, 217–18, 223 Golden Age (l’age d’or): in Rousseau, 12–13, 19, 38–40, 50, 56–58, 164, 167, 187, 206, 215, 217–18, 292n33; in Seneca, 14, 190 Goldschmidt, Victor, 60, 292n33 Goodman, Dena, 52 goodness, 18; merited, 117, 122, 129, 189, 194, 198–99, 201, 212; natural, 15–16, 92, 118, 134–35, 163, 173, 188–90,

198–99, 201, 210–11, 257. See also innocence; virtue Gordon, Jane Anna, 2, 294n5 government, 7, 14, 245–47, 266; as defined by Rousseau, 23, 119–20, 122, 131, 146, 178; hypercephalic, 69, 130, 206, 228, 231–34, 236, 239–40 Grand Tour, 115–17, 135. See also travel Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 80 Grotius, Hugo, 44, 50, 67–68, 76–77, 251 Hahn, Steven, 248, 317n63 Haitian Revolution, 33, 206, 226 Hardt, Michael, 271–74 Harlem Renaissance, 279–80 Hartman, Saidiya, 277 Hegel, G. W. F., 263 Hellenistic philosophy, 26, 40, 109–10, 123, 129, 133, 137, 160, 162–63, 170, 177, 182–83, 189, 190. See also Epicureanism; Stoicism Helots, 235–36, 243. See also slavery Herodotus, 120–21 heteronomy, 10, 23, 71, 74, 93, 100, 143, 146, 149, 153–54, 156–57, 176, 193, 209, 238–40, 245, 248, 259 Hierocles, 124–25, 173 Hirschman, Albert O., 4–7, 21, 23, 35, 65 Hobbesianism, 8, 22, 29, 51, 162–76, 177, 183, 185, 186–88, 192, 199, 200, 202, 208, 219, 237, 247, 258, 311n4 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 14, 44–45, 47–48, 50, 68–69, 70–71, 153, 163–67, 169 Hobsbawm, Eric, 248 homelessness, existential, 8, 125–26, 131, 147, 266–67 homesickness, 126, 147, 218, 303n53 hospitality, 171, 195, 209 hostility, 51, 65–70, 209 Hottentot, of Second Discourse, 206, 214–27, 250, 265–67, 282–83 Hulliung, Mark, 104 humanism, 103, 110, 116–18, 122, 131, 150 hyperbole, 2, 23, 28, 35–36, 37, 40, 48, 50, 53, 61, 68, 71–72, 74–75, 85, 114, 227, 233, 258, 271 imagination, 106–8, 131–34 immobility/immobilization, 5, 21, 25, 37, 52, 55, 67, 111, 116, 121, 123, 148, 156, 208, 221, 226–27, 242, 259, 267

Index impassivity (apatheia), 17–18, 91, 186, 200, 242 impurity, 29, 118, 128, 141–44, 188, 196, 200, 205–6, 212, 227, 247–48, 262–63 independence, 18–20, 26, 111, 135, 143, 148, 163, 170, 176, 177, 180–81, 185, 208, 224, 245, 246; alegitimate and asocial, 9–10, 74; alegitimate and social, 7, 9–10, 13, 57–61, 62, 69, 75, 86, 99–100, 137, 191, 193, 201, 214, 246–47, 269–70 indigenous peoples, 2, 165, 198, 219–20, 221, 226–27, 248, 250, 256–57, 265–66, 277, 278 inequality, 68–69, 168, 188, 218, 232, 234, 272 innocence, 9, 11, 15, 28, 89, 149, 170, 189–90, 193, 198, 201, 210–11, 218, 227, 278. See also goodness interdependence, legitimate, 9–11, 13, 28, 38–39, 49, 82, 85, 86, 111, 137, 174, 180–81, 185–86, 205, 212, 228–29, 262, 268 interstate system, 2, 8, 9, 22, 29, 110–11, 161–63, 167–70, 171, 175, 177–78, 183, 186, 191, 208, 246–48, 252, 259, 265 isolationism, 143, 165, 168, 195, 200, 257, 259, 260 Jakobson, Roman, 34 James, C. L. R., 2, 37, 72 Jaucourt, Louis le Chevalier de, 116 Jerusalem, 251, 257 Jewish peoples, 23, 24, 98, 157, 168, 179, 206, 231, 242, 249–54, 257–62, 269 justice, 3, 10, 15, 58, 92, 134, 150–51, 152, 175, 188, 190–91, 201–2, 268 Kant, Immanuel, 64, 160, 262 Kofman, Sarah, 210, 312n11 Koselleck, Reinhart, 77 Lacan, Jacques, 34 Laertius, Diogenes, 121, 124 Lenin, V. I., 225, 274 Levasseur, Thérèse, 282 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 4, 211 liberalism, 22, 121, 152–53, 267–68, 271 liberty, 20, 42, 85, 95–96, 156–57, 205, 214, 220, 227, 243, 246, 248; imagery of, 78, 279, 295n11; natural, 3, 5, 20,

329

35–36, 62–63, 72, 161, 164, 187–88, 190, 227–28, 237, 241, 265; political, 212, 228; primitive, 8, 13, 35, 40, 52–53, 65, 72, 74, 212, 246, 250 limits, 14, 143, 176, 239–40; natural, 161, 167, 175, 180, 210, 238; self-imposed, 161–62, 169–70, 175, 180–81, 186, 202 Linebaugh, Peter, 243 Lipsius, Justus, 161–62 Lisbon, earthquake of 1755, 97, 254 Locke, Alain, 280 Locke, John, 3, 14, 45, 47–48, 50, 57, 70–71, 116–20, 122, 137–39, 143, 145–47, 153 Long, A. A., 18, 19, 135 Lovejoy, Arthur, 9 loyalty, 6, 22–23, 65, 121, 267 Lucretius, 3, 17, 133, 182–83, 191–92, 202, 292n39, 301n29. See also Epicureanism Machiavelli, Niccolò, 179 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 319n90 Manigat, Leslie F., 226–27, 245 manumission, 77–78, 80, 153, 225, 295n11 Mao Zedong, 274 marginality, geographic, 8–9, 17, 21, 25, 29, 162, 178, 182–83, 192, 194, 196, 200, 209, 245–46, 252, 259, 270, 278 Maroons, Jamaican, 246–47 marronnage, 2, 42, 157, 206, 212–15, 225–26, 242–49, 273, 279–80, 282. See also fugitive freedom Marx, Karl, 57, 225, 255, 305n7 maturity, 94, 137, 140, 143, 145, 148, 163, 266 metaphor, 5, 28, 34–35, 38, 40, 75, 77, 80, 82–83, 90, 99, 120, 175–76, 187–88, 214, 221, 248 metonymy, 34–35, 40, 80, 82–83, 99, 102, 213–14, 221, 242, 248, 279 Middle Passage, 34, 37, 41 Misanthrope, by Molière, 171–72 missionaries, 116, 217 mobility, 5, 8, 21, 115–16, 120, 122–23, 128, 148, 160, 168, 212, 226, 241–42, 246, 251, 254–55, 260, 262 modernism, 2, 279–80, 282 modernity, 1–2, 4, 33, 35–41, 85, 89, 111, 126, 165, 183, 191, 197, 210–11, 214, 223, 226, 228, 248, 257, 260, 272, 282

330

Index

moi commun, 23–24, 138, 286, 188, 229–30, 233–34, 238, 240–41, 276. See also corresponsibility monarchies, 77–78, 121, 142, 161, 171, 177, 231, 319n82 Montaigne, Michel de, 16, 127, 134, 144, 132, 212 Montesquieu, Baron de, 77–78, 98, 125, 128, 164–65, 177, 262 mores, 57, 134, 179, 182, 196–97, 199, 201–2, 207, 217, 253, 255–57, 260 Moses, 225, 249, 250–53 mutual help, 7, 57, 60, 66, 68–69, 229, 242, 253, 315n35 nationalism, 22–23, 209, 277 natives, 13, 21, 123, 127–28, 141–43, 147, 159–60, 192–93, 199, 201–2, 215, 222–24, 250, 283 nativism, 5, 9, 23, 117, 127–28, 141, 143, 147, 199, 203, 209 “natural man,” 16, 19, 27, 86, 103, 134, 163, 194 naturalism, 4, 12, 14 nature, state of, 5, 7, 10, 13–14, 19, 21, 40, 49–70, 74, 85, 87, 92–93, 97, 101, 105, 154, 163–70, 181, 186, 187–88, 190–92, 199, 210, 211, 238, 258, 269, 290n11 needs, 61, 86–87, 134, 164, 168, 192, 197 Negri, Antonio, 271–74 Neuhouser, Frederick, 60, 292n33 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 254–55, 319n85 nondomination, 100, 225, 259–60 Nussbaum, Martha, 124, 300–1n21 obligation, 11, 27, 43, 45, 116–20, 122, 136, 147 oikeiosis, 106, 134–35, 138, 173, 185–86, 199 opinion, 18–20, 58, 82, 102, 108, 175, 201, 306n25 origins, 5, 11–12, 14, 36, 40–42, 49–50, 52, 54, 65, 68, 70–71, 74, 80, 87, 138, 203, 249, 251–52, 282 Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn, 212–13, 223, 243 Paris, 2, 27, 30, 128, 131, 193–97, 256, 259, 266, 279, 280–83 Pascal, Blaise, 262 passions, 15, 18–19, 20, 86, 91, 104, 129, 134–36, 166, 196 Pateman, Carole, 48

patrie, 111, 124–25, 147, 171, 174–77, 179, 195, 199–200; ideal, 131, 133, 207–8; mobile, 254–56, 266; natal, 22, 119, 147, 219 patriotism, 111, 150, 174, 200, 253; cosmopolitan, 267–68; as patriotic compression, 176–82 Patterson, Orlando, 39, 48, 51, 71, 290n19, 304n66, 317n65 Peabody, Sue, 76–77, 80 perfectibility, 7, 10–12, 14, 53, 56, 210, 256–59, 261, 262, 270, 278 performative utterance, 61–63, 270–72 performativity, 102 philosopher, 15, 17, 256–57; as subjectivity, 89, 103–4, 107–8, 184, 195 pity, 17, 84, 103, 105–10, 134, 165–66, 172–74, 182, 196, 230, 297n47 place, 75, 87, 125, 129, 131, 147, 160, 171; nativized, 53, 56–60, 61–64, 66, 69, 102, 269 plantation, slave, 33, 77, 151, 223, 242, 244–45, 248 plantocracy, 77, 85, 150, 213, 242–44, 246 Plato, 104, 120, 128, 275 plunder, 64–67 pluralism, 252, 256–57, 261, 278 Pocock, J. G. A., 77 political economy, 160–61, 180, 184, 193 population, 84, 180–82, 186, 254 Posidonius, 14–15 Postone, Moishe, 39 potestas, 77, 227, 314n33 presence, 188, 195–96, 201, 209, 240, 250 Price, Richard, 227, 245, 248 primitivism, 3–4, 5, 9–13, 14, 17, 25–26, 29–30, 40, 211, 280–82. See also counterprimitivism; naturalism private property, 10, 14, 28, 50, 80, 87, 161, 167, 175, 181; system of, 8, 35–38, 53–71, 74–75, 82–83, 110, 147, 190, 214, 228, 254, 265, 272. See also property, “a sort of ”; usufruct progress, 2–3, 12, 14–5, 110, 128, 138, 182, 189–92, 210–11, 223, 282, 292n39 property, “a sort of,” 7, 55–58, 62–63, 228, 269. See also private property; usufruct Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 225 psychoanalysis, 24, 34 Pufendorf, Samuel, 50

Index purity, 3, 29, 69, 102, 111, 117–18, 128, 141–43, 147, 163, 170, 182, 193, 195–97, 200, 205–9, 247–48, 252–53, 259, 262–63, 282 quarrel, 51, 56, 166–68. See also war race, 2, 30, 128, 150–51, 190, 220, 252, 279–82, 308n53 Rancière, Jacques, 271–74 reason, 4, 22–23, 30, 44, 96, 101, 121, 174, 192, 258; conditional, 35, 37; distinct from inclination, 92, 119, 131, 139, 145, 235; instrumental, 14, 16, 191; as orthos logos, 14–15, 20, 90, 134–35, 190–91, 201, 238; Rousseau’s critique of, 19, 96, 99, 101, 105–11, 126, 155, 297n47. See also cognitivism rebellion, 95–96, 150–52, 155, 205, 212–14, 225–26, 242–43 recognition, 55, 60, 90–91, 173, 246–47, 292n33 Rediker, Marcus, 243 repose, moral, 3, 15–16, 19–20, 103, 157, 184, 189, 224, 234–39, 247, 255, 268, 277, 311n3 representation: linguistic, 27, 34–35, 51, 60, 77, 91–92, 123, 196, 206, 211, 220–21, 269; political, 60, 85, 236; theatrical, 193–97 republicanism: Dutch, 78–79; French, 37, 77–79; Roman, 77–79 reservation politics, 3–4, 21, 206–12, 226–27, 240, 242, 252, 259–60, 312n11 resistance, political, 4, 26, 29, 45, 48, 95, 98–102, 154–55, 162, 178, 197, 206, 211, 226–27, 235, 237–45, 274 revolution, 37, 56, 59, 95, 115, 161, 205–6, 225, 234, 253 Rey, March-Michel, 78 right, 42, 119, 267, 290–91n19; moralpolitical, 92, 169, 199, 201, 230–34, 238, 240, 255; of nations, 169; natural, 14, 40, 42–48, 66–68, 74, 89, 156, 187, 214, 225, 236 Roberts, Neil, 2 Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, 27, 161 Rogin, Michael, 279, 281, 323–24n48 roots, 21–22, 41, 120, 267, 277

331

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Constitutional Project for Corsica, 180–82, 190, 193–94, 197–201, 255; “Discourse on Political Economy,” 227–40, 314n32; Émile, 92, 115–49, 160, 161, 170, 257–58, 270; Émile and Sophie, 93–95, 148–56; Essay on the Origin of Languages, 4, 106–7; First Discourse, 24–25, 83, 193–94; Geneva Manuscript, 190, 231, 269; Government of Poland, 175, 178–80, 195, 198–200, 250–51, 253; Letter to d’Alembert, 172, 193–97, 200, 206–7; “Letter to Philopolis,” 256–57; “Letter to Voltaire,” 254, 287n27; life of, 2, 26–28, 212–13, 278, 282; Of the Social Contract, 4, 10, 28, 29, 38–53, 57, 66, 73, 76–77, 80, 82, 84, 87–92, 109, 119, 204–6, 212–14, 220, 223, 225, 227–31, 233, 236, 240, 242, 248, 255, 259, 314n32; “Political Fragments,” 299n7; “Preface to Narcissus,” 108, 197, 218; Second Discourse, 4, 9–10, 17, 24, 28, 35, 38, 40–42, 48–66, 71, 74, 76, 78, 82, 84–89, 98–99, 103, 107, 156, 163, 187, 206, 214–25, 228, 234, 236–38, 265, 271, 282; “State of War,” 70, 166, 178, 235–36 routes, 21–22, 41, 120, 250, 277 Saint-Domingue, 226, 243, 247, 318n70 Sala-Molins, Louis, 80, 293n3 salvage paradigm, 211–12, 217, 242, 256 “savages,” 3, 12–13, 16–20, 25, 27, 36, 51, 77, 85–86, 92, 99–103, 136, 157, 163–65, 169, 190, 195, 214–18, 226–27, 247, 250. See also “natural man”; “sociable man” Savoyard Vicar, 127, 134–35, 137, 257–58, 260–61, 269 Schmitt, Carl, 209 Scythians, 25, 121–22, 231 Second Treatise of Government, by John Locke, 45, 71, 116, 119–20, 122, 137, 146, 291n22, 299–300n10 security, 65–70, 86, 89, 100, 144, 148, 167, 169, 175, 181, 252, 268 Sedley, David, 98 self-care, ethic of, 162, 182–85, 188–89 self-determination, 39, 135, 146, 183, 205 self-preservation, 53, 61, 98, 101–2, 134, 166, 173

332

Index

self-relation, 160, 170, 182 Seneca, 3, 14–17, 20–21, 90–100, 124, 131, 135, 140, 144, 150, 182–84, 189–92, 194, 197, 212, 295n21, 296n32, 302n42, 310n72. See also Stoicism sensational psychology, 117, 121, 127, 136–40, 141, 144, 301n29 senses, 75, 89, 101, 136–38, 147, 227 servitude, 44–45, 47–48, 64–68, 77, 83, 88–89, 94–95, 99, 101, 131, 311n3 slavery, 2, 3, 9, 14, 21, 23, 26, 30, 34, 62, 66–67, 75, 80, 82–84, 92, 110–11, 204–6, 221, 223–24, 226, 262, 272; of Africans in Americas, 3, 26, 33, 41, 44, 76–77, 82, 84–85, 150–51, 155, 206, 213, 219, 223–26, 242–49, 277, 279–80; ancient Greek, 78, 87–88, 235–36; Barbary, 93, 155; and Christianity, 150, 220–21, 238, 260–61; Egyptian, 98, 249–51, 260, 269; Émile in, 76, 93–96, 148–58, 213–14, 238; institutionalization of, 48, 50, 54–57, 70–72, 74–75, 213; masters in institution of, 37–41, 150; moral, 8, 14, 20, 25, 34, 72, 82, 84–87, 89, 98–103, 105, 145, 214, 219–20, 234–35; origin of, 41–53, 64, 71; political, 21, 34, 68, 76, 84–87, 98–103, 189, 214, 277; prisoners of war in, 44, 290–91n19; Roman, 78; Stoic views on, 29, 40, 89–93, 95–97, 100–1, 103, 150, 154, 156, 238 smallness, geographic, 177–78, 208, 253 “sociable man,” 18–19, 33, 35, 38–39, 52, 57–58, 75, 82, 86–87, 89, 102, 108, 136, 163, 167, 169, 175, 185, 201, 221 social contract: Rousseau’s three iterations of, 68; theory, 3, 41, 49–50, 116–17, 120, 122, 136, 160, 212, 249, 299n6 Socrates, 96, 140, 296n32 solipsism, 3, 27, 190, 199, 201, 209, 211, 239–40, 292n33 soul, 16–17, 18, 94, 96, 99–101, 139, 145, 188 sovereignty, 23–24, 166, 183, 193, 228, 230–34, 245–47, 249, 252, 255–56; as self-sovereignty, 162, 177 space, 8, 10, 21, 23, 36, 38–41, 51, 53, 54–57, 60–69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 83, 87, 110–11, 125–26, 131, 139–40, 147, 161, 167–68, 175–76, 180, 183–84, 186–87, 190, 210, 228–29, 234–45; 247, 250, 254–61, 263, 265–70, 274, 276–79, 282

Sparta, 24–25, 78, 193–95, 223, 235–36, 243, 252 spectacle, 93, 106, 108, 197 Starobinski, Jean, 28, 160, 324n57 Stilz, Anna, 22, 287n14 Stirner, Max, 153–54, 238–41 Stoicism, 3, 13–21, 29, 40, 72, 76, 89–110, 117, 123–25, 129, 132, 134–39, 143, 148, 149–51, 153–56, 160–63, 170–76, 182, 184–85, 189–90, 192–93, 198–202, 213–14, 220, 223, 238, 261, 274. See also Epictetus; Seneca subjection, 3, 44, 47, 51, 71, 74–75, 80, 82–83, 94, 97–98, 119, 145–46, 149, 155–57, 206, 213–14, 219, 221, 223, 249 sustainability, 12–13, 122, 185–86, 229, 257–60, 278, 292–93n39 Swiss, 25, 190, 193–94, 198, 252 Tartars, 174, 250, 254, 256–57, 259–60 technology, 15, 191 terror, bodily, 35, 57, 151, 154, 236, 242, 248, 279 theater, 194–97, 220 theory, practice of, 118, 120–22 “this is mine,” 7, 14, 37, 40, 50, 53–64, 67, 71, 228, 265, 271, 275 Thucydides, 195 Toussaint l’Ouverture, Dominique, 311n2 Touraine, 128, 141–42, 159–60, 176, 194, 196, 250 travel, 8, 93, 107, 115–17, 136–37, 141–43, 148, 251, 266; ideology of, 117, 123, 125, 127–29, 159–60; as errancy, 125–27, 144, 171, 266; political-educational, 22, 29, 109, 111, 117–22, 129–32, 144–49, 163, 170, 207, 218–19, 266; published accounts of, 107, 127, 163, 191–92; theoría as, 120–22 traveler, as subjectivity, 12, 125, 127–28, 140–42, 250 Tuck, Richard, 165 tutor, Jean-Jacques as, 94, 118–19, 126–33, 135, 136–37, 140, 142–49, 153, 156–57, 161, 162, 193, 210, 226, 266, 299n9 universalism, 29, 131, 150, 199, 201–2, 225, 252, 261, 267, 271, 273, 274, 306n24, 310n79, 321n15 universality, 93, 257, 269, 272–74, 282, 321n22 urbanity, 193–94

Index usufruct, 56, 61–62, 228, 254–55. See also private property; property vengeance, 57–59, 292n32 Venturi, Franco, 78 vice, 14, 29, 93, 104–5, 117, 129, 138–44, 151, 153, 162, 164, 172, 182, 189–90, 194–98, 200–2, 209, 211, 218–19 vigilance, 42, 52, 66–67, 70, 71, 88, 154, 238 virtue, 11, 13, 15–20, 29, 83, 89, 92, 95, 100, 102, 104, 105, 108, 117–18, 129, 134+36, 140–42, 153, 155, 163–64, 166, 170, 172–73, 182, 184, 187–202, 210, 212, 251. See also goodness; innocence vitality, cultural, 229, 252, 256, 260–61, 263 volition, 15–16, 19–21, 34, 43, 46, 83, 90–92, 96, 98, 100–1, 135–37, 143, 146, 154–58, 212, 229, 238–40, 244, 246, 260 Voltaire, 221, 254, 299–300n10; Candide by, 221–24, 233, 313n24 Virno, Paolo, 271–74, 315–16n50 Waltz, Kenneth, 186 Walzer, Michael, 249–50, 319n82

333

war, 44–48, 67, 70, 90, 164, 166–68, 186, 234–37, 244, 247 White, Hayden, 20 Whitman, Daniel, 85 wild children, 11, 13, 217, 287n19, 308n53 Wokler, Robert, 204 Wolin, Sheldon, 29, 275–79, 290n11, 322n26 worlds, 165, 266, 269–70, 275, 283 worth, 60–61, 64, 83, 89, 97, 129, 175; in relation to “trouble,” 56–57, 62, 66, 254, 259. See also esteem Wright, Richard, 37 xenophilia, 162, 171, 176, 200 xenophobia, 29, 121, 163, 192–93, 196, 198, 200, 309n70 yoke, Rousseau’s imagery of, 42, 68, 75, 213–14. See also chains Zeno, 104 Zerilli, Linda, 215, 220, 313n21

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Roger Berkowitz, The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, The Truth of Democracy Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Michael Panfilio, Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfigurations of Critical Theory Karl Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400–1500 Michael J. Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity Drucilla Cornell and Nyoko Muvangua (eds.), uBuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence Drucilla Cornell, Stu Woolman, Sam Fuller, Jason Brickhill, Michael Bishop, and Diana Dunbar (eds.), The Dignity Jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South Africa: Cases and Materials, Volumes I & II Nicholas Tampio, Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory Carrol Clarkson, Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Jimmy Casas Klausen, Fugitive Rousseau: Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom Drucilla Cornell, Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation Abraham Acosta, Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance