Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity [1 ed.] 1412862442, 9781412862448

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction: Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity
Part One: Before and After Vincennes
1 Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship
Part Two: Citoyens and Citoyennes
2 Rousseau’s Response to the Social Contract Tradition
3 Over Her Dead Body: Voilà La Citoyenne?
Part Three: Sound and Music
4 How to Be Modern in Music: Rousseau between Greece, Italy, and Vienna
5 Listening in Rousseau’s Auditory World: Sound, Noise, and Music
Part Four: Ancients and Moderns
6 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
7 Stoicism for Rousseau and Other Beleaguered Moderns
Part Five: The Modern Predicament
8 Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Liberal Modernity
9 The Unconditional Self
About the Authors
Index

Citation preview

Rousseau and the

Dilemmas Modernity

Rousseau and the

Dilemmas Modernity Mark Hulliung, editor

|J Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2016 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2016 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015015667 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rousseau and the dilemmas of modernity / Mark Hulliung, editor. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-6244-8 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. 2. Civilization, Modern. I. Hulliung, Mark, editor. B2137.R679 2015 194--dc23 2015015667 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-6244-8 (hbk)

To the memory of Patrick Riley, a superb scholar and a beautiful human being

Contents Introduction: Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity Mark Hulliung

ix

Part One: Before and After Vincennes 1

Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship Christopher Kelly

3

Part Two: Citoyens and Citoyennes 2

Rousseau’s Response to the Social Contract Tradition Mark Hulliung

31

3

Over Her Dead Body: Voilà La Citoyenne? Claudia Schaler

63

Part Three: Sound and Music 4 How to Be Modern in Music: Rousseau between Greece, Italy, and Vienna Michael O’Dea

89

5 Listening in Rousseau’s Auditory World: Sound, Noise, and Music Julia Simon

121

Part Four: Ancients and Moderns 6 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns Patrick Riley

145

7 Stoicism for Rousseau and Other Beleaguered Moderns Mark Hulliung

161

Part Five: The Modern Predicament 8

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Liberal Modernity Shefali Misra

187

9

The Unconditional Self Claude Habib

209

About the Authors

229

Index

231

Introduction Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity Mark Hulliung

Nothing was more common in the nineteenth century than for Romantics to claim Rousseau as one of their own, ignoring his fullscale immersion in the debates of the French Enlightenment, his monumental contribution to the agenda set by the likes of Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. Nothing, perhaps, is more common in our age than to realize that after restoring Rousseau to his historical milieu, the eighteenth century, there remain compelling reasons to discern in his writings insights pertinent to our present-day concerns. For us ­Rousseau is present as well as past, because he was so remarkably modern and yet so ambivalent about modernity, a position with which we are quite familiar. There are, of course, strongly contrasting scholarly visions of what it means to say that Rousseau’s thought was the harbinger of the modern world. Not so long ago it was common to portray Rousseau as the forerunner of all that is most illiberal in modern times, all that must be avoided at all costs. The liberal fear of Rousseau that followed the Jacobin era of the French Revolution was reborn during the Cold War with the appearance of a spate of books reprimanding “Rousseau the totalitarian.” In this hostile interpretation, Rousseau is a man of our age even more than his own, and his work serves as a warning all good liberals should heed. Whether this phase of denunciatory Rousseau scholarship has permanently worn out its welcome is less than certain. What is certain is that the scholars who have contributed to the present study of Rousseau see him in a very different light. To us, “Rousseau the totalitarian” and “Rousseau the illiberal menace” are formulations both ahistorical and unfair. Worst of all, such interpretations rob readers of our age of his most worthy insights into the modern predicament. ix

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

The contributors to this volume are critics of Rousseau and yet quite appreciative of his work because we collectively recognize that without him our understanding of who we are and what challenges we face would suffer significant impoverishment. Rather than viewing ­Rousseau as a dark and ominous figure, we prefer to see him as someone who foresaw the dark and threatening side of emerging modernity. We also believe he offered lessons from which we can learn. As one of the contributors observes, liberals might do well to apply Rousseau rather than disparage him; they might, for instance, take to heart his lesson that a society must enjoy a measure of unity before it can successfully sponsor diversity. Highlighted in the essays that follow is the contention that Rousseau set the stage for many of our discussions of the good and the bad of modernity. When it comes to whether we can attain self-knowledge, or whether each person is one or many selves, Rousseau is our forebear. Rousseau also preceded us when he used science to question science. As for his position on feminism, it was, as one of our contributors explains, far more complex and noteworthy than contemporary feminists, who view him as the enemy, appreciate. Another generalization that comes to the fore in the essays that follow is that even when he looked back to antiquity, it was to understand and, if possible, to save modernity. Music, too, comes within our purview: the modern appreciation of music as one of the highest of the arts was anticipated by Rousseau, who placed the fate of music at the center of the tale of human progress and regress. Love him or hate him, there is no one quite like Rousseau. Modern history would not be the same in the absence of his ambivalent, tortured, and richly textured treatment of modernity. To recapture Rousseau’s astonishing contribution to the understanding of the dilemmas of modernity is the point of the efforts of the contributors to the present volume. By way of appreciating ­Rousseau’s importance and originality in these matters, a promising way to begin is by contrasting his work with that of another group of his day whose members addressed themselves to the question of modernity: the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. *** I. A Comparative Perspective: Rousseau and the Scots

Rousseau was a man of his time in his constant talk of “nature,” and yet his words may have more resonance in our age than his. A common eighteenth-century move was to rehabilitate nature, especially human x

Introduction

nature, against the Christian doctrine of lust, sin, and depravity. On those rare occasions when figures of the Enlightenment broke ranks with their comrades by way of questioning the worth of “nature,” they did so to express skepticism about its clarity as a norm rather than to vindicate the Church. Thus when David Hume examined the word nature, he remarked that he found “none more ambiguous or equivocal.” His fellow Scot Adam Ferguson made the same point: “Of all the terms that we employ in treating of human affairs,” he contended, “those of natural and unnatural are the least determinate in their meaning.”1 Neither Hume nor Ferguson did justice to Rousseau’s claim, as resonant in our day as unrecognized in his, that “all men do appears natural to us because we are outside of nature.” It is indeed difficult to discern nature, to tell the difference between natural and unnatural, when, as Rousseau asserts, “The whole face of the earth is changed; everywhere nature has disappeared.” Humans “want nothing as nature made it”; they “disfigure everything,”2 especially themselves. Hume and Ferguson may not have understood Rousseau, but we do. Our destruction of the natural environment, our pollution of nature, is what our children and their offspring shall inherit. Only a few decades ago, in the wake of decolonization, the academic curriculum was dominated by triumphal “modernization theory”; nowadays environmental studies, with tales of the woes of modernization, tops the agenda. A brief comparison of Rousseau with leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment—Hume, Ferguson, and Adam Smith—is a promising means of appreciating his prowess in spreading the alarm about the ill effects of modernization. Unlike the French Enlightenment, in which figures such as Helvétius, Holbach, and Diderot expressed considerable worry that “the progress of the child of Prometheus” might go too far,3 destroying far too much in its path that is worthwhile, the Scots voiced only modest misgivings about the movement of history from the age of hunters, to shepherds, to farmers, to traders. Measured against the Scottish Enlightenment, Rousseau’s capacity to question the record of modernity comes into full view, providing us with a convenient starting point for what follows in this volume, which is devoted to an examination of Rousseau and the dilemmas of modernity. Adam Smith was convinced he had arrived at a thoroughly modern morality in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), an ethics standing on its own feet independent of religious support. We may surmise, however, that if Rousseau had been familiar with Smith’s argument, he would have denounced it as little more than an apology for how we xi

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

have lost our way in the modern age. Smith had recommended that we look at ourselves from the outside, through the eyes of a supposedly “impartial spectator,” the better to refrain from base conduct and to inspire admirable deeds. “We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behavior”; we “view ourselves . . . with the eyes of other people.” It mattered not at all to Smith but profoundly to Rousseau that, in Smith’s words, “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons.”4 From Rousseau’s point of view, what Smith was eulogizing was the divided self that had long been recognized, since at least the time of Plato, as the bane of human existence. As early as the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explained that through social interaction we turn inward and gain a sense of self but then quickly lose our selves in the eyes of others. Forever struggling to prove ourselves in society, constantly living outside ourselves, absorbed in “seeming” (paraître), we become untrue to our “being” (être). Smith’s “spectator,” far from impartial, would figure in Rousseau’s conceptions as little more than the agent of established society. Rousseau and Smith were once again together yet in total opposition in their respective treatments of sympathy, pity, and compassion as anchors for moral commitment. To Smith, these emotions demonstrated that there is more to us than self-interest narrowly construed, and he pointed to our feeling for the fate of tragic heroes on the stage as proof of his argument.5 To Rousseau, by contrast, the innocent amour de soi and prereflective pity of the state of nature had succumbed in remote ages to socially induced, narrowly self-regarding amour-propre; and he, too, made his case by pointing to the audiences attending theatrical performances. Yes, a member of the audience cries when a tragic hero dies on the stage, but in truth the tears he or she sheds are little more than a social performance: “Does he not applaud his fine soul?” asks Rousseau. Of what use is this “sterile pity,” except to provide occasions for self-congratulation? “In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything of ourselves.”6 “It is,” remarked Smith, “the misfortunes of Kings only which afford the proper subjects of tragedy . . . All the innocent blood that was shed in the civil wars provoked less indignation than the death of Charles I.”7 All the more then would Rousseau deem his point proven: that society has suppressed our naturally given compassion for our fellow human beings—any and all of our fellows, no matter their social station. Enlightenment for Rousseau is an uphill battle, because, by the time xii

Introduction

we enter the modern age, the resources for building a better world are few and far between, squandered before recorded time. The natural commiseration that is the emotional anchor of true humanitarian concern was long ago overridden by deleterious social conditioning. Rousseau’s distance from Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment is perhaps nowhere more clearly marked than in their sharply contrasting positions on the division of labor. To Smith the division of labor, developing of its own accord, “not originally the effect of any human wisdom,” is responsible for “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor.”8 Along with the new marketplace society, the division of labor proves that heavy-handed governmental interference is unnecessary and harmful. What could be more satisfying than to realize that, even when not listening to our moral impulses, we unknowingly serve the public good out of self-interest? The specialization of tasks and functional division of labor, whatever liabilities they entail, constitute the glory of modernity in the Scottish view. As for the era preceding specialization, it was happily receding into the past but could still be observed in the rural areas, where the worker inefficiently played the role of jack-of-all-trades: “In the lone houses and very small villages which are scattered about in so desert[ed] a country as the Highlands of Scotland, every farmer must be butcher, baker, and brewer for his own family,” remarked Smith. Soon, the sooner the better, history would thankfully overtake the Highlander.9 Rousseau’s equivalent of the Highlanders was the Montagnards of the Valais, whom he praised all the more warmly when Parisian intellectuals denounced them as “cretins.”10 Although he did not finish a projected History of the Valais, Rousseau never missed an opportunity to compare favorably the independent mountain dwellers, able to attend to all their natural needs, with urban sophisticates unable to satisfy their artificial needs without entering into relationships of dependence.11 In his Discourse on Inequality (1754–55) the arrival of the division of labor figures prominently in the tale of our downfall,12 and Emile (1762) is constantly reminded to do for himself rather than have others do for him.13 It is also well to remember that as early as 1752 Rousseau had spoken forcefully against the view that Adam Smith would later hold dear: that a society dominated by the pursuit of self-interest could yield happiness and justice for all.14 Nor is it possible that Rousseau would have responded with anything other than disdain for Smith’s apology for inequality, his claim that “in ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, xiii

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”15 The path of economic progress is less admirable once we admit, with Rousseau in the Second Discourse, that the story of economic advance is part and parcel of the process that “renders man in the long run the tyrant of himself and of nature.”16 The uncanny capacity of Rousseau to complicate and enrich the story of modernity is all the more clear when he is compared to Hume. In the preface to his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau expressed his appreciation of what we nowadays take for granted: that the human self has undergone endless transmutations through the ages and that in consequence self-knowledge is obtained with great difficulty, if at all. Unlike Rousseau, and despite his philosophical denial that we can rationally prove personal identity, Hume never for a moment doubted that he knew human nature; hence the title of his major philosophical investigation, A Treatise of Human Nature. The entirety of his work was based on the assumption that he was building upon the readily accessible “natural and inherent principles and passions of human nature.”17 In spite of his indebtedness to Locke, famous for his tabula rasa and developmental psychology, Hume held that humans “cannot change their natures,” only “their situation.”18 Although he wrote history, there was insufficient place in his thought for time, as can be seen in his occasional obliteration of all distinctions between historical eras. “Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans?” he asked, and then delivered his astonishing answer: “Study well the temper and actions of the [present day] French and English.” All his historical reflections were premised on the assumption that “mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new.”19 Hume often forgot Locke when he wrote his histories, filled with lively events on the surface but reassuringly immobile underneath; Rousseau took Locke to heart when he sketched his conjectural history of the enormous and almost unfathomable gap between humans as they are and as they once were. It is unfortunate that a meaningful exchange between Hume, champion of modernity, and Rousseau, the challenger, never took place. In his Confessions Rousseau remarked that Hume had “acquired a great reputation in France and especially among the Encyclopedists by his treatises on commerce and politics, and by his history of the House of Stuart.” But he readily conceded that his own knowledge of Hume’s writings amounted to little or nothing.20 As for Hume, his comments on xiv

Introduction

Rousseau were mainly on his personality and literary style, mixed with a few scattered remarks on Rousseau’s thought, usually so superficial that one cannot assume he ever read him in earnest.21 Adam Smith, after briefly mentioning the Discourse on Inequality in his early “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,”22 especially Rousseau’s comments on Mandeville,23 went on to discuss Mandeville at considerable length in his major works24 but never bothered to cite Rousseau. When Smith quoted Rousseau in his letter of 1756, he did so only to offer “a specimen of his eloquence.” “It would be to no purpose to give an analysis,” Smith explained, “of a work which consists entirely of rhetoric and description.”25 The scholars of our day who have Smith writing against Rousseau frequently tell us how they believe Smith would have or should have responded, rather than providing convincing proof that Rousseau was in fact his target.26 We do, however, possess one fully articulated Scottish commentary on the Second Discourse, the opening section of Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society, which is a harsh repudiation of Rousseau’s account of the state of nature. Like Hume, who explicitly thought of society, politics, and history on the model of the timeless laws of physics,27 Ferguson regarded “natural history” as the record of what now exists, has always existed, and ever will exist, just as we presume by analogy that Newton’s laws pertain to areas of the earth and universe as yet unexplored. For Ferguson, “the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to offer conjectures.” All our scientific findings must be based on what “has always appeared within the reach of our observation, and in the records of [recorded] history.” Anyone who thinks otherwise is guilty of “confound[ing] the provinces of imagination and reason, of poetry and science.”28 Not for a moment did Ferguson (or Hume) make an effort to come to terms with developments on the Continent, where the burgeoning of the life sciences, especially the publications of Buffon, permitted Rousseau to take seriously the word history in the expression natural history and to suggest the possibility that once upon a time, endless centuries ago, we humans may have been creatures who in the present day resemble orangutans.29 Dismissing Rousseau as a fool, Ferguson dogmatically asserted that “men have always appeared among animals a distinct and a superior race.” On the Continent, Condillac and especially Rousseau considered the possibility, quite consistent with Lockean premises, that language did not always exist, that it had a history, a beginning many ages ago, xv

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and a subsequent development; but to Ferguson it was unquestionable that “[man’s] reason, his use of language and articulate sounds, like the shape and erect position of his body, are to be considered as so many attributes of his nature.”30 It was inconceivable to Ferguson that humans had ever been hairy and inarticulate creatures.31 For all its brilliance the Scottish Enlightenment was always eager to take the world as it is, to decide what has been and might be on the basis of what is, unlike Rousseau who wished greatly to expand the past and, if possible, to open the future to new and less pernicious possibilities. Both Ferguson and Smith were quite willing to admit that the division of labor exacts a human price, that it makes us smaller,32 but neither thinker doubted for a moment that the balance sheet was strongly on the side of “progress,” or that reform could always compensate us for our losses. Privileging the present moment, sanctioning established social custom, was as central to the Scottish Enlightenment as repudiating the present and criticizing society was to Rousseau. If a fixation on Newton’s timeless physics33 was one reason explaining the conservative bias of the Scots, another was the fear, clearly articulated in Hume’s essay on natural religion,34 that superstition is always just beneath the surface, waiting to rear its ugly head. The Puritan Revolution was a troubling memory, and the last thing the Scots desired was a new round of radical ideas. They wanted modernity on their comfortable terms, not Rousseau’s deeply unsettling vision. If Locke’s social contract was too radical for Hume, too reminiscent of the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, we should not be surprised that he simply ignored Rousseau’s Social Contract.35 Placing Rousseau beside the Scots serves to underscore his disturbing success in bringing to the fore dilemmas of the modern age long before it became fashionable for moderns to question the virtues of modernity. Convinced history had gone radically wrong, Rousseau insisted not only upon addressing the advantages of modernity but all of the plagues that followed its advent and called its worth into question. Sometimes more radical than the Scots, at other times more resigned, the common denominator of Rousseau’s works was the shadow he cast upon the promise of modernity. Our brief foregoing comparison of Rousseau with the Scots serves merely as a prologue to the ensuing volume of essays. In what follows, eight scholars—historians, literary critics, and political theorists— will call upon their expertise to spell out some of Rousseau’s dealings with modernity and its discontents. The topics will be multiple, the xvi

Introduction

­ erspectives varied, but the hope is that individually and collectively p we shall shed light on Rousseau and the dilemmas of modernity. *** II. Nine Exercises in Interpretation

Part one, “Before and After Vincennes,” features Christopher Kelly’s essay on “Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship.” Not so long ago, notes Kelly, Rousseau’s jottings on chemistry were relatively ignored, so much so that the compilers of the Pléiade edition did not bother to include the Institutions chimiques in the Oeuvres complètes. Upon examining the writings on chemistry, Kelly concludes that they were not only in Rousseau’s handwriting but were mostly his own work and have considerable significance in helping us understand the development of Rousseau’s mature thought. Quite common in commentaries on Rousseau is the notion that Kelly would have us reconsider: the claim that the “illumination” on the road to Vincennes, followed by the writing of the First Discourse, was the beginning of Rousseau’s career. Against this commonly accepted view, Kelly would have us consider the possibility that the dramatic event on a trip to visit the jailed Diderot was a culmination rather than a beginning. The writings on chemistry, penned shortly before the illumination, Kelly argues, were a major moment in preparing Rousseau for his mature writings. In Kelly’s words, “Rousseau’s mature critique of modernity was preceded by a sustained absorption with one of modernity’s proudest claims: its aspiration to scientific knowledge.” Diderot and Rousseau were as one in appreciating the presentations of the prominent chemist Rouelle, and united again in exploiting the sciences to understand the earth no less than the heavens—including, most importantly, the social and political undertakings of human earthlings. As Kelly remarks, the friendship of Rousseau and Diderot was especially strong during the period when Rousseau was writing the Institutions chimiques. Presumably it is no coincidence that views expressed in Rousseau’s chemical writings of the 1740s directly parallel hypotheses floated by Diderot in his Pensées philosophiques of 1746; nor is it an accident that in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité Rousseau once again invoked the hypothesis he had entertained as a chemist and Diderot as a philosopher in 1746: namely, the possibility that it is nature continuously trying, an infinite number of times, that explains an outcome, in this case the transition from the state of xvii

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nature to social existence. In the largest sense what Kelly demonstrates is that no matter how devastatingly Rousseau criticized modernity, he did so under the aegis of science and Enlightenment rather than by abandoning them. Part two, “Citoyens and Citoyennes,” consists of two essays, the first written by the editor and bearing the title “Rousseau’s Response to the Social Contract Tradition.” Although Rousseau did not speak of the social contract in the very first of the works that made him famous, he did explicitly enlist in the ranks of the social contract theorists very early in his career and remained a prominent contributor ever after to what Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke had initiated during the previous century. Nowhere in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750–51) is the contract mentioned, but only a few years later, in the Discourse on Inequality (1754–55), Rousseau adumbrated the most remarkable of all discussions of the “state of nature” and ended his treatise with a vigorous attack on the social contract as construed by his predecessors. Later, he not only set forth his own version of the Social Contract (1762) but also offered brief but noteworthy discussions of the same topic elsewhere in his works, as in Emile and the Letters Written from the Mountain (1765).36 The social contract was always on Rousseau’s mind. To appreciate Rousseau’s accomplishments as a social contract theorist, we must first free him, I argue, from those who came later—from Hegel, whose influence led a recent generation of scholars to deny that Rousseau was a contractual thinker, and from Kant, through whose eyes the present generation of scholars frequently sees Rousseau. My effort is to restore Rousseau to his context and to show how he developed his own highly original view of the social contract in the course of vigorously criticizing Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke. The upshot of my efforts is to demonstrate how brilliantly Rousseau pursued the social contract, how intent he was on utilizing it as a route not simply to “order,” in the manner of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, but to “freedom,” yet how he was also driven to resignation by his keen awareness of how thoroughly the modern age had blocked the path to the fulfillment of the contract’s promise. Only by reviving classical citizenship in the modern world, by forcing ourselves to be free, can the contract succeed, which is so unlikely to happen and would exact so high a price as to invite despair. Was Rousseau, then, the culmination of the tradition of the social contract, or did the maladies of the modern age compel him to dig its grave? xviii

Introduction

Claudia Schaler follows with an essay titled “Over Her Dead Body: Voilà La Citoyenne?” Her contention is that it is Julie who is fit to be a citizen, more so than Emile and far more so than Saint-Preux. Wolmar does not matter in this regard: Both more and less than human, he is not a citizen but rather a fictional depiction in the familial world of Rousseau’s Great Legislator. Schaler argues that Julie, who is as human and passionate as Wolmar is passionless, succeeds where others fail to achieve self-mastery. In contrast to Emile, who falters in the ­unfinished sequel to Rousseau’s book on education, Julie triumphs in living in accordance with the painstaking demands of classical freedom, the freedom of self-mastery, which sadly is the only form of freedom strong enough to fend off the ills of modernity. Noteworthy in Schaler’s performance is her critique of the many feminist scholars of today who find in Rousseau the man they love to hate. A feminist herself, Schaler’s critique comes from within and is therefore especially challenging. She does not stop with staking a claim that feminists violate the standards of historical investigation with their insistence that Rousseau, in the eighteenth century, should live up to the demands of scholars writing in the twenty-first century. Nor would she be satisfied to point out that feminists frequently misunderstand the word égalité when they accuse Rousseau of hypocrisy in praising equality only to deny it to women. Often what Rousseau means by égalité is a steady, even mode of existence, undisturbed by the traumas of modern life, a goal best achieved when the family is a haven in a heartless world; and women, serving the family, are often more fulfilled and happy than their male counterparts who must endure the ravages of life outside the familial refuge. Schaler goes well beyond the foregoing criticisms levelled against feminist scholars with her vigorous account of all that Julie achieved by way of self-mastery. Also quite significant, Schaler shows how the lessons about self-mastery found in Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse have implications for all Rousseau’s writings. If Rousseau is correct, then Isaiah Berlin was wrong to champion “negative freedom”; his is only the freedom to be denied genuine freedom by the forces of the modern world. And if Julie must die in the novel, so much the worse for the modern social, cultural, and political universe which has made it impossible for a paragon of self-mastery to live. Part three bears the title “Sound and Music” and features contributions by Michael O’Dea and Julia Simon. On a backward glance, it seems fair to say that students of Rousseau’s thought were slow to appreciate xix

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his writings about music; and it is noteworthy that one of his works, Du principe de la mélodie, did not come to light until 1974. In recent decades, however, there has been a wealth of studies of Rousseau’s reflections on music, frequently focusing on his dominant role in the mid-century “Querelle des Bouffons”—the debate over French versus Italian opera. Although Michael O’Dea in “How to Be Modern in Music: Rousseau between Greece, Italy, and Vienna” pays due diligence to the famous quarrel between the corners of king and queen, he begins at an earlier date, with Sébastien Brossard’s Italian-centered Dictionnaire de musique of 1701 and ends long after the Querelle, with an extensive examination of the relationship between Rousseau and Gluck. Nothing, perhaps, stands out more in O’Dea’s essay than his discussion of Rousseau’s response to Gluck. Although Rousseau’s Italianinspired Le Devin du Village (1752) was a remarkable success, he culminated his critique of French music with the extreme pronouncement of his Lettre sur la musique françoise (1753) that “there is neither measure nor melody in French music, because the French language does not permit it.”37 Twenty years later, in an apparent reversal, Rousseau tacitly consented when Gluck, citing Rousseau as his inspiration,38 breathed Italian-style life into French music. Rousseau, O’Dea points out, might therefore be seen as a “champion . . . of a certain modernity.” Certainly, in his writings lauding the Italians, Rousseau had treated them as “our contemporaries,” which made him a critic of one version of modern music, the French, rather than the pure and simple champion of the ancients. Rousseau’s Italians, O’Dea observes, represent not a renaissance of antiquity but rather a novel historical development. When Rousseau criticized Rameau’s efforts to claim music as a branch of natural science, the philosophes abandoned their initial solidarity with the famous French composer who had seemed to vindicate their modernist views, to side with the upstart Jean-Jacques who, they quickly recognized, was the advocate of a type of modernity far more promising than Rameau’s for coming to terms with the emotions evoked by musical experience. Julia Simon both begins and ends her essay, “Listening in Rousseau’s Auditory World: Sound, Noise, and Music,” with an episode Rousseau recounted in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Alone, so he thought, in the wilds, Rousseau heard the sound of a repetitive mechanical click and, upon investigation, discovered to his amazement that he was only steps away from a stocking factory. His initial reaction of joy to be near others soon gave way to his fear that the “others,” wanting to xx

Introduction

do him harm, had malevolently violated the sanctuary of nature. The sounds of birds had been displaced by the noise of humans. On her first page, Simon comments that Rousseau experienced this event as “the penetration of nature by human activity.” On her last page she notes that for Rousseau the noise emanating from the factory signified “humanity’s denatured descent into modernity.” The stocking factory was the future, a future which confirmed Rousseau’s bleak account in the Second Discourse and elsewhere. It was noise that Rousseau heard coming from the factory, neither the natural sounds of a bird whistling nor the music of humans. He could make so much of what he heard because he was remarkably attentive in his theorizing to the complexities of listening. To help us appreciate Rousseau’s increasingly complex treatment of auditory experience, Simon offers clues drawn from Rousseau’s account of pity, contrasting his simple explanation in the Second Discourse with his much more complicated one in the later Essay on the Origin of Languages, where our commiseration for others presupposes imagination, memory, selfawareness, and cognition—the higher powers of the human mind. To which one might add that Rousseau had already in the Second Discourse held that “the more one meditates on this subject, the more the distance from pure sensations to the simplest knowledge increases in our eyes.”39 Rousseau would not follow his acquaintance Condillac, who in the Treatise on Sensations (1754) had completed the empiricist program of reducing all the powers of the mind to sensation. With great skill and insight, Julia Simon takes the reader through Rousseau’s thoughts on silence, sound, noise, and music. As she finishes her labors, we are left with a Rousseau who is brilliantly appreciative of the possibilities of auditory experience and deeply saddened by the sounds and noise of modernity. Part four, “Ancients and Moderns,” opens with Patrick Riley’s essay on “Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.” For Riley’s purposes no quotation from Rousseau is more valuable than the statement that he was one of “those moderns who have an ancient soul.” Riley’s ambition is to retrace the route Rousseau followed as he moved from the antiquity-loving First Discourse to the modern formulations of the Social Contract. On this journey Riley’s guide is Fénelon, much beloved by Rousseau and a constant source of his inspiration—until the realities of the modern world forced him to move beyond this turn-of-the-century figure who had spoken of Mentor in Telemachus and had long served, in effect, as Rousseau’s mentor. xxi

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With a nod to Judith Shklar, Riley notes how Fénelon’s two classical utopias in Telemachus set the stage for much of Rousseau’s mature thought. Bétique, with its ideal of pastoral simplicity and innocence, reappears in the familial triumph of La Nouvelle Héloïse; and Salente’s civic ideal leads a second life in Rousseau’s political works. Everywhere one looks, Fénelon’s name is favorably mentioned, in the Confessions, in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in the Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, and in Emile. If it is Mentor, not the son of Ulysses, who is the true hero of Telemachus, we should not be surprised that the tutor, in parallel fashion, is the hero of Emile. And yet Rousseau did move, ever so slowly, step-by-step, beyond Fénelon in the course of facing up to modern realities. Fénelon’s influence, Riley notes, is strongest in the First Discourse, in which ­Rousseau had not yet begun to speak of “voluntary agreement.” The closer ­Rousseau moved to his modern theory of the social contract, the weaker his ties to Fénelon. Again, when Rousseau decided that his “general will” was that of a particular community, he necessarily put himself at odds with Fénelon’s yearning for a respublica Christiana. For all his admiration of Fénelon, Rousseau’s recognition of modern political realities, international and domestic, led him in a new direction. So did his immersion in modern political thought: the social contract assumes primacy in his mature works; ancient-style civic education plays a secondary role, reduced to a means of sustaining the contract. Despite his ancient soul, Rousseau was very much a modern. After Riley’s essay, I address the theme of Ancients and Moderns in “Stoicism for Rousseau and Other Beleaguered Moderns.” My argument is that the last thing Rousseau and his former colleagues, the philosophes, wanted was to return to the doctrines of Stoic selfabnegation and self-denial; and yet, when their hopes for the modern world were compromised, they sought to protect themselves by donning a Stoic mask, much as Montaigne had done in public but not in private. To Montaigne, political stability sufficed; he would do his public duty when necessary and then return to privacy as soon as possible. The philosophes, by contrast, felt obliged to change the world but soon discovered the world would change them unless they were willing to live a life of sacrifice. They could betray their cause and prosper or embrace their cause and suffer the fate of being Stoics in spite of themselves. Would Diderot provide his daughter with a dowry by selling his library to Catherine the Great, or would he refuse to be compromised? xxii

Introduction

Not simply the Old Regime but civilization itself, according to Rousseau, is what compromises us. Only man in the state of nature has succeeded in living the life of a Stoic; all socialized beings live outside themselves. Emile is constantly cajoled by the tutor to submit without murmur to the blows of necessity; Emile, like the man of nature, is a Stoic without knowing it. Resignation is Rousseau’s theme: present in his early works, present in his final writings. For moderns the doctrines of ancient Stoicism are an unwelcome but necessary medicine. I end my essay by returning to the comparison with the Scots that I set forth at the outset of this introduction. While Stoicism sometimes appears in the Scottish Enlightenment, it is not the world-weary, self-denying version found in the likes of Epictetus and Marcus ­Aurelius, not even when the names of those authors crop up in texts such as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. By contrast, the reluctant backtracking of a significant number of French philosophes to the joyless coping mechanisms of Stoicism indicates that there were significant national variations of Enlightenment. It also indicates that Rousseau was not so much outside the Enlightenment as the thinker who followed the implications of the French Enlightenment to the bitter end. Part five, “The Modern Predicament,” consists of essays by Shefali Misra and Claude Habib. While all the previously discussed essays have compelling present-day implications, each is fundamentally focused on Rousseau’s time period: the eighteenth century. In this final section the two contributors change the focus by placing contemporary matters at the forefront of their examinations. Shefali Misra comes first with her essay on “Rousseau and the ­Dilemmas of Liberal Modernity.” Her striking claim is that the liberals of our day can benefit enormously from the writer they have denounced for two centuries, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ever since the French ­Revolution and the excesses of Jacobinism, Rousseau has been the target of liberal polemicists. Even today, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, not all good liberals have moved beyond Cold War formulations of “­Rousseau the totalitarian.” And nothing is more common than for liberals to complain that Rousseau would have decisively rejected Isaiah Berlin’s liberal concept of “negative liberty” in favor of his version of “positive liberty.” Very striking then is Shefali Misra’s insistence that liberals have much to learn from Rousseau about the preconditions of stable liberal order. Rousseau was no liberal, Misra freely admits, but insists that his formulations are frequently compatible with and essential to a liberal xxiii

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

outlook. Always his concern is for the individual, even when he is at his most collectivist; the collectivity is for the individual, never the individual for the collectivity. A certain amount of privacy, moreover, is quite compatible with Rousseau’s formulations of the “general will,” and never does he demand that we forget ourselves when immersed in civic activities. Toleration, too, a chief liberal concern, is at the top of Rousseau’s agenda. But far better than liberals, Rousseau understood that unity must precede diversity—that we must find a way to come together before we can assert our differences. In his estimation, a civic religion binding for all is the collective force necessary to make toleration possible. Misra briefly applies Rousseau’s lessons to three modern nations: the United States, France, and India. Despite the oft-noted presence of illiberalism in its history, the United States is rooted in the liberal faith that it is a nation of immigrants, observes Misra. In the United States national identity comes first, frequently expressed by chauvinistic claims of exceptionalism, but happily American nationalism sanctions liberal diversity of ethnicity and religion. The French republican tradition, by contrast, at war historically with the Catholic Church, has feared that public recognition of religion and ethnicity will destroy the republic “one and indivisible.” French Muslims, Misra remarks, have reasons to envy their American counterparts, despite 9/11. Worst of all is India, where democracy fares poorly because unity did not precede democratization. Modern liberals would do well to go to school with Rousseau instead of denouncing him. Claude Habib ends part five and brings the entire volume to a close with her essay “The Unconditional Self.” One might say about any essay written on Rousseau in our day that it is not only about Rousseau but also, quite obviously, about our response to him. In Habib’s case, however, the foregoing truism takes on a new and deeper meaning. For what she reveals is the uncanny manner in which a man of the eighteenth century manages to speak directly to his readers in the twenty-first century. Habib contends that his success in speaking across the ages can be explained by his refusal to belong to French society—his constant movement from one job to another without settling on any, his capacity to float between classes, and his rejections of pensions or places in Academies. Thus nothing stands between Rousseau and ourselves. In her words, “This refusal to be indebted to the society of his time for anything is his passport to our society.” xxiv

Introduction

Another reason we have little trouble interacting with Rousseau is that in his presentation of self he stresses not his natural goodness but his internal divisions and complexities, with which we can readily identify. Montaigne may have taken the first steps in this direction, but Rousseau goes much further. Where Montaigne presents his inconsistencies as lovable quirks, Rousseau asks whether his faults are worse than ours and whether we dare condemn him. By his account he is free but weak, very weak, and ever in search of himself, which resonates well in our world. Sometimes he said he acted other than himself, and we make the same claim; sometimes he said he acted against his own interests, and we have much the same experience. Pathos permeates Rousseau’s autobiographical writings, a pathos that speaks directly to us but in his own age was known only in fictional writings, such as those of Prévost. Claude Habib deems Rousseau “the first of the moderns.” As no one had before him, he presented himself to the public as an individual thoroughly absorbed, for better and for worse, in every nook and cranny of himself, in all his complications and contradictions, and in his unending search for his very self. What her examination suggests is that the antimodern Rousseau was the most modern of men. She brings down the curtain on the essays preceding hers and invites the conclusion that few if any thinkers can match Rousseau when it comes to simultaneously expressing and challenging the modern age. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Notes

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 474. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 15. Emile, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1969), vol. IV, pp. 245, 532, 603. Hereafter OC. All subsequent citations to Rousseau’s works will be to the Pléiade edition. Diderot, Réfutation de l’ouvrage d’Helvétius intitulé l’Homme, in the AssézatTourneux edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Diderot (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), vol. II, p. 432. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), pp. 112–113. Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 9–10, 43. Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert, in OC, vol. V (1995), p. 23. Essai sur l’origine des langues, in OC, vol. V, p. 378. Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 52. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), pp. 25, 13. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 31. Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2014), pp. 161–162. Originally published by Harvard University Press in 1994. xxv

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. xxvi

Lettre à d’Alembert, pp. 55–56. “Lettre à Voltaire,” in OC, vol. IV (1969), p. 1063. La Nouvelle Héloïse, in OC, vol. II (1964), pp. 76–84. Projet de constitution pour la Corse, in OC, vol. III (1964) pp. 914–915. 2nd Discourse, in OC, vol. III , p. 171. Emile, pp. 456, 459, 463, 680, 681. In his preface to Narcisse, in OC, vol. II, p. 968. Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 185. 2nd Discourse, in OC, III, p. 142. A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 521. Ibid., p. 537. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, no. 65. For evidence that Hume was not consistent in this matter, consider his comments in “Of National Characters,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 206. I am, however, not convinced by the claims of Duncan Forbes that Hume is innocent of the charge of ahistorical reasoning. Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), ch. 4. Confessions, in OC, vol. I (1959) p. 630. J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume (NY & London: Garland, 1983), 2 vols., letters 197, 200, 314, 351, 358, 384, 423. One remark of some substance was Hume’s complaint to Mme. de Boufflers that “I disapprove particularly of the seditious purpose” of Rousseau’s Lettres écrites de la montagne. Letter 269. Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 250–254. 2nd Discourse, pp. 154–155. Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 308–313. Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p. 251. Although the passages in question contain remarks by Rousseau on the disastrous consequences of the coming into being of the division of labor, Smith gives us no reason to think he gave them any serious consideration. The contention that Smith has Rousseau in mind in his later The Wealth of Nations, p. 183, rests on very thin evidence. Despite its subtitle, Dennis Rasmussen’s The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), adduces very little evidence, in my judgment, that Smith wrote in response to Rousseau. Similar to ­Rasmussen is Ryan Patrick Hanley’s “Commerce and Corruption: Rousseau’s Diagnosis and Adam Smith’s Cure,” European Journal of Political Theory (2008), 137–158. Hume, Human Understanding, no. 65. Ferguson, Civil Society, p. 8. 2nd Discourse, p. 211. Ferguson, Civil Society, pp. 9, 11. Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott—in The Philosopher’s Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (New Haven: Yale ­University Press, 2009), p. 49—seem to me quite misleading in their comment that Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society was “vaguely ­Rousseauian.” Ferguson, Civil Society, pp. 74, 173. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 782.

Introduction

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

E.g., Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, no. 163. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, nos. 32, 82. It is perhaps worth noting the comment in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (NY: Hafner Press, 1977), p. 75, that “there appears not to be any single species which has yet been extinguished in the universe.” Hume, The Natural History of Religion. Hume also worried about the political consequences of the national debt. See J. G. A. Pocock, “Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Britain,” in Daniel F. Norton, ed., McGill Hume Studies (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1979), pp. 325–343. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. E.g., Emile, pp. 833, 836. Lettres écrites de la montagne, in OC, vol. III, p. 807. Lettre sur la musique Françoise, in OC, vol. V, p. 328. On Gluck’s claim that he was doing what Rousseau would have done, had he continued to compose music, in addition to O’Dea’s fine account, see the older work by Alfred Richard Oliver, The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (NY: Columbia University Press), pp. 120–121. 2nd Discourse, p. 144.

xxvii

Part One Before and After Vincennes

1 Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship1 Christopher Kelly

The temptation to divide Rousseau’s life into a “before” and “after” is irresistible. There are, in fact, numerous candidates for the turning point: his decision to run away from Geneva when he was fifteen, his decision to pursue fame and fortune in Paris when he was thirty, or his flight from France and subsequent persecution after the publication of Emile when he was fifty. Each of these is dramatic enough and Rousseau makes much of each of them; but, for most students of his thought, the authentic turning point is the famous “illumination” on the road to Vincennes in 1749. Rousseau’s most complete description of this moment, in the second of the “Letters to Malesherbes” written in 1762, is particularly vivid in its account of a rupture from the past. Rousseau compares the illumination to a “sudden inspiration” accompanied by “a thousand lights,” “inexpressible perturbation,” “dizziness similar to drunkenness,” and “violent palpitation.”2 This illumination represents a crisis in Rousseau’s life that was intensely personal. The insights contained in it also led to a crisis in modern thought and life under Rousseau’s withering scrutiny. Rousseau’s consequent decision to write works based on the insights acquired so suddenly turned him from a little known secretary into a famous writer almost overnight. In little more than a decade, ­Rousseau published the First and Second Discourses, The Village Soothsayer, Julie, Emile, and the Social Contract—to mention only his most notable works. Among authors, only Voltaire, whose string of successes had begun decades earlier, rivaled his fame. Given the suddenness and durability of this change in Rousseau’s life, it hardly seems an exaggeration for him to describe it by saying, “I saw another universe and became another man.”3 3

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

Rousseau’s own emphasis on this moment and the prominence of the writings that came from it have led to a fairly uniform view of his career, even among scholars who evaluate his work in different ways. It is customary to refer to the writings that were published in the years immediately following the illumination as early writings—as if he had written nothing before.4 Thus the First and Second Discourses are considered early writings, and the Social Contract and Emile are regarded as late. This framework has its uses, but it can be misleading. Rousseau wrote all of these works over a quite short period of time—little more than a decade. He often worked on several at a time, some of which he published right away and others of which he took time to finish. Why is a work published in 1755 an early work and one begun earlier but published a few years later a late work? Rousseau always insisted that these writings formed a unified whole. Furthermore, calling the Discourses early works neglects the fact that Rousseau was thirty-eight when he published the first of these. This does not mean, of course, that little attention is paid to ­Rousseau’s life before the illumination. Indeed, there are few major thinkers whose childhood experiences and feelings have been subject to as much scholarly attention. The unprecedented candor of the account of these experiences and feelings given in the Confessions has been a strong stimulus for psychologically oriented accounts of Rousseau’s life. Those who direct their attention to Rousseau’s life before the illumination tend to diminish the profundity of his mature thought by seeing it as the ultimate expression of deep-seated conflicts rooted in childhood experience; whereas those who attempt to demonstrate the depth of his thought avoid considering what he did before the illumination. In short, the division of Rousseau’s life into two halves encourages a view that the first half was one of intense feeling and variety of experiences accompanied by little thought and that the second was one of deep thought that either did or didn’t free itself from youthful feelings. Rousseau’s apparent authorization of this characterization of the division in his life is hardly absolute, however. His more nuanced view of the matter becomes clearer when one looks at things he wrote near the period of the illumination. For example, in the “Final Reply,” written in 1752 in response to one of the many attacks on the First Discourse, Rousseau complains about the superficiality of those writers who hastened to oppose him saying, “Before explaining myself, I meditated on my subject at length and deeply, and I tried to consider all aspects of it.”5 A few years later, in reviewing the controversies in which he had 4

Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship

been involved, he elaborates on this, saying, “I wondered how anyone could write with so little discretion and no reflection about matters that I had meditated about almost my whole life without having been able to clarify them adequately, and I was always surprised not to find in my adversaries’ writings a single objection that I had not seen and rejected in advance as unworthy of attention.”6 In describing the period before the Discourse, he says, “I was active because I was foolish; to the extent that I was undeceived I changed tastes, attachment, projects, and in all these changes I always wasted my effort and my time because I was always looking for what did not exist.”7 He does not, however, say that he had not had a single thought in his head; he indicates confusion, not total ignorance. Looking at the illumination as a beginning point—which it surely was in some sense—obscures the fact that it was also a conclusion: a period of confusion came to a close and was replaced with clarity. In these passages Rousseau indicates that he had long struggled prior to the illumination with precisely the issues that he addressed in the Discourse and subsequent writings. This evidence does not contradict the later accounts, but it does indicate that the result of the illumination was not the sudden awareness of these important issues, but rather the sudden solution to questions that had plagued Rousseau for a long time. The purpose of this essay is to call attention to one set of these issues centering on a sustained encounter with modern natural science. Rousseau’s mature critique of modernity was preceded by a sustained absorption with one of modernity’s proudest claims: its aspiration to scientific knowledge. I

Since the publication of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Rousseau has been regarded as a critic of the sciences. Even in the case of the one science with which he is closely associated, namely botany, his best-known discussions sharply distinguish this science from other natural sciences such as physics and chemistry. 8 In particular, his praise of the pleasant activity of botanizing outdoors is contrasted to the “tedious and costly experiments” necessary for chemistry, experiments that require spending “money and time in the midst of charcoal, crucibles, furnaces, retorts, smoke and suffocating fumes, always at the risk of life and often at the expense of health.”9 It is not often noticed that this and other attacks on chemistry show that Rousseau was well acquainted with the activity he is criticizing. Indeed, earlier in his life he engaged in an extensive period of study of chemistry and had 5

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

considerable experience with crucibles, furnaces, retorts, and all that their operations entailed. Until the recent publication of two separate scholarly editions of the Institutions chimiques, little attention had been paid to Rousseau’s writings on chemistry.10 Indeed, the Institutions was not included in the standard Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s works, even though the final volume included other scientific works written around the same time or even earlier. The editors apparently regarded the Institutions as a work of mere compilation, which, if it had been completed, might have appeared as the work of Rousseau’s employer rather than his own.11 Rousseau entrusted this work, over 1,200 pages in manuscript and accompanied by numerous shorter essays, to one of his literary executors, Pierre Moultou, in 1778, and it was handed down through Moultou’s family. The manuscript was discovered by scholars toward the end of the nineteenth century and was published successively between 1919 and 1921. Even this publication stimulated little interest. The new editions of the Institutions allow the status of this work to be reevaluated. Book VII of the Confessions discusses the circumstances leading to the composition of the Institutions. Rousseau had been exposed to chemistry in the 1730s when he lived with Mme. de Warens. She combined botany and chemistry with the production of herbal remedies, but Rousseau claims that he did not develop a taste for these studies at that time. The one episode he does recount of performing an experiment involved an attempt to make sympathetic ink, which blew up in his face and blinded him for more than six weeks.12 Book VII begins with Rousseau’s arrival in Paris in the middle of 1742 filled with hopes for success based on his system of musical notation and a draft of his play Narcisse. When neither of these was warmly received, he was left with the resource of some letters of recommendation, one of which was to the Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel. The Jesuit urged Rousseau to turn away from scholars and academies, saying, “One does nothing in Paris except by means of women. They are like the curves of which wise men are the asymptotes; they ceaselessly approach them but they never touch them.”13 Castel obtained entry for Rousseau into a few households, including that of Louise-Marie-Madeleine Dupin, the wife of the tax farmer Claude Dupin, whose son by an earlier marriage, Charles-Louis Dupin de Francueil, was several years younger than Rousseau. Rousseau formed a friendship with Francueil on the basis of their mutual love of music, and, in the spring of 1743, they 6

Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship

took a course in chemistry with Guillaume-François Rouelle, the leading French chemist of his day and later a teacher of Lavoisier among others.14 Some months later Rousseau left Paris to take the position as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice. After a tempestuous stay in Venice, during which he used his knowledge of chemistry to perform magic tricks (apparently using sympathetic ink),15 he returned to Paris in the autumn of 1744 and eventually responded to Francueil’s offer of employment as one of his and his stepmother’s secretaries. Rousseau entered their employ because he was desperate for a steady, if small, income. His correspondence indicates that he had maintained an interest in chemistry. Rousseau explains Francueil’s desire for a secretary by saying, “M. de Francueil was studying natural history and chemistry at that time and was making a collection. I believe that he aspired to the Academy of Sciences: for that purpose he wanted to write a book, and he judged that I could be useful to him in this labor.”16 Accordingly, the two friends resumed their studies with Rouelle and took several of his courses. At the Château of Chenonceaux (owned by the Dupins), they established a quite impressive laboratory, many of the instruments of which still exist.17 Rousseau even took on a student of chemistry. He sums up, “I soon acquired the pace and even the taste for my new occupations. I became attached to Chemistry. Along with M. de Francueil I took several courses with M. Rouelle, and for good or ill we began to scribble on paper about that science whose elements we barely possessed.”18 What began as scribbling eventually became the lengthy manuscript of the Institutions. Most of Rousseau’s mature works are characterized by his ability to turn questions posed by others (such as academies) to his own purposes. He sharpened this skill performing the various tasks imposed on him by the Dupins.19 There are reasons not to attribute too much importance to Francueil’s role in the Institutions. Rousseau complains about the failure of Francueil to promote Rousseau’s opera Les Muses galantes, saying, “I always believed that I saw on that occasion and many others that neither he nor Mme. Dupin cared to allow me to acquire a positive reputation in the world, perhaps out of fear that when their books were seen it might be assumed that they had grafted their talents onto mine.”20 He hastens to exonerate Mme. Dupin from the charge, saying that “she never used me except to write under her dictation, or in research of pure erudition.” His failure to include Francueil in the exoneration is telling. It is likely, then, that the Institutions, which is 7

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

in his handwriting, is essentially his work, accomplished, to be sure, under Francueil’s orders. Consistent with this is the fact that the manuscript remained in Rousseau’s possession after he left the employ of the Dupins. His thousands of pages of work for Mme. Dupin stayed with the family, as did some short essays that he wrote at the time and which were published for the first time in 1884.21 In one of the new editions of the Institutions, Christophe Van Staen has given a plausible chronology for Rousseau’s work on the manuscript. He argues that Rousseau (and Francueil) began writing as early as 1745 while they were attending Rouelle’s course and that Rousseau’s final draft dates from sometime after 1747, given that the final version has references to works published that year. With some hesitation Van Staen ultimately suggests that Rousseau stopped writing by 1749 or 1750, either when he began working on a refutation of Montesquieu for M. Dupin or with the appearance of the First Discourse. It is possible that he continued working on the manuscript for a bit longer. In short, the crucial period of Rousseau’s active engagement was the period shortly before the illumination in October 1749.22 It is in the light of its proximity to this turning point in Rousseau’s career that I propose to look at the Institutions. II

The Institutions is an unfinished introductory textbook. It is divided into four books: On the Elements of Bodies and Their Composition, On Natural Instruments, On Artificial Instruments, and On Operations (which deals with chemical analysis and synthesis). Separate from the manuscript are some essays on specific topics, such as copper, lead, and arsenic. Rousseau relies extensively on established authorities. In fact, he cites quite a number of works by major chemists. He relies most heavily on three Latin sources (by Becher, Boerhaave, and Junker)23 from which he translates or paraphrases into French. He also relies on Sénac’s Nouveau cours de chimie d’après les principles de Newton et de Stahl and sometimes even copies from it word for word. He also certainly used material taken from Rouelle’s courses and refers to a number of other sources. At the very least, Rousseau was well acquainted with major sources that would have interested every proficient chemist at the time. The numerous places in which Rousseau does not borrow from his sources are of obvious importance for determining his own views about chemistry. Nonetheless, other sections can also be quite revealing. Even when Rousseau does rely heavily on his sources, he is 8

Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship

faced with dilemmas because they are frequently in disagreement with each other. Indeed, this problem is also faced by the sources themselves. Boerhaave makes a sort of synthesis of competing views, and Sénac attempts to reconcile Stahl’s version of Becher’s theory with the competing principles of Newton. Therefore, even when transcribing, ­Rousseau had to make choices about which of several competing doctrines he would follow and whether he would highlight their agreements or their disagreements.24 Rousseau’s reliance on and critical use of his sources is clear from the start of book 1, which begins with extravagant praise of Becher and his “illustrious commentator” Stahl, saying, “Becher, then, enlightened by the torch of experiment, dared to penetrate into the most secret routs of nature: his great intelligence, sustained by a truly philosophic genius caused him to find the finest and most complete theory that had yet been imagined about the constitution and composition of natural bodies.”25 This admiration does not stop Rousseau from declaring several pages later that at times “our author” gets tangled up in questions that are quite simple and needs to have recourse to accounts of angels to support his complicated position.26 Later, in his discussion of fire, he concludes that his own account, “that the hot and the cold are the principles of rarification and density of bodies” is “precisely the opposite of the doctrine of Becher.” He is clearly not a slavish follower. From the standpoint of the later history of chemistry, the most significant of Rousseau’s critical discussions occurs in his accounts of fire and the “phlogistic element,” which played such a prominent role in Stahl and the rejection of which was crucial for later chemistry. A key difficulty in the phlogiston doctrine is that, by arguing that the process of “calcinations” (what was later called oxidation) involved a separation of the phlogistic element from the substance that underwent the process, it failed to account for the fact that the weight of metals increased rather than decreased during the process. This problem is precisely the one to which Lavoisier turned his attention a couple of decades later and led to his consequent rejection of phlogiston theory.27 Rousseau inclines to Stahl’s position, saying, “This explanation, accepted today by the majority of chemists, appears to be in fact the genuine ethology of calcinations.”28 Having given this endorsement, however, he hastens to raise the problem of the increase in weight and refers to evidence cited by Sénac against Stahl. He gives the same endorsement and the same qualification when he returns to the issue later.29 Here, after praising Becher’s account for explaining the various phenomena 9

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

of fire “rather well,” he adds that, if one entered into a close examination of the question of the increase of weight, “Becher would no longer do so well.” He ends his description of competing theories by saying, “The reader can choose, or look for a better” and then quotes Virgil: “Non nostrum intervos tantas componere lites” [It is not for us to end such great disputes].30 Immediately after his first discussion of calcinations, Rousseau has a discussion of dissolution that is even more critical of his sources. His reservations about causal accounts of dissolution lead him to adopt the account of relations or affinities presented by Geoffroy.31 Rousseau’s treatment of Boerhaave is similarly nuanced. He refers to him as “that skillful physicist,”32 but, after summarizing his account of the weight of air, adds, “I admit that I am not satisfied with that explanation.”33 Elsewhere he insists that Boerhaave does not take sufficient account of factors that seem to contradict his assumptions.34 In short, while the Institutions looks like a compilation, a closer look shows that Rousseau is both selective and critical. We shall see in the following section that, even when Rousseau seems to be merely translating Boerhaave, he sometimes introduces subtle but significant changes. Rousseau’s most intriguing arguments concern the status and foundation of chemistry as a science. What seems to have mattered most to him in his study of chemistry is his account of what this science—and, indeed, science in general—can claim to accomplish and the foundations of that claim. This account must be followed with some care because Rousseau often begins by appearing to be assertive and ends by being skeptical. By following a thread on this point, one can get a glimpse of at least one fundamental issue with which Rousseau was engaged during this period. That issue is the relation between natural science and rational natural theology. III

Rousseau begins the Institutions with the claim that even the ignorant admit that knowledge of physics, or natural science in the most general sense, is of extreme utility for our preservation because it gives us “knowledge of ourselves, that is to say, that of our body, and that of the bodies that surround us.”35 He immediately turns to a defense of chemistry against the proponents of physics in the narrower sense, who regard chemistry as identical to alchemy or who dismiss it as merely a study of industrial processes such as making beer. His defense of chemistry takes the form of a series of attacks upon its rivals. ­Physics, Rousseau declares, “considers bodies only by their motions, their shapes, and by 10

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other similar modifications.”36 It does not, however, tell us anything about the matter that constitutes bodies: “It examines, so to speak, the outside (écorce) and surface.” Chemistry, in contrast, goes to the essence of matter beneath this surface and looks “to discover the reasons for the diverse modes and accidents under which it presents itself to us.” He concludes that “it is certain that if there is some way to arrive at the true knowledge of nature, that is to say the bodies that compose it, it is by means of the analysis of them and the knowledge of the elements from which they are themselves formed that one can arrive at it.” This is the distinctive domain of chemistry. This apparently humble science has been elevated into the sole source of the true knowledge of nature. The second chapter turns to chemistry’s key question, the manner in which material principles unite in order to form the natural bodies we observe around us. Here again, Rousseau defends chemistry, this time against philosophy. He argues that, while Peripatetics, Cartesians, and Newtonians give accounts of how this union takes place, none of their contradictory accounts succeeds in explaining anything.37 The tendency of philosophers to present only abstract systems not grounded in experiment leads him to conclude that “you will learn more about it in a quarter of an hour in a chemist’s lab than in your whole life among the systems of philosophers.” This does not mean that chemists have been perfect in their quest for knowledge. What is needed is some combination of the systematic spirit of the philosophers and the concreteness of chemical experiments. This combination would be “the true science of nature” promised in the preceding chapter. Having established the dignity of chemistry, Rousseau unobtrusively turns to difficulties in realizing its promise. The key difficulty resides in establishing the basic principles of matter. These principles are inaccessible to our organs and even to any instruments we might use to detect them. Moreover, however many or few these principles might be, we are exposed to an “infinite number of combinations” of them.38 It now appears that even the most perfect chemistry would allow us only to detect the mixts, or substances “formed by the concourse of two or more principles which by means of their union no longer form anything but a single whole.”39 The principles themselves remain mysterious. Thus, after the great promise of his beginning, Rousseau has retreated. The resolution and composition of these “secondary principles” may form a science of a sort, but they do not have “the true science of nature” in an unqualified sense. 11

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Book 1 addresses matter, or chemical elements and the compounds that come from them. Book 2 turns to elements in a very different sense. The difficulties Rousseau has identified in understanding matter lead him to investigate elementary processes, rather than their underlying matter. The goal now appears to be as much the imitation of natural operations as the knowledge of what nature is, or the latter for the sake of the former.40 One effect of this turn away from attempting to understand the nature of matter is that much of the discussion that follows is concerned with things that today’s readers would expect to see in discussions of geology or climatology rather than chemistry.41 If we are interested in the effects of heat, the formations of solids, and so forth, these things may be easier to consider on a massively large scale than on an imperceptibly small one. Book 2 continues the retreat from the strong claims of Rousseau’s introductory remarks. In one of the few substantive studies of the Institutions, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent has signaled the importance of chapter 1 of this book, “On the Mechanism of Nature.”42 She suggests that Rousseau presents three different perspectives on nature in this chapter, corresponding respectively to “good sense,” physics in general, and chemistry in particular. She observes that such a “perspectivism,” in which different but equally valid perspectives on the same issue are presented, is characteristic of chemists of this period. For example, they argue that physics and chemistry consider the same material from perspectives that only seem to be incompatible. Bensaude-Vincent’s presentation has much merit, but it should be noted that Rousseau does not treat these perspectives equally. Instead, he gives sympathetic statements of positions, which he then proceeds to analyze and criticize, following his advice, from the same period, that “the author’s duty is first to explain the common sentiment, to show by what foundations it is supported, and by what arms it is defended,” only to refute this sentiment later.43 This chapter begins with a treatment of common claims about “the magnificence of the spectacle of nature.”44 The admiration of most people for this spectacle is unaccompanied by understanding. Even the most competent philosophers tend to focus on very small parts, such as butterflies or houseflies. Those who go further and “try to embrace the general system of the universe” invariably construct systems that fail to correspond to the facts. This tendency extends to, and indeed is exemplified by, the Cartesians and the Newtonians. Again, Rousseau urges a middle path involving a quest for general laws that are always 12

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subject to correction by experimental data. This middle position is not novel, but it is important to observe the skepticism that accompanies it. Rousseau concludes this part of his discussion with a clear statement that shows how far he has moved from the extreme claims of his introduction: “Let us believe that with the most sublime speculations and the most marvelous discoveries we shall never succeed in knowing the true theory of nature in an evident manner.” He has now completely abandoned the grandiose claims that began book 1: we are now confronted with the claim that the true science of nature not only does not, but never will exist. Since Rousseau has retreated so much, it is surprising to see how assertive he immediately becomes in the discussion that follows. In the midst of an introductory chemistry textbook, he introduces a discussion of natural theology, saying, “An intelligent Being is the active principle of all things. It is necessary to have renounced good sense to doubt this, and to give proofs for such a clear truth is visibly to waste one’s time.” Apparently, this truth is so clear that it does not depend on knowledge of a true theory of nature; all that is required is good sense: the first of the “perspectives” identified by Bensaude-Vincent. In fact, far from depending on science, this beginning point is the presupposition of even the partial truth about nature that natural science makes available: we can hope to understand the order of nature because good sense informs us that it was established by an intelligent being. Rousseau immediately considers a possible objection to this account of the relation between science and religion. He says, “Doubtless this eternal Being could have produced and preserved the universe by the sole cooperation of its power and its will, but it was worthier of its wisdom to establish general laws in nature that never contradict themselves, and whose effect alone is sufficient for the preservation of the world and all it contains.”45 A theology that stresses only the power and will of God would pose problems for any attempt of reason to understand the laws of nature, whereas one that invokes only His wisdom invites us to explore the laws that preserve the world, even if we no longer expect to learn “the true theory of nature” as a whole. Rational natural religion founded in common sense, then, appears to be the foundation of natural science.46 Rousseau drops the subjects of divine power and will, although he will return to them later. For now he focuses on the natural laws that receive their warrant from the account of divine wisdom. He observes that, strangely, knowledge of these very laws has caused some thinkers 13

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to renounce their good sense and to call into question divine wisdom: “Could one believe that it is these very laws, and the faithfulness with which they are kept, that induces so many false minds to fail to recognize the legislator? Matter obeys; thus no one commands. It is impossible to lapse into atheism without making some of these bizarre arguments at every moment.” Rousseau here chides atheists for making use of the necessity accompanying the existence of unbreakable laws to deny the existence of a lawgiver. If unalterable necessity controls everything, they claim, what need do we have for God? Having used natural theology to establish the existence of natural laws, Rousseau now seems to use these laws to support his natural theology: we know that there are laws because common sense shows us that there is a legislator, and we know with certainty that there is a legislator because we see that there are laws. Having constructed this circle, Rousseau exposes its weakness in the next paragraph. He considers the possibility that the laws of nature might be reducible to a single one, such as Newton’s principle of attraction. Whatever the case might be about this particular principle, Rousseau insists that the crucial element of an understanding of nature is some principle of motion, which he calls “the universal agent.” The emphasis on motion, however, is precisely what threatens natural theology. He identifies Descartes as the thinker who has relied most on a principle of motion and says, “[Descartes] built a system singular by its ridiculousness, and he, without thinking of it, provided arms to the materialists who, attributing a necessary motion to matter, made it into the God that created and that preserves the world.” Whatever Descartes’s own opinion about God might be, Rousseau claims that his system invites atheism. If motion is granted to matter, it is possible to imagine the generation of an ordered universe out of chaos if the motion takes place over a sufficiently long period of time, even without a divine legislator. Natural theology is no longer evident because the “common sense” view that order implies a legislator is not necessary.47 In characterizing the Cartesian system as “ridiculous,” Rousseau does not deny that an improved version might be true, although alternatives are likely to be exposed to the same risk of atheism. He begins the next paragraph by asserting that we simply do not know “by what principles” the motions of celestial bodies takes place. The uncertainty of all arguments leads him to a new beginning point, far from the assertion of a rational natural theology based on common sense. He says, 14

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“These observations are enough to show me the point from which my researches ought to begin; I shall not torment myself in wishing to find out why the stars roll in their orbits, I shall not attempt either to relate the formation of plants and animals to the principles of mechanics or hydrostatics, and I shall not imitate that insane chemist who dared to undertake to make a man by the operations of his art.”48 Note that Rousseau has now renounced both natural theology and a materialist account of life. Instead, he focuses on the world of immediate experience, which, he argues, manifestly is preserved by the operation of chemical activities: the operation of climate as well as “digestions, dissolutions, filtrations, fermentations, calcinations, and all the operations that chemistry does nothing but imitate.”49 In short, he recommends a study of basic chemical processes shorn of any pretense to an ultimate knowledge of nature and unconnected with natural theology. This is a modest and skeptical science. As Bensaude-Vincent points out, this does not mean that Rousseau abandons the laboratory, but that he sees chemical processes as having an importance that extends beyond it. In effect, he sees the whole of the natural world as a sort of chemical laboratory. In fact, much of Rousseau’s account of chemistry is an account of the operation of principles such as heat and other chemical processes on a global scale. While the section just considered is the most extended discussion of the relation between science and rational natural religion in the Institutions, it is not the only one. Indeed, the subject returns several times in the next chapter. To this point his discussion of this issue has not relied on any sources, but now Rousseau resumes his reliance on authorities. The major source for the material of this chapter is ­Herman Boerhaave, whom Rousseau follows in appealing to theology as the foundation of scientific knowledge. Such appeals are hardly unique to Boerhaave in eighteenth-century chemical works, although they are quite frequent in his work. As he explains in his dedication of his book to his brother, Boerhaave began his study of chemistry with a theological interest, but then became interested in medicine. His brother had taken the same path, but in the opposite direction.50 The careers of the Boerhaave brothers, then, illustrate the mutual support and interchange of theology and science, precisely the position that Rousseau has just called into question. The issue of theology returns in Rousseau’s discussion of heat and cold, in which, as indicated above, he departs from Becher. After a process of elimination, Rousseau defines them as “principles of ­rarification 15

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and density of bodies”; fire is an elementary process—heat—not a material element. 51 He then adds, It is by these admirable properties that the author of nature maintains in a continuous motion: the course of the sun, the direction of its rays, the clouds it lifts up, the winds it stirs up, and a thousand other particular causes change at every moment the temperature of the air in all the climates of the world. The degree of warmth is never the same in two successive instants in the same place, and it is by that continuous succession that life and movement are preserved in all things.

Rousseau claims that incessant motion, which produces a condition that “is never the same in two successive instants in the same place,” is the necessary condition for the preservation of life, and he attributes the harmony between this motion and the preservation of life to “the author of nature.” His discussion departs from Boerhaave’s only by omitting the qualification of “most knowing” [sapientissimus] in the description of the “author of nature.”52 This small change does remove the emphasis on divine wisdom as the guiding force of nature in favor of simple motion. Rousseau’s change moves away from the natural theology he has earlier endorsed before calling it into question. Later in the chapter Rousseau also follows Boerhaave in attributing to God the facts that the sun is far enough from the earth to keep the ­latter’s inhabitants from being destroyed by its heat and that fire is always connected to sorts of matter that give it a tangible effect.53 The major differences in the passages are that Boerhaave refers to “God” in the first and to “the author of nature” in the second, while Rousseau refers to “the Creator” in both. Both point to a providential action of God in the ordering of nature to fit human flourishing. In short, ­Rousseau’s most conventional statements follow his source closely, whereas his less conventional statements diverge. Bensaude-Vincent, who argues that the Institutions presents a quite antiteleological view of nature on the whole, has identified a passage from the final chapter of book 2, which she regards as the only one that varies from this perspective.54 In discussing the idea of an imperceptible “elemental earth” underlying all the different substances that our senses experience, Rousseau carefully distinguishes this hypothetical element from its manifestations in the chemical compounds we experience, such as sand, which performs the function of filtering and dispersing water, without which the earth “would no longer produce anything, and would soon let the entire human race 16

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perish from hunger and misery.”55 He concludes this discussion and book 2 as a whole, saying, The terrestrial mass upon which we walk . . . is an unformed assemblage, and a sort of chaos of all natural bodies. Thus, in attaching to earth properly speaking the idea that we have given to it, one will easily know that nature does not offer to our eyes an idea that has all the homogeneity that this idea assumes. It does not leave its instruments idle this way, the decomposition of one body is immediately follow by the conformation of another. It is from this infinite number of combinations ceaselessly destroyed and begun again, that the harmony of this universe is born; and it is so that nothing might be lacking in it, that nothing superfluous is found in it.

These remarks, taken together, are what Bensaude-Vincent refers to as “providentialist.” In her view they express the view that humble sand is divinely ordained in order to filter our water. We have already seen that the Institutions does contain other passages that present a view of general providence connected with natural theology. It is not necessary, however, to read this particular one as providentialist. Rousseau does not take the step that Bensaude-Vincent implies he does. He refers to the earth as “a chaos” and claims that harmony comes from an “infinite number of combinations ceaselessly destroyed and begun again.” That this harmony happens to coincide with human survival could simply be the result of a randomly generated order of the world arising out of an indefinitely long sequence of combinations. Moreover, the very infiniteness of the number of possible combinations implies that the harmony that we observe now may well be transient. The passage indicates a present correspondence between human survival and a condition brought about by chance rather than providence.56 That Rousseau’s failure to refer to God here is deliberate is indicated by the fact that Boerhaave does not make the same omission in his corresponding passage. While Rousseau says that the apparently useless sand in fact has “a great importance in the system of nature,” Boerhaave attributes this importance to an intentional action of “the author of nature.”57 Moreover, unlike Rousseau, Boerhaave does not refer to an infinite number of combinations when discussing the destruction and recommencement that take place in nature. It appears, then, that it is Boerhaave, rather than Rousseau, who gives the sort of “providentialist” account that Bensaude-Vincent attributes to Rousseau. Rousseau himself tacitly turns away from such an account. In sum, while 17

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some passages of the Institutions endorse a rational natural theology with a general providence, these passages occur when Rousseau follows his source most submissively. His alterations of Boerhaave and the passages that do not rely on any source move in a different direction. In these alterations Rousseau drops references to a divinity and, at least in some cases, replaces them with the operations of chance over a sufficiently long period of time. When one examines these discussions, it is hard not to conclude that Rousseau indulges in the “bizarre arguments” he has attributed to atheists. It might appear that either a rational natural theology or an understanding of the operation of natural necessity following the laws of probability would be sufficient as a foundation for science. As we have seen, in both Boerhaave and the parts of the Institutions drawn from him, natural religion and science are mutual supports. From the perspective of natural religion, science is a support against atheism in that it suggests that the orderliness of nature is the result of divine wisdom. Some parts of the Institutions suggest that the inverse is also true. That is, rational natural religion is an important support of science against a revealed religion that places greater emphasis on divine will and power than on divine wisdom. Without that support, one cannot be sure that the laws of natural necessity hold. To the extent that Rousseau departs from this circle of mutual reinforcement, his position is a skeptical one. As we have seen, in Rousseau’s preliminary account of the obviousness of rational natural religion stressing the wisdom and beneficence of “the author of nature”—an account that he proceeds to call into question—he raises the possibility that the world could be based on a constant exercise of God’s power and will rather than on rational natural laws. He does not elaborate on this possibility in any systematic way, but two passages in the Institutions bear on it. These discuss the possibility of God changing the ordinary course of nature, performing a miracle. The first occurs in book 1, chapter 1 in the discussion of “material principles.” The bulk of the relevant section relies mainly on Becher and Stahl, but, in the discussion of the question of the infinite divisibility of matter, Rousseau cites Boerhaave. Rousseau argues that disputes over the infinite divisibility of matter are merely quibbles over phraseology and that serious defenders of this hypothesis could be pressed (by a version of Zeno’s paradoxes) into conceding that their position would lead to the denial that matter even exists. He paraphrases a passage from Boerhaave referring to a principle of physical 18

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indivisibility infused into fundamental corpuscles by “the creator God who does all things.”58 While Rousseau’s quotation appears to endorse Boerhaave’s position, unlike Boerhaave he adds that, by means of the “virtual” division of atoms into parts, “God could cut each atom in two, if he judged it appropriate.” An omnipotent God not only establishes the naturally indivisible but could also divide it. Whereas Boerhaave emphasizes the rational limits God imposes upon nature and also upon Himself, Rousseau hints at the possibility of divine power breaking these limits. The other passage occurs in book 2, chapter 2 in the discussion of heat. The fundamental characteristic of fire considered this way is its ability to liquefy “almost all bodies.”59 This discussion follows Boerhaave quite closely.60 Rousseau, however, elaborates on the claim that fire can melt anything, turning even “refractory stones” into glass. He says, “If one could increase its degree as one chooses, nothing would resist it, and if the final incineration is not a mystical figure of speech, it must not be imagined that it would destroy and annihilate the world; but as numerous ancient philosophers believed, it will change it into a mass of glass, unless God gives this avenging fire properties that this element does not have today.”61 For once, Rousseau’s reference to God is not taken from Boerhaave. ­Rousseau’s primary intention here is to side with the “numerous ancient philosophers” and against alchemists who see fire as a candidate in their quest for a universal solvent: fire cannot naturally become hot enough to destroy everything. In this he stands with Boerhaave. Nonetheless, his additional mention of the possibility that a vengeful God might increase the power of fire beyond its natural limits indicates the possibility of a divinity that stands altogether outside of the rational order of nature. The vengeful divinity that would unleash the all-consuming fire is one characterized by power and will rather than wisdom and beneficence. In sum, Rousseau’s departures from Boerhaave show that, while writing the Institutions, he was concerned with a set of issues centering on rational natural religion, revealed religion that departs from natural religion, and the foundations of natural science. There is evidence of this external to but contemporaneous with the Institutions. Like the passages in the Institutions, this evidence concerns Rousseau’s reflections on the question of whether the structure of the world is evidence of a divine legislator or whether it could be the product of random events acting over a sufficiently long period of time. 19

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IV

During the period in which he was studying chemistry and writing the Institutions, Rousseau’s friendship with Diderot was at its peak. The two had met shortly after Rousseau arrived in Paris near the beginning of the decade, and their friendship intensified after he returned from Venice.62 They even planned to start a periodical pamphlet modeled after the Spectator, to be called Le Persiffleur. Rousseau drafted the first number, which expresses a playful skepticism about physics or natural science in general comparable to some of the passages of the Institutions.63 As is well-known, Rousseau had his “illumination” that launched his literary career on his way to visit Diderot in prison. Rousseau closes book VII of the Confessions with an account of Diderot’s imprisonment after the publication of the Letters on the Blind in 1749. In the final paragraph, he explains, “The Philosophical Thoughts had attracted some troubles onto him which had no consequences at all. It was not the same with the Letter on the Blind which had nothing reprehensible but some personal barbs with which Mme. du Pré de St. Maur and M. de Réaumur were shocked.”64 The reference to the Philosophical Thoughts in this context is important. This work did, in fact, attract troubles for Diderot, although it did not land him in jail. The book was condemned by the Parlement of Paris, which characterized it as “presenting to restless and reckless spirits the venom of the most criminal opinions that the depravity of human reason is capable of.”65 This work was written in April 1746, published in June, and condemned in July. In short, its composition, publication, and condemnation occurred as Rousseau was becoming most absorbed in chemistry. In later years Rousseau frequently commented on his reaction to the Philosophical Thoughts. In particular, he refers repeatedly to the twenty-first of Diderot’s sixty-two thoughts. Throughout the work Diderot defends skepticism and suggests that it is compatible with Christianity, or at least natural religion. In this thought, however, he treats atheism more sympathetically. The thought begins, “I open the notebooks of a famous professor, and I read: ‘Atheists, I grant you that motion is essential to matter; what do you conclude from that? . . . that the world results from the fortuitous throw of the atoms? I would just as much like for you to tell me that Homer’s Iliad, or Voltaire’s Henriade is a result of fortuitous throws of characters.”66 Having quoted the “famous professor” (generally agreed to have been one of his teachers), Diderot cautions, “I will be careful about making this argument to an atheist: this 20

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comparison would give him no trouble. In accordance with the laws of the analysis of lots, he would say to me, I should not be surprised that a thing happens as long as it is possible, and that the difficulty of the event is compensated for by the quantity of throws.” What would be repugnant to reason would be the failure of not merely one, but an infinite number of “admirable arrangements to arise” with an infinite number of “throws.” In short, once it is granted that motion is intrinsic to matter, the laws of probability make the establishment of an ordered world out of chaos certain. This is a stronger version of the argument that we have seen Rousseau using against natural theology in the Institutions, but it is the same argument. It is a stronger version because Rousseau’s claim that an unknown number of elementary principles can generate an infinite number of compounds, or mixts—a possibility not considered by Diderot, who seems to assume a finite number of compounds—lessens the force of Diderot’s argument without disposing of it altogether. Rousseau’s judgment appears to be that Diderot’s argument cannot prove that the orderly world would necessarily come into being through chance, but that the mere possibility that it could come into being this way would destroy one of the pillars of natural theology: the argument that the existence of order proves the existence of a divine legislator. Rousseau’s most significant discussion of this thought occurs in a draft of his letter to Voltaire of August 1756. In addressing arguments over the existence of God, he says that “neither the pro nor the con seems to me demonstrated on this point by the lights of reason.”67 He then adds, I remember that what has struck me the most forcefully in my whole life, on the fortuitous arrangement of the universe, is the twenty-first philosophical thought, where is shown by the laws of analysis of chance that when the quantity of the throws is infinite, the difficulty of the event is more than sufficiently compensated by the multiplicity of the throws, and that consequently the mind ought to be more astonished by the hypothetical continuation of chaos than by the real birth of the universe. This is, while assuming motion necessary, what has never been said with more force to my mind on this dispute; and, as for me, I declare that I do not know the least response that common sense might have, whether true or false, if not to deny as false what one cannot know, that motion might be essential to matter.68

Thus immediately after denying that “the lights of reason” can settle this question and before concluding that the presupposition of this 21

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argument cannot be known for sure, Rousseau insists that Diderot’s is the strongest argument he has ever seen on this question. He does go on to say that “sentiment” persuades him that the manifest order of the world is not the result of chance, making it seem that he agrees with Diderot’s professor rather than his atheist, but he also concedes that this sentiment “might be called prejudice.”69 Rousseau returned to the argument of the twenty-first thought frequently. He referred to it tacitly in a letter to the Genevan pastor, Jacob Vernes in 1758 and also in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.”70 He came back to it again, explicitly citing the Philosophical Thoughts, in the “Letter to Franquières” in 1769.71 In his “Fiction or Allegorical Fragment on Revelation,” he presents the issue of whether the order of the universe can be understood as “the effect of a fortuitous arrangement” as the subject of the meditations of “the first man who attempted to philosophize.”72 Each of these cases follows the pattern set in the letter to Voltaire, although Rousseau is usually less candid about the force he found in the argument. In no case does he reject it on rational grounds. The importance that Rousseau attributed to Diderot’s argument is clear. One part of the significance of the Institutions chimiques—and a part that has not been noticed by commentators on it—is that, at a time very close to the publication of the Philosophic Thoughts, it contains Rousseau’s first treatment of Diderot’s argument and the consequences that follow from it. It should be stressed, however, that engagement with the issue does not necessarily mean that Rousseau settles the questions involved even to his own satisfaction. We have seen that the Institutions sometimes follows Boerhaave’s “providentialist” view uncritically, just as at other times it undermines this view. It is important not to look for more in such an early work as the Institutions than it has to offer, but what it does have to offer is an indication of a crucial question that concerned him just before he launched his literary career. V

We can conclude by mentioning two ways the issues addressed in the Institutions open perspectives on Rousseau’s mature writings. In the Second Discourse Rousseau used a variant of Diderot’s argument to undermine the idea of the natural sociability of humans rather than one of the underpinnings of natural theology, although the two ideas are certainly closely related in that ideas about a providential God working through nature are likely to be connected with strong notions about 22

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natural sociability.73 Rousseau closes part 1 of the Discourse with the claim that he has demonstrated “Inequality is barely perceptible in the state of Nature” and that the faculties whose development is required for sociability “could never develop by themselves.”74 The issue, then, is how this stable condition could turn so radically into the extremely different one we observe today. How can we get from the pure state of nature to the radically different social state? If social faculties could not develop by themselves, what made them develop? Rousseau concedes that the details of any account of how the changes took place are conjectural but insists that any successful account must involve “reflections concerning the ways in which the lapse of time compensates for the slight probability of events; concerning the surprising power of very trivial causes when they act without interruption” as well as a number of other factors. Thus Rousseau’s account is based on reasoning similar to that of the twenty-first thought, although it requires only a very long (rather than infinite) lapse of time and insists on the triviality of the causes at work. His effort in part 2 of the Discourse is to show how trivial causes external to human nature—causes such as earthquakes, floods, and small changes in climate—can interact with human nature (with its distinctive faculty of perfectibility) to bring about enormous social change. It is worth noting that among these causes are chemical principles acting on a large scale in the laboratory of nature as a whole. As Rousseau put it in defending the argument of the Discourse, the state of “society is derived from the nature of the human race, not immediately . . . but only, as I have proved, with the help of certain external circumstances that may or may not happen, or at least occur sooner or later and consequently speed up or slow down the progress.”75 In taking note of Rousseau’s discussion of the action of trivial causes over a long period, Marian Hobson has also identified an account of a conversation that took place just after the completion of the Discourse in which Rousseau is reported to have appealed to small causes acting ceaselessly in the formation of continents.76 This argument is closely connected to Diderot’s position, and in a way that is intimately linked with the elementary processes discussed in the Institutions. This is also true of Rousseau’s arguments concerning the importance of climate— which we have seen he understands as part of chemistry—on social development in works such as the Essay on the Origin of Languages. Finally, the reservations that Rousseau expresses about natural religion in the Institutions shed light on his treatments of this issue later. While Rousseau is certainly a champion of a form of natural religion, he 23

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does not defend it unequivocally, and often his defenses are not given in his own name. Even in his strongest defenses, such as the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” he does not defend the rational natural theology of the sort to be found in Boerhaave. In one of the essays published in connection with the re-edition of the Institutions, Francine Markovits chides scholars for uncritically accepting the identification of Rousseau’s own position with the one he presents in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” She asks, “Whether it is believable that the one who criticized the literature and metaphysics of natural law could have faith in natural religion? There is an incompatibility there that nevertheless has not drawn attention.”77 The seriousness of the treatment of the arguments against rational natural religion in the Institutions can only increase the force of this question. Once again, it should be underlined that the Institutions chimiques cannot be taken as Rousseau’s final word on any question. Instead this unfinished work gives us a glimpse into the sort of question that preoccupied Rousseau shortly before the “illumination.” Most of all, it shows beyond a doubt that Rousseau’s critique of modernity did not spring from a void. His engagement with one of the branches of modern natural science led him to see a crisis in the basis of science. Rousseau’s writings certainly brought about a crisis in modern thought, but they stemmed from his perception of a crisis that existed implicitly before he wrote about it. Perhaps without thinking about it, his employers offered him the chance to think about the foundations of modern natural science and the relation between that science and religion. He used the task imposed on him by others to explore a deeper set of questions that he posed to himself. It is from his consideration of this deeper set of questions that he arrived at the distinctive answers found in his mature writings. 1. 2. 3. 4.

24

Notes

I would like to thank the Earhart Foundation for providing a research grant for the academic year 2011–12 that allowed me to study Rousseau’s chemical writings. “Letters to Malesherbes,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. with Roger D. Masters (Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New England, 1990–2009), 5: 575. This edition will be cited as CW below. Confessions in CW, 5: 294. This can be seen even in a work such as Mario Einaudi’s The Early Rousseau (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press), which is explicitly devoted to the years from 1737–56. Einaudi devotes only a dozen pages to what Rousseau wrote before the illumination and neglects numerous works. The

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

division can also be seen in Victor Gourevitch’s two volumes of translations: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which contains only one short work written before the illumination and The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). It is true that Gourevitch’s volumes are restricted to political writings. “Final Reply of J. J. Rousseau of Geneva,” in CW, 2: 110. “Biographical Fragment,” in CW, 12: 30. “Letters to Malesherbes,” in CW, 5: 575. The most extensive treatment of Rousseau’s botanizing is Alexandra Cook, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science,” SVEC 2012: 12. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, CW, 8: 63. See also, introduction to the Dictionary of Botany, ibid., 93. In the context of a praise of education in the sciences, in Emile, Rousseau also attacks chemistry (CW, 13: 329–330); but again does so in a way that shows a detailed acquaintance with this science. The editions of the Institutions chimiques are edited by Bruno Bernardi and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Paris: Corpus des Oeuvres de Philosophie en Langue Française, Fayard, 1999) and by Christophe Van Staen (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010). Van Staen’s edition is supplemented by other chemical writings by Rousseau. Van Staen’s version is now included in volume X of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Trousson and Fréderic S. Eigeldinger (Geneva and Paris: Slatkine and Champion, 2012). The first of these editions led to Rousseau et les Sciences, eds. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Bruno Bernardi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), containing two essays on chemistry, and a volume of the journal Corpus (no. 36, 1999) entirely devoted to chemistry. Bernardi has argued for the connection between Rousseau’s study of chemistry and key concepts in his mature political writings in La Fabrique des concepts: Recherches sur l’invention conceptuelle chez Rousseau (Paris : Honor’e Champion, 2006). Van Staen’s introduction to his edition is devoted largely to a criticism of Bernardi’s claims. See also Bruno Bernardi and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “The Presence of Sciences in Rousseau’s Trajectory and Works,” in The Challenge of Rousseau, edited by Eve Grace and Christopher Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59–75 and Van Staen, “Un Océan de connaissances inutile,” in Rousseau et les philosophes, actes du colloque de la Rousseau Association (Lyon, 2007), ed. Michael O’Dea (Oxford: SVEC 2010). Citations from the Instiutions chimiques below will be from the Van Staen edition and will be cited as Van Staen. Translations are my own. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothue de la Pléiade 1959–95) I: 1414 n. 3 to 342 and II: 1933. Confessions, CW, 5: 183. Ibid. CW, V: 243. The best accounts of Rouelle’s career and his approach to chemistry remain Rhoda Rappaport, “G. F. Rouelle: An Eighteenth-Century Chemist and Teacher,” Chymia, 6, 1960, 68–101 and “Rouelle and Stahl—The Phlogistic Revolution in France,” Chymia 7, 1961, 73–102. See Letters Written from the Mountain, in which Rousseau also refers to Rouelle (CW, 9: 175). Confessions, CW, 5: 286. 25

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 26

See J. Dubois, Le Cabinet de physique et chimie de Chenonceau (XVIIIe siècle) (Tours: Société Archéologique de Touraine, 1989). Confessions, CW, 5: 287. For a discussion of the significance of another of Rousseau’s projects with the Dupins, see Christopher Kelly, “Rousseau and the Illustrious Montesquieu,” in The Challenge of Rousseau, edited by Grace and Kelly, 19–33. Confessions, CW, 5: 286–287. These were published in Le Portefeuille de Madame Dupin Dame de Chenonceaux, ed. Gaston de Villeneuve-Guibert (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1884), 361–425. Bernardi and Bensaude-Vincent take 1747 as the earliest possible date for the beginning of its composition. They put the likely year for Rousseau stopping his work on the manuscript at 1753, the same year in which he published a letter warning about the health hazards involved in the use of copper cooking utensils. This is the letter to Raynal that appeared in the Mercure de France in July of 1753 (CW, 12: 130–133). Bernardi and BensaudeVincent are sympathetic to but fail to endorse the claim by Marco Beretta that Rousseau was still working on the Institutions as late as 1757, when he broke off negotiations with d’Holbach over a chemistry manuscript. See Beretta, “Sensiblerie vs. Mécanisme. Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la chimie,” in Corpus: Revue de philosophie, no. 36, 1999), 103–122. Van Staen rejects (convincingly in my opinion) their interpretation of the evidence internal to the Institutions for this concluding date, although he is too quick to dismiss the evidence for Rousseau’s continued interest in chemistry. For a comprehensive list of Rousseau’s direct and indirect sources, see Van Staen, 391–394. On the resemblance of the form of the Institutions to other contemporary works in the sciences, see Bernardi and Bensaude-Vincent in Grace/Kelly. The classic treatments of the schools of chemical thought with which Rousseau was familiar remain Hélène Metzger, Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la Doctrine Chimique (Paris: Blanchard, [1930] 1974) and Les Doctrines Chimiques en France du début de XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe Siècle nouveau tirage (Paris: Blanchard, 1969). Van Staen, 68. Ibid., 70. For a brief but useful discussion, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, translated by Deborah van Dam (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), 82ff. Van Staen, 301. Ibid., 355. Ibid., 302. Voltaire used this same quotation in the Lettres anglaises (Letter XIV) when discussing the opposition between the Cartesians and the Newtonians. Rousseau had studied the Lettres carefully years before when he lived in Chambery. See Confessions, CW, 5. Van Staen, 308. For a discussion of the way the account of affinities avoided issues of causality, see Alistair Duncan, Laws and Order in Eighteenth Century Chemistry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Van Staen, 184. Ibid., 185.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

Ibid., 205, see also 156n. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 81; see also 66. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 84. This is an emphasis that Rousseau shares with Rouelle. See Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, 61–63. The crucial point is that Rouelle presents elements or principles as instruments. Rousseau is somewhat unusual among French chemists in the first half of the eighteenth century in stressing the connection between chemistry and geology. See Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 4. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “La Nature laboratoire,” in Rousseau et les Sciences, 155–174. “Idea of Method in the Composition of a Book,” (CW, 12: 239). Van Staen, 98. Ibid., 99–100. Bensaude-Vincent suggests that Rousseau is writing in opposition to Newton here (Bensaude-Vincent, 159). Rousseau sometimes indicates that he holds an unorthodox view of Descartes. See, for example, his treatment of the two substance doctrines in the Moral Letters, CW, 12: 186. Van Staen, 101. Ibid., 102. Herman Boerhaave, Elementa Chemiae (Paris: Cavelier, 133) tome premier, i. Cited below as Boerhaave. Van Staen, 110. Boerhaave, 81. I would like to thank Daniel Burns for his assistance in translating Boerhaave’s Latin. Van Staen, 119 and 146; Boerhaave, 115–116 and 168. Bensaude-Vincent, 166. Van Staen, 244. Rousseau addresses the question of the relation between the orderliness of the whole of nature and survival of species with some caution in “Observations of Charles-Georges LeRoy on the Notes of the Discourse on Inequality,” CW, 3: 133. The passage occurs at Boerhaave, 355. Van Staen’s reference at 244 has a misprint. Van Staen, 164. Ibid., 165. Boerhaave, 218–219. Van Staen, 166. On the relations between Rousseau and Diderot toward the end of this period, see Marion Hobson, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the Late 1740s: Satire, Friendship, and Freedom,” in Rousseau and Freedom, eds. Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–76. See, for example, CW, 12: 23. 27

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

28

Confessions, CW, 5: 292. Quoted in P. N. Furbank, Diderot, A Critical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 29–30. Pensées philosophiques in Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Vernière, (Paris: Garnier, 1964), 21–22. Translations are my own. “Letter to Voltaire,” CW, 3: 117. “Letter to Voltaire,” CW, 3: 117–118. See John T. Scott, “Pride and Providence: Religion in Rousseau’s Lettre à Voltaire sur la providence,” in Rousseau and l’Infame: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment, eds. Ourida Mostefai and John T. Scott (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 115–136; and Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Providence,” in Review of Metaphysics, 53 (March 2000), 565–611. Both agree that Rousseau’s position is closer to that of Diderot’s atheist than appears at first glance. Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh (Genève: Institut et muse Voltaire, 1965–91) vol. 5, 32–34; and Emile (CW, 13, 436). CW, 8, 264. CW, 12: 165. While most scholars put the date of the “Fiction” at around the same time as the “Letter to Voltaire,” some have put it prior to the First Discourse and others have put it at the end of Rousseau’s life. The connection is shown in Rousseau’s exchange concerning the argument of the Discourse with “Philopolis,” the pen name used by Charles Bonnet. Rousseau is quite critical of the position he seems to defend in the “Letter to Voltaire.” See CW, 3: 123–132. Second Discourse, CW, 3: 42. “Letter to Philopolis,” CW, 3: 128. Marian Hobson, “‘Nexus Effectivus’ and ‘Nexus Finalis’: Causality in the Inégalité and in the Essai sur l’origine des langues,” in Rousseau in the ­Eighteenth Century: Essays in Memory of R. A. Leigh, eds. Marian Hobson, J. T. A. Leigh, and Robert Wokler (Oxford: The Voltaire Institute, 1992), 239–240. Francine Markovits, “La Science du bon vicaire,” in Rousseau et les Sciences, 215, the translation is mine.

Part Two Citoyens and Citoyennes

2 Rousseau’s Response to the Social Contract Tradition Mark Hulliung

Social contract theory takes us away from the old world of divine right and into a new world, where authority is bottom-up instead of topdown, ascending rather than descending; and in which the consent of the governed rather than patriarchal authority is the source of political legitimacy. My argument is that Rousseau was a social contract theorist from early to late in his career, and a modern no matter how much he admired the ancients; yet to retrace the path of his labors as a social contract theorist is to encounter not only modernity but some of the most striking dilemmas of the modern age. I. Rousseau Was Not a German

Our first step in appreciating Rousseau’s contribution to social contract theory is to dissociate him from two prominent German thinkers: Kant and Hegel, who claimed his legacy for their respective philosophies and whose misleading interpretations continue to be influential into the present day. Scholars who see Rousseau through the eyes of Hegel mistakenly remove him from social contract theorizing; those who see him through the eyes of Kant immerse him in a version of social contract theory that was quite other than his own. In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel first praised and then damned Rousseau, all in the same breath. “The merit of Rousseau’s contribution” to “the Idea of the state” was considerable and commendable, declared Hegel. But no sooner had he complimented Rousseau for serving as his forerunner than Hegel turned around to criticize him: “Unfortunately, however, . . . he reduced the union of individuals in the state to a contract and therefore to something based on their arbitrary wills . . . and their capriciously given express consent,” which destroyed “the 31

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absolutely divine principle of the state” and led to “the maximum of frightfulness and terror” in the French Revolution.1 Several prominent scholars have accepted Hegel’s claim that ­Rousseau was his forerunner in the matter of the state while forgetting his reluctant admission that Rousseau was also a social contract theorist. Ernest Barker spied in Rousseau’s Social Contract “a philosophy congenial to the Germany of . . . Hegel”2; J. W. Gough likewise affirmed that “Rousseau was essentially the forerunner of Hegelian idealism.”3 A. P. d’Entrèves added his voice to the chorus, announcing that “Rousseau’s theory . . . is the real source of [Hegel’s] theory of the ethical state”; Hobbes’s Leviathan, by contrast, “lacks the soul with which Rousseau and Hegel endowed it.”4 After listening to Barker, Gough, and d’Entrèves, we are prepared for the verdict rendered by George Sabine in a textbook that was dominant for decades in institutions of higher learning: “The word contract was about as misleading as any that Rousseau could have chosen.”5 Completely overlooked by Sabine and other scholars who transformed Rousseau into a pre-Hegelian was the persistence of social contract theory as a formidable, perhaps the most formidable, feature of Rousseau’s thought. No one should fail to understand that his Discourse on Inequality sets forth the most innovative and remarkable of all accounts of the state of nature, or that this same essay, toward the end, offers a commentary on the social contract as it was in European governments, as opposed to what it should be. His Social Contract was as it should be, and, in the years following the publication of the Social Contract, he reiterated its premises. In the Letters Written from the Mountain, for instance, he posed the question, “How is it that the state is one?” His answer was that the individual members were bound together by mutual obligations based on consent freely rendered: that is, the social contract. “Besides the truth of this principle, it is preferable to all others by the solidity of the foundation it establishes; for what more certain foundation can there be for obligation among men than the free engagement of those who oblige themselves?”6 Even as scholars lost sight of Hegel’s recognition that Rousseau belonged to the social contract tradition, they remembered his legacy of tying Rousseau not only to nineteenth-century notions of the state but also to modern nationalism. Alfred Cobban’s Rousseau and the Modern State is a noteworthy case in point. In a section titled “Nationalism, the New Tyranny,” Cobban contended that it was “the nation state which embodied Rousseau’s practical ideal in politics.” As a finale to 32

Rousseau’s Response to the Social Contract Tradition

his ­argument, Cobban posed the question, “Does [Rousseau] in the last resort merely change one despotism for another, setting up in the name of the nation a tyranny more terrible and all-embracing that that of kings?”7 The great fault of Cobban’s case against Rousseau is that it is based on the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather than on Rousseau’s own words. “Large populations, vast territories! There you have the first and foremost reason for the misfortunes of mankind,” sighed Rousseau in the course of commenting on the advent of the modern nation-state. Poles, he conceded, needed to affirm their national identity, but only for the sake of preventing the Russians from digesting them. Best by far for the Poles would be to identify as Poles, dress in their own clothing, cherish their folkways, and never fall prey to the temptation to mimic the cosmopolitan French in fashion, manners, or thought. The ideal Polish government, he added, would consist of thirty-three small republics combined in a loose federal arrangement.8 Rousseau’s The Government of Poland is his most nationalistic statement, and yet it is an essay in which he studiously avoids championing anything vaguely resembling a modern nation-state. With its deliberately weak federal government, his Poland would not boast a “state,” and the nationalism of his Poles would be a lamentably necessary weapon of self-defense against a Russian aggressor.9 Nothing would have pleased Rousseau more than a reversal of the modern movement toward the rise of nation-states. All of his reflections on international relations bemoan the coming to the fore of the Leviathans in modern history and the uses of warfare by rulers to oppress their own subjects.10 By now it should be obvious what is wrong with a Hegelian reading of Rousseau. Quite simply, the nineteenth-century state and nationalism have nothing to do with Rousseau’s thought. When scholars blame Rousseau for the excesses of nationalism or, more recently, for totalitarianism, they tell us everything about their preoccupations but nothing about Rousseau. Perhaps, with the pre-1989 Cold War a receding memory, we have finally reached the point where such misreadings are going out of fashion. If so, we may proceed to examine his genuine concerns, one of which was theories of the social contract. Altogether different from the Hegelian Rousseau, far more defensible, and yet highly problematical are Kantian readings of the Social Contract. While precious little textual evidence exists of a direct Rousseauian influence on nineteenth-century nationalists, there is no denying that Kant explicitly credited Rousseau with assisting him in 33

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the formulation of his ethical and political philosophy. Without question, Kant’s version of social contract theory drew inspiration from Rousseau, and modern scholarship has not failed to emphasize the links between these two great figures. Long ago Ernst Cassirer successfully drew attention to the manner in which Kant availed himself of Rousseau’s “general will” in the course of spelling out his concept of the “categorical imperative,” and more recently scholars have skillfully underscored the links between ­Rousseau’s social contract and Kant’s.11 Nevertheless, for our purposes it is as important to set aside the Kantian as the Hegelian interpretation, and for the same reason: In both cases we are dealing with what comes after Rousseau, not with his response to the social contract tradition. So influential, however, is the Kantian reading in our day that we cannot simply ignore it. In order to disentangle Rousseau from Kant, we must point out why there is every reason to suspect Rousseau would have repudiated Kant’s revision of the Social Contract. From the moment we place Rousseau’s and Kant’s works side by side, the enormous differences between their political philosophies immediately come to the fore, differences pertaining both to fundamental principles and to applications. In effect, Kant ignored the Second Discourse because he, enamored of the virtues of culture and civilization, had no interest in the discussion of a state of nature that Rousseau thought absolutely vital to understanding our woeful present-day circumstances. To which we may add that Kant’s so-called social contract is a pretender from Rousseau’s viewpoint, having been reduced to “an Idea of reason,” a regulative idea, a mere “as if”—not “a fact,” wrote Kant, not now or ever, “for it cannot possibly be so.” Perhaps most important of all, Rousseau insisted upon but Kant denied the significance of consent and popular sovereignty in establishing and reaffirming the social contract. “Since every man is born free and master of himself,” wrote Rousseau, “no one, under any pretext whatever, can subject him without his consent.” By contrast, Kant was only concerned with asking the ruler to consider whether a law he proposed was one the people, in principle, could have sanctioned. A proper law holds “even if the people is at present in such a position or attitude of mind that it would probably refuse its consent if it were consulted.”12 Other sharp contrasts come to mind when we turn from general principles to implementation. For Rousseau the record of ever-increasing inequality is the story of all that has gone terribly wrong with human history, and for him, in consequence, no social contract can be ­sustained 34

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unless we uphold the proposition that “one of government’s most important tasks is to prevent extreme inequality of wealth.”13 For Kant, in striking contrast, the “uniform equality of human beings as subjects of a state is perfectly consistent with the utmost inequality of the mass in the degree of its possessions.”14 Rousseau and Kant also contrast on the question of whether revolution is a justifiable response to deep-seated injustice. Although ­Rousseau expresses the strongest possible doubts as to whether revolution can succeed in founding the reign of justice, he never condemns revolution in principle. Kant does precisely that: “There can be no right of sedition,” he writes, “and still less a right of rebellion . . . It is the duty of the people to tolerate even what is apparently the most intolerable misuse of supreme power.”15 Rousseau applauded the revolutions whereby the Swiss and the Dutch attained their freedom; Kant wrote that “these peoples have done the greatest degree of wrong in seeking their rights this way.”16 On the question of the proper political regime, Rousseau and Kant are again in marked disagreement: Kant choosing monarchy, even absolute monarchy, whereas Rousseau demanded a republic. Kant’s monarch is “not a member of the commonwealth, . . . and he alone is authorized to coerce others without being subject to any coercive law himself.” The most he was willing to concede to republics was to say that “it is the duty of monarchs to govern in a republican . . . manner, even though they may rule autocratically.”17 Kant counted on an enlightened monarch, a Frederick, and he charged the intellectuals with the duty of enlightening the prince18—this as opposed to ­Rousseau’s adamant opposition to so-called enlightened despotism and his notorious praise of the Spartan republic for permitting no intellectuals to enter the city.19 Rousseau’s overall stance was that “all legitimate government is republican,” by which he meant to indicate that government must always answer to the sovereign people. The executive authority in a republic might be yielded by one person, but preferably not because there is no government in which “particular will has greater empire and more easily dominates others.”20 Civic education is a constant theme in Rousseau’s writings, because a republic cannot be maintained unless the people love the law, their law. The true constitution is “not engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens.”21 How utterly different is Kant, whose laws only pertain to “the external aspect of actions” and are “unmixed with any ethical considerations.”22 35

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There is every reason to conclude that Rousseau would have rejected Kant’s social contract theory, its principles, and its applications. To say so is not, of course, to deny the merits of the outstanding modern scholarly literature that traces a lineage from Rousseau to Kant to John Rawls. But it is to insist that studying what comes after Rousseau is not the way to understand his intentions and patterns of thought. If we are to understand “Rousseau’s response to the social contract tradition,” if we are to appreciate his identity as a social contract theorist, we must focus not on what stretches forward to Kant and his later admirers but back to the thinkers Rousseau constantly addressed, the leading social contract and natural rights thinkers of the seventeenth century: Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke. II. Rousseau and His Predecessors

One obstacle stands in the way as we enter upon an examination of Rousseau in relation to the likes of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf. Whenever lists are drawn up of the most important books on Rousseau published in the last several decades, one title that is almost always mentioned is Judith Shklar’s Men and Citizens: A Study of ­Rousseau’s Social Theory. In a postscript to her volume, Shklar wrote that ­Rousseau “rejected Hobbes and Grotius and the whole natural law/ law of nations school of thinking.” To her, it was obvious that scholars who strove to show that Rousseau’s thought was a response to the famous seventeenth-century treatises on natural rights and the social contract were wasting their time.23 It was the penchant of intellectual historians for discovering “influences” on a thinker that accounted for the problem, Shklar explained. All too often, when such influences were lacking, scholars unwittingly invented them. “Frequently the ‘influenced’ theorist was unaware of these distant ‘sources’ of his own thought or he might even repudiate them openly,” as was true, she remarked, of Rousseau’s reaction to earlier social contract theorists. In her judgment, “Rousseau’s open contempt for Grotius” proved her point, as did “Diderot’s essay on Hobbes in the Encyclopédie which explained so carefully why Rousseau was the very antithesis of Hobbes.” As a caveat, Shklar’s comments are most welcome. False continuities and invented intellectual genealogies have indeed been all too common in scholarly literature. By way of modifying her position we must note, however, that Rousseau did not stop at expressing scorn in passing for Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. Far from it, he constantly engaged 36

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them in significant intellectual debate. It was during the course of criticizing them that he arrived at the formulation of the social contract he deemed proper. When Rousseau rejected previous social contract theorists, he did so from within the social contract tradition. His was an immanent critique. To omit his debates with the major figures of seventeenthcentury thinking on the state of nature, natural rights, and the social contract is to fail to come to terms with much of what is most important in his thought. How, we must ask ourselves, did Rousseau respond to his predecessors? How did his own thought emerge from the ruins of theirs? It is by placing Rousseau against the background of previous contract theory that we can best enhance our chances of understanding his thought. *** Before examining Rousseau’s critique of his predecessors in the social contract tradition, we would do well to acknowledge his ties to the likes of Grotius (1583–1645), Pufendorf (1632–1694), and company. One pattern uniting him with them is that all of the contract theories, including his, broke with the Greek and Roman classics, both in their original and in their Renaissance guises. Although Grotius, Pufendorf, and Rousseau found much that was worthwhile in classical writings and did not hesitate to draw upon the experiences of the ancient world, they agreed that the “principles” of political thought must be derived from modern reflections, not from Aristotle or Cicero. What could be more typical of ancient political thought than Plato’s and Aristotle’s search for the best form of government? And what could be more typical of modern theories of the social contract than a downgrade of such a quest? Grotius, the pioneer of the modern social contract tradition—recognized as such by Pufendorf and ­Rousseau— pronounced that “a people can select the form of government which it wishes; and the extent of its legal right is not to be measured by the superior excellence of this or that form of government . . . but by its free choice.” Similarly, Rousseau contended that “there is no unique and absolute form of government”; what truly matters is the social contract preceding the choice of government, which alone can render government “legitimate.” For both Grotius and Rousseau, it was the legitimacy of government that counts, not that it be this or that particular form of government; and legitimacy can only be established by contract.24 37

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On the matter of slavery, too, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Rousseau sided with the moderns against the ancients. All three agreed that in the world of the social contract Aristotle’s view that some persons are slaves by nature had to be rejected. “By nature,” affirmed Grotius, “no human beings are slaves”; “slavery is contrary to nature.” Pufendorf agreed that we must “discard that old opinion which makes nature herself ” responsible for the establishment of servitude. Aristotle’s mistake, in Rousseau’s judgment, was that “he mistook the effect for the cause.” The resignation of slaves in ancient times proves not that nature had provided society with natural slaves but only that Greek society had dealt a blow to nature: “Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to be rid of them.”25 Rousseau’s agreement with Grotius and Pufendorf in repudiating Aristotle’s justification of slavery is but one instance of their joint program of moving away from the ancient preoccupation with governance as something naturally given to a modern conception of governance as the outcome of human choice. David Hume was not a friend of social contract theory, but his very concern about its consequences led him to offer a number of insightful remarks in his essay “Of the Original Contract,” among them the observation that this kind of philosophy was alien to ancient thought. Social contract theory makes political obligation a question that demands an answer, noted Hume, whereas for the ancients we owe our very humanity to the polis, hence obligation is not a problem, the question never raised.26 In the largest sense—to look beyond Hume—one may say that the social contract marks a stress on the “will” that was unknown to pagan antiquity and only came into its own with the appearance of Augustine’s De Libero Arbitrio.27 Pufendorf might as well have been speaking for all contractualists when he wrote that a “faculty which is seen to be peculiar to man as opposed to the beasts is called will”—and typical again when he placed this finding at the center of political theory.28 Rousseau, with his social contract sustained by the “general will,” yielded to no one in his insistence upon the primacy of will. Social contract theorists said no to divine right as forcefully as they marginalized the classics. Bishop Bossuet, a divine right spokesperson, demanded late in the seventeenth century that “a prince should use his authority to destroy false religions in the state.”29 Earlier in the century Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf offered contractualism as an alternative to the religious fanaticism and attendant political instability fostered by doctrines of divine right, as did Locke and Rousseau at a later date. 38

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Bringing an end to the wars of religion was a major objective of the social contract theorists, whose views eventually led the way to Locke’s championing of religious toleration, just as divine right led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—with the consequence that the French Protestants, so essential to that country’s economy, were forced to flee. Pufendorf was eager to endorse “the usefulness of religion in human life, to establish that it really is the ultimate and the strongest bond of human society.”30 But he was, if anything, even more concerned to uphold the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which sanctioned religious differences within nations. By speaking of the state of nature, natural rights, and the social contract and by saying that God sanctions proper human conventions,31 he accomplished his objective of addressing public affairs while only indirectly invoking religion. Where divine right excludes and divides, the social contract includes and unites. Grotius, preceding Pufendorf, went further in holding religion at bay with his famous statement that “what we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him.” For his part, Hobbes removed political theory from the direct claims of religion by grounding Leviathan in the new physical science, with its focus on bodies in motion, including in his conception the clash of human bodies in motion. By the age of the Enlightenment, contractual and anticontractual theorists shared a strategy for sidestepping religion. Hume, in his essay debunking social contract theory, remarked that “whatever happens is comprehended in the general plan of providence,” hence no prince should claim the “peculiar sacredness of his authority.” Similarly, Rousseau in the Social Contract stated that “all power comes from God, I admit, but so does all illness. Does this mean it is forbidden to call the doctor?”32 Like his predecessors, Rousseau placed classical thought in a secondary position and pushed divine right to the side. Du Contract Social, moreover, features the full panoply of concepts common to thinkers in the social contract tradition, such as notions of natural rights and government by the consent of the governed. Time and again Rousseau invoked the doctrine of natural rights, as when he asserted that feudal government was “contrary to the principles of natural right.” Under the social compact, he continued, humans become citizens without relinquishing “the natural rights to which they are entitled as men.” In the event that the contract is violated, “each man recovers his original rights and resumes his natural freedom.” Consent, 39

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too, is at the forefront of Rousseau’s political thought: Grotius and Pufendorf had spoken favorably of consent and Rousseau vigorously followed suit.33 Finally, despite his condemnation in the Discourse on Inequality of society and polity as presently constituted, Rousseau agreed with Hobbes and Pufendorf that, potentially, life under the social contract could be infinitely superior to existence in the state of nature. “If the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him beneath the condition he left,” wrote Rousseau, “he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy moment that tore him away from it forever, and that changed him from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.”34 We may conclude that Rousseau very clearly staked out his political philosophy within the social contract tradition. This finding is, however, only the beginning of the story, for it was his criticisms of his predecessors who wrote as contractualists that are especially significant. Having situated him within the social contract tradition, we may now proceed to his critique, which was far more devastating than that delivered by historicists and utilitarians in the nineteenth century, precisely because it was a criticism delivered from within, an immanent critique. *** After Rousseau finished his thoroughgoing examination of the doctrines put forth by his predecessors, he expressed his frustration by saying that “the science of political right is yet to be born and it is to be presumed that it never will be born.” What chance did the ruled have when the rulers pay the bills of the theorists of the social contract? “The people do not give chairs or pensions or places in academies. You may judge how the peoples’ rights are likely to be protected by these men!”35 In Rousseau’s estimation, Grotius was one of these richly compensated apologists for the powers that be. “Grotius, . . . a refugee in France, and desirous of paying his court to Louis XIII, to whom his book is dedicated, spares no pains to rob the people of all their rights and transfers them to kings in the most artful manner.” How absurd it is, remarked ­Rousseau, that Grotius enjoys a reputation as favorable as that of Hobbes is notorious. “When I hear Grotius praised to the skies and Hobbes covered with execration, I see how few sensible men read or understand these two authors.” The only difference was in “method,” Grotius pursuing a historical mode of reasoning quite foreign to Hobbes.36 40

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Historical example is central to Grotius’s thought as a means of determining what is sanctioned by natural law. “That is according to the law of nature,” he wrote, “which is believed to be such among all nations, or among all those that are more advanced in civilization.” When he ransacked history for examples, Grotius drew lessons from “better times and better peoples. Thus we have preferred ancient examples, Greek and Roman, to the rest.” Although Grotius had decisively broken with classical political theory, his education in the classics was front and center in his citations of historical practices, which were borrowed from “the testimony of [ancient] philosophers, historians, poets, and orators.”37 Modern though he was, it was typical of his procedure that in writing six chapters on treaties, not a single one of his profuse examples was less than 1,500 years old.38 Grotius’s measure for what modern rulers could justly do when conducting warfare was the barbaric practices of antiquity, worse than, rather than a corrective to, the practices of the moderns. Rousseau praised “the illustrious Montesquieu” on the same page that he denounced Grotius. While Montesquieu had not concerned himself with the “principles of political right,” Rousseau nevertheless admired his work, not least because Montesquieu remarked that Grotius had “erected iniquity into a system.” Grotius did so, Montesquieu explained, not deliberately but due to his slavish adherence to examples taken from ancient history. Reading The Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau presumably came across this passage: “The authors of our public law, guided by ancient histories, . . . have fallen into very great errors. They have adopted tyrannical and arbitrary principles, by supposing the conquerors to be invested with I know not what right to kill: from this they have drawn consequences as terrible as the very principle, and established maxims which the conquerors themselves, when possessed of the least grain of sense, never presumed to follow.”39 Rousseau was in complete agreement with Montesquieu and condemned Grotius, who had maintained in The Law of War and Peace that the right to kill “extends not only to those who actually bear arms . . . but also to all persons who are in the enemy’s territory”; “the right to inflict injury extends even over infants and women.” Forging blindly ahead, Grotius remarked that “on almost every page of historical writings you may find accounts of the destruction of whole cities . . . Such acts are permissible also against those who have surrendered.” Rousseau’s rejection was uncompromising: “The end of war being the destruction of the enemy State, one has the right to kill its defenders as long as they are 41

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armed. But as soon as they lay down their arms and surrender, . . . they become simply men once again, and one no longer has a right to their lives.” Lest we miss his target, Rousseau remarks that “these principles are not those of Grotius; they are not based on the authority of [ancient] poets [and historians], but are derived from the nature of things, and are based on reason.”40 On the issue of slavery Rousseau and Grotius were in fundamental disagreement. Although they initially agreed that no one is a slave by nature, Rousseau would never accept Grotius’s claim that it was legitimate to become a slave by contract, as with a prisoner of war’s bargain to save his life. “It is not in conflict with natural justice,” Grotius announced, “that slavery should have its origin in a human action, that is, should arise from a convention”; and if anyone entered into such an agreement, it was binding also on “their descendants forever.” Although Grotius believed that slaves were often treated better than day laborers, he nevertheless proclaimed that “there is nothing a master is not permitted to do to his slave. There is no suffering which may not be inflicted with impunity upon such slaves.” Responding to Grotius, ­Rousseau affirmed that “even if someone could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children. They are born men and free.” And, in truth, none of us can forfeit our freedom: “To renounce one’s freedom,” we read in the Social Contract, “is to renounce one’s status as a man . . . Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man, and taking away all his freedom is taking away all morality from his actions.” In a proper doctrine of natural rights, the one freedom not at our disposal is the freedom to abandon freedom. No social contract that sanctions slavery is legitimate.41 In common with Grotius but totally against him, Rousseau drew a link between questions of individual rights and popular sovereignty. “If a private individual, says Grotius, can alienate his freedom and enslave himself to a master,” wrote Rousseau paraphrasing Grotius, “why can’t a whole people alienate its freedom and subject itself to a king?” Rousseau’s reading of Grotius was accurate. For not only did Grotius affirm that individuals can alienate their rights; he also affirmed that the people can renounce their sovereignty: “the opinion of those must be rejected,” remarked Grotius, “who hold that everywhere and without exception sovereignty resides in the people.” In Rousseau’s social contract, as opposed to that of Grotius, government must constantly answer to the sovereign people.42 The social contract of Grotius was utterly fraudulent, a systematic violation of the “principles of political right.” 42

Rousseau’s Response to the Social Contract Tradition

Pufendorf, in Rousseau’s estimation, was no better than Grotius. True, the endless citations of Greek and Roman classics have largely disappeared, but Pufendorf follows Grotius in setting forth a doctrine in which natural rights and popular sovereignty are alienable and have in fact been alienated; in which slavery is justifiable if based on contract; in which the Leviathans are set free to do as they wish in international affairs; and on the domestic scene divine right absolutism is pushed aside only to make room for absolutism by consent. Neither Pufendorf ’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672) nor his On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1673) is an improvement over Grotius’s The Law of War and Peace (1620), no matter how influential Pufendorf was in the Germanies before Kant and throughout Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What was distinctive in Pufendorf, and a favorite target of ­Rousseau, was the contention that there are two contracts: a contract of association binding the people together, followed by a contract of submission by means of which the people alienate their sovereignty to the ­government.43 Rousseau, in response, titled one of the chapters of his Social Contract “That the Institution of the Government Is Not a Contract.” In the final version of the Social Contract, he wrote that “There is only one contract in the State, that of association”; in the original version he stated that “the people contracts only with itself.” Pufendorf ’s formulation was meant to indicate that the people owe unquestioning loyalty to the government, whatever it may be, no matter what it does. By contrast, Rousseau insisted that “those who claim that the act by which a people subjects itself to leaders is not a contract are entirely right. It is absolutely nothing but a commission.” At any time the people are free to change both their governors and the form of the government, and indeed the social contract itself.44 Pufendorf believed that the alienation of sovereignty was all the more essential because an active citizenry was a formula for disaster. Contra Aristotle, “Man is so far from being by nature a political animal . . . that barely a few of them are by long discipline brought to that point.” Most persons “remain bad citizens and nonpolitical animals throughout their whole life” and must be restrained by fear of punishment. Happily a precious few “can be molded through disciple” to play the part of rulers.45 In the most dramatic contrast conceivable, Rousseau insisted on the active citizenry that was mandatory if the notion of popular sovereignty were to be meaningful. Although we are not political animals by nature, founders and legislators can change human nature by ­instituting a reign 43

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of unceasing civic education. “In a well-run city, everyone rushes to assemblies.” While delegates may be necessary to record the people’s will, representatives should be disallowed because they render the people passive. “The better constituted the State, the more public affairs dominate private ones in the minds of the citizens.” Training for a life of active citizenship should begin at birth and last for a lifetime. Citizens may not be born but they can be made.46 On what citizens/subjects can do when faced with an oppressive regime, Rousseau again found himself strongly at odds with his social contract predecessors. Pufendorf ’s more vehement claim was that “a people that has given itself into servitude, or rather subjected itself to the absolute sovereignty of one person, has no more of a right to reclaim its freedom by force than I do to seize again by force a thing that has already been handed over to another by means of a contract.” When taking a softer stance, he lamented “the great slaughter of citizens and the great convulsion of the commonwealth that have accompanied the overthrow of even the worst princes. Accordingly, the lighter injuries of princes are to be condoned.” A way out, one person at a time, might be permitted: “Even when a prince threatens the most dreadful injury with a hostile intent, it is preferable to emigrate.” Barring an escape route, a subject should sacrifice himself rather than rebel: “If there is no way to flee one ought to die rather than kill, not so much because of the person of the prince himself as because of the whole commonwealth.”47 The beginning but not the end of Rousseau’s ardent dispute with Pufendorf concerns the demand that one person die for the sake of the many. “Is the safety of a citizen any less the common cause than that of the whole State?” he asked. If someone tells us it is good that a single man should perish for all, I shall admire this adage from the lips of a worthy and virtuous patriot who consecrates himself willingly . . . to die for the safety of his country. But if this means that the government is allowed to sacrifice an innocent man for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim to be one of the most execrable that tyranny ever invented . . . Rather than that one ought to perish for all, all have engaged their goods and their lives for the defense of each one among them.48

Rousseau’s position on the right to revolution was very different from Pufendorf ’s denial. “It is impossible,” remarked Rousseau, “to guarantee the prince against the rebellion of his subjects without at the same time securing the subjects against the tyranny of the prince.” 44

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An uprising against a tyrannical government is our right; or, as he puts it, “as long as a people is constrained [by force] to obey and does so, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does so, it does even better.” Failed revolutions are commonplace, but there have been a few ­successes, such as “Sparta in the time of Lycurgus, Rome after the Tarquins . . . and among us Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of the tyrants.” On those rare opportunities when the opportunity beckons, the people can and should throw off their chains.49 Rousseau’s response to Locke was far more complicated than his encounters with Grotius and Pufendorf. Instead of continuing to express disdain for those who preceded him in the social contract tradition, he borrowed heavily from the Second Treatise of Government before finding it necessary to launch a critique and go his own way. At the beginning of the Social Contract, Rousseau seconded Locke’s denial of Filmer’s patriarchal doctrine. Not even Aristotle, champion of the patriarchal family, noted Rousseau, held that the father’s authority had anything in common with political authority. And, in what amounts to a rephrasing of Locke, Rousseau wrote that “children remain bound to the father only as long as they need him for self-preservation.” After that, “All return naturally to independence” and each “becomes his own master.” On the issue of slavery, too, Rousseau found himself repeating Locke’s stand that not only is no one a slave by nature but no contract of slavery is legitimate, nor would any such illicit arrangement bind the children of the slave.50 Rousseau readily agreed, furthermore, with Locke’s statement, at the expense of Grotius, that “at best an argument from what has been to what should of right be, has no great force”51; history no more provided the standard for right in Locke’s thought than in Rousseau’s. Also to Rousseau’s delight, Locke affirmed what Grotius explicitly denied, that government is held in “trust,” and the governors, in consequence, can be dismissed from office.52 Against Pufendorf, and again to Rousseau’s liking, Locke denied there is a contract of submission; in the Second Treatise as in the Social Contract at a later date, the only contract is that of association. Emigration was another issue on which Rousseau could admire Locke’s transformation of Pufendorf’s absolutist politics into a program of freedom. Rather than a right, emigration to Pufendorf was a device for saving a tyrannical ruler from a possible uprising by the ruled. Locke, by contrast, championed a position that might be likened to individual sovereignty: “A child is born a subject of no country or government. 45

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He is under his father’s tuition and authority, till he come to Age of Discretion; and then he is a free man, at liberty what government he will put himself under.” Rousseau was in complete agreement with Locke in this matter—“on the understanding,” Rousseau clarified, “that the reason for leaving is not to evade one’s duty and avoid serving the homeland at the moment it needs us.”53 Any contract that sanctioned “despotical power” was denounced by Locke: “This is a power, which neither Nature gives, . . . nor Compact can convey,” because it violates our inalienable rights and implies what can never be granted, that the people can alienate their sovereignty. Life, liberty, and ownership of ourselves are ours for as long as we live; and “the people alone can appoint the form of the commonwealth,” ever retaining “supreme power.” Unlike the contracts of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke’s is not once and forever; it can always be redone, peacefully when possible, but by means of revolution if necessary.54 Rousseau could not agree more. Despite Rousseau’s many affinities with Locke, there was one issue above all that divided them: the question of property, a natural right for Locke, not so for Rousseau, to whom property arose only during the “last stage of the state of nature” and then as the institutionalization of all that had gone wrong with human history. “Competition and rivalry on the one hand, opposition of interest on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of others: all these evils are the first effect of property.”55 The key to his repudiation of Locke was Rousseau’s recasting of Filmer’s reactionary doctrine in an astonishingly radical form. In response to Grotius’s claim that private property was carved out of an original common, Filmer had asked the embarrassing question, when was such an agreement unanimously voted?56 Locke’s solution was to say that, even in a world of social contract, no such vote was necessary; it was enough that various persons mixed their labor with the land, transforming it into an extension of their selves, thereby making it their private property. Rousseau renewed Filmer’s anti–social contract query for the sake of perfecting the social contract. “In vain might [the rich] say . . . I earned this field by my labor,” he argued in the Discourse on Inequality. They might be answered, “Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate to yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?” Because “the right of property is 46

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only conventional and of human institution,” it is subject to regulation assuring that it serves the good of all.57 It was never Rousseau’s intention to outlaw private property. Far from it, property figured mightily in his notions of justice. A proper social contract, he forcefully asserted in his essay Political Economy, will enshrine the sanctity of private property but will insist with equal vigor that economic inequality must be significantly curtailed. The blessing Locke placed on enormous inequalities was firmly denied by Rousseau in all his writings: “The right of each private individual is always subordinate to the community’s right to all,” and “no citizen should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.” All should have something and none anything superfluous, which can be accomplished by a progressive tax code and by public shaming of persons engaging in conspicuous consumption.58 Properly handled, property is one of the best means of teaching lessons in justice. In the original state of nature, no one has “the slightest notion of thine and mine,” nor does Emile during his early years, before he becomes a member of society. It is only when a gardener hoes out the beans Emile had sown in the gardener’s field that the lad learns a first lesson in what is his and what is not. To prepare Emile for society, “the first idea which must be given him is less that of liberty,” which he has been enjoying all along, “than that of property.”59 To summarize our findings up to this point, Rousseau subjected the works of his predecessors in the social contract tradition to an energetic, frequently devastating critique. He did so, however, not to destroy the idea of a social contract but rather to prepare the way for its fulfillment in his Social Contract. Tearing down the social contract was essential to accomplish his end of rebuilding it. III. Testing the Facts by Right

Commenting on Grotius in his Social Contract, Rousseau charged that “His most persistent mode of reasoning is always to establish right by fact. One could use a more rational method but not one more favorable to tyrants.” Commenting on himself in the Discourse on ­Inequality, he suggested that his was an effort “to test the facts by right.”60 Not only Grotius but all the contractualists, in Rousseau’s estimation, confounded ought with is; all decided what ought to be on the basis of what is, and in the course of doing so made themselves apologists of the status quo. One cannot appreciate Rousseau’s book on the social 47

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contract without examining his previous book on the state of nature, the Discourse on Inequality, which tested the facts by right. Before prescribing a cure, he had to diagnose the disease. Rousseau put himself at odds with his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries when he elected to use the “state of nature” to show how thoroughly society has removed us from nature and with what disastrous consequences. Grotius had posited “natural sociability,” fusing nature and society into one; Pufendorf did the same and demanded that “we confine ourselves to man’s present state, disregarding the question whether his primeval condition was different and how the change came about.” So novel and provocative was Rousseau’s challenge that even the most advanced thinkers among his contemporaries frequently responded with incomprehension. The Baron d’Holbach was typical, announcing that “it suffices to consider man such as he presents himself to our view, such as he constantly acts before our eyes.” Taking direct aim at Rousseau, he added, “What is called the state of nature would be a state contrary to nature.”61 Rousseau accepted in the Second Discourse that a social contract had in effect been signed long ago, as Grotius and Pufendorf contended, but maintained that this historical contract marked the consummation of the loss of nature, supplanted by a humanly constructed society that is supremely unjust. Near the end of his hypothetical history of ever increasing inequality, Rousseau suggested that eventually the resulting intensity of social turmoil frightened the privileged, who therefore issued a social contract granting the rich “institutions as favorable to them as natural right was adverse”; they drew up an agreement that “changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right.” In his essay on Political Economy, Rousseau spelled out in graphic phrases the terms of this social contract: “Let us summarize in a few words the social compact of the two estates. You need me, for I am rich and you are poor, so let us come to an arrangement . . . I shall permit you to have the honor of serving me on condition that you give me what little you have for the trouble I shall take to command you.” The historical social contract of Grotius and Pufendorf, and of all their eighteenth-century followers, was one of the facts that must be tested by right; so tested, it failed miserably.62 Only if we stop judging what can be on the basis of what is and has been, explained Rousseau, will it ever be possible for us to open the future to the advent of what might be, a just social contract. The problem, however, is that both rulers and thinkers cannot see beyond what 48

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is in front of them, in plain sight. “Politicians make about liberty the same sophisms that philosophers make about the state of nature; by things seen they judge the very different things they have not seen, and they attribute to men a natural penchant for servitude by the patience with which those before their eyes endure their servitude.”63 Both the common sense of the rulers and the empiricism of the philosophers rationalize all that is wrong. As much as any figure of the Enlightenment, Rousseau was impressed by Locke’s empiricist, fact-loving Essay Concerning Human Understanding; but unlike other philosophers he spied in its pages an opening for much needed criticism rather than rationalization of the status quo. Rousseau’s ploy was to turn Locke’s attack on innate ideas and essences to his purpose of critical social judgment. Was not “natural sociability” a candidate for consideration as one of those dogmatic ideas of which Locke spoke, ideas we never question because we do not remember when they entered our minds? Asking how society came to be, rather than assuming it was always there, was a good Lockean exercise. Locke himself had opened the door in the Second Treatise when he noted that “history gives us but very little account of men that lived together in a state of nature . . . Government is everywhere antecedent to records.” People only “search into their original when they have outlived the memory of it.”64 Locke tried to gain insight into the lost state of nature by collecting information on American Indians.65 Rousseau objected that savage society is a relatively late development in the story of those “forgotten and lost routes that must have led man from the natural state to the civil state.”66 The orangutan spoken of by travelers, a pacific and solitary creature, is Rousseau’s potential candidate for “natural man.” True, unlike all known humans, the orangutan cannot speak; but why, on Lockean terms, should we not consider the possibility that language is an historical acquisition, as Rousseau conjectured in his Essay on the Origin of Languages?67 Once upon a time we may have lived entirely outside society, which would prove that nature and society are not one, that sociability is learned rather than given. Rousseau was engaging in “conjecture,”68 the kind of conjecture that was illegitimate under Newtonian science but quite defensible within the new sciences of life that were flourishing in France. What the expression “interpretation of nature” meant to Diderot, the life scientist, was infinitely more expansive than what it had meant to Francis Bacon, the physicist. 49

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Buffon was the life scientist who mattered most to Rousseau. It was Buffon’s Natural History that figured prominently in Rousseau’s search for the state of nature in the Second Discourse—and Buffon again who appeared on many occasions in Emile, the work in which Rousseau sought to shield the boy from society and keep him in touch with nature as long as possible. At the beginning of his life’s work, before discussing animals, Buffon had used conjecture to inject time and change into the static world of Newtonian physics. He speculated that a collision of a comet with the sun may have given birth to the planetary system and postulated that the face of the earth had changed fundamentally over the eons. Rousseau carried Buffon’s device into the study of the state of nature. He announced that his reasonings “must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better suited to clarify the nature of things than to show their true origin, like those our scientists make every day concerning the formation of the world.”69 In 1749 Buffon wrote that “we distinguish so poorly what nature alone gives us from what education, imitation, and example communicate, that it would not be astonishing were we to fail to recognize the portrait of a savage presented us in true colors.” While Buffon did not follow up on his insight, Rousseau was more than happy to oblige. His Discourse on Inequality would demonstrate “the surprising power of very trivial causes when they act without interruption” over very long periods of time. He would show how “the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand continually renewed causes, . . . has changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.”70 No previous social contract theorist, Rousseau complained, had ever succeeded in finding his way back to the state of nature. All had “carried over to the state of nature ideas acquired in society: they spoke about savage man and they described civil man.”71 Hobbes is an excellent example. Never did Rousseau deny that Hobbes was “one of the finest Geniuses who ever lived,” but he did insist that the “analytical method” Hobbes employed in the Leviathan proved how important it was to utilize a genetic method.72 In chapter 11 Hobbes explains our incessant aggression as the result of human instinct; in chapter 13 he writes that all must be aggressive because some are—which suggests that society is responsible, as does his admission that we are more obsessed with the search for distinction than with the quest for security.73 Rousseau gives Hobbes credit for his depiction of humans as they have come to be but faults him for confusing cause and effect.74 We are not born Hobbesians; we become so through social interaction. 50

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Self-love, or self-interest, was another vital matter on which ­Rousseau felt obliged to test the facts by right. “Self-love is implanted deep in man”75 wrote Pufendorf, who in common with other social contract theorists called upon self-interest to explain why we signed a contract and why we should continue to honor it, no matter what. Although Rousseau agreed that we are not and cannot be selfless, he distinguished between the bad version of self-love embraced by his predecessors and the proper self-love vindicated in his writings. At the outset of his Social Contract, Rousseau stated, “I shall try always to reconcile in this research what right permits with what [self-] interest prescribes, so that justice and utility are not at variance.” Later, in the same work, he strove to make certain no one could mistakenly understand his “general will” as a formula for overriding individual self-interest: “Why do all constantly want the happiness of each, if not because there is no one who does not apply this word each to himself, and does not think of himself as he votes for all? Which proves that the equality of right, and the concept of justice it produces, are derived from each man’s preference for himself and consequently from the nature of man.”76 In Emile, too, Rousseau pursued a program of freedom by calling upon properly directed self-love. The tutor constantly encourages the youngster to pursue his “palpable interest,” his “present and palpable interest,” his “immediate and palpable interest.” Emile, ever attentive to his self-interest, will not compromise his autonomy, will not answer to society and its standards. In the innocence of his early years, he will value an iron worker over a goldsmith, a pastry chef over a member of the Academy of Sciences. He will not answer to others, and his burgeoning reason will not be utilized to gain advantages over others.77 Before Emile, before the Social Contract, Rousseau published the Discourse on Inequality and in its pages explained the difference between good and bad self-love, the innocent amour de soi of natural man, the sordid amour-propre of social man. Amour de soi is the simple and natural desire of any person to avoid pain and remain alive. In the state of nature it is combined with the commiseration which “carries us without reflection to the aid of those whom we see suffer; . . . it takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue.”78 Amour-propre is altogether different; it is socially induced, the result of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others and needing to prove ourselves. We seek social esteem because society has robbed us of self-confidence; and the more selfish we are, the less we have a self. “This furor to distinguish oneself . . . nearly always keeps us outside of ourselves.” It was not his social ­contract 51

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predecessors, with their postulate of natural sociability, but rather Rousseau who appreciated the extent to which society molds our being: “The savage man lives within himself; the sociable man, always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence.”79 All of Rousseau’s predecessors, in his view, had constructed their theories with the rotten materials of amour-propre, not with proper self-interest. All found their false starting point beneficial in carrying out their program of passing rapidly from an initial assertion of natural equality to an apology for the grotesque inequalities of contemporary societies. Once corrupted by society, equality is what we are determined to avoid; and the social contract theorists, once again deciding right by fact, willingly dedicated their writings to legitimizing rather than correcting inequality. Underpinning the entire corpus of works written in the social contract tradition was the notion that the principles set forth were the dictates of “right reason.” Or, in Pufendorf ’s words, contractual theory was based on the conviction that humans were creatures “whose most noble and chief part is reason, the sovereign and controller of all other faculties.” What Pufendorf failed to understand, Rousseau insisted, was that “one no longer finds anything except the ugly contrast of passion which presumes to reason and understanding in delirium.”80 Reason develops in conjunction with amour-propre and as a weapon wielded by amour-propre. Locke was right but did not go far enough when he said that comparison of similar physical objects leads us to form common nouns designating classes of objects. He omitted that many of our comparisons are of ourselves with other persons, as more handsome or less, more beautiful or less, more wealthy or less, and that we lose ourselves in the course of making such comparisons. Reason is fatally infected from the outset by our socially induced passions. In a sense Hobbes was correct when he observed that our thoughts are merely “scouts and spies” of the passions. And he was correct again, that we are so caught up in our competition with others that our longterm, rational, enlightened self-interest usually yields to our “perverse desire of present profit.”81 But Hobbes made the mistake of regarding these as our natural passions when in truth they are social acquisitions. Having made this fundamental mistake, Hobbes, like all the social contract theorists, drew the dreadful conclusion that the social contract is best fulfilled through the empowerment of a ­Leviathan. Even 52

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when they reached beyond the “facts” to the proposal of solutions, the contractualists only completed the destruction of right. “It was on the 9th of April, 1756, that I left Paris, never again to live there,” remarked Rousseau in his Confessions.82 By the time he published his Social Contract, six years of relative solitude had passed, time enough to disentangle himself from the lure of amour-propre and its pollution of human reason.83 Hence he could succeed where all his predecessors had failed: he and he alone was able, so he thought, to enunciate the true “principles of political right.” IV. Freedom and Resignation

Rousseau’s prowess in destroying previous theories of the social contract and in offering a worthy alternative was unmatched. Also noteworthy is this: that where Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf had set their sights low, concentrating on a social contract intended to provide nothing beyond order, Rousseau’s efforts were constantly grounded in the conviction that freedom is “the most noble of man’s faculties” and “alone can give life a value.”84 And yet the theme of resignation figures as prominently in Rousseau’s works as that of freedom: resignation because the gap between theory and actualization is likely insuperable; resignation, also, because success itself, were it to come, would exact a heavy price. In the ideological aftermath of the French Revolution, it was often held that Rousseau had faith in revolution as the cure for the miseries he diagnosed in his Second Discourse. Even before the French Revolution there were already thinkers who feared the revolutionary implications of Rousseau’s indictment of society. To discern why Adam Ferguson wrote a dogmatic and shallow dismissal of Rousseau’s account of the state of nature in 1767, we must look forward chronologically to ­Ferguson’s polemic of 1776, directed against Richard Price’s applause for the American Revolution. Ferguson would have the British soldiers burn American cities, so that the colonists would be driven inland, where they could frolic in the “state of nature” of which they spoke admiringly.85 Down with social contract theory, down with anything reminiscent of the Puritan Revolution, said Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment in general. When Burke fulminated against Rousseau and Price in 1789–90, it was as if he were merely completing what Ferguson had begun. The notion that Rousseau was the proponent of revolution could not be more fallacious. For although we have the right to revolution 53

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in his political philosophy, the exercise of that right would almost certainly make things worse, far worse. “I hold it to be impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to last,” one reads in Emile, but Rousseau took no satisfaction in his finding. The outcome, very likely, will be the arrival of the last stage of history forecast in the Discourse on Inequality, the moment when we reach “the ultimate stage of inequality, and the extreme point which closes the circle and touches the point from which we started. Here all individuals become equals again because they are nothing.” Not even a feeble semblance of a social contract, not even a contract of submission, he predicted, would survive the advent of the modern despot.86 Occasionally, as with Holland and Switzerland, an upheaval does succeed, “but these events are rare.” Almost never do we have at our disposal the historical amnesia needed to free us from the past; normally the enormous burden that the past imposes upon us breaks our will to freedom: “Once peoples are accustomed to masters, they are no longer able to do without them.” Especially in the case of the most advanced countries, there is no hope. “Their revolutions almost always deliver them to seducers who only make their chains heavier.”87 The full measure of Rousseau’s pessimism does not come to light until we recognize that his thought is as incompatible with the radical Lockeans of his own century as with the earlier writings of Grotius and Pufendorf. In the name of fulfilling the social contract, the radical Lockeans Richard Price and Tom Paine called for substantial social change, no matter that this placed them at odds with leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume had observed that “the regard paid to the rich and powerful . . . derives . . . from the enjoyment communicated to the spectator by the images of prosperity, happiness, ease.” Adam Smith had similarly commented on “our desire to serve” our social “superiors.”88 Directly opposed was Richard Price’s comment that “it is not in the high ranks of life, or the great and mighty, that we are to seek wisdom and goodness.” Along the same lines, Paine suggested that nobility should henceforth be spelled “no-ability.” Careers open to talent, meritocracy, was the goal radical Whigs pursued in defiance of the socially conservative Scots.89 Rousseau’s rejection of the proposed new regime of meritocracy was categorical, perhaps even more categorical than his condemnation of the Old Regime. In the Discourse on Inequality his argument was that differences of talent were “the origin of all the other [inequalities].” The compulsive, socially induced search of each individual for a skill 54

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at which he or she could claim superiority over everyone else was the primary source of our downfall. All the most destructive forms of inequality soon followed in the wake of this first inequality—inequalities of wealth, property, and social standing, among others. Quite consistently, then, the tutor in Emile says to his pupil, “Remember that it is not a talent I ask of you. It is a trade.” In Rousseau’s novel Saint-Preux, having praised the virtues of meritocracy, finds himself listening to a lengthy counter-argument from Julie in which she spells out the great harm that follows from the social climbing of meritocracy.90 We should learn to stay where we are. Ours is, more and more, a world of restlessness, instability, and unhappiness. That is why “the grand maxim of Madame de Wolmar is not to favor changes of condition but to render each person happy in his.” The égalité so dear to Rousseau is frequently “the uniformity of a steady [égale] life”; the inégalité he combated is frequently “the extreme inequality in our way of life,” the excesses and deprivations, the chronic imbalance of everyday existence. Nothing, therefore, is more important than to be “satisfied to be what we are.” Julie and Wolmar promote “benevolence” among estates, not their abolition, and the festivals they hold for their workers aim to provide a “reunion of different estates,” not an end to hierarchy. For their own well-being, the servants of the Wolmars would be well advised never to leave the premises nor to aspire to another calling.91 Neither revolution nor reform, in Rousseau’s view, was likely to yield the realization of a legitimate social contract. As if that were not sufficiently alarming, Rousseau made quite explicit the enormous difficulty of maintaining the contract if and when it somehow were to come into being. A true social contract must be reaffirmed by the people day in and day out; it is ever in the making—an exercise in genuine, ongoing democracy, and yet Rousseau had scant confidence in the people such as they have come to be. Nothing less will do, in his famous and infamous expression, than to “force them to be free.” Constant public exposure to the eyes of fellow citizens is how Rousseau would force us to rise above enslavement to amour-propre. Human nature is no longer a tabula rasa; society has shaped, molded, and deformed it. Rousseau has no choice, therefore, but to demand in the Social Contract that we attempt to “change human nature.”92 Even the most effectively constituted political and social order cannot, however, end the reign of deeply entrenched amour-propre. All we can do is attempt to transform ineradicable amour-propre from malady to 55

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cure by collectivizing it. What, after all, is the patriotism he wishes to inculcate if not collectivized amour-propre? Patriotism “combines the force of amour-propre with all the beauty of virtue.”93 In loving our country we love ourselves, which Hobbes, the philosopher of amourpropre, might have understood. In loving our country we are willing to die for it, which Hobbes could not demand or understand except as madness.94 Rousseau did understand. Rousseau, the advocate of the modern principles of the social contract, became an ancient when discussing the civic education necessary to maintain the contract. “Let us consider what can be done on the basis of what has been done,” he wrote in what sounds like, but is not, a reversal of his practice of testing the facts by right. It was ancient history to which he was referring, the Greeks and Romans, who knew how to convert men and women into citizens. Lessons in instilling civic virtue are the ones he would take from the ancients and apply to the moderns. In Rousseau’s day, members of the Académie des Inscriptions worried that our understanding of ancient history may be inferior to what we know about the modern world. Rousseau did not worry: “The ancient historians are full of opinions which may be useful, even if the facts which they present are false . . . Criticism and erudition are our only care; as if it mattered more that a statement were true than that we should be able to get a useful lesson from it. A wise man should consider history a tissue of fables whose morals are well adapted to the human heart.”95 Once upon a time, in an extremely remote and long forgotten past, there was a moment when nature and society were one—the golden age alluded to in the Second Discourse and the Essay on the Origin of Languages. “Happy are the peoples among whom one can be good without effort and just without virtue!” Alas, no such people exists today or shall ever again exist. Julie and Wolmar do manage to recreate the age of gold for their small community of servants, but their schemes hinge on their ability to fend off the larger society and are only plausible because Wolmar, for his part, would make an excellent Great Legislator,96 while Julie, for hers, energizes his plans with her incomparable greatness of soul. Emile, too, during his earlier years, experiences the joys of being a natural man in society, but for this to happen the tutor must incessantly manipulate the social surroundings. “Did I tell you that a natural education was an easy undertaking?”97 Only civic virtue, a virtue that succeeds solely insofar as it denatures us, can save political society. Rousseau calls upon the example 56

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of Sparta when trying to convince the Poles to emulate the men of old. There is no better model for Poles to follow than that furnished by Lycurgus, who “saw to it that Spartans never had an instant of free time to call their own.” From cradle to grave Poles should think only of their country: “The new-born infant, upon first opening his eyes, must gaze upon the fatherland, and until his dying day should behold nothing else.” Never should the child play alone, and “every citizen shall feel the eyes of his fellow-countrymen upon him every moment of the day.”98 By such means the “general will” can be daily sustained, the social contract resigned. By such means we are forced to be free, but is freedom worth having on such terms? That Rousseau himself was as disturbed as enthralled by his civic solution appears evident when he gazes with astonishment at the example of a Spartan mother who, informed by the returning troops that all five of her sons died in combat, is concerned only to learn which side won the battle.99 If denaturation of our socially acquired selves is so ominous and a return to our innocent, original nature manifestly impossible, what is left except resignation? Resignation, submission to necessity, is one of the overriding themes of Emile. Philosophically, Rousseau continues as ever to affirm that we are free, not determined,100 and yet submission to necessity is a lesson he constantly teaches the lad. “The first law of resignation comes to us from nature,” Rousseau announces in the earlier pages of his treatise on education.101 Before long, however, he carries necessity into the social sphere and treats the reader to an incessant imagery of “chains” and “yokes” that must be accepted by Emile without murmur. Writing the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau had designated natural man as the only true Stoic.102 Emile, educated to submit to necessity, is also a Stoic without knowing what Stoicism is.103 Both Emile and natural man never desire what they cannot have and are self-contained, in harmony with themselves, free of socially induced longings, and thus happy—or at least not unhappy. Resignation and freedom were in tension in Rousseau’s thought, and, toward the end of Emile, quite tellingly, it is resignation that wins. The decisive moment arrives when the tutor advises Emile to “extend the law of necessity to moral things.” Quite in keeping with this new development in Rousseau’s thought is the diminished conception of freedom he sets forth in the closing pages: “Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man.” Not much more promising was his willingness to settle, two years later, for liberty as 57

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consisting “less in following one’s will than in not being subject to that of another.” The high-sounding definitions of freedom with which Rousseau began have given way to new definitions offering major concessions to resignation.104 *** Our study of Rousseau’s response to the social contract tradition ends with questions rather than answers. Was Rousseau the thinker who perfected the social contract tradition? Or was he the thinker who proved that the social contract can never be fulfilled? Or both? Ironically, we are in danger of ending our essay by seemingly reversing the beginning: Perhaps Rousseau, although he was not a Kantian, would have despairingly conceded that the German philosopher was sadly right, after all, when he interpreted the social contract as admirable but a mere “idea” of reason. At the beginning of his labors on theories of the social contract, Rousseau said that we lack the self-knowledge that is essential to our quest.105 By the time his work was complete, he had provided his audience with the self-knowledge that was missing. But was this knowledge worth having? Did it matter? Knowledge is not always power, Bacon and the moderns notwithstanding; sometimes it is a bitter acknowledgement of our powerlessness. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 58

Notes

Hegel, Philosophy of Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), no. 258, pp. 156–157. Ernest Barker, ed.,The Social Contract (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. xxxii. J. W. Gough, The Social Contract: A Critical Study of Its Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 169. A. P. d’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Historical Survey (New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 75–76. George Sabine, A History of Political Theory 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1961), p. 587. Lettres écrites de la montagne, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), vol. III, pp. 806–807. Hereafter OC. All subsequent citations to Rousseau’s works will be to the Pléiade edition. Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 116. Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in OC, III, pp. 970, 959–960, 962, 1010. Rousseau’s Projet de constitution pour la Corse is another text that directly contradicts the view that Rousseau was an advocate of the nation-state.

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Stanley Hoffmann, “Rousseau on War and Peace,” The State of War (NY: Praeger, 1965), ch. 3. Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe (NY: Harper & Row, 1963). Patrick Riley’s study, Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory, in Hobbes, Locke, ­Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), chs. 4 & 5, is especially noteworthy. Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 79. Rousseau, Du Contract Social, bk. IV, ch. 2, p. 440. Primarily because of the issue of consent, David Lay Williams suggests that Rousseau offers a better fulfillment of social contract theory than Kant. “Ideas and Actuality in the Social Contract: Kant and Rousseau,” History of Political Thought, vol. xxviii, no. 3, 2007, 469–495. Discours sur l’économie politique [Hereafter EP], in OC, III, p. 258. Kant’s Political Writings, p. 75. Kant’s Political Writings, pp. 144–145. Du Contract Social, in OC, III, bk. II, ch. 8, p. 385. Kant’s Political Writings, p. 82. Kant’s Political Writings, pp. 75, 187. Kant’s Political Writings, p. 85. Rousseau, Dernière réponse [to critics of the 1st Discourse], in OC, III, p. 83. Du Contract Social, bk. II, ch. 6, p. 380; bk. III, ch. 6, p. 409. Du Contract Social, bk. II, ch. 12, p. 394. Kant’s Political Writings, p. 134. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (­Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 218. Implicitly, she was dismissing a work I deem outstanding, Robert Derathé’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1970). [Originally published in 1950.] Explicitly, Robert Wokler later repudiated Derathé for reasons similar to Shklar’s. Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language (London: Garland, 1987), p. 16. Grotius, The Law of War and Peace [Hereafter LWP] (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), bk. I, ch. 3, no. 8.2. Du Contract Social, bk. III, chs. 1, 3, pp. 398, 402–404. Grotius, LWP, bk. III, ch. 7, no. 1. Pufendorf , Of the Law of Nature and Nations [Hereafter LNN] (Clark, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange, 2005), bk. VI, ch. 3, no. 2. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 2, p. 353. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 487. Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy, pp. 4–5. Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen [Hereafter DMC] (Cambridge University Press, 1991), bk. I, ch. 1, no. 9. Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’écriture sainte (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), bk. VII, art. 3, prop. 9. Pufendorf, DMC, bk. I, ch. 4., no. 9. Pufendorf, LNN, bk. VII, ch. 3, no. 1. Grotius, LWP, Prolegomena, no. 11. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” p. 467. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 3, p. 355. 59

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33.

Du Contract Social, bk. I, chs. 4, 6, pp. 357, 360; bk. II, ch. 4, p. 373; bk. IV, ch. 2, p. 440. 34. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 8, p. 364. 35. Emile, in OC (1969), vol. IV, pp. 836–837. 36. Du Contract Social, bk. II, ch. 2, p. 370. Emile, p. 836. 37. Grotius, LWP, bk. I, ch. 1, no. 12.1; Prolegomena, nos. 46, 40. 38. As noted by Garrett Mattingly in his Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), ch. XXVIII. 39. Lettres persanes, XCIV. De l’Esprit des Lois, bk. X, ch. 3. 40. Grotius, LWP, bk. III, ch. 4, nos. 6 & 9; ch. 5, no. 1. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 4, pp. 357–358. 41. Grotius, LWP, bk. III, ch.7, nos. 1–3; bk. II, ch. 5, no. 27. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 4, p. 356. 42. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 4, p. 355. Grotius, LWP, bk. I, ch. 3, no. 8.1. 43. Pufendorf, LNN, bk. VII, ch. 2, nos. 7–8. DMC bk. II, ch. 6, nos. 4–9. 44. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 7, p. 362; bk. III, chs. 1, 16, 18, pp. 396, 432, 436. Geneva Manuscript, bk. I, ch. 3, p. 292. 45. Pufendorf, LNN, bk. VII, ch. 1, no. 4. 46. Du Contract Social, bk. II, ch. 7, p. 381; III, 15, p. 429. See also EP and Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne. 47. Pufendorf, LNN, bk. VII, ch. 8, nos. 5–6. 48. EP, in OC, vol. III, p. 256. 49. Jugement sur la projet de paix perpétuelle, in OC, III, p. 593. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 1, p. 352; bk. II, ch. 8, p. 385. In his novel Rousseau suggested that “revolution” can be successful at the personal level. La Nouvelle Héloïse [hereafter NH], in OC, II (1964), p. 364. 50. Du Contract Social, bk. I, chs. 2 & 4, pp. 352, 356. EP, p. 244. Locke, Second Treatise, nos. 6, 23. 51. Locke, Second Treatise, no. 103. 52. Grotius, LWP, bk. I, ch. 3, no. 8.14. Second Treatise, no. 149. 53. Second Treatise, no. 118. Du Contract Social, bk. III, ch. 18, p. 436. Emile, p. 833. 54. Second Treatise, nos. 141, 149, 172. 55. Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes [hereafter 2nd Discourse], OC, vol. III, pp. 164, 175. 56. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), p. 273. 57. 2nd Discourse, pp. 176–177, 184. 58. EP, pp. 263, 269. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 9, p. 367; bk. II, ch. 11, pp. 391–392. 59. 2nd Discourse, p. 157. Emile, pp. 329–331. 60. Du Contract Social, bk. I, ch. 2, p. 353. 2nd Discourse, p. 182. 61. Grotius, LWP, Prolegomena, no. 6. Pufendorf, DMC, bk. I, ch. 3, no. 11. Holbach, La Morale universelle (Tours: Chez Letourmy, 1792), vol. I, pp. 7, 105. 62. 2nd Discourse, pp. 177–178. EP, p. 273. 63. 2nd Discourse, p. 181. 64. Second Treatise, no. 101. 65. Second Treatise, nos. 14, 36, 41, 49, 108. 60

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

2nd Discourse, pp. 170, 191. 2nd Discourse, pp. 209–210. Robert Wokler, “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures,” Daedalus 107 (1978), pp. 107–134. 2nd Discourse, pp. 123, 162. 2nd Discourse, p. 133. Buffon, Histoire naturelle de l’homme in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Eymery, Fruger, et Cie, 1828–29), vol. 10, p. 438. 2nd Discourse, pp. 162, 122. 2nd Discourse, p. 132. L’État de guerre, in OC, III, pp. 611, 612. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17. Also chs. 8 & 28. Geneva MS, in OC, vol. III, p. 288. Pufendorf, DMC, bk. I, ch. 5, no. 1. Du Contract Social, bk. I, p. 351; bk. II, ch. 4, p. 373. Emile, pp. 329, 335, 345, 350–351, 357, 363, 387n, 445, 447, 458–459, 487, 522. 2nd Discourse, p. 156. 2nd Discourse, pp. 189, 193. Pufendorf, LNN, bk. II, ch. 2, no. 9. 2nd Discourse, p. 122. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 8 and De Cive, ch. III, no. 27. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, vol. I, p. 403. Rousseau’s questionable claim that a “gentleness of soul” marked all his works written after withdrawing from Paris may be found in the Confessions, p. 502. 2nd Discourse, p. 183. Geneva MS, p. 302. Adam Ferguson, “Of the question relating to the State of Nature,” in An Essay on the History of Civil Society, part I, section I. Ferguson, Remarks on Dr. Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1776). Emile, p. 468n. 2nd Discourse, p. 191. Du Contract Social, bk. II, ch. 8, p. 385. 2nd Discourse, p. 113. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, no. 201. A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. II, part 2, sect. 5. Adam Smith, “Of the Origin of Ambition, & of the Distinction of Ranks,” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, part 1, sect. 3, ch. 2. Richard Price: Political Writings (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 87. Paine, Rights of Man (NY: Penguin Classics, 1988), p. 106. 2nd Discourse, pp. 174, 189. 1st Discourse, pp. 25–26. Emile, p. 471. NH, pp. 536–538, 564. Emile, pp. 515, 588. 2nd Discourse, p. 138. NH, pp. 536, 555, 609. To rest content in one’s social station is also affirmed in Le Devin du village. Du Contract Social, bk. II, ch. 7, p. 381. EP, p. 255. Hobbes’s inability to solve the problem of military duty is especially evident in the twenty-first chapter of Leviathan. Du Contract Social, bk. III, ch. 12, p. 425. Emile, p. 415n. As Judith Shklar noted. Men and Citizens, ch. 4. Emile, pp. 325, 468. Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, pp. 957, 966, 968, 1019. Emile, p. 249. 61

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100. 101. 102. 103.

Emile, p. 586. Emile, p. 307. 2nd Discourse, p. 192. See my essay “Stoicism for Rousseau and Other Beleagured Moderns” in this volume for further development of this topic. 104. Emile, pp. 820, 857. Mountain, p. 841. 105. 2nd Discourse, preface.

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3 Over Her Dead Body: Voilà La Citoyenne? Claudia Schaler

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the “political theorist feminists most love to hate.”1 While feminists rightly insist that gender is central to his thought, most fail to appreciate Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse.2 Julie is not Rousseau’s victim: she is his ideal woman and ideal citizen. Julie is Rousseau’s paragon of self-mastery: his neoclassical conception of freedom.3 Rousseau rebukes the feminist aim of liberation and is no advocate of political rights for women. But Rousseau’s misogyny is not the problem: we have differing conceptions of freedom. Julie is Rousseau’s poster girl for liberty because self-mastery allows her to resolve conflicts between self and other, but that cannot satisfy prevailing visions of freedom.4 Julie is not merely an indictment of ­society; she is Rousseau’s normative ideal, his icon of self-mastery. We love to hate Rousseau because he is so compatible with feminism. Nonetheless, rejecting liberation undeniably challenges contemporary feminism. The following sections consider charges against Rousseau, review Julie to assess the charges, and conclude she is his champion of self-mastery. The question is whether to embrace Rousseau’s vision of self-mastery. I. Crimes against Women?

Rousseau is a feminist landmine. Given the dead bodies in his wake, there is cause to investigate Rousseau for misogyny. He wrote too well for his own good, and his inflammatory censures are easy to mistake.5 Rousseau does not hate women or devalue femininity. His aim is not to subjugate women or to confine women to a private sphere he did not recognize. There is no essentialist determinism, no natural, sexual division of labor, but neither is there any return to natural wholeness, happiness, freedom, or equality. The presumption of Rousseau’s ­misogyny 63

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is alive and well but not without qualification.6 Helena Rosenblatt hopefully observed “the feminist consensus on Rousseau’s misogyny’ is breaking down.” 7 The time has come for it to rest in peace. We know from Rousseau’s frank Confessions of the convoluted feelings he developed through formative experiences with Mademoiselle Lambercier and his notorious “Maman,” never mind his own dead mother, or perplexing relations with Thérèse Levasseur, Zulietta, the intrigues with Sophie d’Houdetot and Madame d’Épinay—not to mention five abandoned children.8 Whatever we make of his difficult personal life, Rousseau found psychosexual socialization relevant to civic life. He affirms feminine difference, insisting women have a vital role to play.9 Julie heralds feminist and communitarian critiques of liberal individualism, defining modern norms for democratic society.10 Yet according to Susan Okin, “Rousseau saw women as a major source of the world’s evil.” Okin charged Rousseau with bestowing a fatal honor on his heroines—to socialize his heroes through the example of their virtue. Okin alleges that “women cannot be allowed to live in the patriarchal world,” at least once they have performed their vital reproductive functions, “since there is no way they can fulfill the totally contradictory expectations it places on them.” Her trailblazing indictment protests: “Rousseau allows that a man can be either an individual or a citizen. He does not allow a woman to be either.” A most reproving critic of Rousseau, Okin concedes that while “Rousseau could not conceive of any alternative to the rigid and prejudice-based code of ethics he prescribed for women, neither was he entirely comfortable with it.”11 Okin recognizes: Rousseau was acutely aware, perhaps more than any other political philosopher, of the conflicts of loyalties in people’s lives, and the incompatible demands made by the various personal and group relationships in which people participate. A moderate degree of selflove, love of another individual, love of one’s family, of one’s fellow countrymen, of humanity as a whole—all these he perceived as by no means easily reconcilable.12

Confronted with such difficulties, Okin finds Rousseau “deeply pessimistic.” Okin concludes that “Julie’s pseudo-accidental death, and her posthumous confession of her still unconquered passion for Saint-Preux can only be seen as tragic commentary on her deluded sense of victory over her feelings.”13 Okin, not Rousseau, devalues Julie. In contrast, Helena Rosenblatt rejects misogyny as an adequate explanation for Rousseau’s failure to transcend time and place. Rousseau 64

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advocates women’s civic role, in a vein more hospitable to feminism than most admit. Rosenblatt demonstrated that Rousseau’s vitriol is not targeted at the female sex but aristocratic Parisian parasites and a Frenchified Genevan patriciate. Rousseau castigates women who embrace frivolous, aristocratic norms, neglecting civic duty: “Get ­political. Stop subverting republican values; stop mimicking the manners of French aristocracy; and stop your pernicious luxury consumption. Start remembering that you are citizens of a republic and play your part in reviving both the constitution and the economy.” Rousseau exemplifies eighteenth-century expectations regarding women’s salutary moral influence, similar to later feminists in suffrage and temperance campaigns. He is distinct in his “biting critique” of rotten French values, Voltaire’s decadent influence in Ferney corrupting Genevan noblewomen and perverting their political role in republican society.14 Rosenblatt exposes many of our objections as anachronism. Values are political, but Rousseau does not frame women’s civic role in the idiom of rights. Rousseau defies notions of republican motherhood incarcerating women in domestic exile.15 “Let the homeland, therefore, show itself as the mother of all citizens.” The Romans, he writes, “made all their homes into as many schools for citizens.”16 We presume a normative division alien to Rousseau’s ideals, whatever the confines of the eighteenth century. Rousseau distinguishes the general from the particular will: public and private interests. But he admits no boundary between public and private spheres that banishes women to domestic obscurity: A Spartan woman had five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle. A Helot arrives; trembling, she asks him for news. “Your five sons were killed.” “Base slave, did I ask you that?” “We won the victory.” The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods. Voilà la Citoyenne.17

Rousseau is legendary for challenging a modern, liberal division of moral and political life: “Society must be studied by means of men, and men by means of society. Those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of the two.”18 Feminists also assert that the personal is political.19 Rare for appreciating both Julie and Rousseau’s conception of selfmastery, Nancy Hirschmann accepts the feminist consensus, confirming the “obvious sexism he pours into his views of marriage.” Hirschmann proposes the gentle suggestion: “It is arguable that his position could be 65

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seen as friendly to feminism,” finding Rousseau “much more ambiguous on gender issues than many feminists allow.” Hirschmann’s tentative defense contradicts her most astute reading of Julie, which routs charges of misogyny. Hirschmann recognizes Julie as the model citizen, yet concludes Rousseau disempowers women “in the most critical arenas,” rejecting political equality. Nevertheless, Hirschmann determines that Rousseau’s sexism is “overtly political, not theoretical,” serving discrete political aims rather than arising from misogyny.20 Meanwhile, Hirschmann is puzzled that “Rousseau does not link better education for women with their participation in politics,” yet like Rosenblatt, Hirschmann is attuned to context, recognizing that Sophie is extremely fortunate compared to her peers, if not to us today. Hirschman also details the radical class politics of Rousseau’s crusade for breastfeeding in Emile.21 Although Sophie’s education is surely the most exasperating example of figurative foot-binding imaginable, citizenship was never the immediate or primary goal of Emile. Sophie is not excluded. And while Sophie’s education is hardly progressive now, until Mill’s The Subjection of Women a century later, no one of equivalent canonical stature rivals Rousseau’s commitment to equality, education, or women’s plight. Rousseau’s seemingly blatant sexism evaporates when adequately contextualized, as Rosenblatt demonstrates. He is not motivated by misogyny, but his conception of freedom is inimical to women’s ­liberation. Rousseau exemplifies the provocative role gender has always played in political and social criticism. Since the Peloponnesian War, Euripides’s Medea, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, and Plato’s Republic placed gender, if not women, on center stage. If women rarely speak for themselves, it is closer to the truth to say gender has always defined political theory. Identifying sovereignty of the general will as the only legitimate government, following Montesquieu, Rousseau castrated a decadent aristocracy and made Julie his model citizen, giving republican political ideals a normative sex change.22 Rousseau was never unique in his controversial deployment of sex and gender. Julie is the closest he gets to a self-ruling citizen. Rousseau’s best hope to become a man and a citizen is a woman. Critics and fans alike should revisit Julie. II. Over Her Dead Body?

Rousseau’s immense popular celebrity was due to Julie. Published in 1761, a year before Emile and The Social Contract were banned and burned, Julie was one of the most popular novels of the century, if 66

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insignificant to Rousseau’s political thought today.23 The Discourses, Emile, and The Social Contract bred estrangement, exile, and infamy but define Rousseau’s legacy. Julie is truly a story of divided loyalties, if Okin’s rendition is misleading. Solitary, natural man is whole and good but only divided; civil man has virtue, which cannot arise until self and other conflict in society. Julie reconciles her general and particular will through self-mastery. Self-mastery is Rousseau’s foundation for all freedom in society. Gender is essential to Rousseau’s successful revaluation of democracy: no longer the anarchy of desire.24 ­Rousseau’s view of freedom decisively rejects a feminist project to liberate repressed desire. La Nouvelle Heloïse rewrites the love story of Abelard and Heloise as an epistolary novel set in the Alps during the eighteenth century. Julie falls for her tutor, lapsing from virtue and conceiving out of wedlock, before the ill-fated lovers are separated by feudal prejudice. Like the original couple, the lovers’ enduring bond is recorded in their correspondence, as is Rousseau’s modern revision of their predicament. Julie is first torn between love and virtue by her desire for her tutor, Saint-Preux, a pseudonym given by cousin Claire to their schoolmaster, who becomes Julie’s nameless “ami.” He is self-identified only once by the initials SG. Her infatuation escalates into a conflict with everyone else in her life, not least of all herself. Julie is master of herself and Saint-Preux, despite his title.25 She orchestrates her own seduction through her, perhaps genuinely, conflicted response to her suitor’s anemic overtures. Her love letters are a labyrinth of rejection and encouragement, coquetry and command. Saint-Preux, master in name only, submits to Julie: From this moment I remit to you for life dominion over my will: dispose of me as a man who no longer exists in his own right, and whose whole being relates only to you. I shall keep, doubt it not, the commitment I am making, no matter what you prescribe. Either I shall be the better for it, or you the happier, and in both cases I am assured of the reward for my obedience.26

If only she exiled him then! Already promised in marriage, Julie’s passion pits her against the universe. In her tortured vacillation, Rousseau invokes irreconcilable demands of nature, reason, God, love, loyalty, inclination, and duty:27 Yes, tender and generous lover, your Julie will always be yours, she will always love you: it must be so, I wish it so, it is my duty. I restore to you the empire love has given you; it will never again be taken from 67

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you. In vain does a deceitful voice murmur deep in my soul; it will no longer mislead me. What are the vain duties with which it counters those of loving forever what Heaven has caused me to love? Does not the most sacred of all concern you? Is it not to you alone that I have promised all? Was not my heart’s first wish never to forget you, and is not your inviolable fidelity a new bond for my own? Ah! In the transport of love that restores me to you, my only regret is for having resisted sentiments so dear and so legitimate. Nature, O sweet Nature, take back all thy rights! I abjure heartless virtues that obliterate thee. Will the inclinations thou gavest me be more deceitful than a reason that so often led me astray?28

The passion Julie cannot master leads her to the verge of ruin but for the enlightened values of her fiancé, Wolmar, who does not blink after learning his bride is not chaste. Her mother’s discovery of Julie’s love letters kills her. Bearing that remorse, Julie is unable to brave the guilt of patricide when her father falls to his knees in tears and shame. Julie relents upon seeing her father humbled. Her defiant refusal to marry had provoked her father’s rage, and she weathered a beating without yielding an inch, then miscarried the secret she was bearing. Her brazen disobedience, not her promiscuity or pregnancy, ignited her father’s rage. Julie was never intimidated by brutality, challenging her father to do what he would with her life. When her will defeats his and he collapses at her feet, Julie apprehends her power to destroy the family, accepts her responsibility, and agrees to marry.29 Unlike the original Heloise, Julie evades the cloister, and the new Abelard escapes the knife. Rousseau condemns feudalism while ennobling Julie. The miscarriage allows Julie to wed, avoiding the shame of eschewing Wolmar, who had recently lost his fortune, and to whom the baron owed his life. Julie’s refusal would disgrace her family, insulting the man who saved her father. Saint-Preux was never any match for Julie. Feudal prejudice excluded him as a possible husband, regardless of the baron’s oath. Even Saint-Preux’s poverty could never prove that Wolmar’s misfortune was irrelevant to Julie.30 Such convenient excuse would only compound the insult and dishonor of reneging. Julie rejects the proposal to elope with Saint-Preux under Lord Bomston’s protection, refusing a life of scandal and infamy. Unable to destroy her father, Julie defers, insisting she too has promised herself and cannot preserve his honor by compromising her own. She accepts the baron’s demand to ask Saint-Preux to release her, allowing her to marry honorably, intending to explain to Saint-Preux separately. Realizing there will be no reconciliation of blood and love, 68

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Julie succumbs to smallpox: “I felt most indisposed at the end of this conversation. Upon leaving my father’s chamber, I made an attempt to write a word to you, and was taken so ill that I went to bed hoping never to arise again.” Unable to escape in death, Julie hopes that Wolmar will reject her diminished beauty. Sworn to everlasting love for one and everlasting fidelity to another, we could construe Julie a casualty of conflicted loyalties. A passive death by smallpox, or better yet in childbirth, could sustain Okin’s reading. Julie’s “pseudo-accidental suicide” three hundred pages later cannot.31 Julie seals an alliance in the service of feudal privilege, as a matter of filial duty, although Rousseau repudiates the prejudice constraining marriage by birth. While the choice is not originally hers, the match is so befitting that Julie wills it retroactively. Despite her initial refusal, the arrogant baron got it right for all the wrong reasons. Julie tells her lover, “Heaven enlightens the good intentions of fathers and rewards the docility of children.”32 We need not absolve the baron’s violence or prejudice to allow Julie to change her mind, despite enduring desire. Julie enters “upon a new career which is to end only with my death,” she avows. She was delivered “into a new state that was to purify my soul,” she informs Saint-Preux, “it was as if an unknown power repaired all at once the disorder of my affections and re-established them in accordance with the law of duty and nature.” Her conversion washes away the past: “I seemed to feel myself being reborn; I seemed to be beginning another life. Sweet and consoling virtue, I begin it for thee,” Julie declares. “I have learned too well what losing thee costs to abandon thee a second time!” Julie maintains this “felicitous revolution” until death.33 With Rousseau and Julie, we chafe against arranged marriage. It is harder to deny Julie’s assertions that the right choice was forced on her, and affirmed retroactively.34 Julie dies defending the choice she was not originally free to make, despite her conflicted feelings. Rousseau is no misogynist because he denies a harmonious utopia of compatible desires. We can blame misogyny only by refusing Julie the agency ­Rousseau gives her, because we dislike the choices available, and reject the ones she made. We want Julie to cast off feudal constraints, making it difficult to appreciate both Julie’s nobility and Rousseau’s ­admiration. He vilifies the baron’s arbitrary chauvinism, which is nonetheless redeemed by Wolmar. The right choice becomes legitimate, and Julie dies defending it. Lacking Julie’s charm, Wolmar is not merely her social equal while Saint-Preux is socially inferior. Saint-Preux is an 69

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utterly tedious histrionic. Julie cannot satisfy a nagging desire, but as mistress of Clarens, she presides over a haven of decency in an unjust society. Clarens is feudal to the core, but Julie is good for self and others. Despite corrupt society, Julie is the ideal citizen. We impute to Julie the thwarted desire of a woman forced to marry against her will because we refuse to listen to her and allow her to change her mind. In marriage, Julie rejects the bourgeois ­Romanticism that will define the genre Rousseau anticipates. Repudiating “the blind transport of passionate hearts,” for the “immutable and constant attachment of two honest and reasonable persons,” she tells her lover that she and her husband are so perfectly matched that “it seems that if we had been created expressly to be joined together it could not have been done more satisfactorily.”35 Julie views marriage as a social institution aiming beyond the satisfaction of desire and individual fulfillment: “Love is accompanied by a continual anxiety of jealousy or deprivation, ill suited to marriage,” Julie explains, rejecting the delusion she had shared with Saint-Preux that love was essential to a happy marriage. “Lovers never see anyone but themselves,” she writes, but “one does not marry in order to think solely about each other, but in order to fulfill conjointly the duties of civil life, govern the household prudently, raise one’s children well.” Referring to Wolmar, Julie asserts, “Each of us is precisely what the other requires; he enlightens me and I enliven him; we are enhanced by being together, and it seems we are destined to constitute but a single soul between us.”36 Julie rejects our contemporary view of marriage that amounts to a 50 percent divorce rate and the feminization of poverty, confirming Rousseau’s skepticism toward progress. We exchange one set of insecurities for another. Julie’s unfashionable view of marriage cannot substantiate the charge of misogyny. Julie proclaims: “Were I, with the sentiments I formerly had for you and the knowledge I now possess, still free, and mistress to choose a husband, I call as witness of my sincerity the God who is good enough to enlighten me and who reads the depths of my heart, it is not you I would choose, it is Monsieur de Wolmar.” We need not worry whether Julie truly had the strength to refuse Saint-Preux, only to accept the candid preference she now attests.37 Julie does not deny her passions. She defies them, insisting she would chose Wolmar over amour-propre, rejecting the rule of narcissistic passion, not merely succumbing to guilt or self-abnegating duty. Julie reflects on her feelings ad nauseam. Rousseau suppresses nothing. Such ample navel-gazing allows Julie 70

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to choose among her own conflicting desires. Okin denies her choice, making her an objectified victim. Julie rejects Saint-Preux’s roller coaster for a marriage and family she could not choose while captive of her passionate heart, if her memory of blind transport lingers. Saint-Preux clings to his nostalgia, preventing him from making a life. Although sublimated passion was always Rousseau’s best defense of virtue, Julie shared with Saint-Preux only a “disorderly love,” unstable and destructive from the start. The mad “infection of love” gave Julie smallpox, prompting Saint-Preux to deliberately infect himself: “Unable to heal your disease, he meant to share it,” Claire writes to Julie. Their mania was a constant death wish, each wanting to die for the other and, simultaneously, to kill the other. He would rather plunge a dagger into her breast and she would rather see him dead than not to belong to one another. Saint-Preux routinely threatens suicide; Julie, ever more decisive, appears to many readers to succeed. Julie bores of turmoil: “Do we not know that disordered affections corrupt the judgment as well as the will?” sighs Julie.38 Rousseau indulges artificial passion only to reject it for a social remedy privileging the general will. Saint-Preux is self-exiled, and Julie eschews his antics, if not her feelings. While her attachment persists, she refuses to yield to it again. Despite conflicted feelings, Julie’s will no longer vacillates. Nailing the coffin shut, she declares: If as a punishment for my faults, Heaven took from me the worthy spouse I have so little deserved, it is my firm intention never to take another. If he was not fortunate enough to find a chaste maiden, at least he will leave behind a chaste widow. You know me too well to believe that, having once made you this declaration, I am the kind of woman who could ever retract it.39

Julie insists this is the last letter Saint-Preux will receive, until Wolmar starts meddling and decides to prove his confidence and Julie’s stalwart virtue by recalling Saint-Preux from exile.40 Wolmar tries his customary choreography on his wife, only to find his match in Julie. In keeping with his contemporaries, Rousseau poses his heroines as custodians of virtue, but they cannot cure either the amour-propre of their mates or the vanity of Wolmar’s scheme to redeem Saint-Preux by summoning him to Clarens.41 Emile’s brief happiness unravels in Les Solitaires the moment his tutor departs, while this platonic ménage à trois also ends badly as Julie’s beloved tutor returns. Rousseau dooms 71

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both experiments to fail in pursuit of happiness, emphasizing the triumph of self-mastery. Julie’s victory is accentuated because she never denies her feelings. Rousseau’s only hope for both men and women is self-mastery. Virtue was never cheap for the Spartan mother, Emile, or Julie.42 She taught Saint-Preux “too well how happiness must be immolated to duty,” although he still whines to cousin Claire of Julie’s “fierce virtue.” While Saint-Preux recognizes virtue “itself has dictated the decree” to separate, Rousseau never punishes the lovers’ sexual transgression.43 If they suffer heartbreak, Julie denies individual happiness as a litmus test of misogyny: Following a rule more sure than his inclinations, he is able to do the good that costs him something, and sacrifice his heart’s desires to the law of duty. Such my friend is the heroic sacrifice to which we are both called. The love that united us would have charmed our lives. It survived hope; it defied time and separation; it endured every kind of trial. So perfect a sentiment was not destined to perish of itself; it was worthy of being immolated only to virtue.44

Even Simone de Beauvoir claimed to be concerned with individual liberty, not happiness.45 Julie had a passion for virtue in which her passion for Saint-Preux always dressed. Her aspiration required a strength that she finds with self-mastery: I clearly saw where I must henceforth seek the strength I needed to resist my own heart, and which I could not find within myself . . . From the consideration of order I derive the beauty of virtue, and its goodness from the common utility; but what effect has all that against my particular interest, and which really is the more important to me, my happiness at the expense of the rest of mankind, or others’ happiness at the expense of mine?46

Not even Nietzsche railing against ascetic, slave morality denies Socrates’s liberty or moral victory. If we doubt that teenage Julie might have chosen Wolmar over Saint-Preux without hesitation, as she wills retroactively, adult Julie decisively chooses her family despite renewed desire. Often characterized as suicide, Julie dies of fever after diving into ice to save her drowning son. The maternal sacrifice is explicit: “You die a martyr to maternal love,” her pastor praises.47 Unlike the Spartan mother, Julie’s particular maternal love is easily aligned with the general will, if her love for Saint-Preux was not.48 Julie cannot live as virtuous wife and 72

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mother in a household with her husband and lover: “We were planning to reunite: this reunion was not good. It is a blessing that Heaven has prevented it; it is no doubt preventing calamities.” Julie opts out of Wolmar’s sublimated threesome, while maintaining her right to love virtuously from afar.49 Providence may have endangered her son, but Julie prevents calamity, saving his life and her integrity simultaneously. Casting self-mastery as a maternal pathology of perversely idealized femininity, Okin insists the only choice left is death.50 Julie refuses to be enslaved to passions she cannot extinguish and can no longer elude. Julie hoped that her longing for Saint-Preux was spent, but she dies clear-eyed: “I have long deluded myself,” she confesses, simultaneously confronting and renouncing the illusion, “you have believed I was cured, and I thought I was. Let us give thanks to him who made this error last for as long as it was useful.” Julie’s final words confirm that she has not betrayed herself or others. If she erred in believing she was immune to relapse, Julie never denies her feelings, as Okin claimed: “Everything within the power of my will was for my duty. If the heart, which is not in its power, was for you, that was a torment for me and not a crime. I have done what duty required; virtue remains to me without a spot, and love has remained to me without remorse.”51 “Having it all” does not mean the same thing to us as it does to Julie: But would my soul exist without thee, without thee what felicity should I enjoy? Nay, I leave thee not, I go to await thee. The virtue that separated us on earth shall unite us in the eternal abode. I die in this flattering expectation. Only too happy to pay with my life the right to love thee still without crime, and to tell thee so one more time.52

Julie chooses a heroic death, risking her life to save her child’s while owning her desires without being enslaved to them. Julie is never denied the freedom or happiness Rousseau grants others. Wolmar is doomed to live believing Julie is content to die with her virtue intact, rather than live as his virtuous wife.53 Emile condemns himself to slavery.54 Saint-Preux was the one sidelined. Julie is never marginalized, singled out for misery, nor martyred to redeem the sins of Eve. The story ends with Julie. In the final letter, Claire urges Julie’s nameless “ami” to rejoin the family as tutor to Julie’s children, but Rousseau is done with him. Editors claim his anonymity makes him the implicit hub of all correspondence.55 Letters designated either “to” or “from” Julie negate his identity and subjectivity while emphasizing Julie’s. 73

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III. Charges Dismissed

Rousseau does not advocate feminism, but he is decidedly compatible with much of it. This compatibility breeds sharp disappointment when he rejects contemporary feminist, Romantic, and Freudian aspirations to restore wholeness and authenticity by unleashing desire. Rousseau is neither hypocrite nor misogynist, which would make him easier to dismiss. Yet he never seeks liberation, nor pursues political rights for women. To assess his incongruity with feminism, we must understand Rousseau’s conception of liberty as self-mastery. As Rosenblatt suggests, “We must try to reconstitute the thinker’s historical context with particular sensitivity to the main problem or problems he might have been trying to solve.”56 Rousseau asserts that ancient citizenship is unattainable for modern man. Chasing phantoms, we cannot be “good either for ourselves or for others” while torn between nature and society. Rousseau believed contrary aims worsened the conflict, making “double men.” We can no more return to nature than ancient republics, but we might become good for self and others, simultaneously.57 This goal unites his thought throughout Julie, Emile, The Social Contract, and The Second Discourse. His civil remedies never offered to recapture easy, natural wholeness, happiness, or liberty. Rousseau’s only option was to reconcile individual and society by integrating general and particular will. His aim was never to subjugate women, and his commitments complement many feminist aspirations. Perhaps most conspicuously, no sexual division of labor exists in a solitary natural state: There was one appetite that invited him to perpetuate his species; and this blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart, produced a purely animal act. Once this need had been satisfied, the two sexes no longer took any cognizance of one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the mother once it could do without her.58

Simone de Beauvoir follows Rousseau when asserting “one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman.”59 Eventually, the natural condition gave way and “each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two sexes, which until then had had only one.” 60 In Emile, Rousseau asserts elliptically, “The only thing we know with certainty is that everything 74

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man and woman have in common belongs to the species, and that everything that distinguishes them belongs to the sex.”61 Sex difference has moral and political significance in society, ­Rousseau concludes.62 His view of society was never sex-neutral or difference-blind. Still, he denies a value hierarchy, insisting, “How vain are the disputes as to whether one of the two sexes is superior, or whether they are equal,” otherwise known as the querelle des femmes. Neither sex is superior or inferior where they differ, “in what they have in common they are equal. Where they differ they are not comparable.”63 The discussion of gender roles that follows is spectacularly dated but has nothing to do with natural inferiority, essentialism, or misogyny. Contrary to Okin’s reproach of his rigid, sexist prescriptions, Rousseau is uncommonly progressive in rejecting the conflation of virtue with virginity in La Nouvelle Héloïse.64 In Les Solitaires, Emile blames his own mistakes for Sophie’s adultery. Neither woman nor man can live entirely for ourselves, or for others. Julie is the universal representative of our hybrid subjectivity: the individual prior to society, who remains a dependent, social being. For Simone de Beauvoir, man is One, woman the inessential, derivative Other, the immanent object of man’s transcendent subjectivity. ­Rousseau anticipates the masochistic conundrum of Beauvoir’s independent, modern woman, aiming at impossible autarky, but conceives it as a defining curse of modernity, for both women and men.65 According to Rousseau, Beauvoir’s individual cannot exist in either nature or society. In Rousseau’s ranking of values, Julie is number one. There is no selfasserting, transcendent subject for Rousseau, male or female: merely the deformed egoism of corrupted amour-propre. In solitary nature, there is no one else. In society, we are all the Other: as soon as amourpropre replaced natural amour de soi, we lost natural wholeness, and our subjectivity was divided and mediated through social relations. Reforming corrupted self-love so that we might be good for self and others was Rousseau’s aim, never dominating—or liberating—women. Natural goodness equally absolved women of original sin. The primary threat to natural goodness and liberty is amour-propre, usually found in corrupted forms such as vanity or servility. The disfigured ego becomes impossible to satisfy, always comparing, simultaneously demanding that we prefer ourselves to others, and that others prefer us to themselves.66 Where Beauvoir sees self-mortification and objectification, Rousseau sees self-mastery as the only way to brave inevitable conflicts between 75

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self and other in society. The division afflicting individuals precedes particularly feminine liabilities. Otherness is inevitable for ­Rousseau; the One is as illusory as natural liberty. Civil freedom required selfmastery for both women and men. This prescription is inclusive, and it originates in Julie. Rousseau’s citizen is a citoyenne: Julie is the icon of liberty. Emile may be Everyman, but Julie is Rousseau’s model for everyone. Emile’s ordinariness requires an extraordinary education culminating in slavery to rival Julie’s subjectivity and self-mastery. Emile’s convoluted upbringing and rude awakening in Les Solitaires are unnecessary for Julie. Emile is the generic, empty vessel defined by average intelligence and natural goodness, the objectified puppet of his tutor’s machinations, his education contrived to insulate benign nature from corrupt society. Emile has no individuality beyond his wide-eyed, warm-hearted sincerity. His will is not his own.67 To equal Julie, Emile must be enslaved. Not until the posthumously published, epistolary sequel, Les Solitaires, does Emile acquire his own voice and subjectivity, after he is sold into slavery. Unlike Emile, La Nouvelle Héloïse always affords Julie the ability to speak and act independently. Julie achieves self-mastery despite society. She directly confronts prejudice and brutality, her amour-propre never shielded by an omnipotent, backstage tutor. Julie’s tutor is her lover, but she is never his puppet or his prey. Unlike Emile, Julie is never guileless and never successfully manipulated by her tutor (lover), father, or husband. Julie precedes Emile in every way. Seeking autonomy and wedded to the expectation that Emile is educated for freedom and happiness in society, Okin, like Beauvoir, overstates the prospects. Unlike many indifferent to Emile’s fate in Les Solitaires, Okin concludes that “the end of his story shows that, in the sense of forming an autonomous, internally free man, his education has been a success . . . his personal, moral autonomy renders him essentially free even when his body is enslaved.”68 Okin denies Julie this ambiguous liberty. But autonomy and liberation were never on offer. In Emile, Sophie simply assumes the tutor’s job of governing him. Emile finds freedom only in the sequel, Les Solitaires, when his dependence and subjugation is brutally revealed. Emile forfeits everything to Parisian decadence; succumbing to passions, he finds himself enslaved in Algiers.69 Rousseau prizes feminine difference, recognizing the particular obstacles women face. His political thought better resembles gynocentric feminism than misogyny or antifeminism.70 He depicts, but does not defend, patriarchy.71 For Rousseau, conventional femininity exemplifies 76

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the negotiation of self and other, general and particular will, inclination and duty. Femininity offers a moral education for all citizens.72 His heroines have an advantage precisely because society has historically venerated duty to others over egoism and self-assertion. The partial moral existence prioritizing the common good that citizens acquire through a just social contract is, for better or worse, already enshrined in conventional femininity.73 Rousseau’s heroines have a favorable standpoint: biology, society, even patriarchal double-standards have conspired to give women an equivocal advantage, easing Julie’s transition to the citizen’s partial moral existence while burdening the virtuous disproportionately. No one said civic virtue was easy. 74 IV. Champion of Self-Mastery

Rousseau’s view of freedom is not liberation, self-assertion, or unimpeded motion. Natural liberty was never an option. Self-mastery was a hard-won victory, formerly reserved to the sage that Rousseau extends to Julie, and later Emile. This neoclassical vision of freedom derives from classical sources such as Plato and the Stoics, but Rousseau’s appeal to will to integrate desire is as unorthodox as his effort to extend selfmastery to a woman, or an average bloke like Emile.75 If society makes being good for self and others costly, Rousseau never sugarcoats the demands of liberty. We judge Rousseau “the way a doctor would be judged by a jury of children if a pastry chef were to bring accusations against him.”76 The “Citizen of Geneva” grasped that self-rule was as severe as many forms of oppression.77 Rousseau knew the yoke of liberty was one we would never choose, making the legislator necessary: Liberty is a food that is good to taste but hard to digest; it sits well only on a good strong stomach. I laugh at those debased peoples that let themselves be stirred up by agitators and dare to speak of liberty without so much having the idea of it; with their hearts still heavy with the vices of slaves, they imagine that they have only to be mutinous in order to be free. Proud, sacred Liberty! If only they but knew her, those wretched men; if they but understood the price at which she is won and held; if they but realized her laws are stern as the tyrant’s yoke is never hard, their sickly souls, the slaves of passions that would have to be hauled out by the roots, would fear liberty a hundred times as much as they fear servitude. They would flee her in terror as they would a burden about to crush them.78

This vision of self-rule cannot offer the effervescent liberation we seek from undivided, natural liberty, nor Romantic and Freudian dreams 77

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to liberate desire. We should not blame the messenger, nor should we confuse the chains of self-rule with those of patriarchy. Rousseau was an important influence, but he was no Romantic. Julie is the neoclassical champion of self-mastery who never represses desire, but instead integrates conflicting loyalties, privileging the general will. Hailed as the forefather of Romanticism, Rousseau rejects unnatural appetites bred of decadent society.79 He repudiates Romanticism in advance while detonating the bourgeois fantasy of romantic love and marriage thirty years before Wollstonecraft.80 Julie epitomizes the eighteenth-century, sentimental, epistolary novel. It also exemplifies Rousseau’s signature contrarianism, adopting an idiom only to reinvent it, as he did repeatedly in The Second Discourse, The Social Contract, and The Confessions. After Pamela, and Shamela, but before Justine and Juliette, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse still offers the closest to a feminist heroine to be found in such company. Julie is not the heroine of bourgeois romantic comedy, ending abruptly in marriage to prince charming.81 Nor is she the social climbing ingénue, inescapably seduced by her domineering master, the innocent victim who conveniently embraces her captor’s fantasy. Rousseau did not confuse virtue and virginity. But he repudiated the reign of unfettered desire for men and women, equally. Anticipating while negating subsequent Romantic and Freudian misconceptions of freedom confused with the liberation of repressed desire, Rousseau rejected a prevailing feminist aspiration because it could not secure civil freedom, not because of misogyny. We will never understand Rousseau through anachronistic notions of freedom. Self-mastery is fueled by passion, evincing a Platonic moral psychology.82 The power to choose general over particular will involves sublimating, never suppressing, desire.83 Rousseau heretically adopts self-mastery as his foundation for popular sovereignty. Without self-mastery, we are warped by amour-propre, corrupted by society. Like Plato, Rousseau believed we must harness the power of desire, more likely to be self-destructive than to achieve self-determination.84 Liberating and satisfying desire was never Rousseau’s recipe for either happiness or liberty. Artificial social expectations superimposed upon natural appetites and animal acts devoid of sentiment in The Second Discourse impede Julie’s happiness. Society generated an unnatural need for Saint-Preux, which feudalism also prohibited Julie from satisfying. Rousseau’s idyllic portrait of nature refuted original sin and condemned decadence, but 78

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restoring Rousseau’s asocial state of nature was hardly what the Romantics had in mind, never mind Rousseau. Romanticism offers only the reign of an unhealthy amour-propre, making contradictory demands impossible to satisfy—Sturm und Drang supplanting equally immoderate rationalism.85 Rousseau was not alone among the philosophes to question Enlightenment pieties.86 His flirtation with primitivism and sentimentalism concludes with an appeal for neoclassical self-mastery aimed straight at the heart. Julie is not a pawn sacrificed to instill virtue in men, but an exemplary citizen who adopts the general will, despite the cost.87 The contradictory expectations that Julie cannot fulfill are ours, not Rousseau’s. Why not give Juliet a happy ending? Self-Mastery: Good for Self and Others?

Rousseau’s vision of legitimate self-rule requires reconciliation between individual and common good, possible only through self-mastery. Following Plato and Aristotle, who contend just states serve the common good rather than the interests of the rulers, Rousseau conceives legitimate democracy as sovereignty of the general will. Individual self-mastery is required to regulate amour-propre. Democracy is no longer a regime devoted to the particular interest of the ruling class, even if the majority. In The Social Contract, we acquiesce like Julie: the legislator “persuades without convincing.” Rousseau aims to create a hybrid moral subjectivity to self-regulate particular desires through the general will.88 We are forced to be free, like Julie, because the choice is not yet available: “The social spirit which ought to be the work of that institution, would have to preside over the institution itself. And men would be, prior to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of laws.”89 A legitimate contract requires institutional reform. Adopting the role of self-governing citizens requires self-mastery. As second-class citizens, we seem the second sex, but Rousseau does not devalue, marginalize, or exclude women. Julie’s specifically feminine conflicts as daughter, lover, wife, and mother define the primary challenge of individualism: being good for self and other. His archetype for man and citizen is a woman. Rights were never Rousseau’s priority. Julie’s death is Rousseau’s indictment of society, which makes it too costly to do right by herself and others. Julie demonstrates that self-rule is possible, not easy. Popular sovereignty, not patriarchy, requires the general will is sovereign. Subordinating the 79

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particular to the general will is required of male and female citizens equally.90 Without institutional reform, Rousseau’s vision is hardly appealing. Nevertheless, institutional reform alone cannot produce self-ruling citizens. Like Beauvoir, liberals as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, Judith Shklar, and Susan Okin all rejected self-mastery as suicidal self-denial.91 If Rousseau is wanting, we should sooner blame his neoclassical inclinations than misogyny. Charges of pessimism expect Rousseau, with the stroke of his pen, to deal Julie and all of us a better hand. That is the job of selfgoverning citizens. Sophie and Julie are not feminist heroines. Nor are they casualties of Rousseau’s misogyny. We are left to ponder whether we have any use for Rousseau’s vision of liberty. The feminist consensus on Rousseau indicates that society has not changed sufficiently to make Julie’s self-mastery appealing. If we are expecting liberation, self-mastery will never satisfy. If we reject Rousseau’s vision of liberty, the reason was never his misogyny. 1. 2.

3.

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Notes

Nancy Hirschmann, “Book Review: Rousseau’s Republican Romance,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 164–167, 164. The following English translations are cited, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, eds. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, in Finding a New Feminism: Rethinking the Woman Question for Liberal Democracy, trans. Alice Harvey, ed. Pamela Jensen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Second Discourse and The Social Contract in Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Nancy Hirschmann also recognizes Julie as Rousseau’s ideal citizen. Nancy Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 118–167, 152–161, 164. Others note Rousseau’s conception of self-mastery but not its significance. E.g., Lange recognizes that citizenship requires the ability to transcend particular interest but maintains Rousseau’s misogyny, Lynda Lange, “Rousseau: Women and the General Will,” in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed. Lynda Lange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 47–50; Lynda Lange, “Women and Rousseau’s Democratic Theory: Philosopher Monsters and Authoritarian Equality,” in Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 95, 105; Lynda Lange, “Rousseau and Modern Feminism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 96–99.

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Hirschmann considers Julie the most free by Rousseau’s reckoning, Gender, Class, and Freedom, 157–159; Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 41–42; Marso, “Subversive Women,” 274; Wingrove, Republican Romance, 230–231. Peter Gay, “Introduction,” in The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 13; J. S. Maloy, “The Very Order of Things: Rousseau’s Tutorial Republicanism,” Polity 37, no. 2 (2005): 235–262; 249. Joel Schwartz claims that Rousseau’s overt sexual politics subordinate women while informal political responsibilities reveal women are not as powerless as they seem; Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 45. Carole Pateman asserts the significance of excluding women from a fraternal social contract that condemns them to involuntary sexual subjugation; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Penny Weiss refutes claims that Rousseau supports biological determinism despite rhetorical appeals to nature in Emile, but she repudiates his antifeminist, sexdifferentiated, republican community; Penny Weiss, Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1993). Lori Marso seeks a feminine model of citizenship, potentially emancipatory, instead silenced by marginalization and death; Lori Jo Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine De Staël’s Subversive Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 2, 5–6, 45, 274, 260. Elisabeth Wingrove examines Rousseau’s gendered “political symbology,” finding the “mutual constitution of republicanism and gendered sexuality,” not simply exclusion; Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5, 239. Helena Rosenblatt, “On the ‘Misogyny’ of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 91–114, 91. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, eds. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995). E.g., Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Lange, “Modern Feminism,” 107–108; Lange, “Philosopher Monsters,” 105. Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 100; 194; 165. See also Nicole Fermon, “Domesticating Women, Civilizing Men: Rousseau’s Political Program,” TSQ Sociological Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1994): 431–442, 436; Wendy GuntherCanada, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on the Sexual Politics of Republican Motherhood,” POLP Southeastern Political Review 27, no. 3 (1999): 469–490; Lange, “Modern Feminism,” 103. See also Lange, “Philosopher Monsters,” 105; Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 1–32; Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 5–6, 41–42. Many question Shklar’s mutually exclusive paths to utopia; e.g., Mira Morgenstern, “Between Ancients and Moderns: Women as Citizens in Oeuvre of Rousseau,” in Rousseau and the Ancients, eds. Ruth Grant and Philip Stewart (Montreal: North American Society for the Study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2001), 161; Frederick 81

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 82

­ euhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive N for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 18–19. J. S. Maloy, “The Very Order of Things,” 253. Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 244–249. Okin, Western Political Thought, 167. Ibid., 167; 175. Rosenblatt, “On the ‘Misogyny’ of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” 114; 110, 113; 100. Cf. Gunther-Canada, “Republican Motherhood.” Cf. Fermon, “Domesticating Women,” 432; Gunther-Canada, “Republican Motherhood”; Nicole Fermon, Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman, and Nation (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 50; Rosenblatt, “Misogyny,” 92–93. Rousseau does not share our liberal distinction between domestic and political economy, although like Locke he rejects natural, paternal authority as the source of political power; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Political Economy, in Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 111–113. Rousseau, Political Economy, 123; 126. Rousseau, Emile, 40. Ibid., 235. See also Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 77; Lori Marso, “Rousseau’s Subversive Women,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 274; Wingrove, Republican Romance, 5. Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 140, 152, 166. Ibid., 139–141; Nancy Senior, “Les Solitaires as a Test for Emile and Sophie,” The French Review 49, no. 4 (1976): 528–535, 529. Cf. Montesquieu’s eunuchs, The Persian Letters. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 242; John Scott and ­Robert Zaretsky, The Philosophers Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 10. Cf. Jim Miller, Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Wingrove, Republican Romance, 14–15, 59; John Scott, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), xiv. Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, 268, 272, 342. See also Emile, 473, 479; Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 60. Rousseau, Julie, 45. Cf. Emile, 424. Sophie exercises similar powers; see Penny Weiss, “Sex, Freedom & Equality in Rousseau’s Emile,” Polity 22, no. 4 (1990): 603–625; Denise Schaeffer, “Reconsidering the Role of Sophie in Rousseau’s Emile,” Polity 30, no. 4 (1998): 607–626. Cf. Emile, 280. Rousseau, Julie, 276. Ibid., 289, 300–301, 342, 404, 415; 251, 258–259, 286; 146; 267, 286. Ibid., 288–289, 355; 265. Ibid., 266; 289; 291; 608–610. Okin, Western Political Thought, 175.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

Rousseau, Julie, 307. Ibid., 279; 292–293. Ibid., 300, 307–308, 591. Ibid., 306–307. Ibid. Ibid., 308; 306–310. Ibid., 252; 274; 277–278, 281–282; 295. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 351–355, 415–419. Ibid., 342. Cf. Emile, 40; Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 156, 158–160; “In ­Rousseau’s worldview, death is not too heavy a price to pay for virtue,” 165. Rousseau, Julie, 255–256; 302. Ibid., 299. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1989), xxx. Rousseau, Julie, 294–295. Ibid., 588. See also Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 159. Rousseau, Julie, 608, 292–296, 299, 609. Okin, Western Political Thought, 175–176. Cf. Shklar, Men and Citizens, 144; Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 159, 306n76; Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 2, 6, 21. Rousseau, Julie, 608–609. Ibid., 610. Ibid., 590–591. Cf. Morgenstern, “Women as Citizens,” 161–162. Rousseau, Julie, 659n6. Rosenblatt, “Misogyny,” 96. Rousseau, Emile, 39–41. Rousseau, The Second Discourse, 60. See also Penny Weiss and Anne Harper, “Rousseau’s Political Defense of the Sex-Roled Family,” Hypatia 5, no. 3 (1990): 91–92, 105: who recognize a “potent critique of biological determinism”; Lange, “General Will,” 43; Lange, “Modern Feminism,” 99. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 267; cf. Hirschman, Gender, Class, Freedom, on social construction. Rousseau, The Second Discourse, 63. See also Schaeffer, “Sophie,” 612; Lange, “Modern Feminism,” 99; Lange, “General Will,” 43. Rousseau, Emile, 358. Cf. Wingrove, Republican Romance, 17. Rousseau, Emile, 358. Okin, Western Political Thought, 165. Beauvoir, Second Sex, xxii–xxiii; 682, 691, 699. Rousseau, Emile, 213–214, 444. Cf. N. J. Dent, Rousseau: Introduction to His Psychological, Social, and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 4, 20–25, 52–58; Timothy O’Hagan, “On Six Facets of Amour-Propre,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99, no. 1 (1999): 91–107; N. J. Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005); Neuhouser, Theodicy, 9–18, 29–151. Rousseau, Emile, 332, 424, 473, 479. Okin, Western Political Thought, 169, 157, 169–170. 83

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 84

Rousseau, Emile, 479; 444–445. See Iris Marion Young, “Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics,” Women’s Studies International Forum 8, no. 3 (1985): 173–183. Sarah Kofman and Mara Dukats, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” Hypatia 3, no. 3 (1988): 123–136, 125. See also Lange, “General Will,” 47. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 164. E.g., Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 164: “The demands of moral freedom are not easy but extreme.” Cf. “If liberty consisted in doing what one wishes, no one would be free; that all are weak, subject to circumstances and hard necessity.” Rousseau, Les Solitaires, 226. Peter Gay notes Rousseau’s “highly selective and tendentious classicism,” in Basic Political Writings, xii. See also Charles Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1934); Georges Pire, “De l’influence de Sénêque sur les theories pédagogiques de J.-J. Rousseau,” Annales de la société J.-J. Rousseau 33, (1953–1955): 57–92; Georges Pire, “Du bon Plutarque au citoyen de Genève,” Revue de littérature comparée 32, (1958): 510–547; Ruth Grant and Phillip Stewart, eds., Rousseau and the Ancients; Laurence Cooper, “Human Nature and the Love of Wisdom: Rousseau’s Hidden (and Modified) Platonism,” The Journal of Politics, 64, no. 1 (2002): 108–125; J. S. Maloy, “Tutorial Republicanism”; David Lay Williams, ­Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Plato, Gorgias, in Complete Works, eds. John Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 521E. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to Mirabeau, July 26, 1767,” in Correspondance Complète De Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh (Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–91), vol 33, 243 (letter 5991). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, ed. Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 29–30. Cf., Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919); Judith Shklar, After Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 26–64; Kennedy Roche, Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic (London: Methuen, 1974); Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See Fermon, “Domesticating Women,” 436, 438–439; Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 156, 306n71. See also Les Solitaires, in which the pseudo-conclusion of Emile’s happy marriage unravels. Rousseau, Emile, 233, 291, 321, 327, 445. Cf. Hirschmann’s suggestion of suppression rather than sublimation in a “triumph of will over desire,” Gender, Class, Freedom, 152. E.g., Plato, Phaedrus, in Complete Works, eds. John Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Rousseau, Emile, 213–214. See Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

See also Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 74. See also Schaeffer, “Sophie,” 612. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 163–164. Cf. Wingrove, Republican Romance, 96. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, eds. Henry Hardy and Ian Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217; Shklar, Men and Citizens, 129; Okin, Western Political Thought, 176; cf. Hirschmann, Gender, Class, Freedom, 154.

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Part Three Sound and Music

4 How to Be Modern in Music: Rousseau between Greece, Italy, and Vienna Michael O’Dea

I. “Modern” Music up to Rousseau’s Time

When Sébastien de Brossard published his Dictionnaire de musique in Paris in 1701, the first dictionary of its kind in French, through his entries he gave a view into what the characteristics of modern music might be. Brossard looked primarily to Italy (his dictionary is to a great extent devoted to translating Italian musical terms) and described a turn in music history that he situates in the second half of the seventeenth century. Music becomes more expressive, it seeks to follow the inflections of the voice rather than impose its own rhythms, and clearly for Brossard it becomes more moving and more attractive.1 Was such a reading of the recent past controversial? At this remove, it is difficult to tell. In the following half century, J. S. Bach draws on both the Italian and French styles; the discovery of Vivaldi’s concertos seems to have been of great importance for him, and one has the sense of a fluid exchange between different musical traditions. In France the question is more complex. One composer, Lully, dominates French music for a quarter of a century at Versailles; his prestige gives him a continuing influence after his death. An Italian, his mission under Louis XIV is to create a specifically French art, proper to the royal court. Catherine Kintzler has shown, in a series of remarkable studies, how, with the poet Quinault, Lully created a genre, the tragédie lyrique, that made a place for itself within the aesthetic of French classicism by reversing some of the norms that were characteristic of the verse tragedies of Corneille and Racine.2 In the early part of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s career, before he turned to opera at the age of fifty, the musical style of 89

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his harpsichord pieces is often described as Italian or Italian-influenced, but this is sometimes formulated as a reproach. France had established its preeminence in art and literature under the Sun King and felt assured of its position, whereas in music, French excellence is less recognized, and Lully’s specifically French operatic form did not enjoy the same international recognition as the architecture of Versailles or the comedies of Molière.3 Hence the defensive reactions sometimes encountered in French writings on the question. Rameau’s belated but brilliant lyric career after 1733, with its fidelity to the French forms of tragédie lyrique and opéra-ballet, reinforces the sense of a distinctive national musical tradition but does not draw French opera out of its relative isolation in a Europe dominated by the Italians. Sébastien de Brossard (himself a composer) nevertheless points toward an idea of modernity in music that will be taken up again later in the eighteenth century. In this perspective, music has an intimate relation to human feeling, expressing and arousing emotion: therein lies its true vocation. From about 1750 onward, Jean-Jacques Rousseau will be foremost among those who argue for this conception of the art. However, in France the ultimate triumph of expressive theories of music will be the outcome of a long struggle. In the first half of the century, despite de Brossard’s remarks, music is above all seen by the learned as a science, and mathematical analysis of harmonic relations is seen as the appropriate mode for studying this science. The adherents to this view (Jean-Philippe Rameau is by far the most significant of them)—although certainly influenced by the scholarly Italian musicians and music historians of the seventeenth century, such as Bontempi—also look back to the Compendium Musicæ of Descartes (1650) and in particular to the Harmonie universelle (1636) of Marin Mersenne: in his Génération harmonique (1737) Rameau pays a kind of silent homage to Mersenne by organizing his work in a series of propositions to be demonstrated, as Mersenne had done in his.4 Even if music theory using mathematical models is by no means exclusively a French preference, it offers a possible narrative of musical development in which many points of reference are French, including notably, after Descartes and Mersenne, Joseph Sauveur, a member of the Academy of Sciences, who demonstrated the overtone series that underlies modern harmonic theory.5 Rameau was not yet aware of Sauveur’s studies when he wrote his first major theoretical work, the Traité de l’harmonie (1722), but they inform all his subsequent theoretical writings and support his conviction that music is a science. By 1750 Rameau has put in place an ever-evolving 90

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but substantial body of argument and calculation concerning harmony that was regarded by many of his contemporaries (and by himself ) as offering a complete system of music theory on a scientific basis. The opening statements or “preliminaries”6 of Rameau’s Nouveau systême de musique théorique (1726) are eloquent in that regard: Music is the science of Sounds; it is divided into Theoretical and Practical. Theoretical Music considers the different relations between Sounds, seeks their principle, & justifies the rules necessary for practice. Practical Music teaches composition and execution. Theoretical and Practical Music are divided into Harmony & Melody. Harmony consists in the union of two or several Sounds, by which the ear is agreeably affected. Melody is formed of several Sounds heard successively, as when we sing. We shall see in the continuation of this Treatise, that Melody is born of Harmony.7

These “preliminaries” continue over several pages, to be followed by a second set of preliminaries, the “Préliminaires de Mathématique,” or “Mathematical Preliminaries,” which Rameau introduces by writing: “We have so far only spoken of things that the Ear can judge; but Reason will now conduct us, showing us a manner of marking by Numbers the exact relationship of sounds. To this effect, we shall be obliged to borrow some necessary notions from Mathematics.”8 Not only is Rameau’s general approach scientific, but he claims all of music for science, including musical practice. Moreover, he makes music coextensive with the study of sound (“Music is the science of sounds”), thereby enlarging the domain of musical study, or so it appears, far beyond the boundaries of musical art.9 These are not new claims, but they renew and carry forward the scientific musical tradition and, given Rameau’s increasing fame from 1733 on, ensure its continuing prestige in France.10 As a practicing musician himself, from a family of professional musicians, Rameau is ultimately less absolute in his positions than such passages might suggest. In the Nouveau systême, he does acknowledge that a good organist can work from nature and experience, without mastering the science of music as Rameau conceives it. There can be no doubt, he writes, that music is natural to us, “nor can one doubt that we can become sensitive to all its different effects, by dint of hearing it and practicing it.”11 The minimum position he defends is linked to efficiency and rapidity: if it takes fifteen years to become a good musician by exposure and practice, a scientific approach can shorten that 91

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apprenticeship and make learning music easier. This practical advantage will contribute greatly to Rameau’s renown: even in the hostile portrayal that Diderot attributes to the composer’s nephew Jean-François Rameau, the value of his approach for music teachers is not disputed, and Rousseau will likewise recognize that Rameau has simplified the task of teaching and learning music.12 Rameau’s prestige as a theorist will of course be enormously enhanced by his late-blossoming career as an operatic composer. Hippolyte et Aricie had its first performance in Paris in 1733, when the composer was almost fifty; Castor et Pollux, which held the stage longer than any other Rameau opera, followed in 1737. Referring to his own discovery of Rameau, Rousseau writes in The Confessions, “While they were fighting in Italy, they were singing in France. Rameau’s operas were beginning to make noise and brought back into view his theoretical works, which because of their obscurity were accessible to few people. By chance I heard of his treatise on harmony and could not rest until I had acquired this book.”13 By the time d’Alembert comes to write the Discours préliminaire of the Encyclopédie, published in 1751, Rameau’s place in the narrative of human progress since the Renaissance seems secure. The musical complexity of his operas has not prevented them from achieving exceptional success. A small traditionalist party remained hostile, comparing them unfavorably with Lully’s works, but this only reinforced the support of modernizing groups such as the Encyclopedists. D’Alembert’s eulogy of Rameau is unequivocal. Rameau has brought the practice of his art (composition) to a high degree of perfection, but above all he has completely renewed music theory: But what distinguishes him more particularly is that he has reflected with great success on the theory of this same Art; that in the Fundamental Bass he has discovered the principle of harmony and melody; that by this means he has reduced to simpler & more certain laws a science that was previously given over to rules that were either arbitrary or blindly dictated by experience. I hasten to seize the opportunity to celebrate this Artist-Philosopher in a discourse that is primarily devoted to the praise of Great Men.14

Rameau is thus perfectly positioned in the progress of polite learning. He is praised by name, as only a few contemporaries are, Voltaire and Montesquieu among them, and he is praised in implicitly Newtonian terms for apprehending a complex mass through a small number of 92

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general laws. He is, therefore, a modern, according to the notions of modernity defended by d’Alembert. The ideas of musical modernity that underlie de Brossard’s dictionary, based as they are on aesthetic and affective rather than scientific criteria, seem to have perished in France, with as little influence on the work of a musical theorist and composer like Rameau as on the thinking of a polymath like d’Alembert. The following thirty years, however, would bring a dramatic reversal, with the Querelle des Bouffons as the first round in a long combat. II. Rousseau: Using the Ancients to Attack the Moderns

The pages on music in the Discours préliminaire have a human as well as an intellectual context. When d’Alembert wrote the Discours, he already had Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s articles on music for the Encyclopédie to hand: Rousseau, unlike most other Encyclopédie authors, did as he was asked by the editors and turned in over 400 articles, from A (“Accolade”) to Z (“Za”), early in 1749. D’Alembert knew therefore that Rousseau, while referring readers constantly to Rameau’s harmonic theory, expressed skepticism about many of its consequences for composition and execution, and in addition often spoke ill of French music, without specifically naming Rameau but without excluding him from his critical remarks either. Frequently at issue are questions of feeling and expression: according to Rousseau, French music doesn’t provide much of either. Consciously or not, he thus links back to de Brossard’s notion of modern music, and in his value judgments depreciates the great mass of harmonic theory that Rameau had painstakingly put in place. What really count are the “touching and well-judged inflections of a beautiful voice”; it is melody, not harmony, that holds sway over the heart.15 Rousseau delivered his articles to Diderot, who had asked him to write them, but d’Alembert, as the person in charge of everything mathematical in the Encyclopédie, is responsible for preparing them for press.16 A letter from Rousseau to d’Alembert makes it clear that d’Alembert had toned down parts of Rousseau’s text in the early volumes.17 It is safe to say that this was to make it less hostile to Rameau, but he does not appear to have removed any of Rousseau’s acclamation of melody in Italian music, nor the descriptions of its emotive powers. In the Discours préliminaire, d’Alembert’s exceptional praise for Rameau may be partly intended to deflect any ill-humor that ­Rousseau’s articles might provoke in the composer. There are other signs of a looming, awkward presence of Rousseau in the Discours préliminaire. D’Alembert feels obliged to refer to the Discourse on the Sciences and the 93

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Arts, which was published in the first days of 1751, a matter of months before the first volume of the Encyclopédie, and which appeared to deny any link between art or learning and moral elevation, operating a characteristic reversal by its criticism of the moral laxity of the cultured Moderns and its praise for the most austere and militaristic of the Ancients. Indeed, the whole of d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire could be read as a reply to Rousseau. D’Alembert is polite in his response to an “eloquent and philosophic” adversary but in the end quite vigorous: even if the argument of Rousseau’s First Discourse were accepted (which it is not), abolishing learning would have no good effect, since “our vices would remain, and we would have ignorance in addition.” In a note, d’Alembert also recalls that the same writer, “M. Rousseau de Genève,” is a contributor to the Encyclopédie, author of “the part of the Encyclopédie concerning music, with which we hope the public will be very satisfied.”18 Rousseau is thus already occupying a characteristic position as outsider and insider at the same time.19 He would later become involved in the major crisis of the Encyclopédie, publishing the Lettre à D’Alembert sur les spectacles in 1758 against d’Alembert’s article on Geneva (1757). This article had provoked a diplomatic row between France and Geneva and caused the Encyclopédie, which had only reached the letter G, to be banned. That however was a separate problem: on musical questions, d’Alembert was by then aligned more closely with Rousseau. Nevertheless, even the music articles were to cause difficulties. Rameau, who may have been mainly stung into responding by ­Rousseau’s much more extreme Lettre sur la musique françoise (1753), produced pamphlets (1755 and 1756) seeking to discredit his tormentor and attacking the articles as full of mistakes. The position of the Encyclopédie was at all times insecure, and for it to be challenged by the greatest musician of the day under the uncompromising title, Errors on Music in the Encyclopédie, was undoubtedly an embarrassment.20 There could be no going back: Rousseau’s articles not only had the merit of existing, through to the letter Z, they were of real substance. Moreover, d’Alembert progressively grasped the importance of ­Rousseau’s overarching argument, which outweighed any technical weakness the articles might occasionally display. They had to be defended, and d’Alembert was to respond firmly to Rameau in the introduction to volume VI of the Encyclopédie. He also increasingly entered into dialogue with Rousseau’s articles, adding passages to some of them, to develop them or suggest nuances, thus creating quite a different relationship with the author from that of censor, which he had originally played.21 Whatever the influence of Rousseau’s 94

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articles on the general public, they detached d’Alembert from Rameau’s side: after playing Aaron to Rameau’s abstruse Moses in the Elémens de musique, a successful music handbook published by d’Alembert in 1752 and based on the Basse fondamentale, he increasingly turned away from Rameau under the influence of Rousseau’s ideas—with, no doubt, the composer’s violent responses as an aggravating factor. Rousseau’s most explicit treatment of musical modernity in the Encyclopédie—which is also his most developed treatment in the work of music as a mode of expression with vast emotional impact—comes in the article “Musique,” which the public did not see until 1765, when the later text volumes of the Encyclopédie were finally published all together. By then, musical debate had moved on, but d’Alembert seems to allude to the article in the Discours préliminaire and to recognize the fundamental character of the question it raises.22 Is ancient music of any value? In the previous century, Claude Perrault, a champion of the Moderns like his brother Charles, considered the Ancients much inferior in music.23 Pierre-Jean Burette, who had presented several mémoires on the subject to the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres, also gave a broadly negative answer to the question.24 Rameau himself was at times extremely dismissive, as in the Génération harmonique (1737), the work that Rousseau mainly draws on when presenting or criticizing the composer’s theories in the Encyclopédie.25 However, as Marc Fumaroli has shown, the quarrel about Homer prompted by Anne Dacier’s translation of The Iliad (1711) had given new arguments to the defenders of the ancients in the last phases of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, arguments that Rousseau draws on and reshapes in this article to favor ancient music. After extensively reproducing the “Music” article from Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia, Rousseau raises the question to which he will devote the last and only original part of his article: is ancient music as insignificant as Burette and others have claimed?26 His long answer essentially recognizes and praises the technical superiority of modern music but accords moral superiority to the Ancients, whose music is more expressive and closer to the spoken language. Rousseau’s technique is to enumerate the qualities of the Moderns in music and then to suggest that these qualities are ultimately secondary. Thus, he recognizes that the Greeks had no harmony or counterpoint and adds: Thus we are superior to them in that regard & it is a point of importance, since it is certain that harmony is the true foundation of melody & 95

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modulation. But do we not abuse this advantage? One may well feel a doubt on hearing our modern operas. What! This chaos, this confusion of parts, this multitude of different instruments that seem to be exchanging insults, this clash of accompaniments that drown out the voice without supporting it; does all this make up the veritable beauties of Music?27

The technical advantages of modern music have in the end produced only excess and cacophony. More does not mean better. In a similar vein, on the larger range of modern music, Rousseau writes: Finally, we are superior by the general extent of our system, which, no longer restricted to four or five octaves, henceforth has no limits other than the musician’s whim. Yet I don’t know if we should congratulate ourselves so much on this. Was it such a great misfortune for ancient music to have to provide only full and harmonious sounds drawn from a beautiful middle range? Voices sang without forcing, instruments didn’t screech constantly in the vicinity of the bridge; are the out-of-tune and dull sounds deriving from shifts, or the yowling of a voice exceeding its limits, capable of moving the heart? Ancient music could touch it [the heart] by pleasing the ears; the new music, by grating on them, will never do more than surprise the mind.28

Rousseau’s argument in these paragraphs and throughout the final part of the article “Musique” corresponds to the strategy of Homer’s defenders against the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as described by Marc Fumaroli: If they succeeded in imposing what for them was a certainty no less universal than rational certainty even if not of the same order, the cause of the Ancients, weakened by the scientific and technical arrogance of the Moderns, would be solidly re-established on a higher plane.29

The followers of the Ancients thus give up the struggle as regards rational analysis and the physical sciences, for after Descartes the battle has become too unequal, but they reform around aesthetic criteria and specifically human values that are not necessarily open to the scrutiny of abstract thought. This is what Rousseau also does here: modern music is technically accomplished, he acknowledges, but ancient music touches the heart.30 Rousseau’s turn to the Ancient will sometimes have a specific social and historical content—in the Essai sur l’origine des langues, he momentarily questions whether writing had been invented in Homer’s time; and the importance of wells and 96

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fountains in the early books of the Hebrew Bible leads him, also in the Essai, to situate the origins of language around these gathering places. Here in his much earlier Encyclopédie article, however, he operates a pure reversal of values, favoring the simple over the complex and questioning the value of technical sophistication, which has become an end in itself, no longer at the service of musical expression. This is the beginning of a linkage between emotion and transparency, and between technicity and social ills, that will be characteristic and central in his work. When he writes, “What conclusion do I seek to draw from all of that? That ancient music was more perfect than ours? By no means. On the contrary, I think that ours is incomparably more learned and agreeable,”31 he confronts the reader sharply with the radicalism of his thought. Formal perfection is a value, but it can be superseded by other values, those of energy and expression, in which the Greeks excel.32 And all of this bears a shadowy, premonitory resemblance to the reversal of values proclaimed in Rousseau’s two discourses—but the article “Musique” is written before the illumination of Vincennes. *** In the article “Musique,” Rousseau seems to offer a complex but ultimately sharp distinction between two different conceptions of music. His article opposes the ancient and the modern and, not without nuances, tries to show the superiority of the Ancients. However, his argument is complicated by further elements. Ancien can perfectly well refer to a much more recent past, and Rousseau offers some guarded praise of Lully, whom he was later to attack vehemently in the Lettre sur la musique françoise (while still maintaining a preference for him over his successors). Above all, though, here as throughout the Encyclopédie, from the article “Accompagnement” (alphabetically the first article of consequence that he writes) onward, Rousseau contrasts French and Italian music, using the latter to show the defects of the former. In “Accompagnement” he writes: “The Italians do not think much of noise; a third or a well-chosen sixth, even a simple unison when good taste requires it, pleases them more than all our fracas of parts & accompaniment.”33 In “Musique,” where the Ancients are at the heart of his argument, he nevertheless also writes: Consider the Italians our contemporaries, who have the best or rather the only good music in the universe, by the unanimous judgment of every people except the French, who prefer their own. See what 97

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sobriety there is in the chords, what choice in the harmony! These people wouldn’t think of measuring out their esteem for a piece of music according to the number of parts; strictly their operas are simply duets, & all of Europe admires and imitates them. It’s certainly not by multiplying the parts in their music that the French will succeed in making foreigners appreciate it.34

“The Italians our contemporaries”: just as, subtly, the description of ancient music becomes a critique of the technical sophistication of modern music, so, more specifically, the quality of Italian music, which has moved away from harmonic complexity, shows that French music is on the wrong path. Rousseau thus doubles his praise of the Ancients with praise of other Moderns. The history of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in its several phases shows that favoring certain Moderns is not at all incompatible with an allegiance to the Ancients. In the previous century, Racine’s Iphigénie becomes the emblematic modern work that scrupulously respects its ancient sources: it will be attacked by the Moderns and defended by the Ancients. In the article “Musique,” ­Rousseau’s ideas have not yet taken the highly schematic form found in the Lettre sur la musique françoise, but the elements that will be reorganized to give an absolute condemnation of French music are already in place. And questions of energy and of strong feeling are what establish a link between the Greeks and the Italians, while disqualifying the French. In music, the connection is measured by its results: if Italian music is intensely affective, that is its link to antiquity. There can be no study of ancient models, since in music, unlike literature, nothing has survived. III. Using Italy to Attack France

In the Lettre sur la musique françoise, written three years after the ­Encyclopédie articles,35 the Italians come to the forefront and the ancients recede. The context Rousseau is working in had changed dramatically as a result of the Querelle des Bouffons: the works performed by a small and perhaps only moderately talented group of Italian musicians, led by Eustacchio Bambini, who were invited to the Paris Opera in August 1752, had changed French musical taste.36 In particular, Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona (whose score Rousseau personally published from his own lodgings in late 1752),37 showed the Paris public the charm of a simple comic plot with only two singers, a tiny orchestra, and an engaging style of recitative, close-to-ordinary speech, punctuated regularly by enchanting solo arias and duets. Just 98

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before the Italians arrived in Paris, Rousseau completed his own comic intermède or intermezzo, Le Devin du village, in which he adopted a partly Italian style. Performed after the arrival of the Italians, the Devin enjoyed great success at court (October 1752) and at the Paris Opera (March 1753) and became closely associated, as did its author, with the new fashion for Italian music. The Lettre sur la musique françoise is mainly devoted to explaining and analyzing the qualities of Italian music and the reasons for its superiority. Ancient Greek music is only briefly mentioned, and Rousseau, who had recently criticized the rétablissement des arts et des lettres—the reestablishment of arts and letters, that is the Renaissance—in his First Discourse, nevertheless presents Italian music in a positive light in the letter as a late product of the same movement: There was a time when Italy was barbarous, and even after the renaissance of the other Arts, all of which Europe owes to her, Music was more belated and did not easily acquire the purity of taste that distinguishes it there today; one can hardly give a worse idea of what it was then than by remarking that for a long time there was one and the same music in France and in Italy.38

The passage does not suggest a specific return to an ancient model but rather a general quest for purity of taste in all the arts. Characteristic of the Renaissance, this quest eventually leads the Italians to reform their music and break with the contrapuntal tradition. In some respects, the Lettre sur la musique françoise has a highly negative role in the musical debates of the time. By its excesses, and notably by the famous final claim that the French have no music, it precipitates the end of the Italian seasons at the opera, as David Charlton shows, thereby producing a result quite opposed to ­Rousseau’s own ambitions and convictions.39 At the same time, the letter is a kind of crucible for the advancement of Rousseau’s own ideas and is notably the work where he puts in place the principle of “unity of melody,” which he will regularly refer to as a touchstone of excellence in his later musical writings. “Unity of melody” has a suspiciously large number of external characteristics in common with Rameau’s Basse fondamentale or fundamental bass: it is a hidden underlying principle, instinctively exploited by earlier composers without having yet been formulated, and it is finally revealed by one man, who demonstrates its value, thereby providing guidance and support to all his successors.40 Rousseau’s pretentions in this regard may seem excessive—his stature as a musician is 99

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hardly comparable to Rameau’s—but his influence on later composers, direct and indirect, should not be underestimated. Again, in the context of Rousseau’s distaste for everything fugal and contrapuntal, “unity of melody” can only be a characteristic of the melodic, lightly-scored operas that have brought about the triumph of the Italians. Rousseau is setting himself up as leader of a party, face-to-face with another party, led by Rameau under the banner of the Basse fondamentale. Here the conflict between two versions of modernity becomes acute: Rousseau virtually abandons the reference to antiquity. “What is music?” becomes a strictly contemporary question, to be decided with relatively little reference to history. Rousseau founds his arguments for Italian music in the Lettre on one supposed fact and on a linguistic argument. The supposed fact is that Italian opera has replaced the national styles of Germany, Spain, and England. Rousseau puts this forward at the very beginning of the letter. It is likely that he recalled reading in Addison and Steele’s The Spectator that in the London theatre, opera in English was abandoned early in the century because of the popularity of the Italians.41 He also certainly knew that the great librettists Zeno and Metastasio had been called to the imperial court in Vienna; he personally knew the Spaniard Terradellas, who worked in the Italian style; and he frequently cites Hasse, known in Italy as “il Sassone” (the Saxon), a German musician who had settled in Italy, among his preferred composers. According to Rousseau, all these countries had abandoned “the prejudices that often make Nations ridiculous,” as he writes at the beginning of the letter.42 Although the triumph of the Italians was less absolute than he suggests, they had an undeniable presence in most countries and at most courts that contrasted with their general absence from France before the arrival of the Bouffons. This argument could be described as coercively modern: if the French have not followed the example of their neighbors, they must be backward as well as insensitive to real beauty. Rousseau’s extreme denunciation of French music may be opportunistic: the Italians are present in Paris, and this gives a foundation on which to build an Italian tradition in the opera; if they are allowed to leave, the chance may not arise again for many years. As is turns out, Rousseau’s excessive eagerness is badly calculated. “Each National Music draws its main character from the language that is proper to it”:43 Rousseau uses this principle in the Lettre to depict a hypothetical language utterly unsuited to music (this language being of course French) and then to outline the characteristics of ­Italian: “If 100

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there is one language in Europe proper to music, it is Italian; for that language, more than any other, is soft, sonorous, harmonious and accented, and these four qualities are precisely the best suited for song.”44 Thus, music in the two languages has diverged: the French, with no guidance or assistance to be found in speech, turn to harmony as their main resource. Once again the issue of a misleading perfection arises, with Rousseau suggesting that complex, overloaded chords kill the pleasing effects that harmony might otherwise produce (“I find that the more our Music appears to perfect itself, the worse it gets in reality”), far from the artful impression of negligence that the Italians like to give: thus, historical evolution and progress are not entirely absent as issues in the work. Rousseau also emphasizes stylistic differences between French and Italian opera: the Italian arias are in situation, the air is part of an evolving human drama, which it develops further, sometimes one of great anguish (thus drawing fully on the expressive resources of the language), but the French cannot do that. Hence the importance of the monologue in France—and Rousseau will end the Lettre with his harsh, insulting account of the monologue “Enfin il est en ma puissance” from Lully’s Armide. Until then, curiously, two possible global outcomes seemed possible for the letter, one of which would look back to Lully as the musician who could be a guide in bringing French music to “the very mediocre level of goodness that it is capable of ” as he puts it earlier in the work.45 Instead, the stark contrast between the drama of exchanges “in situation” in Italian operas (to poems by Metastasio, who is everywhere present in the Lettre, though scarcely mentioned) and the relatively static forms of Lully’s monologue leads Rousseau to his fierce conclusion, that “the French have no Music and cannot have any; and if ever they do have any, that will be so much the worse for them.”46 Vehement controversy follows. The authorities are scandalized, Rousseau’s pro-Bouffon friends are embarrassed by his extremism, which seems to imply that they advocate abandoning French music and handing over the keys of the Paris Opera to the Italians. He also places himself in some difficulty as a French composer and will scarcely write any more music for the stage, despite the success that Le Devin du village has enjoyed. The Lettre sur la musique françoise is the culminating point of the Querelle des Bouffons, as by far the most brilliantly argued, but probably also the most excessive pamphlet of them all. It is also surprisingly modern. Ancient Greece is hardly present, even as a backdrop. This is a contemporary confrontation, implying 101

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a model of progressive improvement in which Italy has moved in the right direction while France has lost its way. It could even be seen as a characteristically modern, rationalistic argument, an Encyclopedist’s argument, in the sense that Rousseau, presenting a choice between local tradition and foreign excellence, strongly argues in favor of foreign excellence. Against such a backdrop, the Lettre à D’Alembert sur les spectacles looks almost like a recantation—but there, of course, the choice concerns Geneva and not Paris. On the specifically musical questions, however, there will be no retreat. On the contrary, for Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse will bring his ideas on music to a wider international audience. One of the two letters on music in the novel describes the hero’s discovery of Italian music: “I thought I was listening to the voice of distress, of anger, of despair; I thought I could see weeping mothers, deceived lovers, furious Tyrants, and in the agitation that I could not but feel, I could barely keep still.”47 This is like something from the article “Opéra” in the Dictionnaire de musique transposed to the first person—and taken out of history. The other letter is a vehement assault on the Paris Opera, where, after describing tawdry scenery and unconvincing special effects, the hero presented it in conclusion as “the most boring spectacle that can be.”48 These are the writings that have the greatest influence on public taste, and Rameau seems to have understood their importance. He refers scathingly to La Nouvelle Héloïse in one of his publications as he continues the war with d’Alembert after Rousseau fails to answer him directly.49 Rousseau is also, of course, the author of Le Devin du village, which is regularly revived on the Paris stage and warmly received by a public that sees it as close to the Italian style. And when the Dictionnaire de musique appears in 1767, the most popular article will be the frankly propagandistic “Génie.” The test of the hopeful young artist is to go to Naples and listen to the masterpieces of Leo, Durante, Jommelli, and Pergolesi: if his eyes fill with tears, let him set to work. If he feels nothing, he can compose French music.50 The much more substantial article “Opéra” in the Dictionnaire de musique tells how Italian lyric theatre came to be. In Rousseau’s narrative of modern excellence, music theatre, even in Italy, is initially an absurd form, full of gods and demons, remote from all experience and therefore unable to arouse feeling. However, despite their distance from human concerns, the situations depicted—so Rousseau suggests—ultimately enable musicians to emancipate themselves and 102

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develop the potential for feeling in their art. Subsequently, theatre was purged of the “jargon of Mythology,” interest (a feeling of involvement aroused by the credibility of character and situation) increased as the marvelous waned, and “lyric Drama took a nobler and less gigantic form.”51 This was the first of two major reforms; the second went on to exclude everything trivial and everything political or reasoned from opera, which is to be above all the domain of feeling and violent passion. Rousseau’s positive historical narrative of Italian opera history is concomitantly a kind of implicit satire on French opera, which has never banished its machines and mythologies. Moreover, although he invokes the model of Greek tragedy—which for him, as for many of his contemporaries, is like an opera without arias, entirely in the form of recitative—the opera form is presented as a modern invention: it has a “birth” or naissance, not a renaissance. Here again, in Rousseau’s writing, more even than in the Lettre sur la musique françoise, is an Enlightenment version of history, depicting ignorance and obtuseness, followed by the gradual but courageous struggle for improvement and ultimately the emergence of a supremely successful form. Indeed, in the article “Opéra,” Rousseau uses the analogy of French classical tragedy (which founds its prestige on a similar progressive discourse) to emphasize the high place he accords the two great poets of Italian opera seria: Zeno and Metastasio, who are the Corneille and Racine of the operatic stage. If Rousseau’s contemporaries see him primarily as a promoter of modernity and reform in music, they are following what many of his publications suggest. His admiration of the Greeks does not obscure a clear focus on the excellence of Italian music and the need to find a place for it in France. Certain writings, notably the Essai sur l’origine des langues, that offer a more complex view of the evolution of music and language, were simply not available to ­Rousseau’s contemporaries. IV. Ancient and Modern: The Essai sur l’origine des langues

In 1761, when Rousseau sends his Essai sur l’origine des langues to Malesherbes, Directeur de la librairie, to ask if he may publish it (something that, despite Malesherbes’s approval, he will in fact not do), he writes that he does not want to do Rameau the honor of a direct response.52 Given the controversy provoked by the Lettre sur la musique françoise, this must be reassuring for his distinguished reader: the Ancien Régime seeks to avoid or repress violent public dispute whenever it can. The Essay, in fact, rarely mentions Rameau by 103

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name, although French music is once again pilloried in a kind of fable describing a school of painting that gives color priority over drawing. However, this is not simply an indirect reply to Rameau, if that means repeating in another form the objections to the composer’s supposed abuse of harmony: the Essay involves a profound development and reordering of Rousseau’s ideas and a return to the ancients, who will have a more secure place in this work. He continues to believe in the excellence of Italian music, but the failure of the French in this respect is shown as much more representative of the modern age. That failure is at the real heart of modern civilization. As for Rameau, he is not just wrong about music; the reader of the Essai will deduct that he has attempted to found his art on a moral defect of modern societies. Rousseau describes this defect at the end of chapter IX (“Formation of the Southern Languages”): The first languages, daughters of pleasure and not of need, carried their father’s standard for a long time; their seductive accent disappeared only with the feelings that had given birth to them, when new needs introduced among men forced each person to think only of himself and to withdraw his heart within himself.53

Historically, discussion of the essay has not been focused on music. The briefest glance at the debates to which the work has given rise, mainly devoted to defining its relations to the Second Discourse, demonstrates the point, and, until 1974, much of the debate was founded on false premises.54 Was it wrong not to place music at the center of any reading of the work? In a sense, yes. A lecture by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962 drew the Essai out of the obscurity in which it was languishing;55 Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie made it essential reading, but at a period when there was no modern edition whatsoever of the text. It would take time before all of Rousseau’s writings on music were dusted off and re-read, from the 1742 Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique to the “Letter to Burney” in 1777, and the Essai undeniably makes far more sense to a reader familiar with that context, as one of the densest products of a life in which music was an abiding passion and a constant subject of reflection. In another sense, however, one has to be cautious in the claims made for the place of music in the work. A simple, if oblique, way of saying why this is so would be to point to the absence of opera from the Essai. In this work there is no revival, no rediscovery of the power of the human voice. Rousseau instead insists on a historic link between 104

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language and the larger state of human affairs. If “music found itself deprived of the moral effects that it used to produce when it was doubly the voice of Nature,”56 the explanation lies in the “vicissitudes of things.”57 In ancient times, persuasion effected by oratorical passion made constraint unnecessary in public life, whereas today money and guns determine everything. There is no need for the influence of powerful and seductive language when you can send soldiers into people’s houses. The Essai ends (chapter XX) on a pessimistic note. Hardly anywhere in his work does Rousseau suggest that a revival of the passionate transparency of the first languages is possible in human relations, unless perhaps in the particular case of the “special sign” that unites sincere readers of “J-J” in the Dialogues.58 Even in relation to music, however, the question is problematic. If, as the Essai claims, the barbarian invasions destroyed the musicality of the ancients (a musicality already sorely tested by the rise of philosophy and the dominance of Latin over Greek, among other factors), how could a rediscovery take place? In his unpublished Du principe de la mélodie, a fertile work that lay behind the Essai sur l’origine des langues and remained virtually unknown until 1974, Rousseau locates the beginnings of rediscovery entirely on stage: But when Music was introduced into our theatres with the wish to restore its ancient rights and make it an imitative and passionate ­language—that was when it had to be brought closer to the grammatical language from which it draws its first being, that was when, fixing the modulations of the singing voice on the different inflexions that the passions give to the speaking voice, melody found so to speak a new existence and new strengths in its conformity with the accent of oratory and passion.59

The singular characteristic of the Essai is to set aside that whole question: it tells a story of decline and offers little or nothing to set against that decline here and now, and its final focus will be not on art but on politics. That is perhaps its strongest link with the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité: Rousseau’s musical writings hold forth the promise (or celebrate the reality) of revival, renewal, reform, if not in France then elsewhere. The Essai sur l’origine des langues always locates the warmth and tenderness of passionate language in another, inaccessible place and time: in the distant past, by the fountains where Rebecca was called to be the wife of Isaac; in the Homeric epics where writing is almost unknown and everything, in love and in war is whispered or shouted; or on another continent, where the voice of the Prophet persuades as no 105

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European sermon can; or further East again, where music and meaning are united. More concrete in its locations than the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, perhaps more poetic and expansive, less subject to the constraints of a carefully constructed argument, the Essai shares with it the conviction that contentment is proper to an inaccessible otherness, principally of time in the Discourse, equally of place in the Essai. This is a work that places Rousseau squarely with the ancients, not only by its contemplation of the distant past, Biblical or Homeric, but by its refusal to make links, to console, to suggest that the ancient models can refresh or renew a tired and unjust order. In such a context, opera is hardly relevant. That the Essai remained unknown in Rousseau’s lifetime perhaps increased his influence on music history rather than the opposite. His published satirical descriptions of French music could arouse hostility or a desire for reform, his hyperbolic praise of the Italians might kindle the desire to see what their music could offer or create the urge to demonstrate that he was wrong. Nothing of that was in the Essai, much certainly that could give rise to indignant denial, but nothing that could be transformed into a program, not at least in a positive sense. And the most telling sign of how Rousseau’s interventions in music debate might change musical practice came when Gluck set out to conquer Paris in 1773–74 as he had long since conquered Vienna: he paid elaborate homage to Rousseau, and he quoted, not from the Dictionnaire de musique (1767), still less the articles in the Encyclopédie, most of them finally published only a little before the Dictionnaire (1765), but from the most schematic and polemical of all Rousseau writings on music, by then twenty years old, the Lettre sur la musique française of 1753. V. Gluck Reading Rousseau

Christoph Willibald Gluck prepared the ground carefully before he arrived at Paris on foot with a contract to supply six operas to the Royal Academy of Music. Previously performed in Italian in Vienna, his existing works are rewritten in French, and the musical scores carefully adapted to match the new words. Rousseau is or becomes an important figure for Gluck, who, in a letter to the Mercure de France, draws extensively on the 1753 letter and affirms his wish to learn the lessons that Rousseau’s writings offer. At the Paris Opera in 1774, Iphigénie en Aulide and Orphée et Eurydice, the first works by Gluck to be performed there, create a sensation. The composer is received by ­Rousseau at home in the rue Plâtrière, and there are unverified accounts 106

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of ­Rousseau leaving the opera in tears, overcome by the emotion aroused by Gluck’s music. Rousseau’s presence at the public rehearsals of Iphigénie en Aulide in the spring of 1774 is attested, and he attends Orphée et Eurydice later in the same year. Reports circulate in Paris claiming Rousseau has finally recognized that it is possible to write music to words in French. No authentic document exists, so far as I am aware, to support this claim: if Rousseau had wished to declare a change of heart, he had opportunities to do so, even in the rather reclusive life he lived after his return to Paris in 1770, and notably in his exchanges with the English music historian, Charles Burney. Neither, however, is there any known criticism on Rousseau’s part of Gluck’s decision to use French texts—a decision that sets a pattern for other composers, and notably Rossini in the nineteenth century, thereby contributing to the future preeminence of Paris among the opera houses of Europe. Gluck’s arrival in Paris provoked a new musical quarrel, though the rapid and general recognition of the composer’s genius prevented it from taking on the same proportions as the Querelle des Bouffons. This time, the dividing line between the parties was much less clear than in the earlier quarrel, for Gluck, whose exceptional, immediate triumph appeared to have Rousseau’s tacit support, was opposed by partisans of Italian music, who saw in his French-language operas the final defeat of all their hopes of seeing opera by composers of the Italian school take a significant place on the Paris stage. The call thus went out to Niccolò Piccinni, who arrived from Naples at the end of 1776 to launch a challenge to Gluck that never really took shape: a scrupulous musician, much given to revision, Piccinni admired Gluck and was not temperamentally inclined to challenge him. This was in any case fortunate, since the accounts of his work in the Mercure de France and elsewhere suggest that it had no chance of producing the rapture that in varying degrees greeted each successive opera of Gluck’s over several years. In Vienna people talked of the Reformoper of Gluck and his librettist Calzabigi; in Paris, this became la révolution de l’opéra. By 1781, according to the Mémoires secrets, the Paris Opera, despite the immense repertory of works and sets that it possessed, was short of operas to put on: it had simply become impossible to attract the public to operas of the former French school, and Rameau and Lully were so much out of favor that the Opera had to offer special incentives to new poets and composers. Indeed, the whole notion of what might be performed at the Opera changed: the Opera opened its doors to Grétry, whose previous 107

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work had always been put on by the Opéra-Comique. In 1784, his La Caravane du Caire played at the Paris Opera with enormous success over several months. At this distance, the operatic upheaval of the 1770s seems replete with paradox. Rousseau had strongly affirmed that French was unsuited to music, but by his presence at the performances appears to support Gluck nevertheless. Not only does Rousseau accept these operas in his native language, he does so despite the composer’s other efforts to draw closer to the French tradition, not least by designating his operas tragédies lyriques. Gluck’s works incorporate choruses and dance, familiar elements on the French operatic stage but relatively rare in Italy, and he abandons the Italians’ strict alternation of recitative and arias for a more fluid type of composition, which also releases the individual scenes from the straitjacket of the Italian norm. It is easy to understand the concerns of those who sent for Piccinni, and easy to be surprised that Rousseau was not among them. In Gluck’s letter to the Mercure de France of January 1773, however, the composer does everything possible to win Rousseau’s support. He attributes great importance to Rousseau’s writings, and especially to the Lettre sur la musique françoise. He writes of his own Iphigénie en Aulide: I admit that I would have produced it with pleasure in Paris60, because by its effect & with the help of the famous M. Rousseau of Geneva, whom it was my intention to consult, together we would perhaps, by seeking a noble, sensitive & natural melody, with a precise declamation according to the prosody of each language & the character of each people, have succeeded in fixing the means that I envisage of producing music proper to all Nations & and to make the ridiculous distinction of national music disappear.61

Gluck concludes his letter with a calculated and hyperbolic homage to Rousseau: [From reading his analysis of the monologue in Lully’s Armide] I have retained the intimate conviction that, had [Rousseau] wished to apply himself to the exercise of that art [the art of music], he could have produced the prodigious effects that antiquity attributes to music. I am most pleased to have the opportunity here to offer him this public homage and tribute that I believe he deserves.

A possible first reaction to this letter is to ask whether Gluck has really read and understood the Lettre sur la musique françoise. His expression “the ridiculous distinction of national music” seems to run directly 108

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counter to Rousseau’s claims. In fact Gluck is re-reading, ingeniously, perhaps somewhat perversely, Rousseau’s highly dogmatic text. Can one speak of a “ridiculous distinction” when praise of Italian music is at the heart of Rousseau’s argument? In a sense, yes: as already mentioned, Rousseau opens the letter with the case of the Germans, the Spanish, and the English, who, abandoning the prejudices that often make nations ridiculous, finally welcome Italian music. Some years later, in the same passage of his own opera of that name, Gluck shows that he has genuinely attended to Rousseau’s critique of the monologue from Lully’s Armide. When he states his ambition for “a precise declamation according to the prosody of each language,” he is in a sense following the logic of this critique, for Rousseau’s objections to Lully are to do with what he considers wrong intonations, failures to follow the tones and rhythms of emotional utterance. These appear to be criticisms of Lully personally as a composer whom he reckons unequal to the dramatic situation he is presenting. Rousseau writes: I defy anyone to determine, by the Music alone,—whether by the tone, by the melody, by the declamation, or by the accompaniment—any detectable difference between the beginning and the end of this scene, by which the Spectator might judge the profound change that has taken place in Armide’s heart.62

Rousseau may have written his analysis of Armide earlier than the rest of the letter (he seems to look forward to it in the article “Musique” in 1749),63 but, whatever the date of composition, the passage taken out of context can be read as a critique of Lully that is only secondarily a critique of French music as such. It is not clear whether it is the fault of the language that this monologue is merely “scholastic,” to use a term Rousseau employs twice to describe it: it could well be the fault of the composer. When Gluck speaks of “a precise declamation according to the prosody of each language & the character of each people,” therefore, he is offering a surprising and ingenious reading of Rousseau’s letter rather than distorting it beyond recognition. His argument is that his own noble and natural melody, combined with recitative that takes account of prosody and national character, will produce music that is accessible and pleasing to all. Once that work is done, the music sung in each language perhaps becomes accessible to every nation, regardless of linguistic boundaries. Even if the relations of this program with Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise are problematic, the signs are 109

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there to suggest that Rousseau, distressed and suspicious, forbidden to publish as one of the conditions of his return to Paris in 1770, momentarily found some balm for his heart in Gluck’s homage. Indeed, to say that, had he devoted himself to a career in music, Rousseau might have achieved the extreme effects on his audience attributed to the ancients is to offer more than balm, it associates Gluck with the familiar rising and falling motion of Rousseau’s version of history: there was a golden age and it was lost, but through mediation and intercession, something of what was lost becomes actual again, albeit without actually falling completely within our grasp. What is certain is that Rousseau offered no objection to Gluck’s ambitions. Something like friendship waxed and then waned between the two men. Rousseau writes a commentary in the warmest terms on a passage from Orphée et Eurydice.64 From somewhat later, we have his fragmentary comments on Gluck’s Italian Alceste.65 They are severe, but recognize the musician’s genius. Rousseau even seems to accord little importance to the difference between the French and Italian versions of the opera, writing to Burney: What gives me some confidence in the judgments that I made above in this extract is that almost all of them have been confirmed since then by the public, in the French Alceste M. Gluck gave us this year at the Opera, in which he rightly used the same Music as his Italian Alceste so far as he could.66

It may be that Rousseau, who throughout these late Parisian years was setting French verse to music—sometimes on commission from acquaintances or strangers, sometimes on his own initiative—needed to escape from his apparent rejection of all possible music in French, as formulated at the end of the letter. Gluck was not French; he had written opera to texts by Metastasio before the Viennese reforms undertaken with Calzabigi; his genius was almost universally recognized: if anyone could help Rousseau to move away from the extreme position that he had caught himself in twenty years before, this was the man. Rousseau would even begin work on a new opera, Daphnis et Chloë, again to a French text, before his death. In the public mind, Rousseau becomes closely associated with Gluck during these final years of his life. His presence at Gluck’s first Parisian operas may have influenced this impression. One may also speculate that Gluck’s “revolution,” which had the effect of making Lully and Rameau almost unperformable in Paris, became associated 110

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in the public mind with Rousseau’s rejection of those same composers. Gluck’s noble subjects from antiquity are undoubtedly as far removed as one can imagine from the domestic comedy of La Serva Padrona or the gentle humor of Le Devin du village, but in 1777 the Paris Opera marries Gluck’s Orphée and Rousseau’s Colette with great success. From January 29th to May 12th or 13th, the two works form part of the same program. To perform a light intermède on the same program as a serious work is common practice, but the audience clearly saw more than propinquity in the relations between the two composers and the two works. Olivier de Corancez, one of the editors of the new daily Journal de Paris, had introduced Gluck to Rousseau, and offers an account of the success of Le Devin du village in his paper on February 10, 1777.67 Without mentioning Gluck, he suggests that Le Devin is now a new work. There has been a “revolution . . . in people’s minds . . . and it is easy to be convinced that, if this masterpiece, in spite of the prodigious number of performances it has had, still retains the freshness of novelty today, that is because it is better felt.”68 He concludes: At the time of the first performances, the public enjoyed its beauties without knowing the work, but today we are attentive to the appropriateness of the subject & the characters. We notice with admiration that every line of verse and every sung phrase have a determined meaning & that everywhere we find the accent of Nature; it can no longer seem surprising that the present performances afford the pleasures of novelty, since from this point of view it is genuinely a new work.

Corancez is discreetly making Rousseau Gluck’s precursor, as music reaches, according to him, a level of artistic perfection and emotional intensity hitherto unknown.69 The modern reader can only guess at the reasons for this particular eulogy: it could well be that Corancez is trying to ensure continuing friendly relations between the two men and gives Rousseau a flattering role in relation to Gluck’s triumph, making him an essential figure in the recent history of music. Rousseau has by now begun the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in which he writes: “My contemporaries will never mean anything to me.”70 To maintain any enduring link with him requires skill and patience. Whatever the precise reasons for Corancez’s article, it must have seemed less surprising in 1777 than today. Testimony to the exceptional popularity of Le Devin abounds: the frequency of production at the 111

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opera is the most objective indication and covers the entire reign of Louis XVI. Thinking of Rousseau’s Paris life, we see solitude and modest circumstances, but persons of high birth brought him verses to set, and the queen of France sang his songs and traveled to Ermenonville after his death to pay her homage to him. To give Rousseau a rank as composer that he would not maintain historically, to see him as the prophet of a better and more expressive form of music, was not uncommon in the last years of his life. Perhaps it was in part a way of not remembering that he had also written on other subjects, declaring for example that it was “manifestly against the Law of Nature, however one defines it . . . for a handful of people to enjoy a superfluous abundance while the hungry multitude goes in want of the necessary.”71 *** So in music Rousseau ends up as the champion of la révolution de l’opéra, and thus of a certain modernity, or he is assigned that role by others, who take his silence as consent. In so far as he genuinely adopts this position—and it is undeniable that his short piece on Gluck’s Orphée expresses delight and admiration—irony and paradox once more take up their posts by his side. The immense triumph of Gluck (largely occulted today by the appearance of Mozart shortly after) had forced much rethinking in Paris, and Rousseau’s narrative of music history fitted better than most with the new aesthetic. At the beginning of the century, Brossard had suggested that growing expressivity was a mark of modern Italian music. From the late 1740s on, Rousseau developed his own insights, realizing from the beginning that any challenge to the physico-mathematical system put in place by Rameau involved refusing to allow harmony a defining role, and therefore necessarily enhancing the value of melody and rhythm. Beyond that, he saw the lack of any real theory of reception in Rameau’s work as an obvious weakness and offered in place of an ill-defined instinct for music a theory of musical imitation that sets opera aside from other musical forms and finds its justification in the voice opera gives to dramatic human situations. Rousseau therefore provides Paris with an alternative theory of music, replacing a primarily harmonic system with a theory of affect. At the same time, creative change—inevitably but quite separately— follows the upheaval provoked by the Bouffons; the so-called comédie mêlée d’ariettes that emerges in the Opéra Comique in the early 1760s largely replaces the vaudeville based on familiar existing airs: by 1770 112

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the Opéra Comique had sixty works of the new type in its repertoire,72 and the talents of Grétry find full and multiple expression therein, enriching and developing the form. But Rousseau had other ambitions for music theatre, as the article “Opéra” in his Dictionnaire de musique makes plain. Not only did he reject the mixture of speech and song typical of the Opéra Comique, he looked back to Metastasian opera as an unsurpassable ideal. Although Metastasio was to live on for many years, most of his work was accomplished before 1750, and the GluckCalzabigi reforms, begun in Vienna in the 1760s, are a rejection of the older poet’s norms for opera. As for the composers whom Rousseau admired, all three of those named in the article “Opéra” (Leo, Vinci, Pergolesi) are already dead at the time of writing. Rousseau’s ideal for modern opera was in fact already archaic when the Dictionnaire de musique was published—or even at the likely moment of composition of the article “Opéra” almost ten years earlier. But few people in Paris, perhaps not even the Austrian queen, followed the intricacies of the disputes and jealousies in Vienna. They knew that Metastasio’s operas were full of noble sentiments, with characters of high birth drawn from antiquity, like those of Corneille and Racine, where French opera was full of courtly frivolity. The “noble simplicity” that Calzabigi practiced in his libretti for the reform operas of Gluck deliberately brought opera still closer to French classical tragedy. This made it extremely attractive in Paris, where the public had wearied of the old operatic aesthetic of monsters, marvels, and divine intervention. Since no poet or composer had come forward to adopt a model of simplicity in French serious opera before the arrival of Gluck, the path was open to him. What had been a reform in Vienna (from Metastasio to Calzabigi with Gluck) became a revolution in France (from Rameau to Gluck). As for Rousseau, who does not appear to have followed events in Vienna closely, there is no sign that he saw Gluckian opera as a betrayal of Metastasio, as some did elsewhere, not least at times Metastasio himself. Rousseau’s modest presence in the debates over Gluck’s Paris operas makes it difficult to assess whether he follows Gluck and his librettists in all the choices they make. The Essai sur l’origine des langues had taken him beyond admiring but unstructured references, at one moment to his Italian contemporaries, at another to the Ancients: in the Essay, he refuses any filiation. Italian is not derived from the ancient languages, it is a barbarian tongue like all the others. Only Greek and other ancient tongues of the South give any real insight into modes of relation founded on the passionate voice. 113

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Gluck and his followers break with Italy, in word at least and to some degree in deed. Gluck adopts a tone of sorrow rather than anger, but the break is clear: I made up my mind to publish the music of Alceste solely in the hope of finding imitators; I dared hope that, following the road I had opened up, there would be some effort to destroy the abuses that have been introduced into Italian Opera, & that dishonor it; I admit with pain that up to now my attempts have been in vain.73

And the periodical that translates these lines of Gluck’s into French adds some other lines from Padre Martini, calling for a man of genius who, “in imitation of the Greeks, would bring the true eloquence of Music to life again, that is to say, the art of stirring the passions.” Again, abbé Arnaud, writing in 1779 in the Mercure de France, uses similar language, calling for others to follow the example of Gluck to make “this beautiful Art serve to stir the soul, to paint the passions, to awaken the sentiments and to exercise the mind.”74 Rousseau has argued for such a vision of opera since 1749. To sacrifice Italy (in some limited sense) by accepting Gluck and to look directly toward Greece is perhaps in the end a small price to pay for the emergence of new forms that reveal to the French, at least in part, the power of music to leave “the Spectator beside himself, drawing cries from him in his transports that our tranquil Operas were never honored with” (as Rousseau wrote in 1752).75 Gluck perhaps exploits Rousseau’s celebrity and the high reputation of Le Devin du village, but his work and initial attentiveness offer Rousseau a way out of an impasse, and Rousseau seems to bestir himself when given this last opportunity, albeit with hesitant steps. He still writes songs; he begins an opera. Musically speaking, the rest is silence, the silence of ­Rousseau’s enigmatic old age. 1.

2.

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Notes

Sébastien de Brossard, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, Ballard, new ed. 1703), Subarticle “Musica Moderna”: truly modern music is the music “that over the last 50 or 60 years has begun to be perfected, and to be made gayer, more expressive and better applied to the long and short syllables of the Text” (no pagination, article “Musique”). This and all subsequent translations from French are my own. In the case of Rousseau only, the original French is given in the notes. Notably Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de l’Opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris, Minerve, 1991), and Jean-Philippe Rameau, Splendeur et naufrage de l’esthétique du plaisir à l’Age classique (Paris, Minerve, 1988).

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Cuthbert Girdlestone, Jean-Philippe Rameau. His Life and Work (New York, Dover, 1969), pp. 53–63. For an overview of harmonic studies in the Enlightenment, see André Charrak, Raison et perception. Fonder l’harmonie au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Vrin, 2001). Rameau himself never succumbs to patriotic fervor. He never attacks Italian music. Descartes similarly presents his Prænotanda in the Compendium musicæ. Jean-Philippe Rameau, Nouveau systême de musique théorique, où l’on découvre le Principe de toutes les Regles nécessaires à la Pratique ; Pour servir d’Introduction au Traité de l’Harmonie [A New System of Theoretical Music, Where Is Discovered the Principle of All the Rules Necessary for Practice; To Serve as an Introduction to the Treatise on Harmony] (Paris, Ballard, 1726), p. 1. The notion of the work being an introduction to another, preexisting work, the Treatise, is a reflection of the importance of the discovery of Sauveur for Rameau. On this and many other questions, Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, University Press, 1993), is an invaluable guide. The definition Rameau gives here can be supplemented with the definition of music in the Génération harmonique, in which Rameau recognizes that the end of music is “to please, & to excite in us diverse passions.” See Rameau, Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique (Paris, Prault fils, 1737), p. 30. Rameau, New System, p. 8. It is, however, possible that Rameau did not consider nonmusical sound susceptible of scientific study. Cf. Rousseau, who begins the article “Musique” in the Dictionnaire de musique as follows : “Art of combining Sounds in a manner agreeable to the ear. This Art becomes a science, indeed a very profound science, in the search for the principles of these combinations and the reasons for the affects that they cause us” [“Art de combiner les Sons d’une manière agréable à l’oreille. Cet Art devient une science et meme très-profonde, quand on veut trouver les principes de ces combinaisons et les raisons des affections qu’elles nous causent”] (OC, vol. 5, p. 915). Brossard, however, shows the keenest awareness of the polysemy of “Musique,” under that entry of his own Dictionnaire de musique. In the article “Musique,” he gives “la Science des sons” as certainly the first but only one of many senses of the word. Rameau, New System, p. 90. Diderot, Satyre seconde. Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. Marian Hobson (Geneva, Droz, 2013), p. 56. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, article “Basse fondamentale,” OC, vol. V, p. 657. Rousseau, Les Confessions, eds. M. Raymond and B. Gagnebin, in OC, I, p. 184. “Tandis qu’on se battoit en Italie, on chantoit en France. Les Opera de Rameau commençoient à faire du bruit et relevèrent ses ouvrages théoriques que leur obscurité laissoit à la portée de peu de gens. Par hazard, j’entendis parler de son traité de l’harmonie, et je n’eus point de repos que je n’eusse aquis ce livre.” The military reference (to the War of the Polish Succession) indicates the date of 1734. See Alain Grosrichard’s comments on these early pages of book V of The Confessions (Confessions, livres I à VI, Paris, GF Flammarion, 2003, pp. 386–406). 115

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

116

Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie, ed. Michel Malherbe (Paris, Vrin, 2000). Verified against original text, Encyclopédie, vol. 1. My translation. “[. . .] les inflexions touchantes & bien ménagées d’une belle voix” (Encyclopédie, article “Musique,” vol. X, p. 901). Rousseau, Dialogues, OC, vol. I, p. 680. Rousseau, Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh, vol. 2, (Geneva, Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965), no. 162, Rousseau to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 26 June 1751. D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire, ed. M. Malherbe, p. 143. Rousseau also appears in the présentation of the principal authors at the end of the Discours préliminaire, absent from Malherbe (Encyclopédie, vol. 1, Paris, Le Breton et al., 1751, p. xliii). Mark Hulliung writes, “With [Rousseau] the age of criticism contains a systematic self-criticism which gives the lie to the romantic interpretation of the eighteenth century that never seems to go out of style.” M. Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment. Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 243. [Jean-Philippe Rameau], Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie (Paris, Sébastien Jorry, 1755); Suite des erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie (Paris, no publisher named, 1756). The author’s name was not given, but it was clear throughout who had written the pamphlets. A year before the Erreurs, Rameau had published the Observations sur notre instinct pour le musique (Paris, Prault fils, Lambert, Duchesne, 1754), also largely a response to Rousseau. Thus, for example, the articles “Gamme” and “Genre.” As d’Alembert abandoned the joint editorship of the Encyclopédie after the crisis over the article on Geneva, the dialogue did not continue beyond the letter G. D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire, ed. Malherbe, pp. 122–123. D’Alembert may however be alluding more generally to the works of Perrault and Burette, which are also present in the background of Rousseau’s article “Musique.” See below, note 32. See, for example, Burette’s Sur les merveilleux effets attribuez à la Musique des Anciens (read to the Academy in 1718, published in the Mémoires de l’Académie, 1731). Rameau, Génération harmonique, p. 219 (for example). Like the other Encyclopédie authors, Rousseau was given a translation of the relevant articles from Chambers’s Cyclopædia as he began work. His treatment of this material ranges from simple reproduction to complete rewriting. “Music” by Chambers and “Musique” by Rousseau are set out side by side for comparison in Alain Cernuschi, Penser la musique dans l’Encyclopédie (Paris, Champion, 2000), Annexe No 13. “Nous l’emportons donc sur eux de ce côté-là, & c’est un point considérable, puisqu’il est certain que l’harmonie est le vrai fondement de la mélodie & de la modulation. Mais n’abusons-nous point de cet avantage ? c’est un doute qu’on est fort tenté d’avoir quand on entend nos opéra modernes. Quoi ! ce chaos, cette confusion de parties, cette multitude d’instrumens différens, qui semblent s’insulter l’un l’autre, ce fracas d’accompagnemens qui étouffent la voix sans la soutenir, tout cela fait-il donc les véritables beautés de la Musique ?”

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28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

“Enfin, nous l’emportons par l’étendue générale de notre système, qui, n’étant plus renfermé seulement dans quatre ou cinq octaves, n’a désormais d’autres bornes que le caprice des musiciens. Je ne sai toutefois si nous avons tant à nous en féliciter. Etoit-ce donc un si grand malheur dans la musique ancienne de n’avoir à fournir que des sons pleins & harmonieux pris dans un beau medium ? Les voix chantoient sans se forcer, les instrumens ne miauloient point sans cesse aux environs du chevalet ; les sons faux & sourds qu’on tire du démanché, les glapissemens d’une voix qui s’excede, sont-ils faits pour émouvoir le cœur ? L’ancienne musique savoit l’attendrir en flattant les oreilles ; la nouvelle, en les écorchant, ne fera jamais qu’étonner l’esprit.” Marc Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées,” in La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, ed. Anne-Marie Lecoq (Paris, Folio classique, 2001), p. 206, On some related subjects, Homer as seen by Pope, Shakespeare as seen by Voltaire, Larry F. Norman has some very enlightening pages. See his The Shock of the Ancient. Literature and History in Early Modern France (­Chicago, University Press, 2011), pp. 213–218. “Que veux je conclure de tout cela ? que l’ancienne musique étoit plus parfaite que la nôtre ? nullement. Je crois au contraire que la nôtre est sans comparaison plus savante & plus agréable [. . .].” Rousseau is very likely in dialogue with Claude Perrault, De la musique des Anciens, who, like Rousseau, believes that ancient music was monodic but, unlike Rousseau, tends to consider this a defect. Perrault concludes his work thus: “The marvels that [the Ancients] recounted of the sweetness & power of their Music do not necessarily convince us of its excellence; or at least this excellence could be of another kind, whose perfection consisted in simplicity, in clarity, & in distinction, which our music in several parts lacks, according to the sentiment of the greater number; but it does not follow from this that the perfection to be found in Music in several parts could exist in the Music of the Ancients.” Claude Perrault, De la Musique des Anciens, in Œuvres de physique et de méchanique de Mrs C. & P. Perrault, 2 vols., (Amsterdam, J.-F. Bernard, 1727), II, p. 321. “Les Italiens font peu de cas du bruit; une tierce, une sixte bien adaptée, même un simple unisson, quand le bon goût le demande, leur plaisent plus que tout notre fracas de parties & d’accompagnement” (Encyclopédie, vol. I, p. 77). “Considérez les Italiens nos contemporains, dont la musique est la meilleure, ou plutôt la seule bonne de l’univers, au jugement unanime de tous les peoples, excepté des François qui lui préferent la leur. Voyez quelle sobriété dans les accords, quel choix dans l’harmonie! Ces gens-là ne s’avisent point de mesurer au nombre des parties l’estime qu’ils font d’une musique; proprement leurs opéra ne sont que des duos, & toute l’Europe les admire & les imite” (Encyclopédie, art. “Musique,” vol. I, p. 901). The Lettre sur la musique françoise is written in late 1752 and published a year later. Andrea Fabiano, ed., La Querelle des Bouffons dans la vie culturelle française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, CNRS Editions, 2005); David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau. Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge, University Press, 2013). 117

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37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

118

Rousseau, Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh, vol. 2 (Geneva, Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965), no. 183, Rousseau to Toussaint-Pierre Lenieps, 22 October 1752. “Il a été un tems où l’Italie étoit barbare, et meme après la renaissance des autres Arts que l’Europe lui doit tous, la Musique plus tardive n’y a point pris aisément cette pureté de gout qu’on y voit briller aujourd’hui, et l’on ne peut guéres donner une plus mauvaise idée de ce qu’elle étoit alors qu’en remarquant qu’il n’y a eu pendant longtems q’une meme Musique en France et en Italie” (Rousseau, OC, V, p. 308). Compare d’Alembert, Discours préliminaire, ed. Malherbe, p. 122: “It must be admitted that the renaissance of Painting and of Sculpture had been much more rapid than that of Poetry and Music.” David Charlton, “New Light on the Bouffons in Paris (1752–1754),” ­Eighteenth-Century Music, vol. 11, No 1 (March 2014), pp. 32–54. In the letter, Rousseau writes that unity of melody is a “rule that no Theoretician has spoken of so far as I know” and “that the Italian Composers alone have sensed and practiced, perhaps without suspecting its existence” [“régle dont aucun Théoricien, que je sache, n’a parlé jusqu’à ce jour; que les Compositeurs Italiens ont seuls sentie et pratiquée, sans se douter, peut-être, de son existence”] (OC, vol. V, p. 311). Cf. Rameau, Génération harmonique, préface, pp. iii sqq. A popularity that Addison did not applaud. “Our great Grand-children will be very curious to know the Reason why their Fore-fathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own Country, and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand” (Spectator, no 18, 21 March 1711). Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, OC, vol. V, p. 291. “[. . .] toute Musique Nationnale tire son principal caractére de la langue qui lui est proper,” (Lettre, OC, vol. V, p. 294). “Or s’il y a en Europe une langue propre à la Musique, c’est certainement l’Italienne; car cette langue est douce, sonore, harmonieuse, et accentuée plus qu’aucune autre, et ces quatre qualités sont précisément les plus convenables au chant” (Lettre, OC, vol. V, p. 297). “[. . .] la porter au très-médiocre degré de bonté dont elle est susceptible” (OC, V, p. 315). “[. . .] les François n’ont point de Musique et n’en peuvent avoir; ou [. . .] si jamais ils en ont une, ce sera tant pis pour eux” (OC, vol. V, p. 328). “[. . .] Je croyois entendre la voix de la douleur, de l’emportement, du desespoir; je croyois voir des meres éplorées, des amans trahis, des Tirans furieux, et dans les agitations que j’étois forcé d’éprouver j’avoi peine à rester en place” (Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, eds. H. Coulet and B. Guyon, in OC, vol. II, part I, letter XLVIII, p. 134). “[. . .] le plus ennuyeux spectacle qui puisse exister” (Nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol II, part II, letter XXIII, p. 289). Rameau, “Suite de la Réponse à la Lettre que M. d’Alembert lui a adressée [. . .],” Mercure de France, July 1761, pp. 150–158. In the same letter, Rameau speaks surprisingly well of Le Devin du village. Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, pp. 837–838. “le Théâtre fut purgé du jargon de la Mythologie” (Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, p. 953) ; “le Drame lyrique prit une forme plus noble et moins gigantesque” (p. 954).

How to Be Modern in Music

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

Rousseau, Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh, vol. IX (Geneva, Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1969), no. 1495, Rousseau to Malesherbes, 25 September 1761. “Les premiéres langues, filles du plaisir et non du besoin, portérent longtems l’enseigne de leur pére; leur accent séducteur ne s’effaça qu’avec les sentimens qui les avoient fait naitre, lorsque de nouveaux besoins introduits parmi les hommes forcérent chacun de ne songer qu’à lui-même et de retirer son cœur au dedans de lui” (Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. V, p. 407). Cf. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, Minuit, 1967), p. 300: “Rameau’s fault responds to the model of all faults and all historical perversions as they take shape in Rousseau’s eyes.” The story is told by Charles Porset, “L’ ‘inquiétante étrangeté’ de l’Essai sur l’origine des langues : Rousseau et ses exégètes,” SVEC, 154 (1976), pp. 1715–1758. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences humaines,” reprinted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale deux, Paris, Plon, 1973 et 1996. “[. . .] la musique se trouva privée des effets moraux qu’elle avoit produits quand elle étoit doublement la voix de la nature” (Essai, OC, vol. V, p. 427). “Ces progrès ne sont ni fortuits ni arbitraires, ils tiennent aux vicissitudes des choses” (Essai, OC, vol. V, p. 428). Dialogues, OC, vol. I, pp. 672–673. “Mais quand introduisant la Musique sur nos théatres on l’a voulu rétablir dans ses anciens droits et en faire un langage imitatif et passionné; c’est alors qu’il a fallu la rapprocher de la langue grammaticale dont elle tire son premier être et que, réglant les modulations de la voix chantante sur les infléxions diverses que les passions donnent à la voix parlante, la mélodie a trouvé pour ainsi dire une nouvelle existence et de nouvelles forces dans ses conformités avec l’accent oratoire et passionné” (Rousseau, [L’Origine de la mélodie], OC, vol. 5, p. 340). When Gluck writes this, the performance of Iphigénie en Aulide in Paris is in fact already decided. Rousseau, Correspondance complète, vol. XXXIX (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1965–98), appendix A639, pp. 322–323. “[. . .] je défie qui que ce soit d’assigner par la Musique seule, soit dans le ton, soit dans la mélodie, soit dans la déclamation, soit dans l’accompagnement, aucune différence sensible entre le commencement et la fin de cette scéne, par où le Spectateur puisse juger du changement prodigieux qui s’est fait dans le cœur d’Armide” (Lettre sur la musique françoise, OC, vol. V, p. 323). After praising Lully’s recitative, which he says “comes closest to the tone of nature & of good declamation” [“son récitatif est celui de tous qui approche le plus du ton de la nature & de la bonne déclamation”], he adds, “But how far removed from [that tone] we would find it if we examined it closely!” [“Mais qu’on l’en trouveroit encore loin si on vouloit l’examiner de près!”] (Encyclopédie, vol. X, end of p. 901). “Extrait d’une réponse du petit faiseur à son prête-nom, sur un morceau de l’Orphée de Gluck” (OC, vol. V, pp. 461–465). Fragmens d’observation sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck (OC, vol. V, pp. 441–457). Gluck politely gave the Italian version of his Alceste to Rousseau for his comments, although a French version was performed in Paris. 119

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66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

120

“Ce qui me donne quelque confiance dans les jugemens que je portois cidevant dans cet extrait, c’est qu’ils ont été presque tous confirmés depuis lors par le public, dans l’Alceste françois que M. Gluck nous a donné cette année à l’opéra, et où il a, avec raison, employé tant qu’il a pu, la même Musique de son Alceste italien” (“Lettre à M. Burney,” OC, vol. V, p. 439). I wrote a brief commentary on his article for a special issue of the review Orages entitled “Rousseau en musique,” eds. O. Bara, P. Saby, and M. O’Dea No. XI (2012). Journal de Paris, February 10, 1777. This belief is widely shared by admirers of Gluck in Paris, as the contemporary press record attests. “[. . .] mes contemporains ne seront jamais rien pour moi” (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, première promenade, OC, vol. I, p. 998). “[. . .] il est manifestement contre la Loi de Nature, de quelque maniére qu’on la définisse [. . .] qu’une poignée de gens regorge de superfluités, tandis que la multitude affamée manque du nécessaire” (Discours sur l’inégalité, OC, vol. III, p. 194). David Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique (Cambridge, University Press, 1986), p. 7. “Traduction de l’Epître dédicatoire que M. le Chevalier Gluck a mise à la tête de son Opéra de Paris & Hélène” (Gazette de literature), reproduced in [G. M. Leblond] Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution opérée dans la Musique par M. le Chevalier Gluck (Paris, Bailly, 1781). [G. M. Leblond] Mémoires etc., p. 435. “Ces chants divins [. . .] mettent le Spectateur hors de lui-même, et lui arrachent, dans ses transports, des cris, dont jamais nos tranquilles Opera ne furent honorés” (Lettre sur la musique françoise, OC, vol. V, p. 304).

5 Listening in Rousseau’s Auditory World: Sound, Noise, and Music Julia Simon

Toward the end of the “Seventh Walk” of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau wanders to a wild, uninhabited refuge while out collecting specimens for his herbaria. The almost impenetrable spot near Robaila turns out to be the location of a stocking factory. Ironically, the regular sound produced by the most sophisticated machinery in eighteenth-century industry1 penetrates the solitude and signals not only human presence in this seemingly desolate place, but also, and more importantly, the penetration of nature by human activity. I was alone, I penetrated into the crags of the mountain and from wood to wood, from rock to rock I reached such a hidden place that I have never seen one in my life with such a wild look. . . . The cries of the horned owl, the sparrow-owl and the osprey could be heard in the cracks of the mountain, some small rare but familiar birds nonetheless tempered the horror of this solitude. . . . I compared myself to those great voyagers who discover a deserted island, and I said to myself complacently: without a doubt I am the first mortal who ever penetrated here; I saw myself almost like another ­Columbus. While I strutted around with this idea a little distance from me I heard a certain clicking that I believed that I recognized; I listen: the same noise repeats and multiplies. Surprised and curious, I get up and I pierce through a thicket of brush on the side that the noise was coming from, and in a valley, twenty feet from the place that I believed that I was the first ever to reach, I see a stocking factory.2

Out in the wilderness, surrounded by nature and the sounds of birds, Rousseau is interrupted by a sound that he recognizes: a repeated and regular sound produced by machinery. His reaction to the discovery is 121

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double: at first, he experiences joy at the thought of human company, “I do not know how to express the confused and contradictory agitation that I felt in my heart at this discovery. My first movement was a feeling of joy to find myself among men where I had believed myself to be totally alone.”3 But the joy is followed by an enduring pain caused by the thought of persecution and his inability to escape into unspoiled nature: “But this movement more rapid than a flash of lightening soon gave way to a more enduring painful sentiment, as if I were unable even in the caves of the Alps to escape the cruel hands of the men bent on tormenting me.”4 Both emotional reactions to the noise stem from its reception: he recognizes it as a product of human activity. The regular and repeated noise produced by the stocking factory indicates human society to the listener—something from which Rousseau believed that he had escaped in the wilderness of the mountains. As a part of aesthetic reception, listening is a complex activity that entails physical sensation, as well as the engagement of cognition, judgment, memory, and feeling. In Rousseau’s world, to listen is to parse the sounds that surround us and attach meaning based on the perception of form and the workings of memory. This entails distinguishing between sound, noise, and music, an activity that requires projecting and attributing a particular origin to acoustic phenomena. In the episode from the Reveries, Rousseau distinguishes between the cries of birds and the noise [bruit] of human industry. While the cries of the birds of prey, as well as the other more familiar birds, provide a kind of sonic depth to the landscape that Rousseau finds both off-putting and reassuring, it is the regular sound of human activity that produces a more complex response. In the regularity of the sound, Rousseau locates a human origin. Rousseau’s understanding of our situatedness in and response to the auditory world points to one of the dilemmas posed by modernity: while the natural landscape contains sounds and noises that provide some level of comfort and solace, it is human activity alone—a product of civilization—that stimulates the most complex responses. Capable of being both positive and negative in the form of music and industrial noise, evoking pleasure and discomfort, our reception of the sounds of the environment, and Rousseau’s attention to it, signals a decidedly modern turn in his aesthetic of auditory reception. His prescient concern with sounds not only anticipates a line of theoretical work that extends into sound studies and auditory culture today, but also, as Jacques Attali would highlight, heralds the development of a new 122

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understanding of the subject embedded in a complex modern world of sound, noise, and music.5 I. Sound Production

Auditory perception entails a complex series of cognitive functions that go beyond the mere physical stimulation of the ear. But before exploring the complexity of listening for Rousseau, and the multiple operations that it engages, I will turn to the accounts of pity that serve as a helpful foundation for understanding Rousseau’s psycho-epistemological framework. Listening, as I will develop in detail, entails mental activities that parallel the accounts of pity and, indeed, overlap with pity in significant respects. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau famously argues that pity is anterior to reason, “a natural repugnance to see perish or suffer any sentient being and principally those like us.”6 His account of pity in the state of nature, as I have argued elsewhere, underscores a lack of cognition in the one who feels pity.7 Pity arises naturally at the sight of fellow suffering, as demonstrated in the scene borrowed from Mandeville that describes natural man’s reaction when he witnesses physical suffering. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau seems to revise his account of pity to acknowledge greater cognition and mental capacity required in the one who feels pity.8 In this later version, Rousseau underscores mental activities involved in feeling pity that require imagination, understanding, projection, and identification: Pity, although natural in man’s heart would remain eternally inactive without the imagination that puts it into play. How do we allow ourselves to be moved by pity? By transporting ourselves outside of ourselves; by identifying with the suffering being. We only suffer as much as we judge that he suffers; it is not in ourselves but in him that we suffer. When we think about how much this transport relies on acquired knowledge!9

Suffering at the sight of someone else suffering requires self-awareness (not present in the Second Discourse),10 as well as the mental capacity to judge, identify, and project. While the example from the Second Discourse specifically entails visual perception of suffering to induce pity—natural man sees the scene of a suffering mother and child11—the account of the mental processes involved in the feeling of pity in the Essay leaves the sensory channel for the perception of suffering ambiguous. Earlier in the Essay, 123

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Rousseau underscores the powerful effect that listening, as opposed to seeing, has on the subject moved to feel pity. Contrasting the effects of seeing versus listening to the account of a person in pain, he writes, Imagine a situation of perfectly known pain, in seeing the afflicted person you would only be moved with difficulty to the point of crying; but give the person the time to tell you everything that s/he feels, and soon you will break down in tears. . . . Let us conclude that visible signs render imitation more exact, but that interest is excited better by sounds.12

While one might be moved to pity by the visual, it is only the ­auditory— with the aid of linguistic narrative—that can move a listener to tears at fellow suffering. For Rousseau, we are more likely to feel someone’s suffering because of auditory stimuli and what those sounds have the capacity to convey. As I will develop, listening in and of itself is a complex process, like pity, that engages a number of mental faculties to communicate emotion from one person to another. But before we can gain an understanding of how sounds carry meaning as part of a signifying system and why certain kinds of sounds should be privileged for particular types of communication, it is necessary to understand how Rousseau believes that sound functions. In the world of eighteenth-century French intellectual life, aural stimuli obey properties distinctive to an understanding of the mechanics of sound. While Rousseau may disagree profoundly with Rameau about the determinants of the kinds of arrangements of sounds that are pleasing and/or beautiful, the two largely share an understanding of the acoustic world that shapes their theories of musical reception. For Rousseau, sound, as a building block of music, must be understood in terms of its natural, physical properties in order to understand its potential as a vehicle for meaning and expression. For Rousseau, as well as his contemporaries, noise and sound are produced by the movement of air: “SOUND, s. m.: When the agitation communicated to the air by the collision of a body struck by another reaches the auditory ear, it produces a sensation that we call Noise.”13 He develops a distinction between sound and noise, insisting on the significance of the act of perception: “But there is a resonant and appreciable noise that we call sound.”14 Here, in the article “Sound,” there does not appear to be any physical or natural property inherent in acoustic phenomena that distinguishes noise from sound, but rather the distinction depends on the ability of a listener to “perceive” or distinguish phenomena. Something 124

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that is indistinct or not clearly perceptible is noise, as opposed to sound. In the article “Noise,” Rousseau elaborates on this lack of physical distinguishability: “I do not know if any property of air has been observed that can make us suspect that the agitation that produces sound and that which produces prolonged noise are not of the same nature.”15 Thus, Rousseau asserts that the properties of the natural world that enable acoustic phenomena do not contain within them the distinguishing characteristics of what humans perceive as either sound or noise. For Rousseau, this distinction resides within the listening subject. All sound, noise included, is created by the movement of the air when two bodies are struck. The act of perception on the part of the listening subject introduces distinctions between types of acoustic phenomena, based, not on the way in which they were generated, but rather on the aural experience that they generate. Since both noise and sound are generated in the same manner, what distinguishes the two? Rousseau asks, “Why is noise not sound, since one makes noise with sounds?”16 His answer, although largely oriented toward the subjective experience of the listener, still maintains some discussion of the acoustic properties that distinguish sound from noise: “Play all the keys of a harpsichord at the same time, you will produce a total sensation that will only be noise, and that will only prolong its effect, by the resonance of its strings, like any other noise that the same strings would make resonate.”17 He goes on to explain that hitting all the keys on a harpsichord at the same time will generate not only the usual series of consonant overtones for each string, but also all the intervals together and all of their overtone series—consonant and dissonant—resulting in the sonic phenomenon of noise. Simultaneous consonance and dissonance in a sustained sound creates an experience in which sounds combine to create noise. While the dissonance of the intervals may be objectively demonstrated, it is nonetheless the perception of these dissonant and agglomerated intervals that causes the subject to hear the sound as noise. As the explanation continues, he introduces another element to the distinction: the listener’s distance from or proximity to the origin of the sound may account for the intensity and violence of noise, as opposed to sound: Why is noise not sound, since an overly loud sound is no longer anything but noise, like a voice that screams at the top of its lungs, and especially like the sound of a great bell that one hears inside the bell tower? For it is impossible to appreciate it, unless, leaving the bell tower, one softens the sound through distance.18 125

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Moving away from the source of the auditory experience can change noise into sound. So, although in the harpsichord example, striking every key on the keyboard produces an experience that can be distinguished by its physical acoustic properties because of the generation of consonant and dissonant intervals at the same time, the bell and screaming examples rely on the listener’s spatial relation to the point of origination of the sound to distinguish between sound and noise. In other words, the context of perception of the auditory experience changes the nature of the experience from sound to noise, rather than any property inherent in the sound itself. One final example from the article “Noise” of its figurative extension to describe music in a pejorative way provides another clue to understanding the distinction between noise and sound: The name noise is applied also, out of disdain, to deafening/disorienting and confusing music, where one hears more din than harmony, and more clamors than song. This is just noise. This opera makes a lot of noise and little effect.19

While the almost Flaubertian citation of clichéd speech at the end of the article indicates common usage by audiences of derogatory terms like noise to describe music that they do not like, the reference to music that is “deafening/disorienting and confusing, where one hears more din than harmony,” with its thinly veiled criticism of Rameau, indicates that some music cannot be perceived as coherent and is therefore labeled noise. This judgment indicates another way of distinguishing sound from noise, besides excessive volume or dissonant resonances. In the case of “noisy music” [musique bruyante], Rousseau suggests that some music fails because of the listener’s inability to perceive it in a way that makes sense or because it disturbs the subject in some way. In this sense, music is experienced as noise when cognition fails at some level. In all three examples of noise from the Dictionary—agglomerated consonant and dissonant intervals, loud volume, and music that is confusing or disorienting—the judgment lies with the listening subject. In other words, Rousseau locates the distinction between sound and noise in the context of its reception. Although some physical properties of acoustic phenomena may contribute to the experience of sound and judgments about it made by the listening subject, such as in the harpsichord example, overall, it is the listener’s reception of the sounds that determines distinctions between noise, sound, and music. In this 126

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respect, Rousseau’s account of listening as a component of aesthetic reception entails a Kantian-style subjective turn that highlights the activity of the subject and its engagement with the sonic world.20 II. Hearing, Listening, and Cognition

If sound production is essentially universal in its physical properties, its reception entails complex acts of cognition located within the listening subject that are both culturally determined and individual.21 That is to say that Rousseau is clear that our modes of understanding what we hear are conditioned by culturally determined modes of sound perception and cultural and individual interpretation. In a sense, what we hear is conditioned by what we learn to hear. In the discussion of sound and noise in the article “Sound” cited above, Rousseau uses the word appreciable to differentiate sounds from noise. For Rousseau, what is perceptible sonically, either linguistically or musically, is conditioned by the systems with which we are familiar. In the case of language, he argues in the Essay on the Origin of Languages that there are an infinite number of possible vowel and consonant sounds, but that the phonemes that we hear and produce are conditioned by languages that we know.22 Likewise, in music, he argues against Rameau that there is nothing natural about the harmonic intervals and sequences that we use in Western music.23 For Rousseau, there are an infinite number of tones and microtones available to the composer and performer. What makes music meaningful depends on knowledge of the harmonic system: “The most beautiful songs to our liking will always strike feebly an ear that is not accustomed to them; it is a language for which one must have a dictionary.”24 In other words, like language, music is a conventionally based system. Familiarity with the sign system that conditions the production and perception of sound represents a necessary condition for the cognition of sound. But mere familiarity with the sonic building blocks is insufficient to produce a reaction of cognition and appreciation, as the bell and harpsichord examples demonstrate. In addition to being an “appreciable” sound belonging to a sonic system with which we are familiar, the emission needs to conform to formal criteria in order to be understood and recognized as part of a signifying system. In other words, listeners process sounds and assign meaning according to other sonic features. Rousseau develops a number of ways of conceiving of sonic form, many of which rely on a notion of repetition. In the scene from the Reveries with which I began, the clicking sound from the 127

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stocking factory interrupts Rousseau’s consciousness and “repeats and multiplies,” causing him to look for the origin of the sound. The repetition of the familiar sound causes recognition, and ultimately cognition, in the listener attuned to the environment. This account of sense experience suggests that aural perception relies on the recognition of patterns stored in memory that activate cognition. Indeed, memory works to enable listeners to distinguish between the qualities of sounds in the environment and to assign meanings to them. In an example from the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau distinguishes between bird calls and human singing: “Birds whistle, only man sings.”25 Although birds and other animals are capable of repeating sounds, the form of repetition does not stir the same kind of reaction in the human listener as music does. In the example from the Reveries, there is even a noticeable difference between Rousseau’s reaction to bird cries and human industrial noise. Although the clicking is only noise, it still has the capacity to provoke a complex emotional reaction because of its human origin. The article “Imitation” in the Dictionary provides insight into the act of cognition that enables the recognition of form through repetition. In a technical definition of imitation in music, Rousseau asserts that “Imitation, in its technical meaning, is the use of the same song or of a similar song, in several parts . . . . Imitation is always well done, even changing several notes; provided that the same song be always recognizable and that one does not depart from the rules of good modulation.”26 The repetition of the same structure in music—through theme and variation or fugue—creates a form that is recognizable precisely because of its reliance on repetition. Memory enables us to recognize repeated structures throughout a piece of music and, in this way, perceive form. Technical mimesis aids in understanding what distinguishes the repetition of the noise from the stocking factory or the repetition of birds’ songs from human music; whereas industrial noise and bird calls are simply constructed out of repetition, human song relies on both repetition and variation. Repetition carries meaning insofar as the listener perceives the repetition as part of a formal structure that belongs to a signifying system. One final example of noise illustrates why repetition in and of itself is insufficient to convey meaning. In the entry “Melodic Unity” in the Dictionary, Rousseau discusses his reaction to Protestant psalms: When I hear our four-part Psalms sung, I always start by being seized, ravished by that full and nervous harmony; and the first chords, 128

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when they are intoned precisely, move me to shudder. But barely have I listened to what follows for a few minutes, when my attention slackens, little by little the noise dazes me; soon I grow weary and I am finally bored to hear nothing but chords.27

The perception of form and repetition in the psalms does not guarantee an emotional or meaningful reception. Indeed, they may still be perceived as noise by a listening subject diverted and distracted by the development of harmony, and therefore unable to perceive or focus on a message being conveyed.28 III. Form and the Effects of Sound

The article “Fugue” in the Dictionary highlights the difficulty of composing meaningful music based on repetition alone: Fugues in general make music more noisy than pleasing; that is why they are more appropriate to choirs than anything else. And since their principle merit is to fix the ear on the principal song or subject, and that in order to do this we pass incessantly from part to part and from modulation to modulation; the composer must take all care to render his song very distinct, or prevent it from being suffocated or confused among the other parts.29

Referring to the crucially important concept of melodic unity, Rousseau cautions that fugues run a high risk of being mediocre because of the difficulty of subordinating lines in order to draw attention to melody and theme, rather than harmonic development. Like the example of four-part psalms, fugues also overwhelm the listener with too much sound, to the point that they lead to distraction and result only in the perception of noise. Melodic unity seemingly supplies the response to the problem of overwhelming the listener with an overly complicated experience that leads to distraction, boredom, or disorientation. Melodic unity enables the listener to process the sounds in such a way that individual parts do not overwhelm one another. As a principle of harmonic subordination, melodic unity provides a structure that aids in perception and reception: “Harmony, that should smother melody, animates it, reinforces it, determines it: the diverse parts, without being merged, converge in the same effect; and despite the fact that each part seems to have its own song, from all the parts together, one only hears a singular and self-same song. That is what I call unity of melody.30 If music composition adheres to this principle, then the disorienting effects of the fugue 129

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and the four-part psalms will be avoided. Listeners will not lose the subject because of the chaos of harmonic development and modulation. Rather, the melodic subject will be reinforced by the other parts, as they sing with and not against the main line. As a guiding principle of composition, melodic unity highlights one of the difficulties of describing music as an aesthetic object. Although the definition above seems straightforward at first glance, it nonetheless glosses over an important problem with music reception. Earlier in the article, Rousseau quickly states two different conceptions of melodic unity: “There is in music a successive unity that relates to the subject and through which all the well-linked parts form a single whole, of which we perceive the ensemble and all the relations. But there is another, a finer unity of object, more simultaneous, from which is born, without our thinking about it, music’s energy and the force of its expressions.”31 The first involves our apperception of a piece as a whole; the second relates to perception in the immediacy of the moment. More importantly, while the first definition of the experience requires a kind of judgment, as the subject perceives the relationship of the various parts to the whole, usually after the piece has been performed, the second definition explicitly banishes thought from the experience, making it a feeling that springs from a kind of energy in the music. One kind of melodic unity ties the movements of a piece together, while the other kind works in the moment of listening to create energy. Taking the experience of listening to the four-part psalm as a counter-example, the lack of unity evokes feelings of disorientation and boredom. In a sense, while the initial reaction to the opening chords provoked a shudder—a physical and emotional response—it could not be sustained. As a mere sensation, the opening effect is closer to physical pleasure than to anything intellectual. As the piece progresses, the listener stops paying attention and loses interest. A detached and distracted response takes the place of the more visceral shudder. We might be tempted to identify this distraction and detachment as a form of alienation that inhibits a kind of emotional response to the music by introducing cognitive awareness. But cognitive awareness and processing are also essential for the apperception of melodic unity in a piece of music conceived in its entirety. In other words, although cognition gets in the way of emotional response in some forms of music, cognition and detachment are nonetheless required for perceiving a piece of music as a work. The two meanings of melodic unity suggest that auditory reception and perception are always double in Rousseau: both 130

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in the immediacy of the moment of listening and in the abstract reconstruction of the piece as an aesthetic object. Music’s temporal and sequential existence requires this double articulation of reception and response.32 Adorno describes this dialectic, with a particular focus on the danger of the immediate reception overshadowing what he identifies as the more essential nature of the musical composition: “The isolated moments of enjoyment prove incompatible with the immanent constitution of the work of art, and whatever in the work goes beyond them to an essential perception is sacrificed to them. They are not bad in themselves but in their diversionary function.”33 For Adorno, the pleasure of listening to music more often than not diverts a popular audience through superficial pleasure toward an illusion that, ultimately, leads to displeasure. Although Rousseau does not characterize the experience in the same terms, the momentary pleasure [frisson] produced by the psalm also leads to a kind of disappointment in the unsustainability of sensual effect. The boredom that ensues resembles the response of Brecht’s distracted theater-goer, detached and alienated from the aesthetic experience.34 Adorno’s emphasis on the immanent construction of the work leads back to Rousseau’s first definition of melodic unity that requires some kind of mental reconstruction of the parts in relation to the whole, perceived as a unity, in order for judgment to occur. Rousseau’s definition of melodic unity thus dovetails with Adorno’s warnings concerning what he dubs the “fetish-character in music”: the tendency for popular reception to eschew the intellectual work of “immanent constitution.” 35 But how can Rousseau reconcile a positive form of cognitive reception and judgment with the immediacy of the moment? How can he navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of alienated and distracted judgment and momentary sensual pleasure, all the while retaining both elements of aesthetic reception? In other words, how is it possible to describe an aesthetic reception of sonic material that provides both physical satisfaction and intellectual pleasure, without devolving into abstract, alienated judgment? Rousseau’s response posits imitation of the passions as a key concept to incite the listener’s interest and thereby engage an appropriate response that preserves both feeling and judgment for aesthetic experience. Parallel to the description of pity that I discussed above, the experience of aesthetic pleasure induced by music entails cognitive and sensual responses that enlist the imagination, reason, and memory. In the case of music reception, it is the imitation of the movement of the passions that induces the response, rather than the 131

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visual or auditory perception of signs of suffering in another being. Nonetheless, both experiences lead to a moral effect. IV. Memory and Moral Effects

Music’s temporal form inspires Rousseau’s double articulation of melodic unity: necessary both in the moment of listening and afterward in the immanent constitution of the work. The latter operation requires the work of memory to reconstruct the work as an aesthetic object. Between these two operations—immediate pleasure in listening and intellectual construction of the object—lies a form of engagement of the listening subject that bridges the gap between the two. While listening to the psalms led to boredom and disengagement, other kinds of performance enable sustained engagement that leads to the perception and appreciation of the aesthetic object. In the Essay, Rousseau asserts that while sounds may be pleasing, only imitative sounds excite interest and create a moral effect. Consistent with eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, he asserts the primacy of imitation for elevating certain stimuli to the rank of art.36 But slavish imitation of sounds is insufficient to excite interest: “The musician who wants to render noise with noise is mistaken,” rather the musician must “make objects speak in order to make himself heard/understood; in all imitation, it is always necessary for a kind of discourse to supplement the voice of nature.”37 Imitation enables a kind of communication between composer or performer and audience, but it is not the sounds of nature that are communicated, but rather the feelings of the musician. In my discussion of imitation above, I underscored Rousseau’s notion of repetition, in the form of theme and variation, as an element of technical mimesis in music. In addition to technical mimesis, Rousseau also follows eighteenth-century aesthetic theory in asserting that music imitates the passions. However, Rousseau theorizes a form of mimesis in music that departs from his contemporaries in his insistence on a second-order form that accomplishes this movement.38 The workings of mimesis in music provide a template for understanding how listening engages cognition, imagination, and memory in the process of stirring passion. In the article “Imitation,” he writes, Let all of nature be asleep, he who contemplates it is not sleeping, and the art of the musician consists in substituting for the imperceptible image of the object the movements that its presence excites in the heart of the one who contemplates. Not only will he agitate the sea, animate the flame of fire, make the streams run, the rain fall and the torrents 132

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swell; but he will paint the horror of an awful desert, darken the walls of an underground prison, calm the tempest, make the air tranquil and serene and will spread a new freshness over the groves from the orchestra. He will not directly represent these things, but he will excite in the soul the same movements that one feels in seeing them.39

Music indirectly represents nature by communicating human feelings associated with the experience of and reaction to nature. In other words, the listening subject hears the music and feels the movements that s/he associates with other experiences. The perception of formal structure enables the act of sensual experience to engage cognition and memory. So, unlike the four-part psalm, the initial sensual pleasure does not result in unsustainability and boredom. With music that achieves its mimetic aims, the listener feels moved in ways that feel familiar. As I have argued elsewhere, the movement of familiar feelings achieved through mimesis in a piece of music resembles the kind of sentimental reaction that readers of Julie experienced in reading the novel: The feelings depicted in the novel seem real, even if they are contained within the confines of fiction.40 Similarly, the feelings evoked by a piece of music create a familiar sensation that enables the same kind of movement of identification that the novel sets in motion. Listening to music will move the listener through a kind of recognition that excites memory. This movement alone is insufficient to explain the effects of mimesis in music. Beyond the recognition of familiar feeling elicited by the sounds, the music also needs to awaken interest. In a passage from the Essay that contrasts painting and music, Rousseau emphasizes the awareness of the constructedness of aesthetic experience that facilitates the engagement of interest: “Painting is closer to nature and music has more of human art. We feel also that one interests more than the other precisely because it brings man closer to man and always gives us some idea of those who are like us. . . . Birds whistle, only man sings, and one cannot hear either song or symphony without immediately saying: another sentient being is here.”41 Imitation, in this sense, is neither a slavish reproduction of sonic reality, nor even a technical achievement of sound manipulation that evokes feeling. The arbitrary nature of the sign system employed in music, coupled with aesthetic formal properties such as melodic unity and repetition, ensure that the listener recognizes the sound as a human construct. If the music succeeds in eliciting our interest, it is because the familiar feelings that it evokes simultaneously communicate the presence of another sentient being. In other words, music’s force resides in its ability to affect listeners by making them 133

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experience particular feelings, while at the same time recognizing that those feelings have their source in another human being. Memory’s role in the reception of music is multiple. At the first level, memory aids in the reception of a piece of music as it unfolds in time. The listener relates the successive parts by engaging memory in order to have a meaningful experience of the music. The listening experience also engages memory insofar as the mimetic quality of the music requires recognition of familiar feelings. Memory serves to enable the listener to draw associations between past and present experiences of feeling. Memory also enables the perception of musical form by enabling the immanent constitution of the aesthetic object after performance, allowing the listener to perceive form in the relation of the parts to the whole. Finally, memory also serves to enable a contextualized understanding of particular pieces of music by providing the individual with a cultural framework in which music is embedded. This last contribution of memory to the act of listening to music moves the singular experience of individual listening toward a communal conception of the reception of the musical aesthetic object. This final aspect of the function of memory in the reception of musical experience supplies a crucial bridge between individual experience of sonic phenomena and group understandings of sounds as cultural forms. If art serves a collective, social function for Rousseau, it requires not only a conventionalized sign system for its expression, but also a context of reception that can account for similar experiences across communities.42 In the article “Music” in the Dictionary, he provides an example of the emotional impact of a particular song that sheds light on how music moves not just individuals, but groups. Speaking about “plate N” in the Dictionary (which offers samples of what we would call “world music” today), he writes, I added in the same plate the famous Ranz-des-Vaches, that air so cherished by the Swiss that it was prohibited from being played to their troops under penalty of death because it made those who heard it melt into tears, desert or die, because it excited in them the ardent desire to return to their country. The energetic accents capable of producing such surprising effects have been sought in vain in this air. These effects, that have no pull on foreigners, only come from habit, from memories, from a thousand circumstances that, retraced by this air for those that hear it, reminding them of their country, their former pleasures, their youth, and all their ways of life, excite in them a bitter pain at having lost all of that. Music then does not act precisely as Music, but as memorative sign.43 134

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Specific pieces of music move specific populations, not only because the listeners are familiar with the conventions of the sign system to which the pieces belong (it is not “foreign” music), but more importantly because of associations in memory between the song and lived experience. The music functions as a sign to conjure memories, here specifically of a lost past. Music as a memorative sign functions on all the multiple levels that I have just outlined to elicit interest in the listening subject. This interest is highly dependent on knowledge of cultural context for awakening an emotional response in the listener. But the song does not necessarily have to be known to the listener—as in the case with ranz des vaches— to evoke a strong response. Music functioning as memorative sign can awaken feelings of past experience through forms of cultural reference to move the audience to engage actively in the listening experience and become interested. The imitation of the movement of the passions, coupled with a shared cultural context, creates the possibility of moving a group of listeners toward shared moral sentiment. Recalling my discussion of the feeling of pity at the beginning of this analysis, active and interested listening also draws on mechanisms that require cognition, projection, and identification. However, in the case of music, it is not only the suffering being with whom one may share feelings and experiences, but all sentient beings capable of emotion. The listening subject feels moved by familiar feelings brought about by auditory reception and, in so doing, understands that the feelings originate in another feeling subject. The listener is moved to take an interest in the sounds and in the originator of the sounds, through the various operations of cognition, imagination, and memory. This movement of interest indicates a moral effect of music that provides a bridge from individual to collective experience—from aesthetic to moral experience. The active and engaged listener experiences in music both a heightened awareness of his/her own subjectivity brought about through the awakening of familiar feeling, and an awareness of the shared nature of the emotional experience, in the projection and recognition of the sounds’ origin in another like being. V. Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I would like to return to consider the sounds emanating from the stocking factory in the “Seventh Walk” of the Reveries. Rousseau’s complex response to the noise may be understood as an indication of his subtle understanding of the modern auditory 135

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world. The noise exhibits characteristics that would lead a listener to posit a human origin: repetition, multiplication, and consistency. In this respect, the clicking noise of the factory is clearly distinguishable from the backdrop of “natural” sounds that provide the setting for the foregrounding of the sonic event.44 Indeed, in this respect, the clicking sound seems to exhibit formal properties consistent with its human origin. Memory is engaged in the activity of recognition and identification of the sound, as Rousseau compares the successive noises to determine that it is a repeated sound and also engages his cognitive store of memories to seek to identify the origin of the sound. Although he uses visual corroboration to positively identify the sound as coming from the stocking factory, such visual cues are likely unnecessary: embedded in the auditory experience itself are a sufficient number of clues to enable him to grasp the significance of the sound. Clicking from a factory is not music, and yet Rousseau’s response to the noise demonstrates common features of auditory reception. If music may function as a memorative sign, then industrial noise may function in a similar way, given certain shared characteristics. Formal regularity, human origin, and cultural context all provide a framework for perception, cognition, and understanding of both types of sound. Rousseau first experiences joy in associating human companionship with the repeated noise, an emotional response to the moral need for community: “My first movement was a feeling of joy to find myself among men where I had believed myself to be totally alone.” But the noise of the factory, although perhaps a memorative sign of human community, cannot produce a sustained feeling of engagement and interest. Because it cannot imitate the movements of the passions, and therefore cannot substantially stir the passions, the joy is followed by pain: Rousseau is reminded of his alienation from the human community through the remembrance of plots to pursue and torment him. Rousseau’s double movement mirrors the uneasiness of the Kantian sublime: pain and pleasure coexisting simultaneously in the perceiving subject, indeed brought about by the subject’s experience of itself.45 Echoing the tension between the imagination and reason in Kant’s account of the sublime, Rousseau identifies two contradictory movements in his own experience of the clicking noise: one movement associates the recognition of fellow human beings with the joys of community, while the other associates the presence of others with alienation and persecution. Within the same subject arises a “self-contradictory concept”46 of human community evoked by the industrial noise of a 136

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stocking factory. Unable to sustain interest, the perception of noise issues in an experience of the sublime. Whereas for Kant, such an experience of our own inadequacy leads to respect before the moral law,47 for Rousseau the experience of the sublime in reaction to the industrial noise of the stocking factory provides no such morally uplifting sentiment.48 As a memorative sign, the clicking fails to engage interest in a manner that can be sustained. Instead, the experience further isolates and alienates the listening subject, disabling a productive moral response. The alienating effects of the experience distance Rousseau from his fellow man, in much the same way as the four-part psalm. Interest in sounds requires overcoming of distance in a movement toward community. Instead, Rousseau retreats into an uncomfortable experience of his own subjectivity: both attracted and repulsed by the sounds of his fellow man. Rousseau’s alienation resulting from the double movement of emotion when confronted with industrial noise signals an awareness of the mode of production of the sound and a reminder of humanity’s denatured descent into modernity.49 Although music can potentially overcome social distance and create fellow feeling with positive moral effects, the noise of the industrial world—however much it may resemble the sounds of nature—can never be perceived without the deleterious effect of alienation. Rousseau’s acute awareness of the complexity of auditory experience, and our responses to it, inaugurates a turn toward an aesthetic of reception that not only highlights the subject, but the subject’s embeddedness in a social world. 1.

2.

Notes

The knitting machine employed to make stockings was the most sophisticated in eighteenth-century industrial technology, prompting Diderot to write the article “Bas” himself for the Encyclopédie. See Denis Diderot and Jean LeRond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols. Available online at ARTFL, http://artfl.uchicago.edu/cgibin/philologic31/getobject.pl?c.120:150:2.encyclopedie1207. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, 5 volumes, Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95, I : 1070–1071. All citations to works by Rousseau are to this edition; translations are my own. “J’étois seul, je m’enfonçai dans les anfractuosités de la montagne et de bois en bois, de roche en roche je parvins à un réduit si caché que je n’ai vu de ma vie un aspect plus sauvage. . . . Le Duc, la chevêche et l’orfraye faisoient entendre leurs cris dans les fentes de la montagne, quelques petits oiseaux rares mais familiers temperoient cependant l’horreur de cette solitude. . . . Je me comparois à ces grands voyageurs qui découvrent une Ile déserte, et je me disois avec complaisance: sans doute je suis le premier 137

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

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mortel qui ait pénétré jusqu’ici; je me regardois presque comme un autre Colomb. Tandis que je me pavannois dans cette idée j’entendis peu loin de moi un certain cliquetis que je crus reconnaitre; j’écoute: le même bruit se repete et se multiplie. Surpris et curieux je me léve, je perce à travers un fourré de broussaille du coté d’où venoit le bruit, et dans une combe à vingt pas du lieu même où je croyois être parvenu le premier j’apperçois une manufacture de bas” (OC, I: 1070–1071). “Je ne saurois exprimer l’agitation confuse et contradictoire que je sentis dans mon cœur à cette découverte. Mon prémier mouvement fut un sentiment de joye de me retrouver parmi les hommes où j’étois cru totalement seul” (OC, I: 1071). “Mais ce mouvement plus rapide que l’éclair fit bientot place à un sentiment douloureux plus durable, comme ne pouvant dans les antres même des alpes échaper aux cruelles mains des hommes, acharnés à me tourmenter” (ibid.). Jacques Attali claims that music not only develops in parallel to social structures as an aesthetic form but actually “announces the future.” See Attali, Bruits: Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique (Paris: Presses universitaires de la France and Fayard, 2001), 13. “Une répugnance naturelle à voir perir ou souffrir tout être sensible et principalement nos semblables” (OC, III: 126). OC, III: 154–155. See my discussion of pity in Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 31–35. Dating the composition of the Essay on the Origin of Languages is notoriously difficult. In the introduction to the Pléïade edition, Jean Starobinski cites a letter from January 24, 1765, to the publisher Du Peyrou that makes mention of the text along with the Lettre sur la musique française and a “Réponse à M. Rameau” (OC, V: clxv). Starobinski also mentions a 1761 letter to Malesherbes that expresses the desire to publish the essay (OC, V: clxviii). Although the dates of composition cannot be determined precisely, and significant differences between the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and the Essay on the Origin of Languages contribute to the confusion, 1761 seems like a fairly safe guess. “La pitié, bien que naturelle au cœur de l’homme resteroit éternellement inactive sans l’imagination qui la met en jeu. Comment nous laissons-nous émouvoir à la pitié ? En nous transportant hors de nous-même ; en nous identifiant avec l’être souffrant. Nous ne souffrons qu’autant que nous jugeons qu’il souffre ; ce n’est pas dans nous c’est dans lui que nous souffrons. Qu’on songe combien ce transport suppose de connoissances acquises!” (OC, V: 395). See Laurence Lemaire’s discussion of natural man’s lack of self-consciousness in relation to the development of language in Image de l’homme, image de soi, image de l’autre: Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la genèse du sujet (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2012). Rousseau stresses the visual in the account of pity in the Discourse: “The pathetic image of a man enclosed who perceives outside a ferocious beast, pulling a child from the breast of its mother, breaking in his murderous teeth the weak limbs and tearing with its claws the palpitating entrails of the child. What awful agitation does this witness not feel of an event that he

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12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

takes no personal interest in? What anxiety does he not suffer at this sight, not to be able to provide any help to the unconscious mother, nor to the expiring child?” [« la pathétique image d’un homme enfermé qui apperçoit au dehors une Bête féroce, arrachant un Enfant du sein de sa Mére, brisant sous sa dent meurtriére les foibles membres, et déchirant de ses ongles les entrailles palpitantes de cet Enfant. Quelle affreuse agitation n’éprouve point ce témoin d’un évenement auquel il ne prend aucun intérêt personnel ? Quelles angoisses ne souffre-t-il pas à cette veüe, de ne pouvoir porter aucun secours à la Mére évanoüie, ni à l’Enfant expirant ? »] (OC, III: 154–155). “Supposez une situation de douleur parfaitement connüe, en voyant la personne affligée vous serez difficilement ému jusqu’à pleurer ; mais laissezlui le tems de vous dire tout ce qu’elle sent, et bientôt vous allez fondre en larmes. . . . Concluons que les signes visibles rendent l’imitation plus exacte, mais que l’intérest s’excite mieux par les sons” (OC, V: 377–378). “SON, s.m.: Quand l’agitation communiquée à l’air, par la collision d’un corps frappé par un autre, parvient jusqu’à l’oreille auditif, elle y produit une sensation qu’on appelle Bruit.” Dictionnaire de musique (OC, V: 1047). “Mais il y a un Bruit résonnant et appréciable qu’on appellee Son” (ibid.). “Je ne sache pas qu’on ait observé aucune propriété de l’air qui puisse faire soupçonner que l’agitation qui produit le Son, et celle qui produit le Bruit prolongé, ne soient pas de même nature” (OC, V: 671). “Pourquoi le Bruit ne seroit-il pas du Son, puisqu’avec des Sons on fait du Bruit?” (OC, V: 672). “Touchez à la fois toutes les touches d’un Clavecin, vous produirez une sensation totale qui ne sera que du Bruit, et qui ne prolongera son effet, par la résonnance des cordes, que comme tout autre Bruit qui feroit résonner les mêmes cordes” (OC, V: 672). “Pourquoi le Bruit ne seroit-il pas du Son, puisqu’un Son trop fort n’est plus qu’un véritable Bruit, comme une Voix qui crie à pleine tête, et surtout comme le Son d’une grosse cloche qu’on entend dans le clocher même ? Car il est impossible de l’apprécier, si, sortant du clocher, on n’adoucit le Son par l’éloignement” (ibid.). “On donne aussi, par mépris, le nom de Bruit à une Musique étourdissante et confuse, où l’on entend plus de fracas que d’Harmonie, et plus de clameurs que de Chant. Ce n’est que du Bruit. Cet Opera fait beaucoup de Bruit et peu d’effet” (ibid.). Jonathan Sterne dubs the set of preconceived notions about the hierarchy of the senses, and particularly the privileging of seeing over hearing, “the audiovisual litany.” Among the prejudices he cites is the common notion that seeing is active and that listening is passive. In this respect, Rousseau’s work overturns some of the usual privileges. See Sterne, “Sonic ­Imaginations,” The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 9. Roland Barthes distinguishes between the “listening” of animals and the specifically human activity of deciphering what we hear when we “listen.” Barthes (with Roland Havas), “Listening,” The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Hill and Wang, 1985): 245–260. OC, V: 387–388. 139

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

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OC, V: 848–851; see my discussion in Rousseau among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 83–103. “Les plus beaux chants à nôtre gré toucheront toujours médiocrement une Oreille qui n’y sera point accoutumée; c’est une langue dont il faut avoir le Dictionnaire” (OC, V: 415). “Les oiseaux sifflent, l’homme seul chante” (OC, V: 421). “Imitation, dans son sens technique, est l’emploi d’un même Chant, ou d’un Chant semblable, dans plusieurs Parties qui le font entendre l’une après l’autre. . . . L’Imitation est toujours bien prise, même en changeant plusieurs Notes; pourvu que ce même Chant se reconnoisse toujours et qu’on ne s’écarte point des loix d’une bonne Modulation” (OC, V: 861). “Lorsque j’entends chanter nos Pseaumes à quartre Parties, je commence toujours par être saisi, ravi de cette Harmonie pleine et nerveuse ; et les premiers accords, quand ils sont entonnés bien juste, m’émeuvent jusqu’à frissonner. Mais à peine en ai-je écouté la suite, pendant quelques minutes, que mon attention se relâche, le bruit m’étourdit peu-à-peu ; bientôt il me lasse, et je suis enfin ennuyé de n’entendre que des Accords” (OC, V: 1143). See Jacqueline Waeber’s fascinating discussion of melodic unity in relation to the sounds that Rousseau claims to hear in his head in a striking episode from the Confessions. She reads the four parts of the psalms against his description of the various sounds that compose his tinnitus. Waeber, “JeanJacques Rousseau’s Unité de Mélodie,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 62.1 (Spring 2009): 79–143. “Les Fugues, en général, rendent la Musique plus bruyante qu’agréable; c’est pourquoi elles conviennent mieux dans les Choeurs que partout ailleurs. Or comme leur principal mérite est de fixer toujours l’oreille sur le Chant principal ou sujet, qu’on fait pour cela passer incessamment de Partie en Partie et de Modulation en Modulation ; le Compositeur doit mettre tous ses soins à rendre ce Chant bien distinct, ou à empêcher qu’il ne soit étouffé ou confondu parmi les autres Parties” (OC, V: 832). “L’Harmonie, qui devroit étouffer la Mélodie, l’anime, la renforce, la détermine: les diverses Parties, sans se confondre, concourent au même effet ; et quoique chacune d’elles paroisse avoir son Chant propre, de toutes ces Parties réunies, on n’entend sortir qu’un seul et même Chant. C’est-là ce que j’appelle Unité de Mélodie” (OC, V: 1144). “Il y a, dans la Musique, une Unité successive qui se rapporte au sujet, et par laquelle toutes les Parties, bien liées, composent un seul tout, dont on apperçoit l’ensemble et tous les rapports. Mais il y a une autre Unité d’objet plus fine, plus simultanée, d’où naît, sans qu’on y songe, l’énergie de la Musique et la force de ses expressions” (OC, V: 1143). See my detailed discussion of the significance of music’s temporal and sequential nature in Rousseau among the Moderns, esp. 22–28. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 291. For an interesting reading of Brecht in relation to Diderot and Rousseau, see Andy Byford, “The Figure of the ‘Spectator’ in the Theoretical Writings of Brecht, Diderot, and Rousseau.” Symposium 56, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 25–42.

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

Adorno warns of a similar effect of isolating independent moments in music and not perceiving symphonic unity as a result of radio transmission: “The meaning of the music automatically shifts from the totality to the individual moments because their interrelation and articulation by dynamics and colors is no longer fully affected. These moments become semi-independent episodes, organized mainly by their chronological succession.” See “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” Essays on Music, 262. See Cynthia Verba’s excellent discussion of Rousseau in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory in relation to imitation: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Radical and Traditional Views in the Dictionnaire de musique,” The Journal of Musicology 7.3 (1989): 308–326. “Le musician qui veut rendre du bruit par du bruit se trompe,” “il faut que les objets parlent pour se faire entendre, il faut toujours dans toute imitation qu’une espéce de discours supplée à la voix de la nature”(OC, V: 417). See my detailed discussion of Rousseau’s particular understanding of mimesis in chapter 5 of Rousseau among the Moderns. “Que toute la Nature soit endormie, celui qui la contemple ne dort pas, et l’art du Musicien consiste à substituer à l’image insensible de l’objet celle des mouvemens que sa presence excite dans le cœur du Contemplateur. Nonseulement il agitera la Mer, animera la flame d’un incendie, fera couler les ruisseaux, tomber la pluie et grosser les torrens ; mais il peindra l’horreur d’un desert affreux, rembrunira les murs d’une prison souterraine, calmera la tempête, rendra l’air tranquille et serein, et répandra de l’Orchestre une fraîcheur nouvelle sur les boccages. Il ne représentera pas directement ces choses, mais il excitera dans l’ame les mêmes mouvemens qu’on éprouve en les voyant” (OC,V: 861, my emphasis). This same passage appears in both the Dictionary and the Essay. See Nicholas Paige’s insighful reading of Julie in relation to the fan mail: Paige, “Rousseau’s Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloïse,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42. 1 (Fall 2008): 131–154; and my discussion of aesthetic reception in relation to theatre and the novel in Rousseau among the Moderns, 42–44. “La peinture est plus près de la nature et que la musique tient plus à l’art humain. On sent aussi que l’une intéresse plus que l’autre précisément parce qu’elle rapproche plus l’homme de l’homme et nous donne toujours quelque idée de nos semblables. . . .Les oiseaux sifflent, l’homme seul chante, et l’on ne peut entendre ni chant ni simphonie sans se dire à l’instant ; un autre être sensible est ici” (OC, V: 421). John Mowitt argues that the prioritizing of reception in musical experience occurs with the advent of electronic reproducibility. Echoing Benjamin and Adorno, Mowitt underscores a shift in the means of production of sound recording from traditional media—radio and the LP—toward electromagnetic recording. Paralleling this shift, he argues that the subject constituted by the new media becomes more acutely aware of the means of production, as well as the social character of cultural production. Rousseau’s insights into the significance of reception for the aesthetic experience of music underscore many of the tendencies identified by Mowitt, including the significance of memory. Moreover, the shift that Mowitt aligns with electromagnetic recording technology already appears in Rousseau’s considerations of the 141

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44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

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processes of meaningful sound production in the form of music. See Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility,” in The Sound Studies Reader, 213–224. “J’ai ajoûté dans la même Planche le célèbre Rans-des-Vaches, cet Air si chéri des Suisses qu’il fut défendu sous peine de mort de jouer dans leurs Troupes, parce qu’il faisoit fondre en larmes, déserter ou mourir ceux qui l’entendoient, tant il excitoit en eux l’ardent desir de revoir leur pays. On chercheroit en vain dans cet Air les accens énergiques capables de ­produire de si étonnans effets. Ces effets, qui n’ont aucun lieu sur les étrangers, ne viennent que de l’habitude, des souvenirs, de mille circonstances qui, retracées par cet Air à ceux qui l’entendent, et leur rappellant leur pays, leurs anciens plaisirs, leur jeunesse, et toutes leurs façons de vivre, excitent en eux une douleur amère d’avoir perdu tout cela. La Musique alors n’agit point précisément comme Musique, mais comme signe mémoratif ” (OC, V: 924). R. Murray Schaefer introduces the terms keynote sounds and signals to differentiate between sounds that are ubiquitous and sounds that are in the “foreground,” respectively. See Schaefer, “The Soundscape,” The Sound Studies Reader, 100–101. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (New York: Hafner, 1951), 96–97. In a passage in the Confessions similar to the one in the Reveries for its evocation of bird cries and savage nature, Rousseau peers into the abyss from behind a parapet and enjoys the feeling of vertigo, while en route between Lyon and Chambéry, at a place called Chailles. See OC, I: 172–173. Kant, Judgement, 94 Kant, Judgement, 96. As I have argued elsewhere, Rousseau’s account of the sublime requires interest and implies a notion of community, contra Kant’s disinterestedness. See my “Diverting Water in Rousseau: Technology, the Sublime, and the Quotidian,” The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, 53.1 (2012): 73–97 and my discussion of interest in Rousseau among the Moderns, 167–168. Mowitt argues that the turn toward reception—for him associated with the advent of electromagnetic recording—leads to an increased awareness of social mediation and modes of production. Rousseau’s turn toward reception and response to industrial noise would seem to indicate prescience about the future of sound. Perhaps in keeping with Jacques Attali’s pronouncements about music’s ability to serve as both a mirror and a kind of crystal ball for society. See Attali, Bruits, 13.

Part Four Ancients and Moderns

6 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns Patrick Riley

In his Jugement sur la Polysynodie (1756), Rousseau says that he is among “those moderns who have an ancient soul”; and this places him squarely in the camp of his greatest modern-ancient hero, François de Fénelon.1 For Rousseau owed to Fénelon nothing less than the legitimation of his obsession with Graeco-Roman antiquity. If an early reading of Plutarch set off this propensity, it was Fénelon’s ­Telemachus (1699) and Letter to the French Academy (1714) that confirmed and dignified it; thus Fénelon’s “Roman” auctoritas and gravitas were worth a great deal. The great Rousseau scholar Judith Shklar thought that Rousseau owed to Fénelon (above all) the notion of seeing and using two ancient models of social perfection—a prepolitical “age of innocence” and a fully political age of legislator-caused civic virtue—as foils to modern egoism and corruption. Fénelon’s familiar utopias of “Bétique” (celebrating pastoral innocence) and of “Salente” (depicting legislatorshaped civisme) in Telemachus were, for Shklar, echoed in Rousseau’s “happy family” (in La nouvelle Héloïse and Lettre à d’Alembert) and in his Spartan-Roman “fantasies” (in Government of Poland and the Social Contract). Small wonder, then, that Shklar should direct us toward “Rousseau’s admiring remarks about Fénelon” in the Confessions, in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in the Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, and in Emile.2 However, none of this can become clear enough until Fénelon’s social thought is exposed to the light of present day. Rousseau may have known it by heart, as Shklar herself was later to do—but we no 145

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longer do. And therefore the first task is to recover those facets of Fénelonianism that Rousseau found irresistible. *** François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon was born in Perigord in 1651, the son of an aristocratic provincial family that was distinguished but threadbare. Ordained a priest in 1675, he was within three years given an important ministry in the Church—that of spiritual guide to the “New Catholics” (ex-Huguenots) in northern France. This ministry lasted for a decade (1678–89) and was crowned by the publication of the treatise On the Education of Girls (1687), which first revealed Fénelon’s classicizing taste for the ancient pastoral simplicity depicted by Virgil in the Aeneid and Georgics. By this time the abbé Fénelon had caught the eye of Bossuet, the most powerful French ecclesiastic of the Grand Siècle; and for the bishop of Meaux, Fénelon produced his Réfutation de Malebranche (ca. 1687–88), which attacked Malebranche’s notion of a “Cartesian” Providence générale operating through simple, constant, universal laws and sustained Bossuet’s notion (outlined in the Histoire universelle) of a Providence particulière that had furnished David and Solomon to ancient Israel and Louis XIV to modern France. In 1689 he was named tutor to Louis’s grandson, the duc de Bourgogne (1682–1712), and it was for his royal pupil that he was soon to write Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (ca. 1693–95) and the Dialogues of the Dead. Rhetorically the high point of Fénelon’s “court” period was his speech on being received into the Académie Française (1693), with its fulsome praise of the Sun King. The archbishopric of Cambrai followed in 1695, carrying with it the titles of duke and prince of the Holy Roman Empire.3 However, in the late 1680s Fénelon had also become deeply interested in the quietistic notion of a “disinterested love of God,” free of hope for personal happiness—a disinterested interest fanned by the mystical pieties of his friend Mme. Guyon. His insistence that one must “go out of himself,” even “hate oneself ” (se haïr), finally eventuated in the Maxims of the Saints on the Inner Life (1697)—a work in which Fénelon argued for five degrees of purity and disinterestedness in human love of God. At the lowest end of the scale one finds the love of God, not for himself but for “the goods which depend on his power and which one hopes to obtain”: This Fénelon contemptuously calls “purely servile love.” One small notch above this, Fénelon places loving God, not for goods that he can provide but as the instrument of our salvation; even this “higher” love, however, is still “at the level of self-love.” At the third 146

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and fourth levels, Fénelon finds a mixture of self-love and true love of God; but what really interests him is the fifth and highest degree, the “pure love” of God that one finds only in “saints.” “One can love God,” Fénelon urges, “from a love which is pure charity, and without the slightest mixture of self-interested motivation.” In such a love, Fénelon adds, neither the “fear of punishment” nor the “hope of reward” plays any part at all.4 As is well known, Bossuet and others—including Malebranche, in his Traité de l’amour de Dieu—argued that Fénelon’s “disinterested” love excluded all hope of salvation, as well as all fear of justified punishment, and thus subverted Christianity. Fénelon’s work was finally placed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in March 1699. In this condemnation the prime mover was Bossuet, now Fénelon’s greatest detractor: “To detach oneself from himself to the point of no longer desiring to be happy, is an error which neither nature, nor grace, nor reason, nor faith can suffer.” And even Leibniz, though another victim of Bossuet, thought that Fénelon’s “se haïr,” to hate oneself, went too far: In the Théodicée and Monadologie, he condemns those who defend “the annihilation of all that belongs to us in our own right”—if persons (“monads”) are “swallowed” without remainder by God, in a kind of occidental Nirvana.5 In April 1699, a month after Fénelon’s work was placed on the Index, Telemachus was printed without the author’s permission, through “the infidelity of a copyist.” Louis XIV had already banished the “chimerical” Fénelon to his Cambrai diocese in 1697, and with the double disaster of 1699—condemnation at Rome followed (within a few weeks) by publication of the “Homeric” novel that Louis considered an attack on his faults—Fénelon was divested of his pension and of his tutorship of the duc de Bourgogne. He never set foot in Versailles, or even Paris, again. With the premature death in 1712 of the duc de Bourgogne, whom Fénelon had carefully educated to be an enlightened successor to his grandfather, Fénelon’s hopes for a renewed France collapsed like a house of cards. His Démonstration de l’existence de Dieu (1713) was a work of pure theology; and, indeed, had Fénelon not been a royal tutor for ten years, Telemachus and the Dialogues of the Dead would almost certainly never have come into existence. Conscientiously administering his half-Flemish diocese even as Louis XIV made perpetual war on its borders, constantly engaging in a wide-ranging correspondence as spiritual counselor, Fénelon died, prematurely worn out, in ­January 1715. To this day many French Fénelonians view the archbishop of 147

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Cambrai as a saint and martyr, the victim of the “interested” high politics of Louis XIV, Bossuet, and the Roman curia. The year 1716 saw the posthumous publication of the magnificent Letter on the Occupations of the French Academy (written in 1714), in which Fénelon contributed to the “quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns” by offering glowing praise of Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Virgil, and Cicero and insisting that “it is our insane and cruel vanity, and not the noble simplicity of the ancients, which needs to be corrected.” It was that “noble simplicity” that he had tried to illustrate in the demi-Platonic myths of “Bétique” and “Salente,” in Telemachus: “When the ancient poets wanted to charm the imagination of men, they conducted them far from the great cities; they made them forget the luxury of their time, and led them back to the age of gold; they represented shepherds dancing of the flowered grass in the shade of the grove, in a delightful season, rather than agitated hearts, and great men who are unhappy in virtue of their very greatness.”6 Telemachus may have contributed to Fénelon’s downfall, but the book was spectacularly successful: indeed it was the most read literary work in eighteenth-century France (after the Bible). Cherished and praised by Rousseau, it was first translated into English in the very year of its publication and was retranslated by no less a figure than novelist Tobias Smollett in 1776. In Rousseau’s Emile the eponymous pupil is given Robinson Crusoe as his sole adolescent reading, then Fénelon’s Telemachus on reaching adulthood—a striking concession from one who thought almost all literature morally suspect. *** Without doubt the two most important pieces of French political theory at the turn of the eighteenth century are Bossuet’s Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (completed in 1704) and Fénelon’s Telemachus.7 However, whereas Bossuet offered the greatest of all defenses of divine right monarchy—in which Louis XIV’s rule is unbrokenly descended from Abraham’s covenant with God in Genesis (“kings shall come out of you”)—Fénelon theorized what might be called a “republican” monarchy in which the key notions are simplicity, labor, the virtues of agriculture, the absence of luxury and splendor, and the elevation of peace over war and aggrandizement. This proto-­ Rousseauian, demilitarized “Spartanism” led Louis XIV, of course, to read Telemachus as a satire on his luxuriousness and bellicosity, and Fénelon fell permanently from official favor. Fénelon combines 148

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­ onarchical rule with republican virtues in a unique way. After him m Montesquieu was to draw a necessary connection between monarchy and “war and the enlargement of dominion” and to separate monarchy by a categorical gulf from republican simplicity and “virtue,” and Rousseau was to restore a more nearly Fénelonian view of “republican monarchy” in his glowing Plutarchian encomium of Lycurgus—in a Sparta not just temporally and geographically but morally distant from Versailles. It was no accident that Rousseau so greatly admired Fénelon’s fable: for like Emile, Telemachus is the story of the moral and political education of a young man by a knowledgeable and virtuous tutor. Whereas Emile, however, is in some sense Everyman, the tutor in Telemachus, Mentor, is preparing a young prince to succeed Ulysses at Ithaca. As Rousseau says, “Emile is not a king, nor am I god, so that we are not distressed that we cannot imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good they did.”8 Fénelon himself, in a letter from 1710, indicates his objective in writing Telemachus for his royal pupil, the duc de Bourgogne: “As for Telemachus, it is a fabulous narration in the form of an heroic poem like those of Homer and of Virgil, into which I have put the main instructions which are suitable for a young prince whose birth destines him to rule. . . . In these adventures I have put all the truths necessary to government, and all the faults that one can find in sovereign power.”9 Louis XIV, for his part, saw nothing but the alleged “faults” of sovereign power in Telemachus—faults that Fénelon describes at length in his account of misrule by Idomeneus, former king of Crete. (Because Idomeneus kills his own son and is deposed and exiled, one can understand Louis’s displeasure!) One of Mentor’s long speeches to the slowly reforming Idomeneus, now king of Salente, in book X of Telemachus must have been read by Louis XIV as a veiled, mythologized version of what Fénelon would have wanted to say to, or rather against Versailles: Have you sought after people who were the most disinterested, and the most likely to contradict you . . . to condemn your passions and your unjust feelings? No, no: let us see whether you will now have the courage to be humiliated by the truth which condemns you. You have exhausted your riches; you have never thought of augmenting your people, nor of cultivating fertile lands. Was it not necessary to view these two things as the two essential foundations of your power—to have many good people, and well-cultivated lands to nourish them? It would require a long peace to favor the multiplication of your people. You should never think of anything but agriculture and the establishment of the wisest laws. A vain ambition has 149

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pushed you to the very edge of the precipice. By virtue of wanting to appear great, you have let yourself ruin your true greatness. Hasten to repair these faults; suspend all your great works; renounce this display which would ruin your new city; let your people breathe in peace.10

That second paragraph, particularly, could be invisibly woven into Rousseau’s Social Contract, book 2, chapter 11: “Devote your whole attention to agriculture, which causes man to multiply, and drive out the arts and crafts.” (To be sure, both Fénelon and Rousseau have their roots in Cato’s De Rustica, with its praise of Cincinnatus’s virtues and its equation of moneylending with murder.) But Fénelon did not put such speeches into the mouth of Mentor only; at every turn and in every chapter, the inventions de la vanité et de la molesse are denounced. In book VII, having escaped the seductions of Calypso, Mentor and Telemachus are told a story of the land of Bétique by Adoam, who reveals that the luxuries of Greece and Egypt are anathema in that simple prepolitical land: Among those people [Adoam says] we found gold and silver put to the same use as iron—for example as ploughshares. . . . They are almost all shepherds or laborers [who practice only] those arts necessary for their simple and frugal life. . . . When one speaks to them of peoples who have the art of making superb buildings, furniture of gold and silver, fabrics ornamented with embroideries and with precious stones, exquisite perfumes . . . they reply in these terms: ‘These people are very unfortunate to have used up so much labor and industry in order to corrupt themselves. This superfluity softens, enervates, torments those who possess it: it tempts those who are without it to want to acquire it through injustice and violence. Can one call good a superfluity which serves only to make men evil?’. . . It is thus, Adoam went on, that those wise men spoke, who learned their wisdom only by studying mere nature.11

Rousseau must have remembered this Fénelonian inversion of the usual value of precious metals when, in the Government of Poland, he suggested awarding gold medals to the lowest public benefactors, silver ones to those who contribute more, and plaques of steel to those who most advance the general good.12 The unfortunate outgrowths of “vanity and flabbiness” are set in even higher relief by Fénelon’s account of the austere and noble pleasures of “just kings” who live in the eternal daylight of the Elysian fields. In book XIV of Telemachus, Telemachus is ferried across the river Styx by Charon, where he sees rulers “who have governed men wisely” enjoying 150

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“a happiness infinitely greater than that of the rest of men who have loved virtue on earth”: “Neither blood-covered war nor cruel envy which bites with a venomous tooth, and which bears vipers wound around its middle and its arms, nor jealousy, nor mistrust, nor fear, nor vain desires, ever approach this happy abode of peace. . . . A pure and gentle light surrounds the bodies of these just men and covers them in its rays like a vestment.”13 Here, of course, the Champs Elysées take on some of the coloration of a Christian Heaven—even if Fénelon’s avowed models are Homer and Virgil. However, what is least “Homeric”—and also most Rousseauian—is the transformation of the notion of “heroism” in Telemachus. The nominal hero, of course, is Telemachus—the son of a greater hero, Ulysses. But the true hero of Fénelon’s work is certainly Mentor. It is he who educates and restrains a Telemachus who could easily degenerate into another Idomeneus. The true hero for Fénelon is not the wanderer on an Odyssey to Ithaca, nor a Louis le Grand, who sacrificed real goods to apparent ones; the true hero is the moral-civic educator who “denatures” natural egoists—the man whom Rousseau later called “the true miracle” in the Social Contract. The proof comes at the very end of Telemachus: Mentor undergoes a metamorphosis and is revealed as Minerva (goddess of wisdom), and the book ends abruptly before Telemachus is shown being reunited with Ulysses. The hero has already been resolved into pure Wisdom. The nominal hero barely reaches Ithaca. What the true hero teaches is a political version of Fénelon’s quietistic “disinterested love of God”; just as one truly loves God only by renouncing self-interested amour-propre (the hope for personal salvation), so too for Fénelon the “idea of pure disinterestedness dominates the political theories of ancient legislators.” In antiquity, “it was not a matter of finding happiness in conforming to that order but, au contraire, of devouring oneself for love of that order, perishing, depriving the self of all resources.” Fénelon completes this thought with a wonderful passage that Rousseau must have had in mind when he wrote his discourse on Political Economy for Diderot’s Encyclopédie sixty years later: “All these [ancient] legislators and philosophers who reasoned about laws presupposed that the fundamental principle of political society was that of preferring the public to the self—not through hope of serving one’s own interests, but through the simple, pure disinterested love of the political order, which is beauty, justice, and virtue itself.” If one brackets God out of Fénelonian thought, the Rousseauian “civic” ideal is more than half in place. 151

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And what is displaced is virtually everything imagined or accomplished by Louis XIV. That is clearest, perhaps, in Fénelon’s On Pure Love: Nothing is so odious as this idea of a heart always occupied with itself: nothing delights us so much as certain generous actions which persuade the world (and us) that we have done the good for love of the good, without seeking ourselves therein. Self-love itself renders homage to this disinterested virtue, by the shrewdness with which it tries to take on the appearance of it—so true is it that man, who does not bring himself about, is not made to seek after himself, but to exist solely for him who has made him. His glory and his perfection consist in going out of himself (sortir de soi), in forgetting himself, in losing himself, in being swallowed up in the simple love of infinite beauty.14

The central truth about Fénelon, then, is that the whole of his practical thought—religious, moral, political—is held together by the notion of disinterested love, of “going out of oneself ” in order to lose oneself in a greater Beyond (or, in the case of God, Above). The disinterested love of God, without self-interest and hope for benefits, is pure charity (as in Pascal’s Pensées, in which “the self is hateful” and charity is “of another order”15); the disinterested love of one’s neighbor is friendship (as in Cicero’s De Amicitia); the disinterested love of the polis is a protoRousseauian ancient civic virtue. On this view of the moral world, an austere Pascalian charité and a Platonic “sublimated” eros meet. Small wonder that Fénelon, a brilliantly sympathetic classical scholar, loved the Symposium and Phaedrus with nonconcupiscent passion.16 *** Because one cannot hope to point out every parallel between Fénelon and Rousseau, the best course is to bring out affinities between Fénelon’s last work, the Letter on the Occupations of the Académie Française, and Rousseau’s first, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), the work that made Rousseau. Fénelon’s Letter was written soon before his death in January 1715 and was posthumously published in the following year. It is the summa of his thought, drawing together his favorite themes. However, above all the Letter is celebrated as the most important turn-of-the-eighteenthcentury contribution to the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns”—the quarrel to which Rousseau was soon to contribute so much. That quarrel itself, however, has a limited side and a much broader significance. The limited quarrel was French, took place mainly from 1685 to 1715, and was fairly narrowly literary; the broader and more 152

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important quarrel was pan-European and political. The “large quarrel” goes back at least to Machiavelli’s claim in The Discourses that the golden age of ancient Roman civic virtue remains a perfect model for intelligent imitation by modern men, whenever fortuna affords the opportunity,17 and extends forward in time—after Rousseau’s ardent “Spartanism”18—to Benjamin Constant’s celebrated essay on ancient versus modern liberty in the post-Napoleonic period. The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns then had a very long run, and it included phenomena as significant as Poussin’s and Lorrain’s paintings of Greek and Roman pastoral felicity at the very moment of Louis XIV’s glittering Versailles ascendancy. Fénelon was an important contributor to that large political-cultural quarrel stretching from Machiavelli to Rousseau to Constant—though his Letter on the Occupations of the Académie Française was nominally concerned with a more parochial fight within the Académie Française, between the classicist Boileau and modernist Fontenelle, for example. Fénelon’s Letter, to be sure, deals with the local and narrow issues of the day—such as the question of whether French is less adequate and expressive than Greek and Latin or whether the rhyme schemes of Corneille are more forced and stilted than those of Sophocles. However, in subordinating the “insane and cruel vanity” of the moderns to the “noble simplicity” of the ancients and in praising Homer, Virgil, Plato, Demosthenes, and Cicero as nearly perfect models, Fénelon went well beyond Parisian academic quarrels about rhetoric and diction to offer a general encomium of pre-Christian civilization. That is, of course, paradoxical, as Fénelon was not only a Christian but an archbishop. But his view (in the Maximes des saints) was that most modern Christians love God from the base of an “interested” motive (hope for personal salvation), whereas the ancients disinterestedly loved the polis and sacrificed themselves for it. For Fénelon, the Christians have the right object (God) but the wrong motive (self-love); the ancients had a lower if estimable object (the city) but a worthy motive (disinterested affection). Here only Fénelon’s own words in the Letter will do: Those who cultivate their reason and who love virtue—can they compare the vain and ruinous luxury which in our times is the plague of morality and the shame of the nation, with the happy and elegant simplicity which the ancients place before our eyes? Virgil who saw all the magnificence of Rome from close up, turned the poverty of the King Evander into the grace and the ornament of his 153

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poem [The Aeneid]. . . . Virgil even goes to the point of comparing a free, peaceable and pastoral life with the voluptuous actions, mixed with trouble, which come into play with great fortunes. He imagined nothing happy except a wise mediocrity, in which men would be secure from the desire for prosperity, and [full of ] compassion for the miseries of others.19

It is easy enough to see why Rousseau so cherished Fénelon and made Fénelon’s Telemachus, with its quasi-Platonic utopias of pacific and agricultural simplicity, the only book that Emile is encouraged to read on reaching adulthood. To be sure, one can understand the dismay of Archbishop Beaumont of Paris: Emile is not given Scripture, or even Bossuet’s Politics from Scripture; he is given a Greek work bearing the subtitle Continuation of the Fourth Book of the Odyssey. He is given Tertullian standing on his head: If we have Greece, what need of Jerusalem? If, indeed, Rousseau had died in the early 1750s, before the writing of Inequality and the Social Contract, leaving the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences as his main legacy, he would now probably be thought of as a minor if eloquent embroiderer of familiar Fénelonian themes. For the First Discourse (1750) is Rousseau’s first contribution to the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns; with its magnification of Spartan and Roman republican civic virtue and its denigration of Athenian aestheticism, it is an extension of the view that Fénelon had made famous in his 1714 Letter. It is almost as if Rousseau, on the road to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, were thinking of these Fénelonian lines: Nothing so much marks a declining nation as this disdainful luxuriousness which rejects the frugality of the ancients. It is this depravity which overturned Rome. . . . I love a hundred times better the poor Ithaca of Ulysses than a city [Imperial Rome] shining through so odious a magnificence. Happy the men who content themselves with pleasures which cost neither crime nor ruin; it is our insane and cruel vanity and not the noble simplicity of the ancients which needs to be corrected.20

Because Fénelon’s letter is so proto-Rousseauian, Jean-Jacques needed only to enlarge a long familiar subordination of modernity to antiquity in Arts and Sciences; mainly he needed to add Cato and Brutus to the Socrates whom Fénelon had already made a civic saint. He did this, in effect, by collapsing Socrates into Cato and Brutus: Socrates is now the only acceptable Athenian, but that is because he willingly died 154

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for the sake of the laws. The Platonic Socrates who hears the harmony of the spheres and sees the psyche as a Pythagorean geometrizing echo of a consonant kosmos yields to Socrates the civic martyr in the Crito. Socrates displays “the general will one has as a citizen.”21 However, that last phrase reveals what is not yet present in the First Discourse. If what is ancient, à la Fénelon, is fully “there” in the First Discourse, what has not yet appeared is modern, indeed Lockean, “voluntary agreement” as the basis of legitimate government in the Social Contract.22 Voluntary agreement gives political power to governors, Locke had said in the Second Treatise. There must be voluntariness as something morally crucial before “general will” can be a will of a particular kind, and that voluntariness is Augustinian/Christian—as is Rousseau’s stress on “conscience” in the Lettres Morales and his insistence on the final arrival of adult moral autonomy at the end of Emile’s denaturing, transformative education.23 The civic généralité of Roman-Spartan antiquity has not yet been fused in the First Discourse with the autonomy and will of Inequality and the works that succeed it. Indeed, the key term volonté générale does not even appear until the Discourse on Political Economy. In time, Rousseau’s thought became far richer and more complex, but the final worry is whether that thought is as coherent as it is complex—whether the Fénelonian, Plutarchian, Lockean, Roman, Christian, Platonic, Machiavellian, Spartan, and Augustinian strands really cohere. Whether Rousseauian thought is truly a corpus or just a basket of enthused-over disjecta membra is what is at issue. At the time of the First Discourse, Rousseau was in his neo-Fénelonian vein. That is why he places Ovid on his title page (“here I am the barbarian because they do not understand me”); later he sought and sometimes achieved an equilibrium between ancient generality and modern voluntarism. And that is why the general will “expresses everything he wanted to say,” in Shklar’s famous phrase.24 Fénelon’s Letter on the Occupations of the Académie Française, then, made a crucial contribution to one of the greatest ongoing modern disputes. If he was certainly no Machiavellian, he loved Rome as ardently as the celebrated Florentine did, and he bequeathed that love to the most intense and eloquent of modern “Romanists”—Rousseau. *** Now that the links between Fénelon and Rousseau have been brought out—the devotion to Greek and Roman antiquity and the subordination of self-love to a larger general good—it is important to stress the 155

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things that separate them; and the main thing that distances them is the crucial difference between “generality” and true “universality.” If the mature Rousseau consistently sought after a civic general will valid only for Sparta or Rome en particulier—so that the general will one has as a citizen is particular with respect to the entire genre humain—Fénelon remained a believer in a Dantean universal respublica christiana held together by universal charity or “disinterested” love. Unorthodox as Fénelon may have been, he was not about to deny Christian universalism, and indeed he and Leibniz were the last figures of the first rank to adhere to the ideals of Dante’s De Monarchia. To be sure, the young Rousseau had at one time clung to the venerable idea of a morale universelle. In an early, unpublished manuscript called Chronologie universelle, ou histoire générale du temps (ca. 1737), he had appealed to Fénelon’s notion of a universal Christian republic: We are all brothers; our neighbors ought to be as dear to us as ourselves. “I love the human race more than my country,” said the illustrious M. de Fénelon, “my country more than my family and my family more than myself.” Sentiments so full of humanity ought to be shared by all men. . . . The universe is a great family of which we are all members. . . . However extensive may be the power of an individual, he is always in a position to make himself useful . . . to the great body of which he is a part. If he can [do this] he indispensably ought to.25

Later, of course—most notably in his attack on Diderot’s notion of a reason-ordained “universal morality” in the first version of the Social Contract—Rousseau would abandon the universelle in favor of the génerale and exchange the respublica christiana for more modest republics, such as Sparta, Rome, and Geneva. That is especially clear in the first of the Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), in which Rousseau shows very clearly that his concern is to produce a civic general will that is peculiar to some particular nation, not a Fénelonian universal will for the good of the whole human race—even if this entails abandoning Christianity as a universal religion: All the ancient religions, not excepting that of the Jews, were national in origin, appropriated to, and incorporated in, the state; forming the basis, or at least making a part of the legislative system. Christianity, on the contrary, is in its principles a universal religion, having nothing exclusive, nothing local, nothing peculiar to one country any more than to another. Its divine author, embracing all mankind in his boundless charity, came to remove those barriers that separated the nations from each other, and to unite all mankind in a people 156

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of brethren . . . National religions are useful to a state . . . but they are hurtful to mankind in general . . . Christianity, on the contrary, by making men just, moderate and peaceable is very advantageous to society in general, but it weakens the force of the political spring [and] . . . breaks the unity of the moral body.26

Rousseau ends this passage with a radical claim that proves how little he finally favored Christian universalism: “Christianity . . . inspires humanity rather than patriotism, and tends rather to the forming of men than of citizens.” In the end, for Rousseau, no morale universelle—whether given by Christ or reason—can help in the transformation of natural men into denatured citizens. The générale must be (somewhat) particulière. Admittedly in the Political Economy, a comparatively early transitional work, Rousseau seems to vacillate between universalité and généralité. There he first says that “any body politic” is “a moral being that has a will,” and that “this general will which always tends to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part, and which is the source of the law, is . . . the rule of what is just and unjust.” But this “rule of justice,” Rousseau immediately adds, although infallible for citizens within a particular polity, “can be defective with [respect to] foreigners.” This is simply because “the will of the state, though general in relation to its [own] members, is no longer [such] in relation to other states and their members.” At this early point, however, Rousseau was not yet ready to say (as he does in the Lettres écrites de la montagne) that humanity must yield to patriotism, that men matter less than citizens; thus, having begun by making the general will the will of some particular body politic, Rousseau falls back in the moreor-less Fénelonian thought that “the large town of the world becomes the body politic, of which the law of nature is always the general will, and the various states and peoples are merely individual members.”27 In his mature, fully confident, and radically civic works, that last echo of the Chronologie universelle, of a Dantean–Fénelonian Christian respublica under Thomist natural law, finally vanishes altogether. After Inequality, there is usually no natural law with which the general will can be equated, and, after the Letters Written from the Mountain and the Government of Poland, the “various states” are no longer members of a world body politic. In the Political Economy there is still some vacillation between the polis and the cosmopolis, the general and the universal; later that vacillation gave way to a radical constancy. *** 157

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If then the disinterested love of Fénelonianism will not explain everything in Rousseau, it nonetheless accounts for a great deal; at a minimum one must fold in Lockean “voluntarism” before one can begin to understand Rousseau’s crucial insistence that “the general will is always right.” Fénelonian antiquity and Lockean will, subtly fused, do indeed provide the substructure of Rousseau’s politics. Rousseau also captured his devotion to Fénelon’s love of antiquity and to Locke’s ardent modernism when he characterized himself, in a moment of brilliant insight, as one of those “moderns who has an ancient soul.” No one ever saw this unorthodox and unexpected Rousseauian rapprochement between Fénelon and Locke as clearly as Judith Shklar. But then she was in the habit of seeing, not through a glass darkly, but face-to-face. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 158

Notes

Jugement sur la Polysynodie, in C. E. Vaughan, ed., Political Writings (­Cambridge University Press, 1915), vol. I, p. 421. J. N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (­Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 4–5. Elie Carcassonne, Fénelon: l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Boivin, 1946), ch. 1, and, above all, Jeanne-Lydie Goré, L’itenéraire de Fénelon (Paris: P. U. F., 1957), passim. Fénelon, Maximes des saints, A. Cherel, ed. (Paris: Libraire Bloud, 1911), pp. 118–130. Bossuet, Avertissement to Quatre écrits sur les Maximes des Saints, cited in M. Terestchenko, “La doctrine de Fénelon du pur amour,” Les études philosophiques, 2 (1992). See also Leibniz, Théodicée (New Haven, 1952), no. 10, and also Patrick Riley, “Leibniz’ Monadologie, 1714–2014,” in Leibniz Review, vol. 24, December 2014. Fénelon, Lettre sur les occupations de l’Académie Française, in Oeuvres de Fénelon (Paris: Bonnot,1835), vol. III, pp. 248–250. Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, Patrick Riley, ed. & trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1990), introduction. Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, Patrick Riley, ed. & trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1994), introduction. Rousseau, Emile, B. Foxley, trans. (London: Everyman, 1910), p. 431. Fénelon, “Letter to Letellier,” Oeuvres, vol. III, pp. 653–654. Fénelon, Telemachus, pp. 152–153. Ibid., pp. 109–110. Rousseau, Government of Poland, in Political Writings, F. Watkins, trans. (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1953), p. 174. Fénelon, Telemachus, p. 252. Fénelon, “Sur le pur amour,” Oeuvres, vol. I, pp. 307–310. Pascal, Pensées, L. Brunschvicg, ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1914), nos. 473–483 and (above all) no. 792. The notion that egoism is evil ties together figures as radically different as Plato, Augustine, Pascal, Fénelon, and Rousseau. In each of these there is

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

a sublimated ascent from low to high. Here Kant is exceptional: for him all love is “pathological,” and ethics needs “reason-ordained objective ends,” not sublimated eros. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Indianpolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts, 1956 ), pp. 126–136. Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. I, ch. 10 and bk. II, introduction. See again Rousseau’s claim that “I am a modern who has an ancient soul.” Fénelon, Lettre sur l’Academie Française, pp. 248ff. Ibid. Rousseau, Du contrat social, in Vaughan, Political Writings, vol. II, pp. 35–36. Ibid., pp. 105, 28. Rousseau, Emile, p. 436. Shklar, Men and Citizens, p. 184. Rousseau, “Chronologie universelle,” cited in Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 206–207. Rousseau, Letters from the Mountain (Edinburgh: 1764), pp. 34–37. Rousseau, Political Economy, R. Masters, trans. in On the Social Contract (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), pp. 211–212.

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7 Stoicism for Rousseau and Other Beleaguered Moderns Mark Hulliung

Devoted to the promise of the modern age, the French intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the so-called philosophes, began by outspokenly repudiating the Stoicism of resignation and self-denial that they had inherited from times past. Yet long before the end of the century, they found themselves reluctantly returning, willy-nilly, in fits and starts, to a partial recovery and adaptation of the sad doctrines professed by the likes of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Most of all, it was ­Rousseau who felt compelled to retreat to a sometime Stoicism—in his case because of its uses in indicting the modern world and keeping it at bay. Initially his embrace of resurgent Stoicism had something in common with that of his one-time comrades, later ex-comrades; but over time it became something more, an integral feature of a grand personal and intellectual drama unlike that of any other figure of his age. I. Montaigne and the Stoic Legacy

For the French thinkers of the eighteenth century, Rousseau included, the inspiring figure of times past who had shown the way beyond Stoic notions of self-abnegation and resignation was Montaigne. Little did they know earlier in the century that the time would arrive later in their careers when Montaigne would again be relevant to their circumstances, the second time round by way of demonstrating how to utilize Stoic strategies and tactics to fend off challenges originally unforeseen, without endorsing the entire Stoic philosophy. Stoicism as a worldview would disappear; Stoicism as a coping mechanism would reassert itself. Why the philosophes were originally drawn to Montaigne is not mysterious. Near the outset of his Essays, he had asserted, in good Stoic fashion, “that to philosophize is to learn to die.” Later, to the delight 161

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of Rousseau, Diderot, and all the philosophes, he decisively reversed his stand, holding that “death is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life . . . Life should be an aim unto itself.”1 Montaigne relished the human body and was quite willing to discuss his own body, which greatly pleased his successors two centuries later, who not only overturned the Church’s teachings about the flesh but also rejected Marcus Aurelius’s talk about the body as “a prey of worms,” death as “a release from impressions of sense . . . , and from service to the flesh,” and who had approvingly quoted Epictetus’s saying that a human was “a poor soul burdened with a corpse.” Also to the liking of his eighteenth-century admirers, Montaigne accepted the passions, which again set him again apart from Marcus Aurelius, who had commanded, “Let no emotions of the flesh . . . affect the supreme and sovereign part of the soul,” our reason, the sole source of our dignity.2 Christians had long deemed Stoics guilty of the sin of pride3 in thinking they could save themselves without recourse to priests; Rousseau and his original Parisian cohort, following the example set by Montaigne, thought it essential to save humanity from both Christianity and Stoicism, frequently denouncing the two interchangeably. Montaigne’s reversal of the Stoics on the emotions had direct implications for the moral outlook of his intellectual heirs, especially for the humanitarian concern that figures so prominently in the ranks of Enlightenment intellectuals. “I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and gentleness,” wrote Montaigne. “Yet to the Stoics pity is a vicious passion; they want us to succor the afflicted, but not to unbend and sympathize with them.”4 For the philosophes generally but Rousseau especially, as in his Discourse on Inequality, pity or commiseration is the foundation in human nature of our concern for others. Humanity for Montaigne and Rousseau must be experienced, not conceptualized; it is not real as an abstraction, or can only be conceptualized after being experienced, sensed, felt. How could the philosophes fail to appreciate Montaigne’s invitation to abandon Stoicism when it was accompanied by so many other attitudes that seemed to prove he was a Lumière before the age of the Lumières? His epistemological skepticism and rejection of the vita contemplativa was theirs; his hostility to the European rape of the Americas theirs as well; and his dismissal of the pursuit of glory as “the most useless, worthless, and false coin that is current among us”5 opened the door to the efforts of Voltaire, Turgot, and Condorcet to write a new history, dedicated to recording the advances of culture, 162

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civilization, and the life of the mind, rather than the butchery and death celebrated in classical histories of armies, battles, and bloodletting. Living in an age of horrific religious civil wars, Montaigne again pleased the philosophes when he denounced ideological fanaticism as they would later. The religious fanatics, complained Montaigne, “want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts.”6 Long before Voltaire wrote Candide, the Essays of Montaigne urged us to cultivate our own gardens and to seek modest, attainable, life-affirming goals. Following in Montaigne’s footsteps, the philosophes were well prepared to break definitively with Stoicism—or so they initially thought. II. Banishing the Stoics

No document of the eighteenth century was more symbolic of the self-conscious break with Stoicism than the relatively brief essay “Le Philosophe,”7 of uncertain authorship, possibly the work of the grammarian Dumarsais, originally published in 1743, reissued by Diderot for the Encyclopédie in 1765, and published yet again by Voltaire in 1773. Doubtless what attracted Voltaire so strongly to “Le Philosophe” was that its attack on antiworldly Stoicism could readily double as a refusal of otherworldly Christianity. In the pages of “Le Philosophe,” Voltaire could discern a replay of the critique of Pascal he had appended to his work of the 1730s, the Lettres philosophiques. It was abandonment of the world, whether by Stoics or Augustinian Christians, that was fervently repudiated by the author of “Le Philosophe,” much to the delight of Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, Rousseau, and all the luminaries of the age. Voltaire had led the way when, against Pascal, he used Locke’s empiricism to remark that “Our condition is precisely to think about outside things, with which we have a necessary connection . . . To think about oneself, apart from all natural things, is to think of nothing at all.”8 What Voltaire had done against Pascal, Dumarsais would do against Stoicism a decade later. Taking direct aim at the Stoicism of withdrawal, Dumarsais wrote that “Our philosophe does not think he lives in exile in this world; he does not believe himself in enemy territory.” Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were certain that social intercourse threatens a loss of self, and that even love of family members is a trap. Kissing your wife or child is dangerous, warned Epictetus; remind yourself constantly, he recommended, that they are merely human and as such have no cosmic worth, and then, “when the wife or child 163

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dies, you will not be disturbed.”9 Marcus Aurelius advised that no matter where we are, we can and should withdraw from society into ourselves whenever possible: “At any moment you can retire within yourself. Nowhere can man find a quieter retreat than in his soul . . . Avail yourself often then of this retirement, and so continually renew yourself.”10 Precisely the opposite is Dumarsais’s contention that “our philosophe . . . wishes to find pleasure in the company of others, and to find pleasure he must give pleasure.” All of life is and should be an exchange of social services, and it is in the company of others that we find fulfillment. No person can be happy alone but potentially everyone can be happy living with others was the message of “Le Philosophe.” Virtue need not be the onerous, repressive virtue of the Stoics; it is simply a matter of doing what we want to do, enjoying and honoring our mutually fulfilling exchanges and relationships with others, whether they be our family, friends, neighbors, business associates, or anyone else with whom we socially interact. The extent to which the philosophes aimed to overturn the Stoic message is all the more evident if we spell out the sharp contrast between the admonitions of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius concerning the stage and the playing of roles, on the one hand, and Diderot’s enthusiasm for the theatre and acting, on the other. “It is not necessary to go to the theatres often,”11 suggested Epictetus, and important, if one does attend, never to respond to the performances with a display of emotion—a loss of self. To Epictetus and to other Stoics, it was true but quite unfortunate that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. “Remember that thou art an actor in a play,” recommended Epictetus; remember also that “this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another”—a command of resignation to one’s social station, whatever it is, including, in his own case, that of serving as a slave and to a man who was by some accounts a brutal master.12 Marcus Aurelius may have been an emperor rather than a slave, but he took no satisfaction in his high station. As a good Stoic he went so far as to deny himself the emotional satisfaction of secretly deriding the public life he despised; after any brief respite he told himself to go “back without fretting to the duties to which you must return,” never to lament his fate, no matter how tempted he might be to complain about his unhappy burden. “Let no one, not even yourself, ever hear you abusing court life again.” For him, as for Epictetus and other Stoics, the comparison of living out one’s days in society to a mandatory everyday appearance on the stage 164

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was a favorite means of expressing their refined despair: “An empty pageant; a stage play; . . . puppets jerking on their strings—that is life.”13 All one need do to arrive at the position of the philosophes on acting and the theatre is answer the question, “What is the direct opposite of the Stoics?” Voltaire appreciated that drama remained at the top of the artistic hierarchy in the eighteenth century and accordingly wrote tragedies that were feeble compared to those of Corneille and Racine but which served him well as vehicles for spreading philosophical messages against fanaticism and in favor of tolerance. But it is Diderot, above all, who wrote incessantly about the art of acting and who invented a new form of theatrical entertainment, the drame. The reason Diderot cared about actors was that he wanted them to perform on a new stage, one devoted to teaching audiences a morality that would repeal the lessons taught by self-abnegating Stoics. Tragedies aim too high: at heroes not at ordinary persons; comedies aim too low: they are too frivolous to instill lessons. Diderot’s drame would occupy the space between tragedy and comedy; it would depict the everyday lives of everyday persons, teaching the audience how to honor their duties without subjecting themselves to a repressive ethics rendering them miserable. If modern-day Stoics could enhance their antiworldling credentials by citing Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus on role-playing, Diderot could remind his contemporaries that a fulfilling, nonrepressive morality of social roles was at least as old as Aristotle. On Diderot’s stage, as they witnessed performances of his Le Fils naturel or Le Père de famille, members of the audience viewed fathers and mothers, sons and daughters who knew who they were, what they must do, and who enjoyed the fulfillment that comes with living up to one’s role. To describe someone’s role in society is also to prescribe how that person should act. Is and ought merge into one: ought is not elevated in defiance of is; fathers and mothers serve themselves in serving their children. Attending a dramatic performance, the audience internalized the morality of social roles that was championed earnestly but less movingly in the treatises on ethics written by philosophes. Holbach, friend of Diderot, wrote a book on “universal morality, or the duties of man founded on his nature.” Chapter by chapter Holbach spelled out the duties of every social station, always underscoring that this was a morality that never asked us to rise above our nature. There was no dilemma of choosing between acting from virtue or self-interest since they were one. What, then, could be more wrong-headed than the world-denying admonishments uttered by Stoics and Christians? 165

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Instead of fleeing the world or sleepwalking through it, we should immerse ourselves in social existence and savor its joys. Hence ­Dumarsais’s audacious remark that the philosophe “looks on civil society as a divinity on earth.” Hence, too, Voltaire’s conclusion several years earlier to his poem Le Mondain, that Paris was his paradise. Whenever the members of the party of humanity were as hopeful about the future as Voltaire was in 1736 or Dumarsais in 1743, they rejected outright the Stoicism of world weariness. Alas, occasions for second thoughts would arise later in the century. III. The Revenge of the Stoics

One can practice Stoicism without being a Stoic. Such was Montaigne’s fate or rather his strategy for controlling his own fate; such would also be the eventual fate and strategy of his eighteenth-century admirers. It is easy to abjure Stoicism when all goes well; less easy when formidable problems arise. Stoicism would have its revenge. There were moments when Montaigne, seeking the freedom to pursue the pleasures of friendship and private life, sounded misleadingly like a Stoic. “Not being able to rule events, I rule myself,” he said, sounding a Stoic theme. “The wise man,” he wrote in another essay, “should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.” Philosophical skeptic that he was, he rejected the vita contemplativa but that did not mean he embraced the vita activa: “As for that fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover—that we are born not for our private selves, but for the public—let us boldly appeal to those who are in the midst of the dance.” All of which seemingly echoes Stoic sentiments, but on a careful reading of Montaigne he was not embracing the grand philosophical claims of Stoicism. He wanted tranquility, “tranquility not according to . . . [the philosophers] but according to me. Since philosophy has not been able to find a way to tranquility that is suitable to all, let everyone seek it individually.”14 In what matters most Montaigne was the opposite of the Stoics: he did everything to enrich his private life, not to impoverish it. For him Stoicism was the mask he had to wear in public to enhance his private existence which consisted of the friendships, the intimate conversations, the joys of the body, and the delights of the mind that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus denied themselves. It was the substantial and unyielding difference between the social world as depicted in “Le Philosophe” and the one the philosophes 166

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actually inhabited that eventually led the new philosophes to utter words sounding like echoes of the old Stoics. Montaigne was willing to accept public service, as mayor and as diplomat, if necessary to restore and maintain order, but he had no interest whatsoever in altering the social and political world. Innovations, he despised: “I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.” “In public affairs there is no course so bad, provided it is old and stable, that is not better than change and commotion.”15 Altogether different was the situation of the philosophes who were out to reform the world, to make it better, to enact the program of the Enlightenment, but found themselves stymied by intractable obstacles. When Montaigne donned his Stoic mask, it was to rejoice in his success at protecting his private world: when the philosophes assumed the posture of Stoics, they did so to cope with their limited successes and frequent failures to change the public world. At the outset the philosophes wanted nothing less than to constitute a new intelligentsia, such as had never before existed—a “society of men of letters” that would be freestanding, independent, beholden to no one, and above patronage, hence at liberty to espouse its humanitarian ideals to the public and the leaders of the nation. They would be masters of something new, the “empire of public opinion.” Leaving their garrets behind them, they would enter le monde, where they would learn the sociable arts of pleasing the grands, the better to instruct them. Plaire and instruire would be united. Accused of being dangerous by the clergy and conservative journalists, they would reply that they abhorred the memory of revolutionary upheavals in mid-seventeenth-century England and the civil wars of sixteenth-century France. Their insistence upon removing politics from the grip of priests, far from threatening social disruption, would make for a more stable and a more humane world. Such was their ambitious program of action, well expressed in the essay “Le Philosophe.”16 Unfortunately, the vision of the philosophes was one thing: the reality with which they contended quite another. Dumarsais revived Aristotle’s belief, the opposite of that of the Stoics, that a certain measure of external goods was a prerequisite to living the good life. “The true philosopher,” one reads in “Le Philosophe,” “needs over and above the bare necessities, the modest superfluity which is a necessity for an honnête homme [a gentleman] . . . Only counterfeit philosophers [the Stoics], with their dazzling maxims, have propagated the false notion that the barest necessities suffice for a philosopher.” How far short the 167

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world fell of Dumarsais’s hope may be seen in the career of Diderot. Although he was one of the most formidable and creative intellects of the age, Diderot could barely scrape by, surviving financially but just barely because he landed the job of editor of the Encyclopédie. Caring deeply for his daughter, his only chance to provide her with a proper dowry and social respectability was by making a deal with Catherine the Great of Russia, she granting him the funds he needed in exchange for his library after his death. Thereafter, Diderot could not speak his mind publicly against “enlightened despotism,” despite his growing conviction that the only thing worse than one enlightened despot would be two in succession, because that might render the public permanently infantile.17 While Dumarsais spoke of the situation of the philosophe in le monde as it should be, d’Alembert a decade later struggled to come to terms with what it was. “I wish that my reflections may be of use to those who shall follow me in the same career,” he alerted his readers in the opening pages of his Essay on the Society of Men of Letters (1753). How his fellow philosophes could participate in society and influence it for the better while staving off its corruptions was his concern. Many a philosophe wakes up in the morning proclaiming his independence only to succumb to slavery by the evening, he noted. “Liberty, Truth, and Poverty” should be the motto of the philosophes, but d’Alembert understood that it was one thing for him, a bachelor, to abide by such a slogan, and quite another for those writers who had children to hold out against offers of sinecures and pensions. “It is not in the antechamber [of the privileged] that one learns to say, think, and do great things,” but if even a writer of the caliber of Diderot cannot make a living selling his books, who can?18 Paying the bills was only the most blatant of the problems facing the would-be agents of enlightenment. Another less obvious problem was that the entry into high society that was the rightful aspiration of the philosophes proved quite often to be their undoing. Stoics notwithstanding, social esteem is a natural and proper desire, one the philosophes were entitled to seek, d’Alembert affirmed, but which could never be attained if they lived outside society, on its fringes. Moreover, they could not hope to educate the privileged unless they entered le monde. Alas, the grands were often anything but great; for them education was external, merely for show—their philosophes also were for conspicuous display and philosophy merely the latest vogue, perhaps soon to displaced by a new fashion. It was difficult for 168

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a ­philosophe to influence the great, but easy for the great to influence a philosophe by granting him the applause that his own kind, his fellow intellectuals, jealous and petty, frequently denied him. How little the philosophes actually meant to the grands, noted d’Alembert, could be plainly seen whenever an intellectual had the audacity to disagree with one of their spoiled numbers: A display of withering contempt on the part of a self-satisfied, entitled superior for an untitled social inferior was certain to follow.19 There is another problem, explained d’Alembert, arguably the most fundamental of all. Although the grands are unwilling to be educated, they remain irreplaceable. Even if we could restructure society, and this without a shedding a drop of blood, it is better by far to practice Stoic forbearance and resign ourselves to the deeply compromised status quo, because the question who should rule cannot be answered. “All men, no matter what imbecility, flattery, or pride say, are equal by natural right.” Differences of talent are what constitute “the real differences of men.” “A nation owes principally to talents the estime of strangers.” Nevertheless, outside the sciences exactes such as geometry, in which d’Alembert excelled, there is no agreement as to who has talent, and who does not. There will never be a definitive answer in the world of the arts and letters, the sciences agréables, so even in principle, meritocracy is impossible. We do agree, however, on who has money and who has titles. Equality being out of the question, “It is necessary that the difference between these persons and others rest upon advantages that cannot be disputed or denied; now this is what we find in birth and fortune.”20 The society in which d’Alembert wished the philosophes to play a larger public role is by his account an unjust society, irremediably so. And so, after kicking Stoicism out the front door, he permits it to return through the back door. Diogenes tellingly fares well in d’Alembert’s essay, and philosophes are encouraged in good Stoic fashion to protect their inner life by keeping society at a distance. “The sage, in rendering to birth and fortune the duties that society prescribes, is miserly in these duties; he limits them to the exterior.” Also reminiscent of the Stoics is d’Alembert’s advice to his fellows concerning the stage of the world: they should attend as “spectators” judging the actors while never themselves performing as actors. D’Alembert was at the center of the French Enlightenment, and he reserved there a Stoic refuge to which embattled philosophes could retreat.21 Both d’Alembert and Diderot contemplated writing a book on ethics; neither completed his self-appointed task. How, a bewildered 169

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d’Alembert asked in 1770, could anyone living in his age be so misinformed as to write a book about obligation? “Can those who have nothing, who give everything to society and to whom society refuses everything,” can such people have any obligations? All along the philosophes had taught that virtue need not be repressive, that the exchange of services in society makes for a marriage of virtue and interest. Now he feels compelled to demand, “How can we persuade [the downtrodden] that their true interest is to be virtuous when they might cease to be so with impunity?” Frustrated that an anti-Stoic ethics is not feasible in society as constituted, he concludes by saying, “If I had found a solution to this problem, I should have come forth with my moral catechism long ago.”22 D’Alembert did not permit himself the luxury of despair. He continued his work of stacking the Academies with proponents of the philosophical cause and called upon all his diplomatic skills to keep the philosophes united, despite the inevitable tendency of intellectuals to squabble. It is telling, however, that he also warmed up in his spare time to the self-imposed task of translating Tacitus, the uncompromising historian of Roman corruption, whom he had cited at the beginning of his Essay on the Society of Men of Letters. Neither Marcus Aurelius nor Epictetus appeared on the cover with Tacitus, perhaps because they were full-time Stoics, lending their entire beings to cosmic resignation, whereas d’Alembert was a part-time Stoic, frequently but not always forced to assume an attitude of social resignation. Skirmishes could still be won in the battle for the good cause, even if one acknowledged that total victory was a chimera. As with d’Alembert, so with Diderot. All through his life, Diderot thought of writing a book proving that “even in a society as poorly ordered as ours, where successful vice is often applauded and virtue that fails is almost always ridiculed, . . . there is no better path to happiness than to be a good man.” Yet, prolific writer that he was, this was one book Diderot could not complete or even begin. “It is the work the most to my liking, the most important and interesting to undertake, the one I would recall with the most satisfaction in my last moments. It is a question I have meditated a hundred times,” a frustrated Diderot explained. But, “I have not dared pick up the pen to write the first line. I say to myself: ‘If I do not emerge victorious in this effort, I shall be the apologist of evil.’”23 If Diderot did not know how to write a treatise demonstrating that happiness and goodness, self-interest and virtue, were one, he did 170

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s­ ucceed in writing a brilliant dialogue calling for the conclusion—­ running against the entire philosophy of the Enlightenment—that one must choose one or the other, whether to be happy or good, to serve one’s interest or to be virtuous. In Rameau’s Nephew it is the reprehensible figure “Lui,” a fictionalized and upgraded version of the actual nephew, who carries the action and frequently silences the normally voluble Diderot, who is “Moi.” Hidden from the public, the divided self of the philosophe comes to the fore in this unpublished dialogue. From the conversation of Lui and Moi, the Diderot who emerges is a man who continues to adhere to his commitments only by becoming a Stoic in spite of himself. Self-sacrifice, he admits in effect, is required of the agent of Enlightenment. Lui understands full well that “you can’t bring dishonor upon yourself if you are rich.” Better then to flatter and entertain the wealthy than to delude oneself into thinking they can be educated; the typical person of means is “like a child and prefers being amused to being instructed.” Were interest and virtue compatible, the Nephew would be virtuous; by his account, “If virtue by chance led to fortune, I should have been as virtuous as the next man.” In the world as presently constituted, the one and only moral obligation Lui concedes is toward his son, whom he dutifully instructs in the arts of living at the expense of others: “I want my child to be happy, or what amounts to the same thing, honored, rich, and powerful . . . If you wise men blame me, the majority (and success itself ) will absolve me. He will have gold . . . and if he has a great deal, he will lack nothing, not even your admiration and respect.”24 Along with the philosophes, the Nephew admires Montaigne, especially the passage in the Essais, directly contradicting Marcus Aurelius,25 in which Montaigne denies that we can ever be above it all, “perched above the epicycle of Mercury,”26 outside society, looking down upon it. The Nephew agrees with the Stoics that we are fated to play a social role, with the difference that they would imprison us in a single role forever, whereas he, knowing all the roles, plays one after another, whatever it takes at any given moment to get ahead in the world. The successful Nephew stands up for his exploitative kind against Diderot and “all the little Catos like you who despise us from sour grapes, whose modesty is the prop of pride, and whose good conduct springs from lack of means.”27 Let Diderot, who penned glowing articles on Epicureanism for the Encyclopédie, be reduced to a Stoic; in the meantime, it is the Nephew who will enjoy the life of an Epicurean. 171

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All the self-doubt of the philosophes is revealed in Rameau’s Nephew. Yet Diderot never quit the good fight and perhaps had better reasons to continue than d’Alembert. Like Montaigne but for different reasons, d’Alembert did not develop a political philosophy. To be avoided, in Montaigne’s view, are questions about consent and political obligation, citizenship and the ideal political regime. Best never to raise such topics, which are much more likely to divide than to unite: “Public society can do without our thoughts . . . But it is the rule of rules, and law of laws, that each man should observe the [customs and laws] of the place where he is.”28 Reluctantly, d’Alembert agreed: we must sanction the political society that exists because there is no way to advance from a starting point of equality of natural rights to an agreement on a just society. Here we encounter a significant difference between Diderot and d’Alembert. Not a political philosopher by the cast of his mind, Diderot nevertheless did advance ever more in his later years to reflections on the political order—the best regime that could be attained, one in which there would be a public to educate, perhaps something along the lines of what Montesquieu had in mind when he called England a “republic hidden under the form of a monarchy.”29 By political means the Nephew might yet be refuted, if not now then eventually through reform of the monarchy. There was reason to worry but not to despair. For the time being, but not forever, one must continue to act as a reluctant Stoic, practicing self-denial in the hope of a better world to come, in which Stoicism would be unnecessary. IV. Rousseau’s Uses of the Stoic Tradition

From the very beginning of his days of prominence in French intellectual debates, Rousseau was well-prepared to incorporate elements of Stoicism into his thought and did so as early as his Second Discourse, the Discourse on Inequality (1754–55). Residing in Paris until 1756, Rousseau was familiar with those concerns of Diderot, d’Alembert, and other philosophes that placed Stoicism on the agenda. The Essay on the Society of Men of Letters, with its backdoor Stoicism, appeared midway between the First and Second Discourses, at a time when Rousseau was intimately familiar with the preoccupations of his fellow philosophes. Montaigne, anti-Stoic and Stoic, was someone on ­Rousseau’s mind throughout his career. In the First Discourse Rousseau applauded Montaigne’s championing of the American Indians against their highly cultured European oppressors30 and ended his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts by paraphrasing and seconding Montaigne’s 172

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distinction between Athenians who only “knew how to speak well, and [Spartans who knew how] to act well.”31 Several years later he ended his Second Discourse by lamenting that “a handful of men are glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities”—words again paraphrasing Montaigne.32 Never did Montaigne disappear from Rousseau’s writings, appearing repeatedly in Emile and occasionally in Rousseau’s autobiographical writings near the end of his life. Montaigne was always available to teach Rousseau various lessons, among them the selective uses of Stoicism. It was while writing his Discourse on Inequality that Rousseau initially granted Stoicism a central place in his thought. That he always preferred Epicurean delights to Stoic austerity was made especially clear several years later when in his Letter to d’Alembert he conjured up a joyous vision of Genevan citizens dancing “in the open air,” relishing “the sweet sentiment of happiness,” “each person seeing and loving himself in the others”; and again, still later, when in La Nouvelle Héloïse he reveled in his depiction of a festive grape harvest and communal meal.33 Such moments were to be cherished, however, precisely because they were so rare. In the Second Discourse and throughout his career, Rousseau was fundamentally concerned that we should belong to ourselves rather than losing ourselves in others, and to that end Stoic warnings of the obstacles to self-mastery were of considerable interest. What the Second Discourse accomplishes, among other things, is to show how very difficult it is for anyone to remain his or her own person. Intellectually, what Rousseau sought in his Discourse on Inequality was to marry two seemingly quite disparate intellectual traditions: the old world of Stoicism with the new world of philosophical history. In the preface he wrote that his was a “study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive developments”; at the close, reviewing his performance, he spoke again of “the development of our faculties and the progress of the human mind.”34 Turgot at mid-century had preceded Rousseau in writing a new kind of history; Condorcet would follow near the end of the eighteenth century. All three were uninterested in the old history of wars but intensely interested in the collective development of the human mind over the centuries, philosophical history. Employing his environmental psychology, Locke had moved away from the notion that an individual’s life was the unfolding of what was given in advance; rather, it was the story of the interactions between self and world and of different stages of life, childhood being a stage all its own as opposed to the usual treatment of children as if they were miniature 173

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adults. Turgot, Rousseau, and Condorcet expanded Locke’s outlook by applying it to the entire species. For them history was the story of progress, with the difference that Rousseau questioned the worth of progress, of our “perfectibility,” and offered an account of the “fatal enlightenment of civil man.”35 Turgot and Condorcet notwithstanding, the story of our so-called progress is in reality a tale of the disastrous triumph of inequality and injustice. For our present purposes, there is no need to recapitulate Rousseau’s hypothetical journey through endless centuries of human history. What matters is to observe how Stoicism figures in his analysis as he suggests the manner in which the advance of progress is accompanied by the loss of self-mastery. Marcus Aurelius had demanded that we “limit time to the present,” that one should “be concerned solely with the life which you are now living, the life of the present moment.”36 Rousseau affirmed that what the Stoics asked of social man was only available to natural man: “His soul, agitated by nothing, is given over to the sole sentiment of its present existence without any idea of the future.”37 Unfortunately, humans in society are ever living in the future, obsessed with what might yet be, unless overtaken by nostalgia and mourning for opportunities lost, which maroons them in the past. We are never present to ourselves. Rousseau also might as well have been Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus when he asserted that the master himself, in his dependency on others to satisfy “a multitude of new needs,” is more slave than master.38 The teaching of the Stoics was that we must avoid any needs exceeding our capacity to fulfill them; but it is only natural man, Rousseau noted, whose desires “do not exceed his physical needs.”39 Within society, humans constantly torment themselves by chasing after what will never be enough to meet the inexhaustible needs induced by comparing ourselves with others. Satisfaction always eludes us—it is just beyond our grasp—because we live outside ourselves and do not know who we are. Conjuring up a vision of the proper Stoic, Marcus Aurelius commented that “No thought is wasted on what others may say or think of him.”40 In response Rousseau wrote that all of us, social beings that we have become, are constantly preoccupied with what others think of us; we are absorbed in that “universal desire for reputation, honors, and preferences, which devours us all.” All “race the same course” and are consumed by “this furor to distinguish oneself.”41 Not to any Roman philosopher should we look to discover a Stoic but to the man who has not yet learned to think, the precivil being. Man in the state of nature 174

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“breathes only repose and freedom; . . . and even the perfect quietude of the Stoic does not approach his profound indifference for all other objects.” Sadly, it is only the savage who “lives within himself,” whereas “the sociable man, always outside himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence.”42 Stoicism in the Second Discourse is a valuable philosophy, insofar as it provides us with a measure of our deep and possibly irreversible losses. Perhaps we may one day encounter a human who still lives in the state of nature and benefits without knowing it from the lessons of Stoic thought. If so, his name will surely be Emile. Submission to necessity, the world as a stage, the need to limit our desires, and the quest for self-sufficiency are central themes in Emile, each reminiscent of Stoicism, all having as their starting point the strong body, which is a prerequisite of a strong mind. Here again Rousseau acknowledges his debt to Montaigne, who had applauded the attention the ancients paid to gymnastics. Citing Montaigne, Rousseau praised “that vigor of body and soul which distinguishes the ancients most palpably from the moderns.” Physical pain, too, Emile must take for granted and bear with indifference: “The more he gets used to the sufferings which can strike him, the more, as Montaigne would say, the sting of strangeness is taken from them, and also the more his soul is made invulnerable and hard.”43 Emile’s tutor seems to know a thing or two about Stoicism when he says “our unhappiness consists in the disproportion between our desires and our faculties.” Competition inflames the imagination and spurs us onto a quest for one enjoyment after another that never results in happiness. Because “unhappiness consists not in the privation of things but in the need that is felt for them,” Emile must be taught to limit his needs. Fencing off society during the child’s early years, keeping him in a state of nature, is how the tutor will protect him from artificially induced needs. Then, at eighteen, he will be taken backstage. “Think of him at the raising of the curtain, casting his eyes for the first time on the stage of the world; or, rather, . . . seeing the actors take up and put on their costumes.” Place him on the stage, “for from the pit one sees objects as they appear, but from the stage one sees them as they are.” Once he has seen how hollow our socially acquired selves are, how infrequently our actions are anything other than play acting, Emile will learn never to envy or emulate someone else, always to be himself, attentive only to his genuine needs.44 175

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Epictetus advised, “Wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” He then quoted Euripides, “Whoso nobly yields unto necessity, we hold him wise.”45 The theme of resignation, of submitting to necessity, pervades the pages of Emile. “Do not rebel against the hard law of necessity” is Rousseau’s message, incessantly repeated. Emile “bears its yoke from his birth.” Under the tutor’s watchful eye, the boy must be taught to yield to “the heavy yoke of necessity,” “the blows of necessity,” “the chains of necessity.” To force him to live within his limits, the tutor “enchains, pushes, and restrains him with the bond of necessity.” If we learn to resign ourselves to our circumstances, to accept our social station as well as our physical ills, “we shall always be sufficient unto ourselves.” To accept the “chains” and blows of necessity, never to murmur against our situation, is to achieve the Stoic and Rousseauian goal of self-sufficiency.46 How astonishingly far Rousseau was intent on pressing his theme is evident in the two chapters he completed of a possible sequel to Emile. Given Emile’s education, we are not surprised to hear the young man’s statement that “wisdom is to will that which is.” Quite remarkable, however, are his words when his “chains” are literally made of iron, he having been captured on the seas and sold into slavery. “Wasn’t I born a slave of necessity?” he asks. As for freedom, “If liberty consisted in doing what one wishes, no one would be free.” Although he is willing to organize a revolt against a brutal master, his objective is better working conditions for himself and his fellow slaves, not an end to their slavery. Sounding much like Epictetus, he proclaims, “I have never had so much control of myself as when I was wearing the irons of barbarians.”47 Rousseau’s sequel gives added meaning to the passage in the published version of Emile, stating that freedom is in the “heart of man,” not in any “form of government.”48 If there is one word that appears as often as necessity in Emile, it is will. And its prominence in Rousseau’s vocabulary signifies that Stoicism, however useful it might be for controlling one’s life, was false as a general philosophy. “No blame,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “for the order of things can lie . . . with men, whose misdoings are none of their own volition.” As a good Stoic Marcus Aurelius found consolation in the cosmic determinism that led him to “abstain from all thoughts of blame.”49 By contrast, Rousseau, in defiance of the French materialists, has the Savoyard vicar assert, “It is not the word freedom which means nothing; it is the word necessity.”50 Will was as central to Rousseau’s thought as it was absent from that of the Stoics. 176

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If only determinism were true, we would be better off. For it is the wrong that humans willingly do to one another that is unbearable, not physical illness or any other misfortune stemming from impersonal, unwillful nature: “It is in the nature of man to endure patiently the necessity of things but not the ill will of others.” There are “two sorts of dependence: dependence on things, which is from nature; dependence on men, which is from society.” Would that all forms of dependence were on things: “If human laws could, like those of nature, have an inflexibility that no human force could ever conquer, dependence on men would become dependence on things again.”51 At this point a reconsideration is in order of laws passed in the name of Rousseau’s “general will.” Even in the Social Contract, the theme of something resembling Stoic resignation lies just below the surface. Sometimes it arguably comes out into the open during his discussion of the general will, as in his account of how on any public matter I should react after learning that my vote was at odds with the final tally. “When the opinion contrary to mine prevails, that proves nothing except that I was mistaken, and what I thought to be the general will was not.”52 One might think it would be enough for me to say, I lost on this issue but will obey the law because I signed the social contract and agreed to follow the law. Rousseau will not have it. I must agree that my vote was a mistake; I must submit to necessity. We must not forget that on the opening page of his Social Contract Rousseau promised not to remove to our “chains” but to render them “legitimate.” Submission to the general will is much like submission to the law of physical nature; both are impersonal, neither subjects anyone to another person’s will, neither demeans anyone. Apparently the active citizen, like the withdrawn Stoic, would be well advised, then, to learn that freedom and resignation are intimately interrelated. Our great misfortune, however, is that only with the greatest difficulty do we attain the worthy Stoic objective of self-mastery: citizens must be “forced to be free,” and Emile, too, having arrived at maturity, beseeches his tutor to “force me to be my own master.”53 Rousseau’s final writings, autobiographical and confessional in nature, would at first glance seem an unlikely place to find him talking about Stoic themes. Montaigne, who presented Rousseau’s generation with a gateway through which intellectuals accepted and rejected Stoicism as circumstances dictated, was no longer Rousseau’s man. Or rather he was only useful by way of permitting Rousseau to draw a contrast between his determination to tell all, including his most 177

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questionable deeds, with Montaigne’s habit of revealing only such faults as made him more endearing.54 Nor, Rousseau was well aware, would the Stoics have sympathized with his effort in the writing of the Confessions to shape his self-image in the eyes posterity. Any such concern for “opinion” was a violation of Stoic teachings. Nevertheless he does sound a Stoic theme in his final work, the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. “The wise man,” he reminds himself, “sees in all his misfortunes no more than the blows of blind necessity and feels none of this senseless agitation.” Applying this lesson to himself he adds, “I have learned to bear the yoke of necessity without murmur.” Alone, convinced that he was the victim of a universal conspiracy, no longer hoping that any of his works written in self-justification would ever reach the public in unadulterated form, he turned to Stoic philosophy for consolation. Best that he should “regard all the details of my fate as the workings of a pure fatality.”55 The worst that could come was that he might be imprisoned, but why should he fear incarceration? His inner self would still be free, and he could not be denied his reveries.56 There was one aspect of the Stoic doctrine that troubled Rousseau personally: its demand for virtue. Having publicly confessed that he sent his five offspring to a foundling home, he could not claim that he was virtuous. But he might yet exonerate himself for any and all misdeeds by reexamining and applying to himself his teaching in the Second Discourse. He could admit he was not virtuous but declare that he was good, naturally good, good in the same manner as the man of nature, the only genuine Stoic who has ever walked the face of the earth. In his Dialogues—or Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques—of 1776, Rousseau noticed that all the traits he had attributed to natural man just happened to be his as well. Both he and the man of nature were at one with nature, both explored the world through their senses rather than their reason, lived in the present, and were lazy and self-contained. Rousseau would have us believe that he was the one person who underwent socialization and somehow inexplicably remained natural man.57 Of course he could not convince anyone, not even himself, that he remained natural man, since only a few pages before he had written that “human nature does not regress and never can one return to the time of innocence.”58 And so we find him two years later recalling time spent on a boat, undulating with the waves, emptying his mind of reason and imagination, which take us outside ourselves, giving himself over to the present moment, selfconsciously creating for a few minutes a mind-set close to that of natural man.59 If he could not simply be natural man, he would make himself such. 178

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Alas, his reveries as recorded in his final year did not last very long; soon he awoke and was faced once again with his circumstances. ­Rousseau could not be natural man; he could not undo his socialization, quiet his irrepressible imagination, and become the original natural Stoic. For him as for everyone else, only a full scale immersion in the repressive ethic of the civilized Stoic will do. Yet no matter how much we need repressive Stoicism, it is a bitter medicine, one he himself could not swallow. That we should need Stoicism to avoid losing our way is the greatest confession of all—of the failure of modernity. V. Finale

Rousseau, as we have seen, was not isolated during his age in taking refuge in a reluctant, self-denying, part-time Stoicism. Along with him, such notable advocates of Enlightenment as d’Alembert and Diderot had reason to mimic Montaigne in wearing a Stoic mask when necessary, always hoping to remove it as soon as possible. Montaigne was faced with the horror of religious civil war, d’Alembert and Diderot with threats to the cause of Enlightenment, Rousseau with the question of civilization itself. That there was something distinctively French in their outlook becomes immediately clear if we cross the Channel to look briefly at the Scottish Enlightenment. Other than Hume’s fear of the primitive mind, just under the surface, ever ready to answer to the call of superstition, the Scots seemingly had relatively few doubts that Enlightenment was all but irreversible and entailed no highly problematic consequences. The inequality that Rousseau condemned was of less concern to Adam Smith, who wrote that “when Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition [of property] . . . In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”60 The division of labor did exact a human cost, the Scots conceded, but they never doubted that the price was well worth paying.61 Whereas for Rousseau the division of labor was central to all that had gone wrong in history, for the Scots it was, despite the problems it entailed, the key to all that had gone right, its defects open to remedy. Education for commoners, thought Smith, could provide an adequate solution. Ferguson, for his part, far more so than Smith or Hume, worried that military valor and the citizens’ militia might be fading into the past, 179

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but never did his concerns lead him to question fundamentally the worth of modern commercial society.62 To all appearances modernity and Enlightenment were virtually one and the same in Scotland, the only significant threat coming from forces that would compromise the achievements of modernity. How very different, then, were the French intellectuals who championed progress and yet worried constantly about its continuing viability and ultimate consequences. D’Alembert, in the midst of penning a philosophical history of progress, expressed the opinion that barbarism is “our natural element, reason and good taste only passing.”63 More significant, perhaps, were the doubts raised by the likes of Holbach, Helvétius, and Diderot whether full-scale economic “progress” was worth the inequality, corruption, and unhappiness that follow in its path. “Happy mediocrity,”64 thought Holbach and various other French philosophes—the deliberate sacrifice of a measure of economic advancement—might be better than runaway commercial development. Diderot and his kind fretted about “deadly perfection” and looked back nostalgically to the age “between the savage state and our marvelous civilized state, when there was a middle ground that retarded the progress of the child of Prometheus . . . and held civilized man in a fixed position between the childhood of the savage and our decrepitude.”65 The language is notably similar to Rousseau’s, even if Jean-Jacques opted for near despair where they chose ambivalence and doubt. So often did Rousseau speak of the chronic instability of modern society and urge his readers to accept their social station66 that we forget the philosophes shared the same view, albeit once again in a less uncompromising form. Rousseau could interact amiably with the Luxembourgs67 because they, as noblesse de race, knew who they were; but never was he at ease with the middle class. Similarly, Diderot, d’Alembert, and other philosophes abhorred the bourgeois financiers and tax farmers who increasingly held sway in Paris and who were beasts of prey, feeding on estate-less intellectuals. The sociological models postulated by nineteenth-century and later thinkers, which contrast a stable traditional and prerevolutionary society with the perpetual mobility and insecurity of modern society, would have been regarded as laughable by the best French minds of the eighteenth century. Rameau’s Nephew says it all. It is, of course, not impossible to discern Stoic influences in the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, but tellingly theirs was 180

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often the world-affirming version that one finds in Cicero. Their Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, although present, were highly expurgated, the world-weary and self-abnegating teachings deleted, replaced by the claims of Adam Smith that these Roman philosophers were advocates of “universal benevolence.” Only nominally, moreover, did Smith’s call for “self-command” have anything in common with Stoic self-abnegation.68 Stoicism in Scotland taught the happy lesson that natural laws yield socially beneficial results even in the absence of virtuous motives. Hume went further, rejecting Stoic doctrine outright.69 In the world of the French Enlightenment, by contrast, the dreariest strain of Stoicism was frequently visible, although filtered through Montaigne’s lessons on when to don and when to remove the Stoic mask. No matter how estranged Rousseau became from Diderot, d’Alembert, and his other one-time Parisian colleagues, his thought continued to have much in common with theirs, except that he pushed his arguments boldly forward where they halted midway. Reluctantly, the beleaguered French moderns known to themselves and to others as philosophes conceded that the dismal Stoic legacy could not be abandoned. As tonic and therapy it still had something to offer the philosophes, who believed the patient might yet be saved, no matter that the doctors themselves had to swallow so many noxious pills. In Rousseau’s case, Stoicism announced as early as the Discourse on Inequality the far more radical finding that the patient might very well be suffering from an incurable, terminal disease.70 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Notes

Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1969–79), bk. 1, ch. 20, pp. 127–142; bk. 3, ch. 12, pp. 262–263. Donald Frame translation. Note Holbach’s paraphrase of Montaigne in La Morale universelle ou les devoirs de l’homme fondés sur sa nature (Tours: Chez Letourmy, 1792), vol. 1, pp. xviii–xix. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Penguin, 1964), bk. 2, no. 17; bk. 4, no. 41; bk. 6 no. 28; bk. 5, no. 26; bk. 3, no. 4. Christopher Brooke, “Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins,” in ed. Patrick Riley, The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 5. Essais, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 40. Montaigne, Essais, bk. 1, ch. 39, p. 293. Ibid., bk. 3, ch. 13, p. 327. Dumarsais [?], “Le Philosophe,” Encyclopédie, vol. 12, pp. 509b–511a. Herbert Dieckmann, Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretation (St. Louis: Washington Univeristy, 1948). Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, letter 25, “Sur les pensées de M. Pascal.” 181

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 182

Epictetus, Enchiridion (compiled by Arrian), no. 3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, bk. 4, no. 3. Enchiridion, no. 33. Enchiridion, no. 17. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, bk. 4, no.3; bk. 8, no. 9; bk. 7, no. 3. Montaigne, Essais, bk. 2, ch. 17, p. 307. Bk. 1, ch. 23, p. 165. Bk. 1, ch. 39, p. 289. Bk. 2, ch. 16, p. 286. Essais., b0k. 1, ch. 23, p. 166. Bk. 2, ch. 17, p. 318. Bk. 3, ch. 9, p. 171. Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2014), ch. 3. Diderot: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 208. D’Alembert, Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, 5 vols. (Paris: A. Belin, 1821–22), vol. 4, pp. 339, 355, 363, 367. D’Alembert, Essai, p. 357. D’Alembert, Essai, pp. 353–354. D’Alembert, Essai, pp. 357, 359, 361, 369. D’Alembert to King of Prussia, 29 Jan. 1770, Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 5, p. 289. Diderot, Réfutation de l’ouvrage d’ Helvétius intitule L’Homme in Oeuvres complètes, eds. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris: 1875–77), vol. 2, p. 345. Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, in Oeuvres romanesques (Paris: Garnier, 1981) , pp. 458, 499, 477, 504. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, bk. 12, no. 24. “Imagine yourself suddenly carried up into the clouds and looking down on the whole panorama of human activities: how the scene would excite your contempt!” Montaigne, Essais, bk. 2, ch. 17, p. 298. Diderot, Neveu, p. 456. Montaigne, Essais, bk. 1, ch. 23, p. 165. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, bk. 5, ch. 19. 1st Discourse, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), vol. III, pp. 11–12. Hereafter OC. All subsequent citations to Rousseau’s works will be to the Pléiade edition. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,”Essais, bk. 1, ch. 31. 1st Discourse, p. 30. Essais, bk. 1, ch. 25, p. 191. 2nd Discourse, in OC (1964), vol. III, p. 194. Essais, bk. 1, ch. 31, p. 263. Lettre à d’Alembert, in OC (1995), vol. V, pp. 114–115. La Nouvelle Héloïse, in OC (1964), vol. II, pp. 607–611. 2nd Discourse, pp. 127, 193. 2nd Discourse, pp. 142, 170. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, bk. 7, no. 29; bk. 12, no. 3. 2nd Discourse, p. 144. 2nd Discourse, p. 175. 2nd Discourse, p. 143. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, bk. 10, no. 11. 2nd Discourse, p. 189. 2nd Discourse, p. 193. Emile, in OC (1969), vol. IV, pp. 371, 378. Emile, pp. 303–304, 532, 543. Epictetus, Enchiridion, nos. 8, 52.

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

Emile, pp. 308, 422–423, 320, 783, 458, 321, 305. Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, in OC (1969), vol. IV, pp. 883, 916–917. Emile, p. 857. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, bk. 12, no. 12. Emile, p. 586. Emile, pp. 320, 311. Du Contract Social, in OC, III, bk. IV, ch. 2, p. 441. OC (1964), vol. III. Emile, p. 652. Confessions, in OC (1959), vol. I, pp. 516–517, 1150. Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in OC (1959), vol. I, pp. 1077–1079. Rêveries, p. 1048. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in OC (1959), p. 754. Confessions, pp. 172, 646. “Il est l’homme de la nature.” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 939. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 935. Rêveries, 5th Promenade. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), p. 185. In The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), p. 22, Smith commented on “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” Offsetting comments may be found on pp. 84–85, 96. Smith and Ferguson commented on the undesirable consequences of the division of labor; Hume ignored the issue. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 782. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 74, 173. For Smith’s decision in favor of standing armies over citizens’militias, see The Wealth of Nations, pp. 697, 699–701, 705–706, 787. D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire in Encyclopédie (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), vol. 1, p. 161. Holbach, Système social (London, 1773) vol. 3, part 3, ch. 11, p. 140. Diderot, Réfutation de l’ouvrage d’Helvétius intitulé l’Homme, in the AssézatTourneaux edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Diderot (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), vol. II, pp. 431–432. E.g., Emile, pp. 252, 303, 305, 310, 588. La Nouvelle Héloïse, in OC (1964), vol. II, p. 536. Le Devin du village, in OC (1964), vol. II, pp. 1093–1114. Rêveries, p. 1085. Confessions, pp. 522, 527, 533. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 888. Eventually Rousseau fell out with Mme de Luxembourg. E.g., Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics,1982), pp. 235–264, 274–294. Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 151, 172–174. The Natural History of Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 62–63. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, no. 34. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, no. 199. For a pioneering appreciation that the Enlightenment, for all its cosmopolitanism, assumed different forms in different countries—that the Scottish Enlightenment, for instance, was not interchangeable with the French, see Roy Porter & Mikulás, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridige University Press, 1981). For the case that Rousseau, rather than abandoning the French Enlightenment, took it to a radical fulfillment, see my Autocritique of Enlightenment. 183

Part Five The Modern Predicament

8 Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Liberal Modernity Shefali Misra

Rousseau famously dichotomized public and private existence, relentlessly pursuing the implications of each to its limits in order to demonstrate the gulf between the two. “Give him (man) entirely to the state or leave him completely to himself if you wish to make him happy,” he admonished, for division would rip his soul apart.1 Social freedom alone could compensate for the loss of natural independence, and it was predicated upon complete denaturing. Failing that social man would remain a slave who thought only of himself in dealing with others and only of others in viewing himself. So goes the story, amply supported by Rousseau’s own rhetoric. Yet no one knew better than Rousseau that the most strenuous and immaculate efforts to denature man are destined for no more than partial success: Virtue itself must be coaxed from the citizen by ministering to his self-love and pride through the institution of civic honors.2 The self-overcoming required for republican citizenship is effected through the proper channeling of self-love and -interest, not its annihilation. As public and collectivist a work as the Social Contract postulates a stringent hierarchy rather than a strident dichotomy between private and public existence. It thereby bridges Rousseau’s “theoretical audacity” and his “unmatched sense of the real.”3 Rousseau’s critique of divided modern existence and its devastation of the soul of man, as well as his partial paternity of the modern ideology of nationalism, have been fully acknowledged. Less well noted is the similarity between his insights about national homogeneity and the flattening of “difference” undertaken by every successful modern liberal state to ensure its health through identity formation, suppression, and reformation. To observe that “the modern phenomenon of nationalism thrives 187

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in large and undemocratic states” carries little cost for the denizens of modern Western democracies; to proclaim that “Rousseau’s conception of the political preconditions of obedience and patriotism . . . is clearly too narrow” carries none at all.4 Less pleasant but no less true is this: Not only can and does nationalism thrive in large liberal “democracies,” but a nationalist core, whatever its self-justification, is the precondition for every successful liberal modern polity. Rousseau showed the evils of liberal existence in pure form. That the purity of that form is itself a fiction is a tribute to the psychological acuity of his illiberal insights rather than a rebuke to his critique. ­Rousseau’s account of the unwholesomeness of liberal division is crushing enough, but it is susceptible to some sort of response through a liberal costbenefit analysis. What is truly humbling is the liberal retreat in practice from liberal doctrine and an accommodation of Rousseauian precepts in order that the liberal polity may flourish. Illiberalism resides at the heart of the modern polity, even where liberalism reigns normatively. Every minimally functional liberal polity is parasitic upon an “imagined community,” a “shared” identity that is not simply organic but molded through a more or less ruthless process of homogenization by the modern state.5 The persistence of language referring to the “nation-state” in a world where every state is multinational is among the gentlest of intimations of the state’s—any state’s—need and determination to homogenize. The liberal state may stitch together a liberal narrative of national identity, but the need for that identity and a narrative to sustain it is a Rousseauian stipulation that liberal states must accept no less than illiberal ones. Even in a nation of immigrants—especially in a nation of immigrants—illiberal homogenization precedes the expansion and sustainability of liberalism in the polity and never entirely ceases to exist in attenuated forms. A minimal unity is the precondition of sustainable diversity. Conversely, wherever the opportunity to effect such homogenization has failed to materialize before liberal values became ascendant at home or through international surveillance, political instability has taken a severe toll on the functioning of modern liberal democracy. The young states that became independent or were born in the twentieth century come to mind, the highly diverse societies of India and Israel prominent among them. The success of illiberal foundations in holding aloft the modern liberal state and its personal and political freedoms may or may not owe anything directly to Rousseau’s thought. In America’s case, it does not.6 But it furnishes the strongest possible testimony from the least 188

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likely quarter to the accuracy of Rousseau’s insights about identity and political life. It also affirms that there is a rich reward awaiting those who would revisit his thought for the more moderate messages that emerge when we synthesize his radical critique and his practical prescriptions. Not that immoderateness was Rousseau’s alone. He would have us go to astonishing lengths to achieve a core of political unity; we have gone to astounding lengths to achieve a core of political unity. Only our methods have been significantly worse if not significantly more radical than the psychological transformation he sought. Rousseau’s message about identity has proved to hold good not just for the republican polity but for any polity, including the sort for which he himself had only contempt. *** “One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time,” Rousseau said.7 Yet his republic allowed for citizens who were men, if not for men who had been made men rather than citizens. Rousseau made it perfectly clear in the Social Contract—his most complete picture of the good society—that a limited private existence is possible that in no way sets man apart from citizen and, as such, is legitimate. One who has been made a citizen can maintain a contingent and limited private existence at the pleasure of the community without being afflicted by the soul of the bourgeois or of unsocialized natural man, each unfit for social life. The privacy that divides man between duty and inclination is political by its nature, unwholesome, and, in the good society, utterly illegitimate. But the legitimate, limited mode of private existence that is compatible with the demands of citizenship is extremely important for the individual. Indeed it is his due, given that “in the social state the good of one necessarily constitutes the harm of another. This relation is in the essence of the thing, and nothing can change it” (emphasis added).8 This is not the end of the matter. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, man may have been put back together again for social life, but he has hardly survived the refurbishment without severe injury. The Spartan mother who gave thanks for victory in the wake of her sons’ deaths might evoke Rousseau’s ecstatic admiration as the exemplary citoyenne, but the Pyrrhic quality of this triumph was hardly lost on one who proclaimed conjugal love and paternal love to be the finest sentiments known to man.9 Regret for this loss of an aspect of humanity is a demand of conscience, even though Rousseau knew that the transformation he had 189

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wrought in the soul of the republican citizen was necessary for justice and happiness. It is writ large over his attempts to compensate man as best he could without undoing his work for the stunning price man has paid to live justly. His conditional private possessions and existence, rendered legitimate by the sanction of the community, must provide a different source of nourishment from the rewards of citizenship for innocuous self-love. It is not Rousseau in any event who misleads us in the matter of the possibility of any private existence in his republic. It is those who insist upon making him an ancient and deny that Rousseau intends to do full right, both by individual and community; and that although his solution may be ancient, the concerns to which it answers could not be more modern. He might subjugate the individual to the community for the sake of the individual—freedom demands it—but Rousseau never does so gratuitously.10 This should not be mistaken to suggest that there is any substantive concession to the liberal creed: “However this acquisition (of property) is made, the right of each private individual to his own resources is always subordinate to the community’s right to all.”11 The very existence of privacy as well as its extent is contingent upon the needs of the community, to be assessed solely by the community.12 Yet insofar as his theory is aimed at the happiness of and justice for the individual, Rousseau’s thought is necessarily liberal in its concerns, if emphatically not in its solutions. Even in the small republic of his telling, Rousseau was concerned to protect tolerance. The one negative dogma of the civil religion forbade intolerance except towards those whose religion preempted adherence to its—singularly undemanding—“sentiments of ­sociability.”13 The much maligned civil faith was an attempt at laïcité on the one hand; it sought on the other to remove the “deepest source” of the division in the soul of modern man.14 Yet the implications of the interaction between the dogmas of the civil religion and of tolerance for the dichotomy between public and private existence and for collective identity have remained obscure. “As is entirely clear,” wrote Judith Shklar, “the civil faith is a religious program for post-Christian Europe.” It aims to “emulate the republican martial ethos by removing the deepest source of our inner division . . . Give Europe a new civic religion of public loyalty, and maybe it could yet attain a republican future.”15 No less unequivocally but entirely to the contrary, Ronald Beiner sketches the portrait of a manmade quasi-liberal in spite of himself when faced with the implications of 190

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f­ anatical intolerance. These implications allegedly led Rousseau to follow ­Montesquieu all the way, not simply in his analysis of classical virtue but also in his liberal prescription for Europe: What he (Rousseau) offers in the last five paragraphs (of the Social Contract), however, is a highly attenuated “phantom” religion, an Enlightenment-style “religion of tolerance” . . . in which liberal or negative tenets prevail . . . it is as if Rousseau bids farewell to his republican ideal, with the hearty parochialism and potential illiberalism that it implies.16

What explains the contrast between the republican unity that Shklar stresses and the “liberal tenets” that Beiner emphasizes is the fact that Rousseau’s treatments of religion show his attempt to combine conformity with toleration. In effect, he divides religious matters into . . . ceremonies, moral teachings, dogmas that serve as the basis of moral teachings, and speculative dogmas having nothing to do with morals [Rousseau 1959–1995, (Pléiade) Vol. III, 694]. In the case of ceremonies and the moral teachings that constitute a society’s sentiments of sociability, Rousseau insists on the greatest degree of conformity . . . with regard to purely speculative dogmas . . . he insists upon a complete toleration.17

Rousseau, true to reputation, gave grounds for each one of these readings. On the one hand, he declared: Those who make a distinction between civil and theological intolerance are mistaken . . . These two intolerances are inseparable . . . Wherever theological intolerance exists, it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect . . . Now that there is no longer and can never again be an exclusive national religion, one should tolerate all those religions that . . . are in no way contrary to the duties of the citizen. But whoever dares to say there is no salvation outside the church should be chased out of the state, unless the state is the church . . . Such a dogma is good only in a theocratic government; in any other, it is pernicious.18

On the other hand, in Emile, he made no attempt to finesse the connection between pagan fanaticism and republican virtue. The tolerance argued for in the Social Contract seems by implication a poor substitute made necessary by changed circumstances: Bayle has proved very well that fanaticism is more pernicious than atheism, and this is incontestable. But what he did not take care to 191

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say, and which is no less true, is that fanaticism, although sanguinary and cruel, is nevertheless a grand and strong passion which elevates the heart of man, makes him despise death, and gives him a prodigious energy that need only be better directed to produce the most sublime virtues.19

Should we then crave the grand passion that unleashes the prodigious energy to produce the most sublime patriotic virtue? Or should we strive, in accordance with the only negative dogma of the civil faith, for the self-restraint that teaches us to patiently suffer our fellow citizens and their strange beliefs rather than want to live and die with and for them? What, indeed, should we make of the teaching of the chapter on civil religion of the Social Contract—the rest of which appears to hammer home the message of uniformity for the sake of unity—on what today we would call difference? Rousseau’s point is that combining the passion that unites with tolerance for differences that are indifferent in their implications for unity is not formidably difficult. The real challenge is to achieve republican unity. It is hardly a coincidence that the positive dogmas of the civil faith are exceptionally undemanding but kept closed to all questioning: “The dogmas of the Civil Religion ought to be simple, few in number, stated with precision, without explanation or commentaries.” They are also deliberately kept to the minimum that Rousseau considered absolutely necessary for moral agreement and, hence, health. Any easygoing liberal could easily accommodate them, although a squeamish or a strident one might object to the two demanding faith in “an Eternal and good Being and an afterlife.”20 But precisely in insisting upon them lay Rousseau’s acute insight about the psychological limits of tolerance and compromise. Man’s “need for God” meant that the preponderant majority of believers who needed their God could not and should not tolerate such skeptics throwing rocks into their tranquil pond—especially when Rousseau had gone out of his way to make the sentiments of sociability utterly benign in order to preempt a quarrel between the dogmas of different faiths.21 Unity is exceptionally difficult for us moderns. If that could be accomplished, the rest would be easy. If Rousseau’s attempt at producing such unity in the midst of the dividing power of diverse religious beliefs itself is workable, then tolerance itself is no longer problematical. Seeking tolerance for what may lie beyond a handful of shared dogmas, so long as it does not directly contradict them, is a much less challenging if also important task. Those who do not challenge the dogmas of 192

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the shared civil faith but maintain innocuous private dogmas of faith and belief are thereby rendered eccentric, perhaps, but not odious. And where there is friendship, eccentricity is relatively well tolerated. Indeed, as any serious theorist of tolerance would likely agree, this sort of tolerance hardly even qualifies as real political tolerance. Real political and religious tolerance refers to putting up with what is found morally abhorrent; living with those who contradict or challenge one’s most powerfully held beliefs. Rousseau once again displayed his customary psychological brilliance, not to mention his prescience, in saying, “It is impossible to live in peace with people whom one believes are damned. To love them would be to hate God who punishes them. They must absolutely be either brought into the faith or tormented.”22 We are living this truth in especially stark ways in the twenty-first century. It is psychologically much easier to point to the obvious problem of citizenship in liberal societies for those who refuse to leave their religious beliefs at home when they step out into the marketplace. That is obvious enough. But this is a lesson not simply about faith of the religious sort. Much more important for this secular age in Western societies is the intolerance of those whose substantive notions of justice are widely at variance with those of the majority in liberal-democratic societies. It pays secular homage to Rousseau’s profound dictum. Compromise and tolerance is not possible for the overwhelming majority of people concerning the most essential articles of their faith, religious, moral, or political—even liberal political faith, paradoxically. This is why liberal host societies have been witness in recent years to the unrelenting hectoring of Muslims through satire and corporeal representation of the Prophet, unleashing an unending cycle of provocation and retribution. Only in the United States, where the right to free speech is more stridently upheld by the courts than anywhere in the Western world, is there also a public reluctance to go out of the way to give offense to Muslim citizens so that they might be compelled to internalize the norms of free speech in a liberal society. And the United States, as we shall see, is a special case. In exhibiting such tolerance, it bears powerful witness to another Rousseauian truth. For the rest, the practitioners of the modern doctrine that comes closest to having cosmopolitan pretensions turn out to be anything but when the articles of their own liberal faith are challenged. Rousseau’s seemingly schizophrenic remarks on the subject of cosmopolitanism make perfect sense in this light. On the one hand, he noted: “The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom 193

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one lives”; “the man of the world lives entirely in his mask . . . what he appears to be is everything for him”; “Today, there are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards or even Englishmen: there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, and the same customs”; and “Every people has or ought to have a national character, and if it lacks one, we would have to begin by giving it one.”23 On the other, the men who “embraced all of mankind in their benevolence” were “Great Souls.”24 The Second Discourse has a lengthy lament about the division of the world into distinct societies, bringing with it untold bloodshed, a theme Rousseau elaborated in The State of War, in which he argued that a state could only measure its own power and glory through the misery of its neighbor.25 Cosmopolitanism, when it is genuine, is a very fine thing, but it is so rare that genuine cosmopolitans are Great Souls. For the rest of us, it is one more launching pad for devices to nourish our amour-propre by making us appear better than we are. The vast majority of us can only be good to those with whom we identify; any sensible politics will narrow its ambition to scale. Another way of saying this is that the “central” liberal virtue, as is so often noted, has a way of breaking down when it is genuinely tested.26 Liberalism’s great justification, peace, breaks down with it. The story of the connection between a degree of coherence in the central tenets of belief and tolerance is, it seems, timeless. The story of liberal ambition becomes one of humiliating defeat as soon as it seeks to transcend entrenched identities, whether in the European Union or within the boundaries of the liberal state. These articles of faith aside, tolerance of difference that is not inherently and deeply offensive is more in the nature of indifference, learned or involuntary, than anything else.27 Rousseau’s problem remains one of creating the requisite minimum unity that enables a degree of difference to exist in safety. Once unity is accomplished, difference is easily managed within bounds that do not transgress the innermost boundaries of what is universally or at least generally held to be true or decent within a society. As Rousseau might say to the liberal state about its dilemmas of pluralism if he cared at all about its fate: “First lesson for you!” The problem is not difference but division at the core. Rousseau was a master rhetorician of dichotomies, and he paid dearly for his gift. His thought has been called contradictory, paradoxical, incoherent, totalitarian, even pluralist. But he was exceptionally consistent, clear, precise—and right—about the circumstances in which fanatical responses are psychologically necessary. Rather than puzzle 194

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over the problem of reconciling his argument for tolerance with his panegyrics on behalf of the virtue of fanaticism, we are better served by recognizing his acute psychological realism about the limits of tolerance for the great majority of human beings. Tolerance was the creed to be maintained toward all those who complied with the undemanding dogmas of the civil faith, the sentiments of sociability that unite.28 It is only a further explanation, not any sort of contradiction, that anyone whose dogmatic articles of faith made him a bad citizen could not be tolerated. This is no more than what any contemporary liberal state maintains, rightly or wrongly. The current confrontation in the Western world with Muslims arises from the essentialist and simplistic claim that Islam—regardless of particular interpretations, cultural affiliations, and the treatment of Muslim citizens by liberal states—produces bad liberal citizens because it lacks the resources for separating church and state.29 But surely the proper response to this is not that the liberal state should not try to make good liberal citizens; but that these particular claims about Islam and Muslims are historically, politically, and philosophically ignorant and prejudiced. When Rousseau observes in addition, elsewhere, that fanaticism may be channeled into supreme virtue, it represents for him a oncewas model that he has no realistic expectation of reproducing. It is about all he can hope to do to substitute the unifying force of the civil religion for Christianity’s otherworldliness and to fend off its political manipulation by Geneva’s magistrates in order to subvert the democratic principles of Geneva’s constitution.30 When we focus on what lies between the boundaries of tolerance and intolerance as defined by Rousseau, we see that this father of nationalism and advocate of homogeneity accommodates a great deal more difference than he would often have us believe. This is not simply because he, “with his matchless sense of the real, does not think that even the good society” can be free of imperfections—in this instance, that absolute homogeneity is impossible without the most egregious totalitarianism. It is because for Rousseau, more than for almost any other thinker, politics exists in the service of the health of the individual and not vice versa; and because not totalitarian politics but patriotic virtue conduces to the individual’s health.31 Anything that is not essential for the strong public ties necessary for justice and for keeping the individual whole is a nonpolitical matter. This space is relatively small for one consumed by patriotic passion. But it cannot justly be eliminated by society. 195

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Such nonpolitical privacy is, of course, potentially political. The community’s views of its needs or about citizens’ private conduct might change, as might the conduct itself. If privacy threatens unity, it must be eliminated. Even so, the distance between the reality of contemporary liberal societies and Rousseau’s prescriptions is greatly reduced. We cannot be attentive to Rousseau’s teaching that the condition of social freedom is the individual’s subjugation to the community without giving full credit to his insistence that the community cannot even will to impose any burden on the individual that is useless to it. This is not altered by the fact that the community alone will be the judge of what is and is not useless to it. Rousseau sometimes shows himself willing to engage existing societies for application of his theories. He wrote about Poland, Corsica, and the Valais because he thought that these people had qualities that made them fit for freedom. It is nonetheless true that, at their most expansive, “Rousseau’s theories are meant for good societies alone.” These peoples were of interest because they had the essential ingredient and the potential to become good societies. In such societies, members being in a similar and equal condition, no one ever has any interest in burdening any particular member.32 It is agreed that each person alienates through the social compact only that part of his power, goods, freedom whose use matters to the community; but it must also be agreed that the Sovereign alone is the judge of what matters. A citizen owes the State all the service he can render it as soon as the Sovereign requests them. But the Sovereign, for its part, cannot impose on the subjects any burden that is useless to the community. It cannot even will to do so, for under the law of reason nothing is done without a cause any more than under the law of nature. (emphasis added)33

This may be ammunition against the old Rousseau-as-totalitarian refrain, which has, in any case, worn thin, but it is cold comfort to those liberals who would claim him as one of their own. Some difference and privacy may be permitted, but disunity and the pursuit of selfishness are forbidden as they are not in any liberal order. This is true despite the highly variable boundaries of the normal, the frowned-upon, and the forbidden within different liberal societies; they have themselves to do with the state’s quest for unity. Besides, too extensive a private existence could corrupt a majority of citizens, in which case the general 196

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will would be suppressed by a plethora of private wills. The community will necessarily have to be vigilant. The most stringent of the limits on differences obviously refers to marked economic inequality, but that is not of direct interest to us here— although questions of difference, identity, and identification with others cannot be divorced from equality and inequality, as Rousseau argued so strenuously. It is not coincidental that the civil faith in its connection to identity is analogous to the general will and its connection to equality: “The will of all is the sum of individual wills, including all their actual variations from one another, while the general will is to be found by adding the concordant motives of individual wills, and excluding their dissonances” (emphasis added).34 In both cases actual variations—between the general and particular wills, and between the civil and private religions— remain. In both cases—the community’s disciplining power aside—the solution is sought in identity. Hence Rousseau’s exhortation to the Poles that “the new-born infant, upon first opening his eyes, must gaze upon the fatherland, and until his dying day should behold nothing else.”35 If that is a message for any polity that exists today, it is certainly not one for a liberal state. Nor was it intended to be. Nevertheless, the success of modern liberal democracies is tied to Rousseauian insights about national identity, whether or not derived from him. The forgoing discussion of the Social Contract and contemporary experience both suggest that a public embrace of nonthreatening difference after the American fashion may better accomplish attenuated civic virtue and public loyalty than a rigidly republican insistence on public uniformity in the French republican tradition. *** Even the most cursory comparison with France is enough to demonstrate that American institutions have been inspired by liberal ideology. Montesquieu belonged both to the Federalists and the Antifederalists in America . . . Once Americans got hold of Montesquieu, they would not let go. Remarkably different was the fate of Rousseau.36

In recent years John Gray, in proclaiming the failure of Enlightenment liberalism, has argued for value-pluralist modus vivendi. The substance of his claim is that liberal tolerance used to work in an environment of broad moral agreement in the modern West, but that broadly shared moral consensus has broken down in our globalized 197

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world as those divided by a metaphysical gulf have come together to jostle in tight physical proximity. This has rendered even minimal liberal universalism untenable and value pluralism—outright relativism, really, although he explicitly denies it is that—the only workable option.37 Gray’s solution has nothing to do with Rousseauian prescriptions, but his analysis of the problem has a similar dimension: If tolerance is to work, it must itself be undergirded by some form of identity—a broad identity of views based in cultural similarities, if not identity based in communal solidarity. Stretched too far beyond such broadly shared views and sensibilities, liberal tolerance breaks down, with disastrous implications for peaceful liberal coexistence, not to mention ambitious communitarian living. Rousseau did not address himself to the liberal polity, so it is hard to say whether he underestimated liberalism’s capacity for embracing a version of nationalism as a solution to the liberal problem of pluralism and disunity. Gray, on the other hand, certainly makes a mistake concerning the capacity of the liberal state or, rather, of a particular kind of liberal state to manage “difference” in a much more pluralistic environment than in the past. Fortified by its capacity to homogenize identity sufficiently for its own flourishing, this is the liberal state that can countenance with equanimity the presence of extensive difference. That liberal state par excellence is the United States. It would be wrongheaded to suggest that only such difference is permitted to flourish in the United States as does not rub up against national unity. It is rather that national unity in America is somehow able to withstand such difference. “On the face of it, Americans such as Paine, Jefferson, and others might have found much to their liking in Rousseau’s writings, had they bothered to peruse his pages,” but it is unlikely that this would have included Rousseauian nationalism.38 How remarkable then that the most pluralistic liberal democracy in the modern world is also the one renowned for its power to unite; noted for its “constitutional patriotism,” its “civic nationalism,” and all the innocuous labels used to distinguish “good” patriotism from “bad” nationalism and implicitly challenge Rousseau’s claim that “Every patriot is harsh to foreigners.”39 Its travails and misadventures since 9/11 notwithstanding, the United States continues to stand out a shining example of success in fostering national identification among the newly arrived and the utterly different in relation to the rest of the West. The events of the last decade and a half have rendered things somewhat precarious. Yet large numbers 198

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of American citizens regularly step in to try to compensate for the mistakes made by the American state by welcoming new arrivals with open arms and seeking to enfranchise recent arrivals. The contrast this presents to the much smaller and significantly less diverse West European democracies is stunning, where the assault on Muslim difference is relentless, from state and society alike. The resources—the historical reinforcing the contemporary—that enable the United States to break down indigestible difference swiftly are the precondition of an extensive tolerance. The analogy to the discussion above of the last five paragraphs of the Social Contract is exact except that the American core is nowhere near as hard as the one of Rousseau’s vision. In a virtuous cycle, America’s tolerance itself fosters loyalty for their new home among immigrants and, together with the inducement of material success, invites them to soften the sharper edges of their own difference voluntarily. The United States’ association with Montesquieu explains American civic sense from at least one perspective: “Once we recognize, however, that his (Montesquieu’s) liberalism is neither aristocratic nor straightforwardly Lockean, but rather a democratic and civil liberalism, the insistence on duties as well as rights no longer comes as a surprise.”40 Add to this the observation that “Montesquieu belonged to both the Federalists and Antifederalists in America,” and America’s civic liberalism begins to make historical sense.41 Nor should we forget the service Tocqueville rendered Americans, for “only Tocqueville understood that Montesquieu and Rousseau were emphasizing different aspects of one emergent republican tradition,” as Morton Horwitz has argued. “The dialectical character of Democracy in America must be understood as Tocqueville’s attempt to integrate his two great forbears.”42 Intellectual history aside, the practical demands of politics in a highly pluralistic modern democracy, however farcical the term from a Rousseauian perspective, impose unrelenting demands for a core of civic unity. Precisely because the differences with which we live are so vast and unbridgeable, a small but firm national core becomes more necessary than ever. To use Rousseauian language against Rousseauian concerns, the paradoxical challenge is to achieve a small, tight core of unity and identity in order that we may live in modern, negative freedom with the greatest degree of pluralism. America’s paradox of a national narrative, a nation defined by diversity, with its contrary pulls of nativist and illiberal exclusions and liberal openness produces a tension that somehow holds things up in 199

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a miraculous trapeze act. This is not facile: Any country that would absorb wave upon wave of immigrants throughout its history needs to exhibit the most astounding powers of absorption and assimilation. America has coped with a two-pronged, chronologically layered but overlapping approach. The first half of its history was marked by the ruthless suppression, dispersion, and physical destruction of the nations that predated the arrival of the European colonists; forcible exclusion of blacks and new immigrants from citizenship; territorial dispersion and mixing of minority nations—in some cases their near-annihilation; and a resolute denial of the existence of national minorities in international organizations well into the twentieth century.43 It is upon this profoundly illiberal, even brutal edifice of national homogenization that the United States has since built a liberal order that, shocking though it is to say, would be unsustainable without it. The methods of homogenization have little to do with Rousseauian ideas, but the homogenization speaks volumes about the veracity of his claims about identity. It also leads us to another unsurpassed Rousseauian insight: Everything that is not in nature has its problems, and civil society more than all the rest. There are some unfortunate situations when one cannot preserve one’s freedom except at the expense of others, and when the citizen can only be perfectly free if the Slave is completely enslaved.44

This is the second Rousseauian admonition to liberals. It takes a high degree of self-delusion to believe that we can have it all in politics: freedom, self-government, and disunity, all at the same time, all without cost. If the past were not awful, the present would be impossible. As Rousseau told it, the complete enslavement of some was necessary to pave the path to the freedom of some others. America can afford to be the most welcoming multinational polity on the foundations of a brutal past, and yet even now it must jealously guard its success in forging a broad national identity as melting pot, not mosaic. The first, ethnically defined half of the hyphenated American identity is characteristically empty of any strong cultural content. Few ethnic cousins from Americans’ various countries of origin would recognize authentic vestiges of their own culture in the hyphenated American identity past the first generation. Illiberal pressure to assimilate linguistically and a voluntary eagerness to integrate for success—they arrive, after all, largely in pursuit of the American dream—are accompanied 200

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by a unique tolerance of the public expression of depoliticized religious, ethnic, and cultural difference. The combination has historically proven to be irresistible for new arrivals, their difference systematically diluted then warmly embraced. America’s unique combination of deep religiosity and the absence of attempts by members of any particular religious creed to capture the state are often remarked upon.45 The latter claim may be overstated, but it is not simply untrue. The United States is the only country that successfully integrated its Muslim population by making it easy for them, in ways remarkably reminiscent of Rousseau’s civil religion, to be Muslim and American. At any rate, it did so in the last century. Its multicultural success in this century depends crucially upon its continuing to do so, although of course that does not guarantee it will happen. After all the bad blood of recent years, it is still only in the streets of New York, and certainly not in the streets of Paris, that non-Muslims turn out to raise the slogan, “We are all Muslim” when policies of harassment are pursued toward Muslim Americans. Contrast this with the French republican tradition, directly indebted to Rousseau, unlike American civic liberalism yet missing the crucial Rousseauian insight that asking people to choose between God and citizenship is to give the faithful no choice. It is a foolish invitation to trouble for the state by the state. The French republican model has struggled recently because it has dug in its heels precisely on the strident liberal division between public and private that Rousseau strenuously demolished. The civil faith had sought to resolve the problem in a way that French laïcité, understood since the Revolution as the demand that citizenship requires leaving faith at home, has failed to do. It is not clear that the Rousseauian solution would have worked in the contemporary European context, but it is crystal clear that he understood the problem as contemporary France has failed to understand it and as the United States has successfully accomplished until very lately. The rest of Western Europe is struggling too. Europe’s most progressive social-democratic states instituted the possibility of strong—­ separate and distinct—multicultural existence for their minorities, only to have liberal majorities revolt against the illiberal norms of some of them. Especially contentious have been questions of gender equality and women in public space, where feeling runs high in support of hard-fought-for and still sometimes precarious freedoms and equality. Many have since instituted policies that are quite forthrightly assimilationist and aimed to socialize immigrants into liberal social and civic 201

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norms.46 Where the ideological hold of liberalism prompted policies in the recent past to overcome nationalism and promote “strong multiculturalism”—strong cultural pluralism—social and political turmoil has been the outcome. Refusing to countenance citizenship for those who do not share the cherished values of liberal freedoms and equality, many liberal citizens exhibit a stridency against the illiberals who pose no threat to the polity that is difficult at times to distinguish from right-wing xenophobia. Europe’s retreat from the limits of liberal difference into a politics of civic liberalism against liberal pluralism speaks to American success in predicating difference and freedom upon a brutally forged and determinedly enforced civic identity. Now America’s famous absorptive capacity is no longer predicated on claiming the citizen for the state. That job was done early and done well. The officially American secular state and the religious American public take in their stride the public expression of religious difference that is not expressly opposed to a civic identity: This is not to deny the presence of a lunatic fringe in the United States but to contrast its general public ethos from much of Europe’s. When it comes to what we now call “multiculturalism,” the American mantra has been: “Homogenize differences that detract from a common civic identity, then liberate the public expression of nonpolitical private identity.” It testifies not only to the accuracy of Rousseau’s teaching about the limits of pluralistic accommodation, but also, paradoxically, its possibilities. The modern society best equipped to cope with the most extensive pluralism early identified itself as a country of immigrants but flattened, dispersed, suppressed, and integrated difference forcefully. That option is foreclosed to countries trying today to become fully fledged liberal states. Unable to annihilate or suppress difference in ways that the United States did with brutal injustice but positive consequences for both political stability and liberal freedom, they are now unable to transition to greater liberalism, because their pluralism has not been sufficiently defanged through an early exercise in homogenization. In the developing world, among countries that did not have the “opportunity” to bring the full force of illiberalism to bear upon the shaping of national identity before they became independent and declared a formal allegiance to liberal-democratic principles, primordial identities have flourished to the near exclusion of a national identity shared across the board. All this has worked to the great detriment of what 202

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passes for democratic politics even among us moderns, let alone what it meant for Rousseau: As even Americans have discovered, a multicultural success they may be, but democratic functioning requires a higher degree of agreement and solidarity. A great deal of the historical legacy that has brought things to this pass in these developing countries owes, of course, to colonialism and other specific historical circumstances, not to mention that Enlightenment liberalism was not born there and in many cases never spread there. Even so, the striking truth of Rousseau’s message about identity and democratic politics, if not liberal politics, cannot be ignored. The relative strength of national identity in the United States and the largest aspiring but struggling “liberal” democracy, India, is a striking case in point. The first thing to say in this regard is obviously that modern India is a much younger state; the second that the history of the two countries is utterly different and incommensurate. Yet comparison is justified between two of the world’s most diverse countries, with the latecomer to independence aspiring at its birth as a modern state to become a liberal democracy. Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi’s closest associate and independent India’s first prime minister, invoked the slogan of “unity in diversity” to promote a civic nation out of a myriad of age-old, trenchant identities that had little in common besides their tyrannical rulers, and often not even that. India is a case of a country in which liberal imperatives and aspirations appeared before the modern state had the chance to undertake the homogenization of the differences that presented the greatest difficulty for the forging of a common civic identity. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British, the rulers emphasized Hindu and Muslim difference, introduced separate communal electoral constituencies for Hindus and Muslims, and enthusiastically pursued policies of “divide and rule.” Their fostering of Muslim nationalism and the concomitant Hindu nationalism, albeit not of the mainstream national liberation movement, produced the two-nation theory that culminated in the eventual creation of Pakistan; Kashmir remained in India as the only Muslim-majority province because of the whimsical conduct of its Hindu native prince. When Jawaharlal Nehru organized the states of independent India along linguistic lines, he was responding to economic, democratic, and regional- and linguistic-nationalist demands, in contrast to historical American policies of dispersing minorities, who were in no position 203

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to articulate their demands forcefully, let alone enforce them. It is this background of nationalist strife and the state’s failure to tame India’s breathtaking diversity sufficiently to forge a strong pan-Indian identity that has yielded an unrelenting legacy of civil disturbances, religious strife, regional separatism, and a polity that is increasingly illiberal rather than liberal. Hindu nationalism, after being in abeyance for a while under Nehru’s charismatic and sternly secular leadership, has been resurgent since the 1980s. Under the new government of the Hindu nationalist party, whose leader is viewed as India’s great economic hope, Hindu women are hounded by fundamentalist thugs allied to the regime for marrying Muslim men. Muslims find it hard to find people willing to rent them their homes. Traumatized by partition, the Indian state and all too many Indians have been obsessed by the need for “territorial integrity,” at the expense both of regional democratic aspirations and civil rights.47 Nor is this simply paranoid. At any given time, there are multiple insurgencies in the heartland, as well as secessionist movements in the small and desperately poor states at the periphery; a military trained to fight external enemies is often deployed against citizens and uses its military training against them. The human rights disaster in Kashmir, long an international story rivaled only by the Israel-Palestine conflict, is an outcome of the one “liberal” national narrative that appears to have a hold on the collective imagination of India’s citizens: India, unlike Pakistan, is a secular country, and the retention of its one Muslim-majority province is crucial to prove this secular identity. A too-powerful center, weak states, and a shocking record of civil rights are the legacy of a national memory haunted by partition and the absence of a strong civic nation based in some minimally shared identity. The one possible source of national unity is a jingoist narrative of a nation united against the foreign threat, and the Pakistani state obligingly furnishes a legitimate case for that argument through its sponsorship of terrorism across the border. The sort of national identity this is capable of producing is not one that facilitates the functioning of liberal politics.48 Mark Lilla has rightly argued that liberalism and the relegation of faith to private life is not only a highly artificial but also a historically contingent occurrence in the modern West, and he has rightly credited Rousseau as being virtually alone among the philosophes to give full acknowledgment to man’s need for God. Yet he takes the dichotomy too far. The successful liberal state is not nearly as liberal as he implies. 204

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Not pure Enlightenment liberalism but modern nationalism is its creed; division in one sphere compensated for by fusion, forcible where necessary, in another. It turns out that Rousseau was right about more than man’s need for God. He was right also about the state’s need for citizens, even of the state committed to liberal pluralism. 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Notes

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Bonheur Public, vol. 1 in The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited C. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962); 326. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, in Marcel Raymond and Bernard Gagnebin, eds., Oeuvres Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade), henceforth PL.; vol. III, p. 963. Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion,” French Politics, Culture & Society, 25:3, 2007; p. 7; George Kateb, “Aspects of Rousseau’s Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 76:4; pp. 519–543. Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 290. “Imagined communities” is, of course, the phrase immortalized by the eponymously titled work by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). On the nationalist foundations and powerful overtones of modern liberal democracy, see Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” Critical Review 10:2 (1996): 193–211. A short and illuminating review of the brutal career of homogenization by the prominent liberal democracies of today may be found in Taras Kuzio, “The Myth of the Civic State: A Critical Survey of Hans Kohn’s Framework for Understanding Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25:1 (2002): 20–39. Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America 1760–1809 (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1969). Emile, PL, IV, 246. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 247; Second Discourse, PL, III, 168. Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution : The Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 47–57. The Social Contract, II: 9, PL, III, p. 369. Ibid., II: 4. Ibid., IV: 8. Rosenblatt, n. 3; Chris Kelly, “Rousseau and the Case for (and Against) Censorship,” Journal of Politics, 59:4, pp. 1232–1251; Melzer, n. iii, p. 109; Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enligtenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 242; Judith Shklar, “Montesquieu and the New Republicanism,” in Judith Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 205

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

206

Shklar, ibid.; 252. Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15. Chris Kelly, n. 3; 1241. The Social Contract, IV: 8, PL, III, 468–469. Emile, p. 312. Social Contract IV: 8; PL, III, 468. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Ibid. Emile, 249; 515; Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1003; Project for a Corsican Constitution, PL, III, 913. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, PL, III, 178. The State of War, PL, III, 603–605. E.g., Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in David Heyd, ed., Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See, for example, Andrew Sabl, “The Last Artificial Virtue: Hume on ­Toleration and Its Lessons,” Political Theory 37: 4 (2009), 511–538. Shklar, n. 16; Rosenblatt, n. 3; Kelly, n. 15. On the contingent and historically accidental nature of liberalism itself and Rousseau’s extreme prescience in fully acknowledging the relationship between politics and man’s need for God, see Lilla, n. 21. Rosenblatt, n. 3. Kateb, n. 2; 529. Ibid., 534. Social Contract, II: 4; 372. Otto Gierke, Natural law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, cited in Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 43. Considerations on the Government of Poland, PL, III, 966. Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 62. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000); “Mill’s Liberalism and Liberalism’s Posterity,” The Journal of Ethics 4: 1–2 (2000), 137–165; “Pluralism and Toleration in Contemporary Political Philosophy,” Political Studies 48: 2 (2000); 323–333. Hulliung, n. 34, p. 40. The original distinction comes from Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1944). For “constitutional patriotism,” see Jürgen Habermas, “Political Culture in Germany since 1968,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Emile, 243. Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 220. This perspective on Montesquieu is not shared by Bernard Yack and implicitly by Judith Shklar, who have both maintained that civic virtue was no part of Montesquieu’s vision of the moderate regime, but it certainly offers a stronger connection between Montesquieu’s thought and the American situation.

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Hulliung, n. 34. Morton Horwitz, “Republicanism and Liberalism in American Constitutional Thought,”William and Mary Law Review 29:1 (1987), pp. 57–74; p. 71. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Social Contract, III:15; PL, 430. Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in David Heyd, ed., Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18–27. See Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism Without Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Paul Brass, The Politics of India Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Ramachandra Guha has discussed Indian society as characterized by religious, linguistic, regional, and caste, in addition to class, cleavages. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New Delhi: Harper Perennial, 2008).

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9 The Unconditional Self 1 Claude Habib

“Pour être soi-même un, il faut agir comme on parle.” —Emile

Reactions to Rousseau’s writings, and to the opening pages of the Confessions in particular, reflect the confusion into which he was not afraid to cast his reader. From the preamble on, a violent proximity is imposed. The reader, summoned to be a judge, is apprehended as a peer. But this peer cannot continue to be one unless he accepts the task of understanding Rousseau. But this judge would impeach his own judgment if he did not acknowledge the innocence, not to say the excellence, of this new sort of penitent. This entrance into the matter is an entrance into tumult. By means of a famous formula, Rousseau sets everyone the challenge of saying, “I was better than that man,” after having read his book. That is to affirm, if not that he is the best of men, at the very least that there is no one better than he is. And since upon opening a book no one can have read it, this is not a challenge that one can accept, but an intimidation that one must endure. Thus it is to be feared that one cannot understand Rousseau without admitting his moral superiority from the outset. In this case the reader could be a peer only on the condition of admitting himself to be an inferior. Doubtless this is not what Rousseau wanted to say, because he knows and distrusts this logical circle; he described it himself with regard to amour propre under the grip of which each wants others to prefer him to themselves, which cannot happen. Upon what foundation could Rousseau lay claim to a moral magisterium over the whole human race? He cannot be better on account of his virtue, which he says he lacks. If he is better, it is because he has preserved his connection to the goodness of the origins. It is uniquely 209

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because of what he has in common with all men that he distinguishes himself from them and claims to take precedence over them. This is certainly surprising, but it is not preposterous: along the way others might have lost this original disposition that he alone has preserved. Rousseau, contrary to the rest of men, has not squandered his humanity. It must be recalled that original goodness does not consist in active beneficence, nor even in good will for others: it consists in the fact of loving oneself, which assumes that one does not compare oneself, because every comparison inevitably brings about the coming to awareness of an inferiority or a superiority— and by that very fact an experience of vexation or disdain. It is only because man in the state of nature is by himself that he is good. Rousseau is not in that situation: he lives in society, he is certain of having readers. Thus to put his goodness into play, or to transform goodness into a supporting player, creates a short circuit injurious to theory. This amounts to putting into the service of ever dangerous comparison the distinctive feature by which each person experiences himself as incomparable. Manifestly, the fact of being good in Rousseau’s fashion should forbid one to believe oneself to be better. This consideration does not stop Rousseau (his theory is made not for stopping, but for propelling him). The definitive version of the preamble of the Confessions is a forceful passage, and every reader feels it even without having his theory of man in mind—it is even keener if one does remember it. The book opens, then, with a brutal injunction: this narrative of life is a moral challenge, and everyone must measure himself by ­Rousseau’s yardstick; that is to say in accordance with the criterion and the procedure that he sets up. The criterion is a goodness that proves itself not by means of works but by interior testimony; the procedure is total veracity. From this results a very new bluntness in the sexual domain. Readers are informed, without any possible equivocation, about ­Rousseau’s masochism or onanism. In this connection it is necessary to dispel a misunderstanding: the unveiled intimacy to which he invites his readers has very little in common with contemporary exhibitionism. His motives differ in every respect. If Rousseau tells all, he does so, not for the pleasure of exhibiting himself, but to prove that he is not hiding anything. He must tell all, even if it costs him to do so: “While I blush only to think about the things I must say, I know that harsh men will still treat the humiliation of the most painful admission as impudence; but I must make these admissions or disguise myself.”2 210

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The difficulty of the three admissions contained in the first three books of the Confessions cannot escape anyone. The erection during the spanking by Mlle. Lambercier forms the first step “in the obscure and miry labyrinth,”3 the succeeding calumnious accusation of the theft of the ribbon is given as the most serious crime and the most stinging remorse; the abandonment of Lemaitre at Lyon, finally, is signaled as the third and last of the most painful admissions. The indulgence that Rousseau demonstrates in the narrative of behavior that seems to us to be even more compromising seems all the more surprising. Even leaving things at the account of book 3, the exhibitionism at Turin does not enter into the list of “painful admissions.” Now to show one’s behind to washerwomen is an intentional action, obviously more reprehensible than an involuntary erection. The puerile erection is not morally blameworthy; the exhibitionism at Turin would be criminally liable in our day, as an insult to modesty or sexual harassment. Rousseau does not manifest any contrition: he deplores his stupidity and relives again his keen relief at having escaped the pursuit of “the man with a sabre.” The tone is that of a good trick and not of remorse, which produces, at the minimum, an impression of imbalance, at worst of madness. This impression arises from a lack of awareness of the historical setting. In Rousseau’s defense, it is necessary to place the episode into a popular context, which the work of Yvonne Verdier allows us to appreciate: “The play of verbal and even gestural aggression between the washerwomen and the man who passes by is traditionally vouched for in the folklore of washerwomen and, what is striking, is the wellestablished character of their language, a filthy language.”4 Noël du Fail indicates that, having reached the end of their insults, “they [had] no other recourse for protection than to display themselves and hump their behinds at the opposing party. The same gestural tradition is reported by a traveler who sails up the Seine in the 18th century.”5 We always assume that women are vulnerable, because, in a world where women are not segregated anymore and where public order is well established, we have lost the habit of seeing them exist in groups. The level of excitement around the washhouses was a matter of course for Rousseau’s contemporaries, the situation of maidservants drawing water from a well is quite similar, and his exhibition must have appeared inoffensive if not entirely banal. The man with the sabre, who pursues the rascal, manifestly desires more to frighten than to chastise. It is probable that the scandal has changed meanings: in the eighteenth century, the little sketch must have been perceived as popular, hence ignoble. The 211

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perception of a corporal class distinction and consequently the breach with popular gestures are evident to everyone, including the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse; witness this remark about an illustration of the novel: “The more I look at the final engraving, the more ignoble I find it, and that is the greatest defect it could have. In the figures of Claire and Wolmar there must be a certain nobility of bearing that distinguishes them from the people who are in the chamber.”6 We do not adopt any distance of historical perspective with ­Rousseau because he created an intimacy of a new type with his readers. Some have emphasized its elements of identification and fusion. Thus ­François Mauriac states: “Today Jean-Jacques arouses love or hatred, we love him as we love ourselves, we hate him as we hate ourselves.”7 He is an author whom one calls by his first name and who provokes an admiration without distance, if such a thing is possible. He is also a man whom one does not easily reject: “Even when he irritates us most, we do not fail to discover in him that flavor that one finds only in oneself.”8 In fact, today’s readers are willing to follow his footsteps in order to traverse the society of the Ancien Regime. Little by little they succeed in initiating themselves into the complications of the Old World because they have fastened themselves to this self who resembles them. The world of noble privilege has no equivalent in modern experience, but Rousseau is a brother. He is a guide whom we are willing to follow in this world before the revolution because he suffers from it in the same way we would suffer from it in his place, and because he ventures into it for reasons that are still ours: Rousseau, like Stendhal after him, goes off in search of happiness. We share his humiliations; we sympathize with his ecstasies, because he is obviously an individual. His emotions stir us without mediation, because between him and us, the emotional register has not changed. It is common to be stopped by a difficulty in a text; here, on the contrary, it is the too great facility that ought to alert us. This simplicity cannot be taken for granted. This immediacy ought to surprise us. If we listen to the pieces of music that Rousseau composed, the temporal distance becomes perceptible immediately. How does it happen that it appears to be abolished in the first-person narrative? As complicated as he might be on the psychological level, by means of his life Rousseau carried out a tremendous simplification. He deliberately extricated himself from all forms of affiliation—familial, social, religious, or national—in order to become a man who did not depend on anything. Even if he took the patriotic trumpet to his mouth, he 212

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nevertheless ran away from Geneva before being exiled from France. Even if he sang familial virtues, in his own case he was satisfied with an ersatz household: for a long time Thérèse passed for his housekeeper, an indication of the domestic role to which he confined her even before the abandonment of their children. That does not mean that he had no affective tie with his fatherland or his substitute family, or any sort of fidelity. Up until the final period of his life, he celebrates the anniversary of the journée des échelles9 along with Genevans in Paris. He took on his share of familial obligations: until his Aunt Suzon’s death, he paid her a small pension. Similarly, he had promised Thérèse Levasseur never to abandon her and did not break this meager promise. These are obligations he chose to take on: freely given benefits, rather than duties prescribed by his station, because he wanted nothing to do with a station. Whatever importance he might attribute to charity, his first duty was toward himself. He maintained a jealous vigilance in the preservation of his freedom. When one gets interested in Montesquieu, one can hardly avoid asking oneself what a président à mortier is. It is impossible, when reading Saint-Simon, to be unaware of the statutory privileges of a duke and a peer. On the other hand, when one hones in on Rousseau, it is useless to learn what a cashier of a financier does or what role the director of the Journal des Sçavans plays. These are positions that were within his reach but which he turned down, as he refused the three royal pensions for which he was put forward. Rousseau made obstinate efforts to reduce social constraints. He sought to be nothing but an “I.” In that he resembles, but more hardheadedly, adolescents who do not want to fit in, and this refusal to be indebted to the society of his time for anything is his passport to our society. In truth, this is only a negative condition: because he is not attached to his own epoch, he appears less alien to ours. His effective independence effaces the distance in time. When he leaves Savoy, at more than thirty years of age, he is a destitute man who, in order to succeed, counts only on the talents he has and on the impression he makes. He did not create this personage: this human type preexists him, and it is very suspect in a society that is organized against social mobility. In a world that is not structured in a bureaucratic manner, it is imperative to know whom one is dealing with. Every man is protected by the network in which he is caught up, and one knows just about what to expect from the person who is the son of such-and-such, member of such a corporate body, or native of such province. It is true that in the eighteenth century, numerous 213

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adventurers, knights of industry, or professional gamblers happened to disturb this established order. Distrust is essential toward men without protectors who speak in their own name, plead their own case, promise pleasure or make a display of their fine sentiments. The classic distrust toward the exhibition of emotions is the corollary of a regulated social order, in which each person’s reticence signifies the knowledge, acceptance, and preservation of his place. One must not conclude from this that in the Old World emotional turbulence was unknown: it did not fail to be as intoxicating then as it is now. It was simply the specialty of seducers and good-for-nothings, charlatans, and swindlers. In writing the Confessions, Rousseau frees emotion from the social suspicion that weighed upon it because he inaugurates a new discourse that is based on passions without being strategic. To take pride in affective memory is to present life as a succession of affects: emotion does not intend to be contagious; it is the writer’s guide. It is no longer a risk of unruliness; it is the narrative’s rule. We know that literary precedents exist, in particular with the abbé Prévost, whom the young Rousseau made his favorite writer for a while: “I believe that reading—with fury and often interrupted—the imaginary misfortunes of Cleveland caused me more distress than my own misfortunes did.”10 To read Cleveland with fury is to identify oneself with a character who is as dubious as can be, since Prévost’s hero is the bastard son of Cromwell, who in this novel plays the role of the absolute monster. Cleveland lives tossed about by his passions. He gives way to the flux of the emotions, whether it is a question of love, jealousy, and desire for vengeance, or again resurgent desire in the middle of life: he is a hero whose passion triumphs, and it very often blinds him. Separated from his wife, he toys with the idea of marrying his daughter, who has been abducted as a child and whom he does not recognize. As if to compensate for his hero’s dubious birth and the risqué situations into which he puts him, Prévost endowed him with emphatic nobility. Before the Rousseauian heroes, Cleveland is both generous and passionate at the same time. In another manner, the hero of La Nouvelle Héloïse represents the possibility of a life free from any tie and directed by his passions through and through. Saint-Preux has no social position. His family never appears in the frame of the novel. He does not even have a name. His sole definition is to be Julie’s lover. The possibility of a definition of oneself purely in terms of the passions thus precedes the autobiographical undertaking, but the consistency of the fictional world can be called into question. Is it a real world, a 214

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possible world, or have we entered into the “land of illusions”? One can always raise the objection to novelists that Rousseau raises to playwrights: that they overvalue the excellence of their characters, and that it doesn’t cost them anything to load them up with imaginary virtues. It is not the same in autobiography when it is placed under a requirement of truthfulness. The inventory of emotions becomes an end in itself. To write the history of his soul, as Rousseau projects it, is to write the history of the successive feelings that have affected it. Their exposition no longer has the goal of eliciting pity from people in influential positions in order to obtain their forgiveness, favor, or promotion. It has no other goal than self-knowledge. Interior life exists for itself, on the fringe of objectivity, apart from anyone else’s perception. The author of the Confessions takes it upon himself to restore to the interior life its depth and its own consistency. This is a deliberate project that he explains in the Neuchatel preamble: “What shows itself is only the smallest part of what is; it is the apparent effect whose internal cause is hidden and often very complicated.”11 From the moment that what appears on the outside is only the smallest part of what is offered to analysis, a man ceases to be reducible to what he does. That does not lead to any dismissal of responsibility. He has done what he has done, his actions remain what they are, and the historical truth is not dissolved in the analysis of passionate motives. Just because the largest part of an iceberg is invisible does not mean that collisions do not take place on the surface. Nevertheless accidental collisions are not explanations. They need to be explained. And moral causality has nothing mechanical about it: it is disconcerting unless one pays sustained attention to it. What a man does is not necessarily the result of what he wants, for one is not always equal to oneself. It is not impossible to fail in justice or to fail in enjoyment without wanting to. The episodes of the stolen ribbon or the fiasco in Venice illustrate these sad contingencies, and manifestly show that interior dispositions cannot be deduced from actions. To denounce the person whom one likes, precisely because one likes her, to push away the person one desires, precisely because one desires her, these are actions impossible to decipher from the outside, and unpredictable from the beginning even for the person who commits them. Rousseau was the first to be caught by surprise when he burst into tears in Zulietta’s bedroom. It happens that one may act against one’s interests, against one’s desires, or against one’s conscience. From this it must be concluded that it is possible to be good and to act badly. No one doubts that this 215

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discovery opens the door to the worst sort of egotistical complacency. The self that contemplates itself in its lapses can pass its life bemoaning the harshness of the world. The lyrical self-pity of the Romantics will make visible, as through a magnifying glass, a risk present from the beginning. These weepers make an easy target, and the critique of the beautiful soul becomes a commonplace theme in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is present in Flaubert; one finds it again in George Eliot’s pen: “Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake.”12 The estrangement of the self and the world is not a late discovery for Rousseau, even if it stands out with the greatest sharpness in the Dialogues. The young Rousseau had not yet elaborated his theory of man while he was already measuring the distance between worldly success and the sensitivity upon which he prided himself. Relating the impression that a spectacle had made upon him, he writes to Mme. de Warens in 1737: “Why, Madame, are there some hearts sensitive to the great, to the sublime, to pathos, while others seem made only to crawl in the baseness of their feelings. Fortune seems to make a sort of compensation for all that; but by dint of lifting up the latter, it seeks to put them at a level with the greatness of the others.”13 At this age, twenty-five years old, he takes on a worldly tone in order to underline the outrageous distribution of worldly advantages. He does not complain: he banters. But one already distinguishes the motif of a sentimental elitism to which the ideal world of the first Dialogue was later to give its completed form: certain beings stand out from the crowd and are not made to inhabit the earth. They are worth more than the others because they are more sensitive than they are. Men might well be equals as men; nevertheless they are not equally human. Confronted with this sort of claim, we share the irony of the postRomantic writers. In a world that has ceased to be ordered by the difference of conditions, it has become commonplace to take oneself for an exceptional being. We are used to it, and we shrug before so much candor and self-complacency. If Rousseau captivates us, it is not for the exaltation of his own sensibility, nor for his belief in inborn goodness—a belief in which he proved to be in fine the principal beneficiary, since even if everyone was born good, he is the only one to have remained so. The fact remains that even if we do not adhere to his founding principle, Rousseau’s introspection is striking because of its acuteness. Its premise seems false to us, the conclusion hardly debatable. 216

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In fact, it is impossible not to be gripped by the observation of mental life. Rousseau has given credence to the opposition between being and appearing, not by opposing his sad fate and the excellence of his soul, but by revealing the complexity of interior life: he has lifted the veil on interiority without relation to what appears outside. And it is by means of incongruities—unpredictable flashes or disastrous lapses— that he has made its density tangible and sounded its depths. It is by following the strange percolations of what passes from the inside to the outside that he promoted a new vision of the individual. This new vision is irreducible to the Christian conception—because the self is no longer guilty. It is equally irreducible to the liberal vision—because the self is passionate and can in no way be reduced to the calculation of its interest. It does seem familiar to us, perhaps even more familiar than it really is. Since Freud we have been habituated, much more than Rousseau’s contemporaries were, to the extent to which the individual escapes himself. It is rather the project of mastering oneself that has become incomprehensible to us. We are persuaded that a part of mental life falls under the unconscious, whose activity is betrayed by the symptom, the slip, or the dream. Rousseau does not minimize the experiences of internal otherness, on the contrary. He sets them down, and he emphasizes them: “There are times when I am so little like myself that I would be taken for another man of a completely opposite character.”14 He is a hitched-up composite and presents himself as such. This bizarre character does not condemn the project of knowledge. On the contrary, it is its object. But unlike readers formed by reading Freud, Rousseau is always persuaded that a sustained attention would succeed in explaining his behavior, as disconcerting as it seems. Introspection is enough for everything. The clarity of reason achieves the goal of clarifying the seemingly most arbitrary details. It can explain sexual preferences, as it can cross through the opacity of habit, which Rousseau affirms at the beginning of the Sixth Promenade: “There is hardly any one of our automatic impulses whose cause we could not find in our heart, if we only knew how to look for it.”15 In order not to hide anything, it would be necessary to know everything. The intention, proclaimed many times, of allowing the reader to see him entirely presupposes a complete self-knowledge. Rousseau does not boast at having perfectly attained it: he admits some gaps of memory. Even so, he does not judge such knowledge to be inaccessible in principle. This conviction, which has become alien to us, is shared by 217

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his contemporaries when they take an interest in “thought about which one does not think,” what Jean-François Perrin calls, “the Augustinian approach to what we call the unconscious.”16 Marivaux brings the same attention to the obscure zones of consciousness and shows the same confidence in the powers of analysis when he brings his attention to bear on the minute movements of the soul: the imperceptible can be perceived and the incomprehensible can be comprehended provided a subtle observation. The more precise the examination is, the more sure the knowledge is. According to this optimism of intelligence, whose concept we have lost, there is no unknowable at the bottom of the human soul: neither trauma, nor repression. The other side of this assurance is the conviction of sinful nature. For the descendants of Malebranche, as a matter of course, sin is what obscures consciousness, and amour propre remains, as in the preceding century, the great provider of illusions about oneself—an amour propre conceived as it was before Rousseau, not as the corruption of a primary passion, but as the mark of our finitude. Without being a Freudian, Rousseau, who is not exactly a Christian either, scrutinizes the accidents of his mental life with an impressive courage. Since this examination is supposed to constitute its own justification, the more thoroughly the former is searched, the more unassailable the latter will be. No sense of propriety holds him back, no fright paralyses him: he is not afraid of discovering himself to be mad, he no longer fears being damned. He dreads men’s injustice, but he counts on his memory and on the testimony of his conscience. This fine optimism does not apply to himself alone, first he extended it to the ensemble of men before making use of it for defending his own cause: “There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered.”17 Such is the foundation of his confidence. Every man is intelligible, provided one has the means to recover his path. It is this perfect legibility of the “I” that the Confessions develops, no longer under the form of the general law of the human race, but in the fractal precision of memory. For personal history differs from the history of men that it confirms: it is a singular adventure, it is nevertheless universal as the trajectory of an alteration. The attention brought to internal heterogeneity strikes us as modern. It is nevertheless not new. Montaigne, who opened the field of the examination of oneself to literature,18 had given striking formulations of it: “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so 218

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diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.”19 From Montaigne to Rousseau, the filiation is hardly disputable, across the parenthesis that forms, in the seventeenth century, the ideal of a subject fully master of itself. For Montaigne as for Rousseau, the accidents of mental life pass to the center of attention. In the meantime, consciousness of internal division had never completely disappeared. The classical project might have obliterated it, but the greatest minds had taken good care not to forget it. In pointing out that a sneeze fills the soul, Pascal mines the same vein, even if he does so with a different aim. If the accidents of subjective life are not a new material, in what then does Rousseau’s novelty consist? The difference is in the treatment. Interior otherness appears to be burdened with new risks. Henceforth, it is the cause of suffering and menace in a different way than it had ever been before. Division is no longer anecdotic and amusing, it is disturbing this internal otherness can separate one from what one desires, alienate one from what one esteems, condemn one to misunderstanding. Thus the treatment of the motif is in terms of passion. This is not a pure question of coloration or style. The treatment concerns pathos because the motif has become historic: Rousseau’s self develops itself in time in an irreversible manner. Bizarrely modified by its readings and its encounters, this self is humbled by servitude, it is compromised by its own hopes. Constantly exposed to the rough seas of society, it is different from those leisuretime depictions of Rousseau’s predecessors. It is no longer a question of considering internal dissimilarities with a smiling self-sufficiency—the sufficiency of the one who is exploding human presumption. It is even less a question of taking advantage of it in order to reveal the weakness of our reason and the urgency of our salvation. Rousseau has no leeway. He disposes neither of skeptical self-sufficiency nor Christian overtowering. Henceforth, incongruities and aberrations expose the most naked part of one’s being. Rousseau is without family, without fatherland, without support, as he never stops repeating (the litany of destitution is the other side of his freedom). Now his only support does not stop betraying him: he is the one who is only himself, who can count on nothing but himself, and who cannot even count on himself. Weakness crops up constantly. He excels in making us feel its painful reality. It is the pitiful and banal experience of the lie as it is evoked in the Fourth Promenade—not the criminal lie, but the unthinking invention 219

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with the sole end of filling a blank space. And not only does Rousseau says foolish things; he hears himself saying them: “[Conversation] almost always forcing me to speak before thinking, has frequently suggested to me foolish and inappropriate things of which my reason disapproved and which my heart disavowed as soon as they escaped from my mouth.”20 From the Confessions onward the relationship to himself is also filled with a new gravity, in spite of the humor that colors the first part. ­Rousseau is not satisfied with keeping a log of peculiarities; he is speaking about his heart. Even if the sanction of remorse sometimes accompanies the confession of faults, the majority of episodes do not call for moral judgment, whether he is evoking the shame or embarrassment that ruined so many moments or the rare happiness that wreathed several years. The present unhappiness never completely disappears. It is there, held in abeyance, as the memory reactivates, by retracing them, the swelling of multiple emotions—hope and happiness but also uncalled-for fears, ridiculous humiliations, and all the trifling woes of the past. The tenderness shows that it is no longer simply a question of the intimate picturesque. This succession is the truth of a life that is not only singular, although it certainly is that, but eminently personal: this destiny belongs to no one but him. This way of merging with one’s history is new; it makes Rousseau the first of the moderns. The one who is stripped of all traditional affiliations is in intimate solidarity with a past that has made him what he is. He depends on it, as much as and more than his contemporaries could hold on to their entangled familial, religious, national, or corporatist loyalties. With every fiber of his being, Rousseau, who meticulously freed himself from these loyalties, holds on to the history that has made him. He has no distance with regard to his trajectory: he clings to it. Because he has not embraced the roles of the theater of the world as the men of the classic age did, he is quite simply the life he has lived. If today we disdain the concept of original goodness, we cannot fail to recognize this fierce attachment to oneself. It is self-evident; we consider it natural. We no longer adhere to the foundational principle, but we continue this way of adhering to oneself; we reproduce that passionate attachment that only this first principle allowed to be discovered. For if Rousseau had not been certain of his native goodness, he never could have embarked on the undertaking of the Confessions. He would never have risked showing himself on the outside as he felt himself to be on the inside if he had not anticipated showing, along with his faults, the dispositions that redeemed them. 220

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Sometimes Rousseau expresses consideration, in particular for the few women who made a mark on his life. Nevertheless his attachment to himself is unrestrained: Rousseau never keeps himself in the background. He does not have the elegance of the man of the world, accustomed to seeing himself as one among others; he is not the representative, more or less singular, of a class or a station. He is only himself; that is what makes him absolutely himself. His destitution is the wellspring of his affirmation: this expanded self whose extension knows no limits is essentially a vulnerable self. It is weak and it defends itself. There is no other way to understand the surprising subtitle of his first collection: The Allobrogian Muse or the Works of Tom Thumb [La Muse allobroge, ou les Oeuvres du Petit Poucet]. In the tale, Tom Thumb is the puniest and the most lucid of the children: the one who becomes aware that his parents are trying to kill him. At the time of the theoretical works, the fact of caring for oneself is posed as the original passion: it is ineradicable and always remains, although under altered forms.21 Still discreet in the first subtitle, this defensive position becomes dominant in the following works: for him, to write is to counterattack. Self-defense is legitimate in view of the weakness of the self. If one excepts La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau hardly ever takes up the pen except in a state of legitimate self-defense. Pathos results from this weakness. It accounts for the unmoored subjectivity that is ceaselessly tossed from shame to pride and from happiness to despair. It is the natural accent of a desire to live that is threatened by death. Previously pathos and weakness were excluded from the relation to oneself, as unworthy of a man and even more of an honorable man. Even in the abbé Prévost, they are not entirely self-evident: in Manon Lescaut, in many places the highly poignant narrative of des Grieux allows one to suspect the bad faith of a pleader whose passion is as clear as his behavior is murky. The case is different in Cleveland: the character requires an increase of nobility, as if abandonment to the torrent of the passions made indispensable, as compensation, the display of his greatness of soul and his generosity. It is not appropriate for a man to be weak; an honorable man does not employ pathos in speaking of himself. The power of the Rousseauian infraction is measured in relation to these standards: he needed an uncommon strength to bring disdain upon himself and to stand up to ridicule. Furthermore, a trivial weakness never could have made itself audible. A different quality was needed for that, aside from weakness 221

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and passionate nature. This self wants to have integrity. By means of this vocation to integrity, Rousseau made himself into someone who transformed the moral world. His strength is hidden by the themes he promoted, which can strike the reader as linked to weakness, or even to cowardice. Incrimination of society, conviction of one’s own innocence, self-pity: this triad has become familiar, it resembles a fatality of adolescence. And, from the fact that adolescence tends to extend itself over the whole life, this unavoidable passage can become a sidetrack: a fair number of lives are passed in suffering and moaning. The self-expression of passive and suffering men is without a doubt a characteristic of modernity (in previous times, those who suffered were voiceless). Between the Rousseauian posture and that of belated adolescents, there is then a resemblance and not an identity: the ­Rousseauian complaint excludes spinelessness. An uncommon power was needed to bring to light dispositions that are so common. A relentless labor was needed to release and defend, as the essence of man, a nucleus of idleness and freedom. Weakness and strength, timidity and courage, dissimulation and parrhesia: Rousseau is very conscious of the alloy of opposites that makes up his character, causes the incoherencies of his behavior, and provokes the incomprehension of those who intersected with it. He makes a masterful synthesis of it in the admirable self-portrait in book 3—he who affirms elsewhere that he refuses to paint his portrait, but limits himself to giving a detailed account of his history, allowing the reader to deduce his character from it: “If I took responsibility for the result and I said to him; such is my character, he would be able to believe, if not that I am fooling him, at least that I am fooling myself. But by relating to him in detail with simplicity everything that has happened to me, everything I have done, everything I have thought, everything I have felt, I cannot lead him into error.”22 Rousseau can merge his portrait and his history. What is true for one is true for the other: he is only what he has done, felt, thought. It results from this that a selective history would be a touched-up ­portrait; it becomes imperative to tell everything in order not to distort the picture: “For if I keep silent about something one will not know me about anything, so much does everything depend on everything else, so much is everything one in my character, and so much does this bizarre and peculiar assemblage need all the circumstances of my life to be well unveiled.”23 Thanks to history, two apparently contradictory affirmations are here uttered with the same breath. Affirmation of the 222

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composite character of the self goes hand in hand with the fierce affirmation of its unity: everything holds together, everything is one. While he willingly acknowledges his disparate interior, Rousseau persists in feeling himself to be one. Here a dividing line passes between Diderot and Rousseau, both of them heirs of Montaigne, but who carry on this inheritance very differently. For Diderot and the materialist thinkers who follow him, the unity of the self is only an illusion. The self is entirely made up of bits and pieces: all the internal organs and all external stimuli pull their own way. Also, he continuously denounces the twin illusions of the unity of the self and human freedom. Jacques le fataliste forces the caricature by presenting under the features of the master an impotent simpleton who imagines that he is doing what he wills. In Le Rêve de d’Alembert, the unity of the individual is represented as that of a swarm of bees. If the self can appear as one, it is in the manner of a cluster, of an aggregate of distinct individuals. If it is one, it is as seen from afar. Up close, it is composite. Better, the elements that form it have autonomous motions: they can combine or separate. They can combine provisionally, as they can tug in opposite directions at the same time. The violent unity, which is that of the fanatic, the lover, or the creator, is never anything but a provisional condition of the self. To the tradition of the egocide thinkers, to use Jacob Rogozinski’s expression, Rousseau opposes a flat refusal. For him the sentiment of freedom is ineradicable, and the perception of unity resists the consciousness of psychic heterogeneity. Rousseau can describe the most aberrant impulsions, admit moments in which he is no longer himself, multiply examples of these things: all that changes nothing. The disruptions of continuity do not make a dent in unitary certitude. If he is bold enough to exhibit the successive corruptions of his nature that have made him what he is, it is because he does not merge his nature and his history. He might well be the fruit of his history; he does not identify absolutely with the corruptions that have altered him, even though they did alter him: there are matters of fact and there are matters at the bottom of things. The feeling of what he is at bottom never abandons him; he is the foundation of his own confidence. Deformed, hard-hit, perverted, he is one. One can recall that education has the goal of protecting and promoting this subjective unity. It gives itself the mission of preserving the child’s self, kept away from the seductions of vice and the vexations of competition. The project of Emile is to make an unfailing man, capable 223

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of committing himself and of keeping his promises, a man whose actions and words coincide. Emile will be happily and uniformly what Rousseau can only strive to be, unhappily and in fits and starts. Even if he is incapable of achieving it, he does not want to renounce it. Not only does Rousseau feel himself to be one, but he wants to be one. That could pass for a contradiction: if he really were one, why does he need to desire to be one? Nevertheless, that is his situation and his fundamental resolution: he is the one who experiences his unity in the chaos of intimate divisions, without despairing of resolving them or at least reducing them. He is the one who strives and who takes responsibility for himself and is the one who sets this in opposition to the company he keeps in Paris. In Paris, division is omnipresent but has stopped being the given of the internal problem. It does not call for reduction; it has changed itself into seduction. It is the titillation of fine wits. What stupefies his Saint-Preux, when he sets foot in the capital, is to encounter men there who revel in division. Paris is the place par excellence of division made comfortable: “They have principles for conversation and others for practice; the contrast scandalizes no one, and it is agreed that there should be no resemblance between them. It is not even required of an Author, especially of a moralist, that he speak as his books do, nor that he act as he speaks. His writings, his words, his conduct are three utterly different things, which he is not obliged to reconcile.”24 The convivial people crossed by Saint-Preux resemble the Encyclopedists frequented by Rousseau: they are brilliant, witty people, delighted at being able to write, speak, and live on different levels. To them, this division seems to be a new freedom: they are held to nothing, not even to their own declarations. For Rousseau or for his hero, this dissipation of oneself, far from being a freedom, is the renunciation of the life of a free man. For, if the Citizen of Geneva admits division as a fact, one must have a completely Parisian frivolity to see it as a benefit. Rousseau certainly takes into consideration the self ’s incoherencies and flaws: he knows them, he tolerates them. He does not approve of them. In the midst of the general laxity, he maintains the ideal of unity of self. He perseveres in it with more or less friction—ideally, in the epoché of Emile, sorrowfully, in the chaos of personal experience. But the principle does not vary, unity is natural; it corresponds to the primordial experience: that of the original independence of the human race, that of the sentiment of existence for the individual. Whereas modern division is the corollary of impotence, bringing oneself together is the path to 224

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liberation and the mainspring of independence. Freedom depends on rediscovered unity. The passion for integrity is alien to literary people. They do not see any inconvenience in splitting themselves apart; their own multiplicity pleases them. They are enchanted with their complexity, having reached that point of no return in which contradiction is no longer denial but amusement. For them, word and thought have become ­inconsistent—thought and word, the only resources of the one who does not have anything. Before dreading the world’s cruelty, Rousseau makes its inconsistency tangible. For before being cruel, the world is hollow. Definition of the self in terms of passion, but also weakness and defensive posture: by means of these three aspects, the Rousseauian self communicates on an equal level with modern individuality. It differs from it, nevertheless, by a final feature: the passion for integrity, which is another name for hatred of lying. We have a tendency to neglect this aspect, without seeing that it was, strictly speaking, the condition of its discovery. We are no longer favorably impressed by this aspect: such an effort seems excessive; it disturbs us more than it convinces. So much jealous and vigilant ardor no longer compels admiration. This fidelity to oneself, always on the alert, is not in style in our mocking and relaxed age. The tension of pathos is the exact opposite of a cool attitude. Because we are incapable of such an effort, we have a tendency to disqualify it as a personal pathology or as the residue of an old fanaticism—to denounce Rousseau’s paranoia or Puritan heritage. But how is it possible not to see that this tension, of which we disapprove, is what allowed him to break with the old representations and to leave behind him the definitions of man by reason, by sin, or by affiliation with a political body? If he had not “consecrated his life to the truth,” he would not have opened the individualistic, agnostic, and passionate perspective in which we remain caught. It is hard to characterize as modern this passion for integrity that distinguishes Rousseau from his contemporaries. To keep one’s promises and to believe what one says are qualities that have been acknowledged in all places at all times: they are always necessary for human relations, and, without being modern, the adage Pacta sunt servanda continues to be in force among men and states. Moreover, when traditional affiliations have become obsolete, it is all the more indispensable to be able to count on reliable agents. Individual moral responsibility can appear to be an austere perspective, but it is not clear that modern society can do without it. The requirement of unity certainly has less attraction 225

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than a swarm of bees in Diderot’s fashion, taken not as a model of social organization but as a principle of internal anarchy: not the swarm that attends to its life in an ordered way, but the one that swarms, that flies where it flies, without any of those who form it being responsible for the direction of the whole. Such an image exercises a powerful attraction. It combines freedom of each of the parts with self-regulation of the whole. Rousseauian tenacity, along with what it presupposes of suffering and effort, pleases us less. We have more of a tendency to be distressed about them for his sake. Was not he the artisan of his own misfortunes, parading unacceptable moral demands and inappropriate ambitions through a permissive world? Rousseau, it cannot be doubted, inaugurated the injunction to be oneself, promised a fine future in democratic societies. But he accompanied it with the duty to be faithful to oneself in order to become a reliable being, a man who does not deceive and upon whom one can count. It is not clear whether this horizon of integrity can still attract individuals ever more liberated, who long ago rejected the dictatorship of the superego, the stringent morality of Calvin, and even differences that relate to nature: ungendered individuals, for whom constraint, wherever it comes from, is no longer timely. Through his example, Rousseau invites thinking about the constraint one imposes on oneself, in order not to lose oneself. Always striving to be himself, but also to be intelligible to himself. It is certainly in this effort, and not in his various talents, that he saw his personal merit, and it is from this that one can understand the initial challenge, thrown in humanity’s face. If no one can say, “I am better than that man,” it is not because there are gradations in original goodness: obviously, it is the same for everyone; but it is because no one has made such an effort to proclaim to men the good news about their goodness, nor such an effort to remain good under the repeated blows of destiny. We must hope that we have not been rendered incapable of understanding this passionate perseverance. 1. 2.

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Notes

Translated by Christopher Kelly, who also translated all quotations from French unless otherwise indicated. “Fragments and Sketches from the Confessions,” Collected Writings of Rousseau, edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991–2011), volume 5, p. 589. This edition will be cited as CW. I thank Patrick Hochart for having drawn my attention to this passage.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Confessions, CW, 5, 15. Yvonne Verdier, Façons de dire, façons de faire (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque des idées,” 1979), p. 133. Ibid. The first sentence comes from Noël du Fail, ctied by P. Sébillot, Légendes et curiosités des métiers (Paris: Flammarion, 1895). “Letter to Coindet,” 19 January 1761, emphasis added. François Mauriac, Préface aux Confessions (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1963), p. 5, cited by Nanine Charbonnel, Comment payer ses dettes quand on a du genie. Philosophie de Rousseau, t 1 (Lons-Le-Saunier: Aréopage, 2006). Ibid. On March 29, 1529, Geneva rebuffed a surprise attack by Savoyards and later established a celebration to commemorate the event. Confessions, CW, 5, p. 184. CW, 5, p, 586. George Eliot, Middlemarch, VII, chapter LXIV. Grenoble, 123 September 1737 to Mme. de Warens, Correspondance ­complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited by R. A. Leigh (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–95), t. 1, 16, p. 49. This edition will be cited as Leigh with the volume number and letter number. Confessions, book III, CW, 5, p. 107. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, CW, 8, p. 49. Jean-François Perrin, Rousseau, le chemin de ronde (Paris: Hermann, 2014), p. 392. Emile, CW, 13, p. 225. On this point see Pierre Manent, Montaigne. La vie sans loi (Paris: ­Flammarion, 2014), chapter 3 “De l’eloquence à la litérature.” Pierre Manent sees in Montaigne’s operation, not the addition to a new field for literature, but truly the opening of the field of literature as such. Montaigne, Essais, translated by M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003) l.2, chap. 1, p. 380. Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, CW, 8, p. 35. In the fairy tales collected by Charles Perrault (and in Mother Goose in England and elsewhere), Petit Poucet detects his parents’ plan to abandon him and his siblings in the woods because of their poverty. Confessions, book IV, CW, 5, pp. 146–147. Neuchâtel preface to the Confessions, CW, 5, 589. La Nouvelle Héloïse, II, letter 14, CW, 6, pp. 192–193.

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About the Authors Claude Habib is professor of eighteenth century French literature at the University of la Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is author and editor of several books on Rousseau. Mark Hulliung is professor of history at Brandeis University. He has published widely on topics concerning intellectual, cultural, and political history, European and American. His works include The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes. Christopher Kelly is a professor in the department of Political Science at Boston College. He is co-editor of the Collected Writings of Rousseau and author of Rousseau as Author and Rousseau’s Exemplary Life. Shefali Misra is a professor of political theory at St. Michael’s College. Her research interests include the history of eighteenth century thought; ancient and modern skepticism; and issues of cultural diversity and democratic justice. Michael O’Dea is professor emeritus at Université Lyon 2. He is author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire. He has edited Rousseau et les philosophes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau en 2012. Patrick Riley (1941–2015) was a professor of political theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and also taught at Harvard University. He is author of The General Will Before Rousseau and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau. Claudia Schaler has taught at Stonehill College and St. Francis Xavier University. Her research centers on the problem of authority in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Julia Simon is professor of French at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics. 229

Index Addison & Steele, The Spectator, 20, 100, 109, 114 Adorno, Theodore, 131 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, ix, 92–95, 102, 145, 168–170, 172–173, 179–181, 223 amour de soi, xii, 51, 75 amour propre, xii, 51–53, 55–56, 70–71, 75–76, 78–79, 151, 194, 209, 218 Aristophanes, 66 Aristotle, 37–38, 43, 45, 79, 165, 167 Augustine, 38

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, abbé, xv, xxi Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de, 162, 173–174 Confessions, xiv, xxii, 4, 6, 20, 53, 64, 78, 92, 178, 209–211, 214–215, 218, 220 conjecture, xv, 49–50 consent, 31–32, 34, 39–40, 43, 46, 172 Constant, Benjamin, 153 Corancez, Olivier de, 111 Corneille, 89, 103, 113, 153, 165

Bach, J. S., 89 Bacon, Francis, 49, 58 Bambini, Eustacchio, 98 Barker, Ernest, 32 Beauvoir, Simone de, 72, 74–76, 80 Berlin, Isaiah, xix, xxiii, 80 Boerhaave, Hermann, 8–10, 15–19, 22, 24 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Bishop of Meaux, 38, 146–148, 154 Brossard, Sébastien de, xx, 89–90, 93, 112 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de, xv, 50 Burette, Pierre-Jean, 95

Dante, 156–157 Demosthenes, 148, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 104 Descartes, 14, 90, 96 Cartesians, 11–12 Diderot, Denis, ix, xi, xvii, xxii, 20–23, 36, 49, 92–93, 151, 154, 156, 162–165, 168–172, 179–181, 223, 226 Diogenes, 169 divine right, 31, 38–39, 43, 148 division of labor, xiii, xvi, 74, 179 Dumarsais, César Chesneau, 163–164, 166–168 Dupin, Louise-Marie-Madeleine, 6–8

Cassirer, Ernst, 34 Castel, Louis Bertrand, 6 Catherine the Great, xxii, 168 Chambers, Ephraim, 95 Chemistry, xvii, 5, 6–13, 15, 20, 23 Christianity, 20, 147, 156–57, 162–63, 195 Cicero, 37, 148, 152–153, 181 citizenship, xviii, 44, 66, 74, 172, 187, 189–190, 193, 200–202 civic virtue, 56, 77, 145, 152–154, 197 Cobban, Alfred, 32–33 commercial society, 180

Edict of Nantes, 39 education, xix, xxii, 35, 41, 44, 50, 56–57, 66, 76–77, 146, 155, 168, 176, 179, 223 Emile, xiii, xviii–xix, xxii–xxiii, 3–4, 47, 50, 51, 54–55, 56, 57, 66–67, 71–77, 145, 148–149, 154–155, 173, 175–177, 191, 209, 223–224 Encyclopédie, 36, 92–95, 97–98, 106, 151, 163, 168, 171 Encyclopedists, xiv, 92 enlightened despotism, 33, 35, 168 231

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity Enlightenment, xii, xviii, xxiii, 39, 49, 53, 79, 103, 162, 167–168, 171, 174, 179–180, 191, 205 French, ix, xi, xxiii, 169, 181 Scottish, x, xi, xvi, xxiii, 54, 179–180 Entrèves, A. P. d’, 32 Epictetus, xxiii, 161–166, 170, 174, 176, 181 Essay on the Origin of Languages, xxi, 23, 49, 56, 113, 123, 127–128 Euripides, 66, 176 family, xiii, xix, 6, 8, 45, 64, 68, 72–74, 91, 145–146, 156, 163–164, 213–214, 219 feminism, x, 63, 65–66, 74, 76 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, xxi, xxii, 145, 146–58 Ferguson, Adam, xi, xv–xvi, 53, 179 First Discourse (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts), xvii–xviii, xxii, 3–4, 8, 23, 67, 94, 99, 154–155, 172 Flaubert, Gustave, 126, 216 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 153 Francueil, Charles-Louis Dupin de, 6–8 Frederick the Great, 35 freedom, xviii, xix, 35, 39, 42, 44–45, 51, 53–54, 57–58, 63, 66–67, 73, 76–78, 166, 175–177, 187–188, 190, 196, 200–202, 213, 219, 222–226 Gandhi, Mohandas, 203 gender, 63, 66–67, 75, 201, 226 general will, xxii, xxiv, 34, 38, 51, 57, 65, 66, 67, 71–72, 74, 77–80, 155–158, 177, 197 George Eliot, 216 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, xx, 106–14 Gough, J. W., 32 Government of Poland, 33, 145, 150, 157 Great Legislator, xix Grotius, Hugo, xviii, 36–43, 45–48, 53–54 harmony, 98, 101, 104, 126, 128 and melody, 91–93, 95, 112, 129 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xviii, 31–34 Hélvetius, Claude-Adrien, xi, 180 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’, xi, 48, 163, 165, 180 Homer, 20, 95–96, 105–106, 147–149, 151, 153 Hume, David, xi, xiv–xvi, 38–39, 54, 179, 181 Hobbes, Thomas, xviii, 32, 36, 38–40, 50, 52–53, 56 232

imitation, mimesis, 128, 132–133 inequality, xiii, 23, 34–35, 47–48, 52, 54–55, 174, 179, 180, 197 Julie, xix, 3, 55–56, 63, 64–80, 133, 214 Kant, Immanuel, xviii, 31, 33–36, 43, 58, 127, 136–137 language, xv, xvi, xx, 49, 95, 97, 100–101, 103–105, 107–109, 113–114, 127, 180, 188, 199, 211 legitimacy, 31, 37 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 147, 156 Letter to d’Alembert, 94, 102, 173 Letter on French Music, 101, 108–109 Letters to Malesherbes, 3 Letters Written from the Mountain, xviii, 32, 157 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 104 liberalism, 188, 194, 197–199, 201–205 illiberalism, xxiv, 188 Locke, John, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 36, 38–39, 45–47, 49, 52, 54, 155, 158, 163, 173–74, 199 Louis XIII, 40 Louis XIV, 89, 146–49, 152–153 Louis XVI, 112 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 89–90, 92, 97, 101, 107–110 Lycurgus, 45, 57, 149 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 153, 155 Malebranche, Nicolas, 146–147, 218 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de, 3, 103 Mandeville, Bernard, xv, 123 Marcus Aurelius, xxiii, 161–166, 170–171, 174, 176, 181 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 218 Mauriac, François, 212 memory, xxi, 49, 71, 122, 128, 131–136, 204, 214, 217–218, 220 meritocracy, 54–55, 169 Mersenne, Marin, 90 Mill, John Stuart, 66 misogyny, 63–64, 66, 69–70, 72, 75–76, 78, 80 modernity, ix–xi, xiii–xiv, xvi–xxi, xxiii, 5, 24, 31, 75, 90, 93, 95, 100, 103, 112, 122, 137, 154, 179–180, 222

Index Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de, 90 Montaigne, Michel de, xxii, xxv, 161–163, 166–167, 171–173, 175, 177–179, 181, 218–219, 223 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Sécondat, baron de, 8, 41, 66, 92, 149, 172, 191, 197, 199, 213 Moultou, Pierre, 6 music, x, xix–xxi, 6, 89–114, 122–124, 126–137, 212 Muslims, xxiv, 193, 195, 201, 203–204 nationalism/nation state, xxiv, 32–33, 187–188, 195, 198, 202–205 Narcisse, 6 natural history, xv, 7, 50 natural law/natural rights, 13, 18, 24, 36–37, 39, 41–43, 46, 157, 172, 181 natural theology, 10, 13–18, 21–22, 24 Nehru, Jawaharal, 203–204 Newton, Isaac, xv, xvi, 8–9, 11–12, 14, 49, 50, 92 Okin, Susan, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75–76, 80 opera, xx, 7, 89–90, 92, 96, 98–104, 106–114, 126 oratory, 105 Paine, Tom, 54, 198 patriotism, 56, 157, 188, 198 Pascal, Blaise, 152, 163, 219 passions, xiv, 52, 70, 73, 76–77, 105, 114, 131–132, 135–136, 149, 162, 192, 214, 221 patriarchal, 31, 45, 77 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 98, 102, 113 Perrault, Claude, 95 philosophes, xx, xxii–xxiii, 79, 161–172, 180–181, 204 philosophical history, 173, 180 Piccinni, Niccolò, 107–108 Plato, xii, 37, 66, 77–79, 148, 153 Plutarch, 145, 149, 155 Political Economy, 47–48, 151, 155, 157 popular sovereignty, 34, 42–43, 78–79 Prévost, Antoine-François, abbé, xxv, 214, 221 Price, Richard, 53–54 “Profession of Faith”, 22, 24 property, 46–47, 55, 179, 190 Pufendorf, Samuel, xviii, 36–40, 43–46, 48, 51–54 Puritan Revolution, 53

Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, xxi, 95, 98, 145, 148, 154 Querelle des Bouffons, xx, 93, 98, 101, 107 Racine, Jean-Baptiste, 89, 98, 103, 113, 165 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, xx, 89–95, 99–100, 102–104, 107, 110, 112–113, 124, 126–127 Rameau’s Nephew, 171–172, 180 Rawls, John, 36 religion, xvi, xxiv, 13, 15, 18–20, 23–24, 38–39, 156–157, 190–192, 195, 197, 201 Reveries of a Solitary Walker, xx, 121, 178 revolution, 35, 44–46, 53–55, 69, 110– 111, 113, 167, 212 American Revolution, 53 French, ix, xxiii, 32, 53, 201 Puritan, xvi, 53 Romanticism, 70, 78–79 Rosenblatt, Helena, 64–66, 74 Rouelle, Guillaume-François, xvii, 7–8 Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques, 178 Sabine, George, 32 Sauveur, Joseph, 90 science, x, xv, xvii–xviii, xx, 5, 7, 10–11, 13, 15, 18–20, 24, 39–40, 49, 90–92, 96, 189 Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality), xii–xv, xviii, xxi, 3–4, 22, 32, 40, 46–48, 50–51, 53–54, 56–57, 67, 74, 78, 104, 106, 123, 162, 172–173, 175, 178, 181, 194 “the self ”, 151–52, 187, 216–217, 221, 223–225 self-interest/self-love, xii–xiii, 51–52, 75, 146–147, 151–153, 155, 165, 170, 187, 190 self-mastery, xix, 63, 67, 72–80, 173–174, 177 Shklar, Judith, xxii, 36, 80, 145, 155, 158, 190–91 slavery/servitude, 38, 42–45, 49, 73, 76–77, 168, 176, 219 Smith, Adam, xi–xiii, xv–xvi, 54, 179, 181 sociability, 22–23, 48–49, 52, 190–192, 195 Social Contract, xvi, xviii, xxi, 3–4, 32–34, 39, 42–43, 45, 47, 51, 53, 55, 66–67, 74, 78–79, 145, 150–151, 154–156, 177, 187, 189, 191–192, 197, 199 233

Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity social contract, xvi, xviii, xxii, 31–34, 36–40, 42–48, 50–55, 58, 77, 177 Socrates, 72, 154–155 sound, xvi, xix–xxi, 58, 91, 96, 121–129, 132–137 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 8–9, 18 state of nature, xii, xv, xvii–xviii, xxiii, 23, 32, 34, 37, 39–40, 46–51, 53, 79, 123, 174–175, 210 Stoicism, xxii–xxiii, 57, 161–163, 166, 169, 172–175, 177, 179, 181 theatre/the stage, xii, xxii, 92, 100–103, 105, 107–108, 113, 164–165, 169, 175 theology, 10, 13–18, 21–22, 24, 147 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 199 tragédie lyrique, 89–90 Treaty of Westphalia, 39

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Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, baron de l’Aulne, 162, 173–174 tyranny, 32–33, 44 utility, 10, 51, 72 Van Staen, Christophe, 8 Vernes, Jacob, 22 Village Soothsayer, 3 Virgil, 10, 146, 148–149, 151, 153–154 Vivaldi, Antonio, 89 Voltaire, ix, 3, 20–22, 65, 92, 162–163, 165–166 Mme de Warens, 6, 216 Wolmar, xix, 55–56, 68–73, 212 Zeno, 18, 100, 103