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Rousseau and Revolution
Edited bv
Holger Ross Lauritsen
and
Mikkel Thorup
- ~
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Holger Ross Lauritsen, Millel Thorup and Contributors, 2011
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British library Cataloguing-in-PubHcation Data
.\catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-44ll-2897-3 (HB)
Library of Congress Cataloguiog-io-PubHcation Data
Rousseau and revolution / edited by Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mille! Thorup.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-2897-3
I. Rousseau,Jean1acques, 1712-1778--Political and social views. 2. Rousseau,
Jean1acques, 1712-1778--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Revolutions-Philosophy.
4. Political science-Philosophy. 5. Democracy-Philosophy. I. Lauritsen, Holger Ross.
II. Thorup, Mille!. III. Title.
JC179.R9R683 2011
321.09' 4-dc22
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Primed and bound in Great Britain
:W10051887
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Bolger Rnss Lauritsen and Mikkl Thorup
Part 1: Democracy and Violence
Chapter 1:
Why Rousseau MistrUsts Revolutions:
Rousseau's Paradoxical Conservatism
Blaise Bachofen
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter6:
Chapter7:
The General Will and National Consciousness:
Radical Requirements of Democratic Legitimacy
in the Writing of Rousseau and Fan on
Jane Anna Gordon
Rousseau and the Terror: A Reassessment
Julian Bourg
Arbitrariness and Freedom: Hegel on Rousseau
and Revolution
Angelica Nuzzo
Part 2: Philosophy and Political Change
Reverse Revolution: The Paradox of
Rousseau's Authorship
Fay,al Falaky
The General Will between Conservation and Revolution
Bolger Rnss Lauritsen
Rousseau and Revolution in the Making of a Modern
Political Culture: Denmark 1750-1850
.Bertel Nygaard
30
Rousseau and Revolution
understand and yet more than ever need to understand. Without a revolu-
tion in culture, 'freedom is but an empty word and legislation but a chimera'
(ibid., 239).
Notes
1 They are especially linked to Robespierre's dictatorship and the time that immedi-
ately followed. The transfer of Rousseau's remains to the Pantheon had been
decided by decree as of 25 Germinal of year II ( 14 April 1 794), and several weeks
later Robespierre delivered an enthusiastic eulogy. But the transfer itself did not
take place until after the fall of Robespierre, 17 Vendemiaire of year III ( 8 October
1794). Cf. Roussel, 1972, 11-15.
%Letters of 6 November 1766 to Taules and of 12 November 1766 to Damilaville,
cited by Robert Osmont (Rousseau, 1995b, 1639).
! 'Oh, Emile, where is the man who owes nothing to the land in which he lives?
Whatever that land may be, he owes to it the most precious thing possessed by
man, the morality of his actions and the love of virtue' (Rousseau, 1993b, 524). Cf.
Plato, Crito, 50a-52a.
4
Cf. The Dedication to the Second 'Freedom is like those solid and rich
foods or those hearty wines, which are proper to nourish and fortify robust consti-
tutions habitued to them, but which overpower, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and
delicate who are unsuited for them' (Rousseau, 1992a, 4).
5
And in the conclusion: 'All these great Ministers who, judging men in general in
terms of themselves and those around them, believe they know them, cannot begin
to imagine what resilience the love of fatherland and the surge of virtue can impart
to free souls. Regardless of how often they are duped by their low opinion of
republics which offer to all of their undertakings a resistance they did not expect,
they will never abandon a prejudice based on the contempt which they feel they
themselves deserve and in terms of which they judge humankind' (Rousseau,
1997a, 257).
Chapter 2
The General Will and National
Consciousness: Radical Requirements of
Democratic Legitimacy in the Writing of
Rousseau and Fanon
Jane Anna Gordon
Introduction
Rousseau's concept of the general will has been attacked as totalizing,
romantic and repressive and as tuming on a capacity for dear and transpar-
ent willing that regular citizens do not, in fact, possess. Still, its vision of
political legitimacy has captured the imagination of many readers by sug-
gesting the radical requirements of modem, legitimate, democratic life.
Several genealogical lines have been drawn from Rousseau's classic formu-
lation of the general will to figures that both embrace and reject such rela-
tions of indebtedness. And yet, as I hope the following discussion convincingly
demonstrates, it is in conversation with Frantz Fanon that the irredeemably
political dimensions of Rousseau's writings, their revolutionary import, are
best revived. At the core of Frantz Fanon's work is a theory of political trans-
formation of how colonized people, through revolutionary action saturated
with tragedy, error and reversals, remake themselves into self-goveming citi-
zens. In contrast, one has to piece together how, in the work of Rousseau,
one would move from the dire conclusions of the Second Discourse to the
fragile altemative outlined in the Social Contract. Rousseau was consistently
ambivalent about unfolding futures, always sensing that currents that under-
cut the shared conditions of political life were stronger than their antidotes.
Fanon, by contrast, would never qualify his insistence upon the need for
people to act with agency in history.
Rousseau on Method
Rousseau's life as the man who was canonized began with his controversial
reflections on the possibility of work in the arts and sciences contributing to
32 Rousseau and Revolution
the moral improvement of humankind. He famously challenged that such
work was most developed in societies that were not the most moral but the
most amply resourced to indulge their greatest vices. He suggested that most
men who undertook such work did so in idle pursuit of reputation and
rewards and could neither know if they had discovered truth nor discern how
it could be constructively put to use. Although he defended the work of a
small group of self-educated and uniquely gifted men including Verulam,
Descartes and Newton, who were satisfied to labor on uncompensated, quietly
discerning the secrets of nature, he urged most readers to consult their con-
science for the philosophical guidance they needed to be good, productive
and public-spirited citizens. His index for measuring the value of arts and
sciences was whether or not they contributed to an increase in the virtue of
men and women. In his assessment, the opposite tended to be the case.
Rousseau's Second Discourse or effort to theorize the origins of inequality
among human beings added subtlety to these initial claims. In it he empha-
sized that the most useful and least advanced of human knowledge is that
of man and asked how we could understand inequality without knowing
human beings themselves. He began by cautioning his readers:
0 man, whatever may be your country, and whatever opinions you may
hold, listen to me: Here is your history as I believe I have read it, not in
books by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies.
(Rousseau, 1992a, 19)
The aim of discerning a nature of man independent of culture, or of
upbringing, education and habits, was what Rousseau thought could reveal
the history of the species. Through so doing one could create a point of
view from which to assess one's own times with regret if not despair and to
imagine whether they could be otherwise. This endeavour most essentially
required clarifYing what constituted relevant questions rather than rushing
prematurely to resolve them. Rousseau famously stated:
Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for thev do not affect
the question. The Researches which can be undertaken concerning this
Subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical
and conditional reasoning better suited to clarify the Nature of things
than to show their genuine origin. (Ibid.)
For Rousseau, addressing what it means to be a human being cannot be
done through recourse only to facts all of which are gathered with reference
to guiding hypotheses that may be deeply flawed. To get to the root of what
General WiU and National Consciousness 33
we are therefore required a different kind of exercise, one in which we
imagine how we became what we are through postulating the absence of
our conditions of possibility. This meant, for Rousseau, imagining a world
without sociality, of pre- or asocial creatures that, with nothing but sporadic
contact with other human beings, easily drew on their natural physical
strength to meet their minimal needs. In Rousseau's account, it was only as
the world became more populated and human contact more regular that
human beings developed abilities upon which we now rely. Centrally, with
sustained engagement, we began immediately to make comparisons (now
not the straightforward one that human beings tended to be superior to
non-human animals) about the relative endowments of different people.
This capacity was a foundation both for the kinds of abstract thinking
involved in understanding the connections between particular interests and
needs and more general categories that Rousseau thought were necessary to
political life and also to our ability to distance ourselves from the feelings of
suffering of others that once arrested us.
Rousseau was keenly aware of the ways in which our guiding interests
shaped what we were or were not able to see in the world around us. He was
particularly struck by the travel writings of European explorers of his own
day, writings that were treated by many distinguished philosophers as legit-
imate empirical data on Mrican, Asian and New World peoples. Such travel-
lers, Rousseau insisted, seemed incapable of perceiving human difference:
For three or four hundred years since the inhabitants of Europe have
inundated the other parts of the world, and continually published new
collections of voyages and reports, I am persuaded that we know no other
men except the Europeans [ ... ] In vain do individuals come and go; it
seems that Philosophy does not travel. (Ibid., 84)
Philosophy with a capital 'P' was the kind that he (and Hobbes) criticized in
his First Discourse. Unlike philosophy or critical reflection, its sources and prod-
ucts were vanity and vice, the rationalization of political worlds that were fun-
damentally illegitimate. Rousseau noted the role of Christian missionaries in
this work. In particular, he suggested that their skills were not the same as
those necessary to undertake work in the human sciences. The former seemed
able to articulate the worthiness of potential converts only by likening them to
one, undifferentiated European notion of human character. Rousseau wrote:
[T]o preach the Gospel usefully, zeal alone is necessary and God gives the
rest; hut to study men, talents are necessary that God is not obligated to
give anyone [ ... J [t]hese People l ... J have known how to perceive, at
34 Ruusseau and Revolution
the other end of the world, only what it was up to them to notice without
leaving their street; and that those true features that distinguish Nations
and strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. (Ibid., 85)
Rousseau concluded that although Europeans had set themselves up as the
world's judges, in the kind of role that Fred Dallmayr insists that those
undertaking work in comparative political theory avoid, their understand-
ing of the peoples that they relegated to lower order species was at best
superficial projection (Dallmayr, 2004). They had missed a unique opportun-
ity to engage in human study and failed to employ what Claude Levi-Strauss
called 'the methodological rule for all ethnology' that he thought Rousseau
had presciently described thus: 'When one wishes to study men, one has to
look close by; but in order to study man, one has to learn to cast one's eyes
far off; first one has to observe the differences in order to discover the prop-
erties' (Levi-Strauss, 1966, 305 and Rousseau, 1988).
Their aims had not been actually to learn about the people about whom
they felt compelled to write, but instead to aggrandize themselves and offer
rationalizations for such illegitimate self-enrichment:
[W]e know nothing of the Peoples of the East Indies, who have been fre-
quented solely by Europeans more desirous to fill their purses than their
heads. All of Mrica and its numerous inhabitants, as distinctive in charac-
ter as in color, are still to be examined; the whole earth is covered by
Nations of which we know only the names - yet we dabble in judging the
human race. (Rousseau, 1992a, 85-6)
,.
For Rousseau, the endeavours in which we are involved set the terms of the
worlds that we encounter. One cannot assume that research and writing
about human beings is more than a refracted mirror of the perceptions
that will best enable us to realize our aspirations.
On Illegitimacy and Its Alternatives
In his Social Contract, Rousseau had described both conquest and enslave-
ment as impossible to articulate in terms of political right. The former
could create a subjugated multitude or an aggregate but neither an associ-
ation, polity, nor people. Both turned on the s<realled right of the strongest
or the claim that any individual or people who overcame others did so legit-
imately. Rousseau contended that force could elicit little more than acts of
General WiU and National Consciousness 35
necessity and prudence. Without independent acts of consent, these simply
set one person's private interest up against those of others, reflecting a
readiness to divide the human species into 'herds of livestock, each with its
leader, who tends it in order to devour it' (Rousseau, 1994d, 132 and 137).
Against Aristotle, Rousseau asserted that if there are slaves by nature it is
'because there have been slaves contrary to nature' (ibid., 133). In other
words, although Rousseau conceded that many people's ability to resist was
compromised by their experiences of enslavement, he insisted with what
Frederick Douglass later explored more fully, that to make human beings
slaves is a political achievement that requires ongoing brutal reinforce-
ment. The relations of masters to their slaves are not a reflection of rela-
tions demanded by their unequal natures (Douglass, 1982).
In Rousseau's account, illegitimate rule, as opposed to legitimate self-
governance, emerges as minor differences in physical endowments of one
generation compound over-determining the fate of their descendants.
What is essential for him is not the fact of inequalities and disparities of
wealth but the relationships among people that they inevitably produce.
Most, argued Rousseau at the end of his Second Discourse, would have to
ingratiate themselves to others who would denigrate them precisely because
they relied on their labor. Cunning, self-deception, avarice and cultures of
violence would become normal behavior, and the ability to perceive the
shared conditions of collective thriving, the core of public-spiritedness,
would corrode. In such societies, political institutions and laws frequently
failed to create a genuine alternative to rule by force. Although less imme-
diately corporeal in their effect, through the introduction of institutions
and laws, they transformed usurpation and theft into a right of whoever was
best disposed to impose their will over and against others.
For Rousseau, the possibility oflegitimate government was easier to envis-
age than to realize. Still, trying to imagine people as they are and laws and
institutions as they might be, he offered his effort 'to square the circle'
through the idea of the 'general will' the pursuit of which was the only
legitimate basis of government. Formed through an act of convention that
gives life to a common self, city or people, the general will makes the foun-
dation of society possible. Consisting in what the differences of all members
of a polity have in common, it is an outgrowth of what emerges when mem-
bers think together in their capacity as citizens about their shared well-being.
Rousseau contrasts the kind of reflection this demands with the sort one
does as a private person considering one's own individual needs and wants.
The latter, when expressed and aggregated, is the 'will of all'. It may, but
will not always, coincide with the general will. Although all general wills are
36
Rousseau and Revolution
partial to the extent that they are not universal and are always rooted in a
limited people and place, the general will is broader in scope than the wills
shared by groups or organizations within the polity. Each of these will also
have a sense of the conditions that enable their respective project's thriv-
ing, but these do not aim to be as general as the society itself. The general
will therefore is also an effort to describe the scope of political identity.
Between the universal and the particular, what is general to a people is deter-
mined by the shared context of their lives. This can be defined in the nega-
tive, as Max Weber outlined, when he wrote that people recall that theY
share states when they are attacked in war with other nations (Weber, 1994).
It is also conceded as people defend the need for domestic infrastructure,
for roads, technology that reliably allows for communication and transpor-
tation, and for minimizing the decimation of a necessarily shared natural
environment. Rousseau clearly wrote in a world in which the local and
international were not quite as cross-cutting and interpenetrating as in our
own day, but he did still underscore how easily political identities could be
undermined by narrower forms of loyalty. It was very easy, he lamented, for
each citizen to minimize the significance of his or her disinvestment from
political life and to see idiosyncratic individual preferences as a more mean-
ingful and significant expression of who they were.
Although the general will can at times be reached numerically through
voting, with the significance of an issue determining the requisite scale of
endorsement, Rousseau stresses that 'that what generalizes the will is not so
much the number of votes as the common interest that unites them, because
in this institution everyone necessarily submits himself to the conditions he
....
imposes on others, an admirable agreement between interest and justice
which confers on common deliberations a quality of equity that vanishes in
the discussion of private matters' (Rousseau, 1994d, 149). The general will
then not only frames what functions as law, guiding its efforts to do so is the
larger aim of minimizing the kinds of inequality that would lead to funda-
mentally antagonistic interests between members that would make it impos-
sible for them constructively to see their fates as intertwined.
Finally, Rousseau's general will, as jason Niedleman has argued, stresses
two ideas at the core of the very project of democratic self-governance
(Niedleman, 2000). Its content must be willed by everyone to which its
resolution pertains and its substance must be capable of being defended as
the best outcome or as right for all who will be affected. In principle, its
content can be universally communicated. In other words, the general will
holds in tension the requirements that active citizenship alone can, the
need for popular willing, because this is what is understood to be the basis
__,.......-
General Will and National Consciousness
37
of legitimacy in democratic regimes and rational willing since democratic
outcomes are what we seek from democratic procedures. Thus the general
will is also an effort to grapple with how to make an abstract sovereign
people present in politics by, as Margaret Canovan has argued, uniting the
individual and collective dimensions of citizenship in the realization of the
general will (Canovan, 2005).
The Case of Corsica
Rousseau clearly argues that the general will is more audible in healthier
societies in which public life is real and primary, with coherent and demon-
strable meaning for its members. As living projects, polities begin to die at
birth. One can prolong their coherence, but even where health does exist
it is fragile and can easilv erode first and foremost as people regularly come
to view what [they owe] the common cause as a free contribution, the loss
of which will harm others less than its payment burdens him' (Rousseau,
l994d, 141). Once this becomes a norm, the social bond that was given
public expression in and through the general will 'is broken in all hearts'
and 'the basest interest brazenly adopts the sacred name of the public good'
(ibid., 198). Still, in these circumstances, Rousseau insists that the general
will is neither annihilated nor corrupted. It is easilv ignored for it is largely
rendered mute. Once the conditions for maintaining the organizing core
of a polity crumble, societies can be mended neither by reform nor by
revolution .
On the other hand, there are general wills that are still emerging or still
in the making. Rousseau considered this to be the case with the island of
Corsica for which he was asked to play the role of legislator. Christopher
Kelly writes that what interested Rousseau in this task was precisely the
island's reputation as a European backwater, as the opposite of French and
English models of eighteenth-century strong states. Kelly writes, 'Rather
than seeing Corsica as merely the uncivilized abode of bandits in need of
colonial rule by a continental power, he regarded it as the one place in
Europe still capable of receiving a sound legislation' (Kelly, 2005, xxiii).
Formerlv colonized by the Moors and then the Genoans, the framing
question of Rousseau's work was how the island could aim to become a
genuinely post-colonial state: how to move it out of conditions of economic
dependence and poverty. He surmised that this would require figuring out
how to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an asset, most
ambitiously how to translate its produce into international capital. Rousseau
38 Rousseau and Revolution
insisted, as Fan on on postcolonial states would later, that the newly independ-
ent Corsicans should not aim to emulate the culture of their former col-
onizers, but to lead a concerted national effort to identifY and cultivate its
indigenous resources, most centrally its people. This would require Corsicans
treating Corsica as its own economic and political center, rather than as an
outpost or appendage to the political economy of the mother country of its
colonizers. One indispensable resource for this project was that Corsicans
were not decadent; they did not display the individual and collective vices of
their supposedly more civilized Western counterparts. This, for Rousseau.
meant that they remained spirited. Still, this strength could easily collapse
into widespread banditry, especially if people grew impatient with the pro-
ject of building a legitimate democratically governed state. Rousseau argued
that they did not need to become different from how they were but to pre-
serve this in the absence of a shared enemy that united them across differ-
ences. They could do so by directing their collective forces toward maintaining
their independence (Rousseau, 1986, 125).
Rousseau insisted that the characterization of Corsica as a lumpenproletar-
ian island of people more inclined to be thieves than hard-working citizens
obscured the origins of these predilections in the culture of colonialism
itself. He wrote,
Who would not be seized with horror against a barbarous Government
that, in order to see these unfortunate people cutting each other's throats,
did ~ o t spare any effort for inciting them to do so? Murder was not pun-
ished; what am I saying, it was rewarded [ ... ] [l]t had as its goal [ ... ]
keeping them from rising up, from being educated, from becoming rich.
Its goal was to get all produce dirt-cheap from the monopolies of its offi-
cials. It took every measure for draining the Island of money in order to
make it necessary there, and in order always to keep it from returning to it.
(Ibid., 137)
In other words, Corsicans had come to deplore labor not only because it
was, under colonial conditions, a pure loss to them, but also because it was
a seemingly permanent and destructive sentence. It was from this condition
that Rousseau now hoped the Corsicans could emerge. He recommended a
temporary isolationism that would enable the island to increase the internal
interdependence of its regions, making a culture of cultivating and depend-
ing on their own forces (ibid., 125).
Rousseau underscored the appropriateness of different governmental
forms to different environments and argued that such a rustic place was
.,
'
', ... ~
+ t ; ~
.a .
.
;
'
General Will and National Consciousness
39
best fit for a democracy. Ironically, the counties and jurisdictions that the
colonists had introduced and the destruction of the local nobility that they
had overseen could facilitate a transformation in this direction: A strategy
that had been devised to subdue the Corsicans could be reemployed to
enlarge their equity and freedom. It was key to avoid certain errors so fre-
quently made, however. Rousseau insisted that political creativity would be
necessary to assure that different parts of the island did not develop
unevenly, with the administrative capital thriving as everywhere else fell
into economic stagnation and a small group of cities drew in all of the aspir-
ing bourgeoisies that produced nothing. A government surely did require
a center, but this would be a purely administrative one that public men
occupied only temporarily before returning to the other dimensions of
their lives. Rousseau hoped this might forestall the drawing of cultivators
away from the countryside that would be and would have to be affirmed as
Corsica's real source of strength (ibid., 132).
Rousseau sought to figure out how to link political privileges not to
amassed wealth but to productive labor. He therefore aimed to avoid what
he considered the debasing introduction of money, arguing instead for the
use of a strict system of exchange. He explained that money was useful only
as a sign ofinequality, particularly for foreigners. One could make exchanges
of goods themselves without mediating values, creating storehouses in cer-
tain essential places. Ultimately, he reminded his readers that political inde-
pendence, their ultimate aim, required that all lived well without becoming
rich. He insisted repeatedly that the ease and health of politics were two
fundamentally different concerns and that the latter should be their focus.
Efficiency, in other words, though a modem ideal, was also often an anti-
political one. In the absence of money and taxation, citizens could be asked
to contribute in kind through labor. If roads needed to be built, it would be
the citizenry who would have to do it.
Rousseau concluded with reflections about the qualities of human beings.
Here echoing Hobbes, he wrote that it is fear and hope that govern men.
Parting company there he qualified that fear only holds people back lest
they not face punishment, that it is only hope that can lead men and women
to act. The task then was to awaken the nation's activity, literally to give it
ground for great hopes. Not a hope linked to sensual pleasure, but to a
substantive pride that he explained involves 'esteeming oneself based on
truly estimable goods' (ibid., 154). Nothing, he wrote, is more 'really beau-
tiful than independence and power.' What could sustain the character of a
newly articulated nation was to maintain and deepen activity and life in the
entire state by paying close attention to the emerging nature of civil power,
40 Rousseau and Revolution
to assure that it would take the form of legitimate authority rather than
abusive wealth. With the latter, Rousseau noted, where wealth dominated,
power and authority would separate- to obtain wealth and authority would
become two separate tasks with the implication that apparent power was
with elected officials while real power was with the rich who could buy their
authority. Such practices could only lead to disappointment that would
spread languor throughout the island. The greatest asset of the Corsicans
was that unlike most of their modem European counterparts they remained
capable of freedom rather than merely obedience. But the cultivation of a
viable political economy would determine whether this could be mobi-
lized in pursuit of a general will or whether a will of some would illegitim-
ately prevail claiming the legacy of the fight for the island's post-colonial
condition.
Devouring Methods and Sociogeny
Fanon's Black Skin, lVhite Masks, among many other things, is a meditation
on method, in particular, a dialectical reflection on how one studies and
understands health and sickness in black encounters with whites in an anti-
black world. Fanon, like Rousseau, was concerned about the ways in which
the legitimacy of certain kinds of facts could block the larger project of
understanding human beings. In Fanon 's case, the status of these facts was
linked to a naturalistic framework that biologized racism, suggesting that a
sense of black inferiority was lying dormant within black bodies, activated,
not created, by colonization. He wrote, 'Beside phylogeny and ontogeny
stands sociogeny [ ... ] But society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot
escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being' (Fanon,
1967, 11 ). The tum to 'facts' in reductionistic approaches to the social sci-
ences was, Fanon Juggested, an effort to belie precisely this, to render us
mere mechanisms without the agency that could introduce either contin-
gency or meaning into the social world. He explicitly rejects this central
tenet, that 'lead[s] only in one direction: to make man admit that he is noth-
ing, absolutely nothing - and that he must put an end to the narcissism on
which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other "ani-
mals'" (ibid., 22). Fanon refuses to so surrender, 'grasping [his] narcissism
with both hands [ ... ] [he] tum[s] [his] back on the degradation of those
who would make man a mere mechanism' (ibid., 23). He emphasizes,
'What matters for us is not to collect facts and behavior, but to find their
meaning' (ibid., 168). In the absence of such meaning, one participates in
'!!!'
General Will and National Consciousness
41
[a] n endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we dis-
cuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is
made, one has the feeling of incompleteness' (ibid., 172).
To explore this phenomenon and its alternatives, Fanon insisted that our
methods themselves must become a question. One cannot assume that
methods are not part of the colonial projects that so determine the charac-
ter of the world of which they are a part. We cannot be sure that they do not
produce rather than give an account of the very kinds of relations that
Fanon sought to interrupt. He writes of his own aims and those of a rad-
ically humanistic political theory, 'The prognosis is in the hands of those
who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure [ ... ]
Reality for once, requires a total understanding' (ibid., 11). In spite of the
exhaustiveness of much psychological literature, they often, by contrast,
'lose sight of the real' (ibid., 83).
Fanon continues in a spirit much like the opening of Rousseau's Second
Discourse:
It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its
methodological point of view. I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the
botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods
devour themselves [ ... ] I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the
white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I
hope by analyzing it to destrov it. (Ibid., 12)
If for Rousseau the index of the quality of writing is its capacity to compel
virtuous action, for Fanon 'truth' is what sets or enables the creation of
conditions for people to encounter one another as human beings. He
states, 'It is not possible for me to be objective' (ibid., 86). He describes his
own text as a 'mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in which it will be
possible to discern the Negro on the road to disalienation' (ibid., 184).
Manicheanism and Liberation
The context of this alienation is one of political illegitimacy, of coercively
created and maintained inequalities outlined in the Wmched of the Earth.
This describes what the construction of a Manichean world, a world vio-
lently divided in two- one strongly built of stone and steel in which garbage
disappears and people, white and foreign, are well-nourished with covered
feet; the other densely populated by people who are dark and hungry, who
42 Rousseau and Revolution
seem to crouch with envy - does to human relationships. This is precisely
the culture of dependence that Rousseau condemns but here theorized not
through imagining what Karl Marx later called the first moment of primi-
tive accumulation but through its extenuation in global relations created
through colonization and enslavement.
Fan on offers a phenomenological portrait of both sides, of what it means
to see oneself as bringing values and civilization to outposts and backwaters,
as making history, creating an epoch, embodying an absolute beginning
and what, in contrast, it means to be treated as 'a negation of' or 'the enemY
of values, to be a deforming element that is thought to disfigure all that is
beautiful or moral; what it is to be the telos toward which others hope to
move, defining the terms of their development and what, in contrast, it is to
be referred to in zoological terms, as reptilic, stinking and gesticulating
within what many think would, if left uninterrupted, have remained a pre-
historical vacuum (Fanon, 1963, 41). How would these Manichean poles
meet to discuss anything shared? The thought of the possibility is patently
absurd. To sustain such a situation of disparity requires the bayonet not the
ballot or collective deliberation in which one can trust that others mav bet-
ter understand what avowed institutional principles intend.
Fanon adds insight to Rousseau's claim on the one hand that there is no
right to slavery and that the slave is right to escape as soon as he can and
on the other that slavery creates 'natural' slaves or habituates people to a
set of conditions that make their legitimate escape extremely difficult to
achieve. While underscoring the form and nature of these constraints, that
one risks death and humiliation if one aims to challenge the coordinates of
a Manichean world, Fanon writes that the 'native admits no accusation,'
that he is 'overpowered but not tamed,' 'treated as an inferior but not con-
vinced of his inferiority' (ibid., 53). He lives in a permanent dream to
switch places, with the basic insight that 'the showdown [between the col-
onizer and colonized] cannot be put off indefinitely' (ibid.). Until such
time, however, members of the colonized community do live with an anger
that is perpetually lit. The explosions are inevitable but the targets the
undeserving and the b ~ t t l e s ultimately displaced. In addition, the colo-
nized easily forget how fundamentally unstable the power of the colonizers
ultimately must be.
Unlike Rousseau, however, integral to Fanon's theory is an account of
how people struggle through such conditions toward a legitimate alternative
of how people refuse complete habituation and seek to become the kinds
of subjects that can create the polities they deserve. Fanon emphasizes,
without romance, what is involved. He writes,
~
General Will and National Consciousness
43
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood
to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the
new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenom-
enon. At whatever level we study it [ ... ] decolonization is quite simply
the replacing of a certain 'species' of men by another 'species' of men.
Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute
substitution. (Ibid., 35)
1
Success entails nothing less than a social structure changed entirely from
the bottom up. Fanon is clear: this kind of transformation only emerges
when it is 'willed, called for, demanded' (ibid.). Its crude form, felt in the
consciousness of the colonized and feared as a terrifying possible future by
the colonizers, must manifest itself in what can only be an historical pro-
cess. Neither magic nor nature can substituted for the meeting of two
opposed groups whose relations were created and sustained in history
through violence. In Fanon's writings, although there are organic intellec-
tuals who, thrown out of established urban party politics, are retrained
through their experiences of living within the peasantry of more remote
areas, there are no singular outsiders who emerge as Rousseau's legislators
helping the colonized to envision what they must become.
The colonized must claim themselves the equal of the settlers. What
makes this possible is when in the moment of an actual fight the colonized
realize that they fight human beings like themselves, that the life, breath
and heart of the colonizers share the strengths and limitations of their own
form. With this grasp of the lies at the core of the social rules that have for-
cibly regulated their lives, they easily begin to crumble:
For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler's, his glance no longer
shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into
stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don't give
a damn for him. (Ibid., 45)
People once weighed down by their 'inessentiality' now emerge as 'privi-
leged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them.'
(Ibid.)
Decolonization unites the people by a decision to 'remove from it its het-
erogeneity', to unify on a national, sometimes racial, basis. For native intel-
lectuals who have imbibed and defended the Greco-Latin pedestal as their
own, these all become lifeless, dead words. They have nothing to do with
the conflict in which they are engaged. The language of individualism is
44 Rnusseau and Revolution
replaced with the vocabulary of family and trusted friend. Fanon writes,
'Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in con-
crete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be mas-
sacred- or everyone will be saved' (ibid., 47).
In such a context, truth is the property of the national cause. 'Truth is that
which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which pro-
motes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and
ruins the foreigners' (ibid., 50). In other words, the Manichaeism of colo-
nial society continues in the early stages of articulating the emergent gen-
eral will that demands and must culminate in the end of colonial relations.
The slogan of non-violence - an attempt 'to settle the colonial problem
around a green baize table'- is that of the colonized bourgeoisie who share
more with their colonial counterparts than with their mobilized, primarily
rural countrymen (ibid., 61). Ironically for those outlawed members of the
group, the lumpenproktariat, it is their willingness to fight violently that reinte-
grates them into a community that has seen them as predatory pariahs.
Their violence now directed at shared enemies whose presence is funda-
mentally a crime is, writes Fanon, their 'royal pardon' (ibid., 86).
This violence is constitutive; its practice binds them together as a whole,
since each individual forms a link in the great chain, a part of the great
organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's
violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the
future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the
people; that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one direction.
(Ibid., 93)
This mass mobilization introduces into the consciousness of each person a
sense of common cause, a collective past, and a national destiny. This forms
a cement which, mixed with blood and anger, will be the basis for the build-
ing up of a nation.
And vet Fan on's d i s c ~ s s i o n of violence is more pedagogical than roman-
tic. There is no alternative literally to seizing one's freedom but many of its
consequences are tragic. Revolutions, even the most legitimate ones, involve
monstrous moments and highly imperfect decisions. There is absolutely no
doubt that the people responsible for the fighting will themselves be deeply
and irretrievably scarred. As Lewis Gordon has argued, they are a gener-
ation comparable to Moses, ones that lead to a promised land that they
themselves cannot enter (Gordon, 2008). Many among them will wonder,
. ~
General Will and National Consciousness
45
with Rousseau, whether they risked all of what they did for a future that
intensifies the very relations they aimed to overthrow.
For Fanon, it is not sufficient for one group of people wielding the right
of the strongest or a will of some to supplant another. Instead an ending of
colonialism must imply the creation of a different set of relations, specif-
ically, politically legitimate ones. It is in outlining the substance of these that
Fan on distinguishes between national consciousness and nationalism, effect-
ively historicizing and reworking Rousseau's notion of the general will.
At the political economic level this first would require nationalizing the
economy through wholesale and resale cooperatives run on a democratic
basis, decentralized so as to involve as many people as possible in public
affairs. This, Fanon explained, had been abandoned in capitalist countries
that governed with law backed only by economic strength and the police. In
addition, as Rousseau also had suggested with Corsica, the nation's capital
would have to be remade and deconsecrated. Party members would not
reside in the capital, which inevitably would lead to the widely observed
trend toward overpopulated and overdeveloped centers flooded by people
who left poorer regions abandoned and unsupported. It would be neces-
sary to privilege the interior rural areas politically, seeking out every oppor-
tunity for contact with rural masses and making national policy for them, in
an effort to recognize and remain in immediate touch with those who had
fought for independence. Government leaders could not act as if the citi-
zenry were incapable of understanding the complexity of self-governance.
If they began to, it would serve them well to recall how capable, in the mist
of revolutionary struggle, these same individuals had shown themselves to
be. For Fanon states clearly, 'the party is not an authority, but an organism
through which they as the people exercise their authority and express their
will' (Fanon, 1963, 185).
The people would need ample opportunities to remain watchful, to
'realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in
their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in
knowing who their enemies are' (ibid., 191). Only through so doing would
the Algerian people develop a clear sense that they together owned the soil
and mineral wealth of the country and that they could be or could become
equal to whichever problems they would face. To enable this, those offi-
cially placed in charge of setting the conditions for self-government would
have to remember that it would be worth being less efficient if the cost of
the smooth and quick exercise of business would be the exclusion of people
from the processes of planning .
46 Rousseau and Revolution
For formerly colonized people together to articulate their collective pur-
pose and direction they would necessarily participate in meetings in which
people would listen and speak, opportunities in which 'the brain increases
its means of participation and the eye discovers a landscape more and more
in keeping with human dignity' (ibid., 195). Seductive short cuts of every
variety would have to be stringently avoided. To cultivate and reclaim a
nation would require sending young people into schools and fields rather
than sports stadiums; the turning out of fully conscious human beings
rather than a slim fraction of exceptional leaders; political education rather
than the inculcations of inspiring slogans. On this score, Fan on describes
this final distinction:
What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses
that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsi-
bility, and that if we go forward it is up to them too, that there is no such
thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the respon-
sibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves.
(Ibid., 197)
The totality of the nation must be a reality for each citizen, its history part
of personal experience of all. Fan on continues,
Individual experience, because it is national and because it is a link in the
chain of national existence, ceases to be individual, limited, and shrunken
[ ... ] In the same way that during the period of armed struggle each
fighter held the fortune of the nation in his hand, so during the period
of national construction each citizen ought to continue in his real, every-
day activity to associate himself with the whole of the nation [ ... ] If the
building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on
it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swim-
ming across the river or going by boat. (Ibid., 2 0 ~ 1 )
A national government must seek to enlarge private aims and interests illus-
trating concretely the ways in which each individual's shared well being is
tied to that of others who together must now move toward the constructive
work of building an inhabitable political world. To do this nationalism must
transform into a consciousness that does not become sterile and empty.
Fan on writes, 'The living expression of the nation is the moving conscious-
ness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men
General Will and National Consciousness
47
and women. The collective building up of a destiny is the assumption of
responsibility on the historical scale' (ibid., 204). The national government
must be for and by the people, and Fanon adds, also for and including the
outcasts. No leader can be a substitute for a popular will. Concerns about
national prestige should never upstage priorities of 'giv[ing] back their dig-
nity to all citizens, fill [ing] their minds and feast[ing] their eyes with human
things, and creat[ing] a prospect that is human because conscious and sov-
ereign men dwell therein' (ibid., 205).
This formulation sustains all of the features that make the idea of the
general will compelling while transcending many of its limitations: both
Rousseau and Fanon challenge the adequacy of mere proceduralism, the
sense that to tally cast votes itself constitutes a democratic outcome, but in
Fanon the general will is not discovered but authored. In Fanon's account
the aim is not to try to emulate the work of G-d here below but instead to
forge models of a shared future realizing that we alone can create the con-
ditions of our own political adulthood. The general will for him is not artic-
ulated by each citizen in isolation considering the quiet voice of G-d within
him, but emerges out of the deliberate challenging of all forms of unfree-
dom. Fanon also makes contemporary Rousseau's discussion of more par-
tial wills that create obstacles for clearly grasping the general will; if for
Rousseau smaller general wills can form within societies and sustain intense
loyalties that interfere with identifying interests as large as society itself, for
Fanon these divisions usually run along ethnic and religious lines and are a
symptom of political failure. They are cultivated, indulged or sought as a
refuge when the project of forging a no-longer-colonial future is prema-
turely and opportunistically abandoned. Their resurgence is a direct reflec-
tion of the deliberate shutting down of fluidity of living political culture for
sedimented relations or a narrow nationalism that enables the enrichment
of a small few, the national bourgeoisie, over and against others.
The aftermath of the effort to give concrete form to a formerly colonized
general will is disappointment. Rousseau himself had been ambivalent
about the question of revolution. His writings inspired insurrectionary activ-
ity from the French Revolution to Fidel Castro, but Rousseau himself feared
that many efforts at political reform in fact enhanced the chains under
which people lived; that whenever change was deliberately sought in the
hope of expanding freedom, the few who knew what would come of the
transformations were the one's who had worked out how financially to profit
from them. For Fanon, the national bourgeoisie did precisely this, hijacking
the revolution and reducing national consciousness to narrow nationalism.
48 Rousseau and Revolution
This congenital problem was due largely to their intellectual laziness,
'spiritual penury' and 'profoundly cosmopolitan mind set' (ibid., 149).
Fanon writes,
Now, precisely, it would seem that the historical vocation of an authentic
middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own nature
in so far it as it is bourgeois, that is to say in so far as it is the tool of capit-
alism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital
which is the people. In an underdeveloped country an authentic national
middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling
fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in
other words to put at the people's disposal the intellectual and technical
capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities.
(Ibid., 150)
Instead of this heroic and fruitful path, the national bourgeoisie retreated
into a cynically bourgeois existence. Ignorant of the local economv and of
its mineral, soil, or mines, they would instead talk cultishly of small-scale
artisanry and about the groundnut harvest, cocoa crop and olive yield. They
were, Fanon lamented, satisfied to continue as Europe's farmers, generat-
ing unfinished products in ways that would not shift the global division of
labor inaugurated by colonization and black and brown enslavement. Thev
said nothing of creating factories that could generate wealth for the nation
and themselves; they made no outcry about the absence of industrv. They
thoroughly lacked the entrepreneurial, pioneering aspects of the early
European bourgeoisie, Fan on balks; beginning at the end, they are 'already
senile before [they have] come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or
the will to succeed of youth' (ibid., 153).
The national bourgeoisie, once concerned about the dignity of the coun-
try, moved into and maintained formerly colonial homes and business
offices. Uninterested in recasting rural and urban divisions or the global
map, they simply settled into a world whose terms were determined from
outside. African unity, an idea that brought immense pressure against colo-
nialism, required the cultivation of political-economic conditions for its
possibility. In the absence of these, it disintegrated. Nationalism quickly col-
"'
lapsed into chauvinistic thinking and language that fueled religious and
ethnic rivalries now mobilized as grounds for economic leverage under
conditions of scarcity. The national bourgeoisie remained content with
what Rousseau referred to as the will of all, here really of some, reinforced
by the so-called right of the strongest.
General WiU and National Consciousness
49
These difficulties were further entrenched by political leaders who, once
associated with the aspirations that led to independence, refused to chal-
lenge the national bourgeoisie. Literally bringing the people to a halt, such
leaders, argues Fanon, expelled them again from history, attempting to
pacifY them into sleep, waking them only occasionally to recall the colonial
period and distance from there that had been traveled. '[T]he militants
[therefore] disappear[ed] into the crowd and [took] the empty title of citi-
zen. Now that they ha[d] fulfilled their historical mission of leading the
bourgeoisie to power, they [we] re firmly invited to retire so that the bour-
geoisie [could] carrv out its mission in peace and quiet' (ibid, 171). The
strength of the police force and army intensified in direct proportion to the
stagnation into which the nation sunk.
Conclusion
There are remarkable similarities in Rousseau and Fanon's cautions that
prevailing perceptions of authoritative social scientific methods may dis-
courage us from asking the most salient of political questions. For both, the
possibility of legitimate political life turns on identifying what the differ-
ences of members of a polity share while refusing to reifY forms of diversity
that are the products of a lack of political possibility. This in turn requires
defending the need for economic conditions that are not so radically
unequal that all political argumentation turns on rationalizing such dispar-
ities as natural and necessary.
Rousseau oscillates between radical irreverence and cold feet- for instance,
unveiling the illegitimate bases of most modern polities while suggesting
that once corrupted, polities cannot be reformed; insisting at the same time
that all people ultimately seek liberty and that people in some climates were
not capable of institutionalizing it. Overemphasizing such passages, how-
ever, can obscure Rousseau's record of challenging the compliance of gen-
erations of readers with the compromising of their freedom. His scathing
criticisms of modern European life inspired not only Immanuel Kant and
G. W. F. Hegel, but also ordinary citizens yearning to create political com-
munities that more ably mirrored unities living but submerged within social
life. Fan on brought to these analyses the insight of a sober psychologist who
knew that nature could offer no idyllic refuge. More willing unambivalently
to confront the contradictions that Rousseau inspired his readers to identifY,
Fanon fruitfully historicized and reworked Rousseau's insights refusing to
collapse into what can be read in Rousseau as moments of conservative
50 Rousseau and Revolution
nostalgia. Fanon's political thought is instead characterized by high mod-
ernism, a modernism from below, that insists that we alone can be the
source of political models under which we live. Fan on would have regretted
the failure of Algeria to become no longer colonial even in the aftermath of
revolutionary struggle. Still, this, for him, would never have served as a refu-
tation of the need for people to act with agency in history. It would instead
have affirmed that questions of political life can never be settled once and
for all.
Note
1
Rousseau suggested that in situations of enslavement, the enslaved were entitled
violently to rebel so long as their efforts were likely to be effective. However,
Rousseau's discussions of violence do not describe collectivities facing one
another - they are either highly individualized as in the case of the sole slave or
a discussion of the way that the right of the strongest is presented as a legitimat-
ing force of 'laws' that are not an expression of the general will.
..,......
......
Chapter 3
Rousseau and the Terror: A Reassessment
Julian Bourg
Introduction
Jean:Jacques Rousseau has been blamed for the Terror of the French
Revolution for a long time (Davies, 2006 and Gough, 1998). Once it was
brought to life by Jacobin voluntarism, his theory of the general will, an
imagined unanimity subordinating the parts of the nation to the whole, is
supposed to have justified and facilitated the guillotine's busy work. The
charge began early with reactionary critics of the revolution, for whom the
Terror was the crowning, horrifying achievement. Joseph de Maistre, for
instance, saw the revolution and Terror as divine punishment and called
Rousseau 'the most self-deceived man who ever lived' (Maistre, 1994, 42).
In the nineteenth century, Hippolyte Taine was not alone in drawing a link
between the author of The Social Contract and the Terror, especially in the
person of Robespierre. Of Rousseau's thought, he observed that, 'The
dogma through which popular sovereignty is proclaimed thus actually ends
in a dictatorship of the few, and a proscription of the many' (Taine, 1878,
2:20).
1
Of course, later left-wing Republicans and especially Marxists
excused the Terror as a legitimate expression of popular justice against
counter-revolutionaries, the price of forging the common good through
the elimination of those who impeded it. Rousseau was thus the prophet of
bourgeois egalitarianism, which was good enough for some, but which for
others was a potentiality eventually developed by Marx and realized by the
Russian Revolution. However, with the analysis of mid-twentieth-century
totalitarianism a sustained critique of the Terror, and Rousseau's central
role in it, came into focus. Anti-totalitarian thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin,
jacob Talmon, R R Palmer and Hannah Arendt tried to save 'good' values
that could be linked to the democratic revolutionary tradition from the
taint of violence, thus defending liberalism against fascism and commun-
ism (Berlin, 2002; Talmon, 1952; Palmer, 1941; Arendt, 1951 ). Both these
systems, in spite of their tremendous differences, were traced to a collectiv-
ist ethos located in a selective reading of the Social Contract.