Rousseau is the first great modern political philosopher discontented with modernity who nonetheless remains a ‘modern.’ He is not Pascal, criticizing modernity in the name of Christianity, or Swift, enlisting in the battle of the books under the banner of the ‘ancients.’
Rousseau rejects the ‘bourgeois’ or post-Machiavellian turn of modern thought. Machiavelli (with Descartes to follow) despised what he called the effeminacy of ‘modern’—he meant Christian—life. The synthesis of ancient ‘idealism’ and Christianity had led (he charged) to an unworldly, castles-in-the-air irresoluteness among the very classes of men who should stand firm and act severely: the princes in principalities, the citizens in republics. The Prince of Peace had unmanned them, and the philosophers hadn’t been much better. As a result, petty ‘city-states’ squabbled at the very center of what had been a world empire. The Augustinian empire of the papacy, neither fully in nor fully out of the world, had corrupted and replaced the real empire of the original Romans. The Prince of Peace must be replaced by the Prince of War and battle-ready citizens.
For Montaigne, Hobbes, and Locke, the practical problem looked quite different. Their Europe was wracked by civil wars. The spirit of Machiavelli had joined with the spirit of Christianity to produce militant fanaticism that was frustrating the very spirit of acquisitiveness Machiavelli had intended to foster. These modern philosophers wanted peace; if not effeminacy, then surely a touch of moderation would be a relief. They emphasized the principle of self-preservation in a world all too inclined to Christian jihadism. For this purpose, the practical, vigorous but unwarlike spirit of the commercial classes seemed a welcome touch of sanity in a world of ambitions inflated by the conflation of manliness and religiosity.
Rousseau understands this. But his heart rebels against it. He is too spirited, too ‘thumotic’ to stomach the halfway-house rule of the commercial classes. Unlike several of the ‘bourgeois’ moderns, he resolutely defends human free will, even if he eventually replaces it with ‘perfectibility.’ Rousseau returns to the manly/spirited origins of modernity, to the Machiavellian polemic against effeminacy and the Cartesian stance of resoluteness. He does so in his own way, however, with an attack on the ‘Enlightenment’ claim that progress in human knowledge will yield, or at least comport with, progress in morality and politics. Although very far from being anti-science, Rousseau does oppose public science, science as a part of public life.
Rousseau begins the second Discourse with a paean to the republicans of Geneva; he appears to harken back to the virtues of antiquity: severe morals, proud courage, martial spirit, all in a country scaled to human governance. (In this he imitates Machiavelli, who appears to appeal to the example of ancient Rome). But Rousseau soon shows a different hand. The human consists, fundamentally, of two principles: the desire for self-preservation and the sentiment of pity. Enlightenment rationalism is too complex to serve as a constituent of any real society; in this it resembles Machiavelli’s ridiculed builders of castles in the air. Mere sentience is the indispensable foundation for peaceful human life. Rationality, which usually serves vanity or amour-propre instead of natural amour de soi, has thus far only impeded decent human life. A thinking man is a depraved animal. What all men—ancient and modern—have called progress is only an elaborate and dangerous reification of vanity. Rousseau rejects ‘histories’ or books (most notably the Book, the Bible) as unreliable guides—vain in both senses of the word—and instead has recourse to nature, which turns out to mean unassisted human reason.
Rousseau (in my opinion unwarrantedly) argues that the original human beings were by nature asocial. He needs this claim in order to integrate spiritedness/thumos in a harmless form as free will, and independence (therefore not the libido dominandi) into his concept of human nature. A social being would not be independent. This rhetorical need results in the contorted discussion of how language arose. Paradoxically, this rhetorical need also results in a possibly self-defeating need to say that much of human nature is mere latency—a set of potential characteristics that emerge by the force of chance events channeling human beings into civilized life. Rousseau’s ‘back to nature’ leads to what we later denizens of modernity might call a historicized nature, a nature that is changeable, manipulable. Of course, what is manipulable is also tyrannizable, unfree. Rousseau himself regards natural freedom as irreversibly destroyed. His life’s work is dedicated not to ‘reaction’ or returning to an recoverable past, but to pushing phony progress into real progress, into the reconstitution of freedom in modern society. He too is thus a ‘progressive,’ a man in need of a future. Like all progressives, he finally must sing, thumotically, ‘Tomorrow belongs to me.’ The very tyranny that results from civilization begins to force men to be equal, again, because (as in Hobbes) under tyranny all men but one are equal, even if (unlike Hobbes) Rousseau wants popular not state sovereignty. Moreover, the reason that led us astray also enables at least one philosopher to think his way back into the natural, and thereby prepare to set a path to ‘progress.’
Such a conception of human nature yields its own monstrosities. In subsequent centuries, we have seen some of them. The Machiavellian, Cartesian, and Rousseauian inspiriting of men to use political means to manipulate course of events in order to reconstitute manliness in some new form, hitherto only latent, has proven overly ambitious, even from a strictly political standpoint. Scientifically, it is by now too late to pretend that human nature is a vague and politically manipulable thing; we know too much about genetics, for example, to suppose that language results exclusively from some train of historical accidents. (Genetics also solves the knotty problem of how to classify orangutans and mandrills, discussed in Rousseau’s Note J.) When it comes to manipulation, it is the scientistic modernity envisioned by Bacon and not that envisioned by the more purely political writers that may prove most formidable.
Kant’s ‘progressivism’ is more straightforward than Rousseau’s because Kant believes he sees a way towards peace that does not jettison Enlightenment rationalism. The crucial difference is that Kant maintains freedom of will and happiness to be dependent upon the capacity to reason; whereas in Rousseau reason attaches to nature, and thus to the realm of determinism, for Kant reason undergirds the realm of freedom. Reason can and must be a crucial public element in a peaceful social order, although not primarily and immediately. Kant can then claim that human “unsocial sociality” is finally good, part of nature’s ‘plan’ to compel human beings to rise above their own laziness and sleepy or unenlightened peaceableness, through centuries of strife, culminating in an awakened or enlightened ‘perpetual peace.’ This historicized nature teaches the recalcitrant schoolboy, man, “that which reason could have told [him] at the beginning and with far less sad experience.” Kant admits that if he is mistaken, and there is no such historical teleology in nature, then nature is “not far wrong in preferring the state of savages.”
To help prevent that dystopian conclusion, Kant advocated what today’s ‘international relations’ specialists call idealism: the formulation of a republican “international government” of “world citizenship.” This a priori creation of the human mind will function as the goal of enlightened statesmen, the Woodrow Wilsons of the future. (It is therefore quite unlike a Platonic eidos, which is hardly a blueprint for future action.) Again unlike Rousseau, Kant optimistically claims or hopes that rational enlightenment will go with “a certain commitment of heart which the enlightened man cannot fail to make to the good he clearly understands.” In this Kant conflates, as Rousseau does not, goodness and morality. Toward this end, a new kind of philosophical historiography is needed, a historiography that will replace previous histories (including the Bible, as seen in his The Conjectural Beginning of Human History) with a narrative of judiciously selected events highlighting the latently ‘enlightened’ features of all previous epochs.
In my view, Kantian idealism is less practicable, and quite possibly less desirable, than he supposes. The contention that commercial republics—as distinguished from such military republics as ancient Sparta and Rome—do not fight with other commercial republics is sound enough. But the prospect of world government or even “international government” (by which he seems to mean a worldwide federalism) does not portend a civitas of self-governing citizens. Commercial, federal republics have proven their capacity to extend over large territories without losing their republicanism, but a worldwide republic of five or six billion souls strikes me as a chimera. The 300-million-soul version has discontents enough.
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