Asher Horowitz: Rousseau: Nature and History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, June 24, 1987.
Serious study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau reveals much of what goes on beneath the surface of politics in the West. Listen to the speeches, read the op-ed pieces, watch the televised argument-circuses, then identify the common themes and assumptions. You will find almost every one of those assumptions in Rousseau—not as assumptions, however, but as questions, criticisms, and counsels. Asher Horowitz writes, “Rousseau’s problems are still our problems, perhaps more so than ever.” The “question of civilization” itself, particularly the increasing dichotomy between rationalism and passion-worship, “still looms as a potentially explosive issue on the political agenda.”
This is so, because the complex question of the relationship between nature and history, a question Rousseau understood better than almost anyone in the past two centuries, remains nothing if not controversial. Do “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” legitimately govern men and nations? Or do we write our own laws, consciously and unconsciously constructing our ‘values’ as we go along? Radical publicists, ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ exalt ‘History’ over God and nature, with results that range from the lamentable to the preposterous.
A serious and perceptive student of Rousseau, Horowitz can therefore help us see the roots of modern politics. Although he foolishly admires the late Herbert Marcuse, a neo-Marxist charlatan who played to, and into, the illusions of the ‘Sixties New Left, Horowitz wisely avails himself of nothing Marcusean in his scholarship: no fake-Freudian social psychology, no Marxist attempt at locating the philosopher within his ‘historical moment,’ and no polemical jive.
Unlike most ideologues, Horowitz reads Rousseau. He tries to find out what Rousseau himself wants to teach careful readers. In this Horowitz follows Marcuse less than Leo Strauss, another German-Jewish refugee scholar with whom Marcuse may be said to have had nothing else in common. Horowitz employs some Straussian means for Marcusean ends, thereby bringing a certain tension to his book: the tension between nature and historicism.
Horowitz praises Strauss for seeing the beginnings of historicism in Rousseau while deploring Strauss’s objections to historicism. Whereas the greatest classical philosophers regarded nature as fundamentally stable, providing standards by which changes may be judged, Rousseau contends that nature, including human nature, lacks stability and hierarchy. Nature has little nature to it; almost infinitely malleable, it can and should be shaped by human artifice. This shaping, this deliberate and undeliberate change, constitutes history. Humanity ‘creates’ itself.
Horowitz stresses the social character of the labor by which humanity develops itself into humanity. Even the human ego results from this social construction. This doctrine contradicts the individualism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—Rousseau is the prototypical anti-‘bourgeois’—while subtly attacking Christianity, as well. “The dictate of conscience is natural only in so far as man is an animal made (by himself) to become social. When Rousseau… exalts conscience as a ‘divine instinct’ and seems to link it to a transcendent nature, he is disguising in terms of providential-teleological thinking a challenge to transcendent moral systems.” Christian an other religious moralities are “ideological illusion[s] bound up with the legitimation of social domination”—a staple trope in Leftist polemics to this day.
Unlike many atheists, Rousseau understands that traditional religion, if abandoned, must be replaced with something that serves some of the same purposes, particularly moral elevation and political cohesiveness. He also understands that rationalism or ‘Enlightenment’ will not serve this purpose. Nor does he assert the existence of all-determining laws of historical development, as Hegel and Marx do, and commend to us a place in the vanguard of historical progress. Called a dreamer, Rousseau has more realism in him than subsequent self-touted ‘realists.’
Rousseau’s (relative) realism catches Horowitz in a net. Having emphasized Rousseau’s social, even socialistic, side, Horowitz balks at some of the tougher themes in the Social Contract—Rousseau’s insistence on the need for a civil religion and for a “Legislator” who alone can design sound institutions. He turns to Rousseau’s great book on education, the Emile. But rather like Marcuse now, he underestimates the authoritarian component of Rousseauan education, with its supremely manipulative “tutor” (the parallel to the “Legislator”) who pulls the strings of Emile’s developing soul, in ways unsuspected by his pupil. Horowitz believes Emile to be a product of natural development, now forgetting Rousseau’s teaching on the malleability of nature.
This is why Horowitz concentrates his attention on the Discourses, the Nouvelle Heloïse, the Social Contract, and the Emile, but omits serious consideration of the Confessions and the Reveries. He claims that in Rousseau reason avoids the “repression and domination” of Enlightenment rationalism, but fails to consider, perhaps because he prefers not to consider, the extent to which Rousseau regards philosophic independence as a conquest, indeed not of nature but of fortune, and of opinion or sociality—the clear lesson of the ‘autobiographical’ writings. Unlike contemporary ideologues, Rousseau insists on the permanent possibility of philosophy, conceived as the transcendence of social and political customs. He would resist being dragooned into the Marcusean army as much as he resisted the calls to Christian soldiery and ‘Enlightenment’ vanguardism.
In approaching Rousseau’s philosophy through Rousseau’s writings, Horowitz the core of his teaching. In failing to consider all those major writings and trying to make Rousseau into a neo-Marxist avant-la-lettre, he partially undermines his own good work.
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