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up to the Contract social. Rousseau did not invent these notions but drew them
from theological debates on grace where, as we have seen, they had a strategic
function in the conception of the providential government of the world. Riley
demonstrates that the general will in Rousseau can be defined without any doubt
as a secularization of the corresponding category in Malebranche and that, more
generally, French theological thought, from Arnaud to Pascal, from Malebranche
to Fénelon, has left substantial traces in all of Rousseau’s work. But to what extent
this might also determine the displacement of an entire theological paradigm into
a political dimension is something that remains outside Riley’s study. That the
transfer of a notion from the field of theology to the field of politics might imply
some unexpected consequences and, hence, something like an “unforgivable
omission,” in the case of Rousseau, was not lost on Alberto Postigliola (Postigliola,
p. 224). But he limits himself to showing that the notion of “general will” in Male-
branche is synonymous with the divine attribute of infinity, which renders prob-
lematic, if not contradictory, its shift into the profane sphere of Rousseau’s city in
which the generality can only be finite. We will attempt to show instead that with
the notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière the entire governmental machine of providence is transferred from the theological to the political sphere,
thereby compromising not only some points of Rousseau’s économie publique, but
giving it its fundamental structure; that is to say, the relationship between sover-
eignty and government, law and executive power. Through the Social Contract the
republican tradition inherited without reservations a theological paradigm and a
governmental machine of which it is still far from becoming conscious.
1.6. In the course of the 1977–1978 lectures Securité, territoire, population,
Foucault defined in a few, extremely dense lines, the fundamental structure of
Rousseau’s political project (Foucault, pp. 106–108). He seeks here to demon-
strate that the problem of sovereignty did not leave the stage at the moment the
art of government came to the fore in European politics. On the contrary, never
is it posed with such urgency as it is at this time: although up until the seven-
teenth century one limited oneself to deducing a paradigm of government from
the theory of sovereignty, it then became an inverse process; given the growing
primacy of the arts of government, it became a case of discovering the juridical
form and theory of sovereignty that were able to sustain and found this primacy.
It is at this stage that he illustrates his thesis via a reading of Rousseau and, in
particular, of the relationship between the 1775 article on “Political Economy”
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in the Encyclopedia and the Social Contract. The problem with the article lies, according to Foucault, in the definition of an “economy” or an art of government that is no longer modeled on the family, but that has the common aim of
governing in the best possible way and with maximum efficacy in order to make
men happy. When Rousseau writes the Social Contract, the problem will instead
be precisely that of
how, with notions like those of “nature,” “contract,” and “general will,” one can
give a general principle of government that will allow for both the juridical prin-
ciple of sovereignty and the elements through which an art of government can
be defined and described [ . . . ] The problem of sovereignty is not eliminated;
on the contrary, it is made more acute than ever. (Foucault, p. 107)
Let us attempt to advance Foucault’s analysis in light of the results of our investi-
gation. To begin with, he has come as close as he possibly can to the intuition of
the bipolar character of the governmental machine, although the methodologi-
cal decision to set aside the analysis of the juridical universals prevents him from
articulating it fully. Rousseau’s theory of sovereignty is certainly a function of a
theory of government (or of “public economy,” as he sometimes defines it); but
the correlation between the two elements is, in Rousseau, still more intimate and
tight than it appears in Foucault’s brief analysis and is entirely founded upon the
theological model that he adopts from Malebranche and the French theorists of
providence.
What is decisive from this point of view is the distinction and articulation of
sovereignty and government, which is at the basis of Rousseau’s political thought.
“I urge my readers also,” he writes in his article on the Economie politique, “to
distinguish carefully public economy, about which I am to speak, and which I call
government, from the supreme authority, which I call sovereignty—a distinction that consists in the one having the legislative right and in certain cases obligating the body of the nation itself, while the other has only the executive power
and can obligate only private individuals” (Rousseau 1992, p. 142). In the Social
Contract the distinction is restated as the articulation between general will and legislative power on the one hand, and government and executive power on the
other. That for Rousseau the distinction has a strategic relevance is proved by the
fact that he forcefully denies that it is a case of division and presents it instead as
an internal articulation of one indivisible supreme power:
For the same reason that sovereignty is inalienable it is indivisible; for the will
is either general, or it is not; it is either that of the body of the people, or that
of only a part of it. In the first case, this declared will is an act of sovereignty
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and constitutes law; in the second case, it is only a particular will, or an act of
magistracy—it is at most a decree. But our politicians, being unable to divide
sovereignty in its principle, divide it in its object. They divide it into force and
will, into legislative power and executive power; into rights of taxation, of jus-
tice, and of war; into internal administration and foreign relations—sometimes
conflating all of these branches, and sometimes separating them. They make the
sovereign into a fantastic being, formed of disparate parts; it is as if they created
a man from several different bodies, one with eyes, another with arms, another
with feet, and nothing else. The Japanese conjurors, it is said, cut up a child
before the eyes of the spectators; then throwing all its limbs into the air, they
make the child come down again alive and whole. Such almost are the jugglers’
tricks of our politicians; after dismembering the social body, by magic worthy of
the circus, they recombine its parts, in any unlikely way. This error arises from
their not having formed clear ideas about the sovereign authority, and from
their regarding as elements of this authority what are only emanations from it.
(Rousseau 2002, p. 171)
In the same way as in the paradigm of providence, general providence and spe-
cial providence do not stand in contrast with each other nor do they represent a
division within the one divine will; and, as in Malebranche, the occasional causes
are n
othing but the particular actualization of God’s general will, so in Rousseau,
the government, or executive power, claims to coincide with the sovereignty of
law from which it nevertheless distinguishes itself as its particular emanation and
actualization. The concept of emanation, utilized by Rousseau, has not failed to
surprise his commentators; but the choice of term is all the more significant if
one returns it to its original context, which is that of the emanative causes of
Neoplatonism, which were incorporated into the theory of creation and prov-
idence through the work of Boethius, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, the Liber de
causis, and Jewish theology. Precisely because of this origin, in Rousseau’s time
the term did not have a good press. In the article by Diderot, “Kabbalah,” in the
Encyclopaedia, the emanative paradigm was defined as the “axis around which
the entire philosophical Kabbalah and system of emanations turn, according to
which it is necessary that all things emanate from the divine essence.” And even
more critical judgments could be found in the entry “Emanation,” which, hav-
ing restated the link with the Kabbalah, warned that “this theory leads straight
to pantheism.” Introducing the term at a delicate point in his system, Rousseau
must have calculated the implications of his choice. This did not hark back to
the Kabbalah but to Christian theology, in which the term referred first to the
procession of persons in the Trinitarian economy (until the seventeenth century
this was, in fact, the only meaning of the French term émanation) and to the
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theory of causes in the creationist and providential paradigm. In this context,
the term implied that the divine principle has not been diminished nor is it
divided by its Trinitarian articulation and by its activity of creation and conser-
vation of the world. It is in this sense that Rousseau uses the term; in order to
exclude, in contrast to those thinkers whom he ironically calls les politiques, that sovereignty is in some way divisible. And yet, just as in the case of the Trinitarian
economy and in the theory of providence, what cannot be divided is articulated
through the distinctions sovereign power/government, general will/particular will,
legislative power/executive power, which mark within it a series of caesurae that
Rousseau tries carefully to minimize.
1.7. Through these distinctions the entire economic-providential apparatus
(with its polarities ordinatio/executio, providence/fate, Kingdom/Government) is
passed on as an unquestioned inheritance to modern politics. What was needed
to assure the unity of being and divine action, reconciling the unity of substance
with the trinity of persons and the government of particulars with the universality
of providence, has here the strategic function of reconciling the sovereignty and
generality of the law with the public economy and the effective government of in-
dividuals. The most nefarious consequence of this theological apparatus dressed
up as political legitimation is that it has rendered the democratic tradition inca-
pable of thinking government and its economy (today one would instead write:
economy and its government, but the two terms are substantially synonymous).
On the one hand, Rousseau conceives of government as the essential political
problem; on the other hand, he minimizes the problem of its nature and its
foundation, reducing it to the activity of the execution of sovereign authority.
The ambiguity that seems to settle the problem of government by presenting it
as the mere execution of a general will and law has weighed negatively not only
upon the theory, but also upon the history of modern democracy. For this history
is nothing but the progressive coming to light of the substantial untruth of the
primacy of legislative power and the consequent irreducibility of government to
mere execution. And if today we are witnessing the government and the econo-
my’s overwhelming domination of a popular sovereignty emptied of all meaning,
this perhaps signifies that Occidental democracies are paying the political price of
a theological inheritance that they had unwittingly assumed through Rousseau.
The ambiguity that consists in conceiving government as executive power
is an error with some of the most far-reaching consequences in the history of
Western political thought. It has meant that modern political thought becomes
lost in abstractions and vacuous mythologems such as the Law, the general will,
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623
and popular sovereignty, and has failed to confront the decisive political prob-
lem. What our investigation has shown is that the real problem, the central mystery
of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police—that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support.
א The two sovereignties, the dynastic and the popular-democratic, refer to two
completely different genealogies. The dynastic sovereignty of divine right is derived
from the theological-political paradigm; the popular-democratic is derived from the
theological-economic-providential paradigm.
א Rousseau does not hide the fact that the fundamental articulations of his political
system derive from a theological paradigm. In the article on Political Economy, he affirms that the principal difficulty of the system that he proposes is that of reconciling “public freedom and the government’s authority” (Rousseau 1992, p. 145). This difficulty has been
removed, writes Rousseau, by the “most sublime of all human institutions, or rather by
a divine inspiration, which teaches mankind to imitate here below the unchangeable de-
crees of the Deity” (ibid.). In other words, the sovereignty of the law, to which Rousseau refers, imitates and reproduces the structure of the providential government of the world.
Just as in Malebranche, for Rousseau the general will, the law, subjugates men only in
order to make them freer, and in immutably governing their actions does nothing but
express their nature. And just as in letting oneself be governed by God they do nothing
but let their own nature take its course, so the indivisible sovereignty of the Law guarantees the coincidence of the governing and the governed.
The agreement with Malebranche’s thought also appears forcefully in the third Letter
from the Mountain in relation to the critique of miracles. Rousseau closely connects the
miracle with the exception (it is “a real and visible exception to [God’s] Laws”: Rousseau 2001, p. 173) and firmly criticizes the necessity of miracles to faith and revelation. In
question is not so much whether God “can” carry out miracles, so much as—through
a perhaps conscious return to the distinction between absolute power and ordering
power—whether God “wants” to do so (ibid.). It is interesting to observe that Rousseau,
despite denying the necessity of miracles, does not exclude them entirely, but conceives
them as exceptions. Schmitt’s theory, which sees in miracles the theological paradigm of
the state of exception (Schmitt 2005, p. 49), finds its confirmation here.
2. The Invisible Hand
2.1. The term oikonomia disappears from the theological language of the
/>
West in the course of the Middle Ages. Certainly, its equivalents dispositio and
dispensatio continue to be used, but they progressively lose their technical meaning and merely designate in a generic way the divine activity of the government
of the world. The humanists and erudite scholars of the seventeenth century are
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not ignorant of the theological meaning of the Greek term, which is defined
with sufficient clarity in Étienne Chauvin’s and Johann Kaspar Suicer’s lexicons
(1682, particularly in the meaning of the “incarnation of the word of God”)
and in the theological compendia such as Petavius’s De theologicis dogmatibus
(1644–1650). However, when in the course of the eighteenth century, the term
reappears in the Latinate form oeconomia and especially in its equivalents in
other European languages with the meaning that is familiar to us: “activity of
management and government of things and people,” it appears to spring, as it
were, ex novo already formed in the heads of the philosophes and the économistes, without any essential relation either to classical economics or to its theological
past. It is well known that the economics of the moderns is not derived from
Aristotelian economics, nor from the medieval treatises of Oeconomica that refer
to it, and even less to the moralizing tradition of works such as Menius’s Oeconomia christiana (Wittenberg, 1529) or Battus’s (Antwerp, 1558), which have as their object the behavior of the Christian family. But the more or less subterranean
connections that might link the economics of the moderns to the paradigm of
the theological oikonomia and the divine government of the world have been left
almost entirely unexplored. It is not our intention to reconstruct the specifics of
these links, but it seems clear that a genealogical inquiry into economics could
usefully focus on the relation to the theological paradigm, whose essential traits
we have sought to delineate. We will merely give a few summary indications here
that others might wish to complete.
2.2. In 1749 Linneaus publishes in Uppsala his Specimen academicum de oeconomia naturae. Given the strategic function that the syntagma “economy of nature” will perform in the birth of modern economics, it is worthwhile dwelling