was an inalienable possession, part of an individual’s very humanity. Rousseau’s
contribution was therefore to attribute not just the origin but also the exercise of
sovereignty to the people.3
The implications of these ideas upon Rousseau’s conception of contract were
necessarily profound, and this because the ‘fundamental’ problem he thus set
himself was nothing less than that of squaring the circle: namely, how ‘to find a
form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods of each
associate with the full common force, and by means of which each, uniting with all,
nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’.4 The contrast with
the position endorsed by Thomas Hobbes could not have been starker. As Hobbes
perceived it, the human condition was so bleak that men could only escape from
the war of all against all by agreeing to transfer their right to govern and to
adjudicate in disputes to the single sovereign power of Leviathan. The trade-off
was a straightforward one: life and an element of liberty in exchange for obedience
to the sword. For Rousseau there was to be no trade-off, there were to be no losses,
only gains. Men could have both liberty and law if they were able to construct a
society where they ruled themselves.5
For Rousseau therefore there was to be only one contract of association and no
pact of submission. ‘Each individual’, he wrote, ‘recovers the equivalent of every-
thing he loses.’ But something ‘remarkable’ took place when the contract was
signed. The individual, in Rousseau’s phrase, was ‘doubly committed’, first to his
fellow contractees and secondly as a member of the community in relation to the
sovereign. Individuals thus found themselves to have entered into a reciprocal
agreement not just with the body of which they were to become members but
also with a sovereign deemed henceforth to possess a moral personality. The latter
point was fundamental. Rousseau, as much as Hobbes, was aware that a contract
where everyone was free to decide upon its terms and when it was to be observed
was a recipe for disaster. To prevent the inevitable descent into a ‘state of nature’
where the association would be either ‘tyrannical or void’ Rousseau therefore had
resort not to the usual strategy of two contracts (the first of which ensures that
society is not dissolved even if government is dissolved) but to a fiction: the general
will. Its existence as something which was ‘always rightful and always tends to the
public good’ was sufficient to allow Rousseau to stipulate that it was the sovereign
3 Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (1970). See Patrick Riley,
The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton, NJ,
1986).
4 Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract’, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings
(Cambridge, 2007), 49–50.
5 The contrast between the positions adopted by Hobbes and Rousseau was noted by Diderot in his
entry on ‘Hobbisme’ in the Encyclopédie.
110
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
and the sovereign alone who was the sole judge of the contract’s implementation.
The State was only viable upon this condition.
Rousseau’s contract was thus in one sense anything but contractual. Postulated
was a pact between a collectivity considered as a single moral person and each of its
members taken individually. From this it followed that of the two contracting
parties it was only one––the individuals concerned––who could be in breach of the
agreement entered into. By an altogether different route we arrived therefore at a
conclusion similar to that of Hobbes: the social contract gave absolute power to the
sovereign over his subjects.
If this was so, it was partly because Rousseau, unlike John Locke, did not view
the foundational contract either as a means of regulating the required balance
between rights-bearing individuals and government or of securing the liberal
functioning of institutions. For him, as for Hobbes, the contract was constitutive
of society itself. Where, however, Rousseau diverged from Hobbes was in the end
envisaged. As Robert Derathé correctly observed, for Hobbes that end was civil
peace, whilst for Rousseau it was ensuring that men could unite without giving up
any of their liberty.
The argument here is sufficiently well-known as not to need detailed clarifica-
tion. As Rousseau explained: ‘what man loses by the social contract is his natural
freedom and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and he can reach:
what he gains is civil freedom and property in everything he possesses’.6 Expressed
differently, there was no other solution to our problems than the substitution of the
arbitrary relations existing between men by the obedience of the citizen to the law.
To that end, it was necessary that the members of the association should transform
themselves from a group of isolated individuals with many different wills into a
community with a common will or interest. As we passed from the state of nature
into civil society, justice was to replace instinct as a rule of conduct and in this way
we obeyed only rules that we had prescribed for ourselves and thus enjoyed
untrammelled ‘moral freedom’.
Given the controversy caused by this proposition and its related claim that
individuals could be forced to be free, it is interesting that it was precisely at this
point of the argument of Du Contrat social that Rousseau chose to declare that ‘the
philosophical meaning of the word freedom is not my subject here’. In a way his
concerns were more mundane and straightforward. What he, unlike so many of his
predecessors (‘Grotius and the rest’ as Rousseau described them), was eager to reject
was the idea that the individual could contract into anything and under any
circumstances and that in this way the rights of slavery, conquest, and despotism
could be justified. Rousseau always opposed such a conception of contract and
he did so for the good reason that ‘to renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s
quality as a man’.
What the reader was to make of this has been open to a wide-range of interpre-
tation. Rousseau himself, given his belief that sovereignty could not be subject to
6 Rousseau, ‘Social Contract’, 53–4.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
111
the procedure of representation, was convinced that his ideas could be applied, if at
all, only to states whose geographical area did not exceed that of a small city.
Political simplicity, exemplified by ‘troops of peasants . . . attending to affairs of
State under an oak tree’, was to be the preferred model and it was only later (in his
reflections upon the projected governments of Corsica and Poland) that these
strictures were to be relaxed. In Du Contrat social itself Rousseau refused to stipulate
‘definitively’ what was the ‘best’ form of government, suggesting that it could be
judged in terms of population growth, thereby handing the entire matter over to
the calculateurs, whom he exhorted, in almost Benthamite
fashion, to ‘count,
measure, compare’.
More profoundly, Rousseau’s musings upon the social contract and the society
to which it was to give rise tied in with the broader Rousseauian theme of how both
individuals and peoples could be structured for virtue. At a psychological level––
and with Rousseau these are numerous––the argument is that Rousseau’s formula-
tions were not derived from the lived experience of the Genevan republic (as he
claimed) but were rather an enlarged projection of his own being, with virtue
measured by the citizen’s willingness to be subsumed by the mythic self he had
elaborated in his writings.7 ‘There is no subjection so perfect’, Rousseau wrote in
Emile, ‘as the one which retains the appearance of liberty.’
To Rousseau’s contemporaries it was precisely this preoccupation with virtue
that struck the deepest chord. ‘Jean-Jacques’, Robert Darnton writes in The Great
Cat Massacre,8 ‘opened up his soul to those who could read him right, and his
readers felt their own souls elevated above the imperfections of ordinary existence.’
Here the key texts were the Confessions (nothing quite like its intimate and often
sordid self-examination had been seen before)9 and the Nouvelle Héloïse (which had
run to some seventy editions by 1800) and not Du Contrat social. Julie’s pure love
for Saint-Preux and her (inevitable) exemplary death were such as to shape the
sensibilité of virtually an entire generation of admirers and so much so, as Emmet
Kennedy has argued, that ‘almost single-handedly Rousseau precipitated an affec-
tive revolution’.10 The cult of Rousseau worship that sprang up shortly after his
death––celebrated by, among others, Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France––had
this rather than any specific political doctrine as its object. It was moreover this
sensibility, this longing for moral elevation, purity, and transparency, which was to
be magnified out of all proportion in the Revolution that began in 1789.
7 Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution
(Ithaca, NY, and London, 1986), 72.
8 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York, 1984), 249.
9 Prosper de Barante, writing in De la Littérature française pendant le dix-huitième siècle (1809),
189, was later to comment: ‘It is indeed a singular occurrence that a man who sought to secure the
esteem and even the admiration of posterity should do so by recounting the smallest details of a life
which had nothing of greatness, which displayed no actions of distinction, and which, on the contrary,
was full of revolting behaviour and unpardonable offences.’
10 Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution 1762–1791 (New Haven, Conn.,
and London, 1989), 112.
112
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
I I
The question of Rousseau’s (and more broadly the Enlightenment’s) connection
with the French Revolution has long been the cause of controversy and debate.
Over eighty years ago Daniel Mornet meticulously reconstructed the reading
patterns of pre-revolutionary France and to his surprise discovered that Du Contrat
social scarcely figured at all. The imagined connecting link appeared to have
vanished. For all Mornet’s errors this view continued for many years to have its
adherents and was most forthrightly restated by Joan McDonald.11 Her view was
that Rousseau had been little read, and even less understood, by those who made
the Revolution but that nevertheless both the revolutionaries and their opponents
made ceaseless appeal to his authority. It was, she argued, the ‘memory’ and ‘the
myth of Rousseau rather than his political theory which was important in the
mind of the revolutionary generation’.12 This thesis was subsequently challenged
by Roger Barny in an important article which stated categorically that Rousseau’s
‘specifically political works, far from being unknown, influenced a number of
the future revolutionary leaders and, in a more general way, contributed to the
formulation of some of the most important themes of bourgeois political
thought’.13 McDonald’s thesis was further contested by R. A. Leigh’s bibliographi-
cal researches which revealed that Du Contrat social had indeed been frequently
republished in the period immediate prior to the Revolution. The picture was
further complicated with the appearance of Norman Hampson’s Will and Circum-
stance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution. Hampson’s contention,
backed up by the analysis of five key revolutionary figures (Mercier, Brissot,
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Marat), was that both Montesquieu and Rousseau
had acted as the principal influences in the intellectual apprenticeship of the
revolutionaries, even though their ideas were basically antithetical. This, he writes,
‘did not stop virtually all the political writers of the 1780s from borrowing from
both at once’.14
The force of Hampson’s argument was that whilst the revolutionaries took
Montesquieu, and not Rousseau, as their guide there was the hope that calmer
waters would be reached. The former’s conception of a pre-existing esprit général
informing and fashioning society and its political institutions made possible the
recognition and equilibrium of competing interests but under Rousseau’s tutelage
these interests had to be dissolved into the general will, by force if necessary. By the
same token Rousseau taught the revolutionaries that as long as a sovereign acted for
the public good it could not infringe the liberty of its subjects. They learnt too that
politics––‘everything is rooted in politics’, Rousseau wrote in his Confessions––was
11 Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution 1762–1791 (London, 1965).
12 Ibid. 172.
13 Roger Barny, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau dans la Révolution’, Dix-Huitième Siècle, 6 (1974), 62.
14 Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution
(London, 1983), 58.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
113
the instrument of social regeneration and emancipation. If need be there could also
be resort to the genius of the lawgiver. It is hard then not to agree with François
Furet when he writes that Rousseau’s ‘political thought set up well in advance the
conceptual framework of what was to become Jacobinism and the language of the
Revolution’.15
This view has now become something of a commonplace. It was restated most
recently by James Swenson is his On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the
First Authors of the Revolution, a title chosen specifically to recall that of the book
published by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in 1791. Of the political situation in 1789,
Swenson writes, ‘Rousseau provided the conceptual terms in which the struggle
developed.’16 Similarly, according to Marcel Gauchet, ‘whether Rousseau had been
read a lot or a little before the Revolution is of minor importance: he was the author
of the moment. He was the thinker exactly appropriate to what the circumstances
required.’17
It is not difficult to find evidence to support this view. To take o
ne slightly comic
example, we can cite the debate which took place in the Constituent Assembly in
August 1791 concerning the raising of a statue in Rousseau’s honour. The debate
quickly turned to the idea of moving Rousseau’s remains to the Panthéon and
ended with a disagreement about who exactly owned his body and who, therefore,
had the right to make this decision. Nevertheless, there could be no doubting the
admiration for Rousseau amongst those present at this discussion. Repeatedly cited
as the author of both Du Contrat social and Émile, this much-persecuted ‘extraor-
dinary man’ and ‘universal genius’ was accredited with being the first to have
established both the equality of rights among men and the sovereignty of the
people and with having been ‘the first founder of the French Constitution’.18
Moreover, this interpretation of Rousseau’s influence upon the Revolution
accords with the views of many of the participants. If we pass over Augustin
Barruel’s famous contention that the Revolution was from start to finish a ‘conspir-
acy’ led by philosophers against both Church and State––a conspiracy in which
Rousseau inevitably figured amongst the gens de lettres and thus as a member of ‘the
most wicked and dangerous group of citizens’19––it is sufficient to glance briefly at
Jean-Joseph Mounier’s Recherches sur les Causes qui ont empêche les Français de
devenir libres et sur les moyens qui leur restent pour acquérir la liberté, published while
Mounier was in exile in 1792. Mounier, as may be recalled, had been a supporter of
moderate constitutional reform and it was he who later enunciated the formula
that, if the philosophes had not caused the Revolution, the latter had produced their
influence. How, Mounier asked, could a revolution that had set out to eradicate
arbitrary power lead to chaos? The answer was simple. Out of ignorance and
15 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 31.
16 James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution
(Stanford, Calif., 2000), 192.
17 Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des pouvoirs: La Souverainété, le peuple et la représentation
1789–1799 (1995), 57.
18 Archives Parlementaires, 29 (1875), 755–61.
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