Rousseau Today

It may be said with a trace of vindication that Rousseau’s time has come, although Rousseau himself best understood the complexities surrounding this assertion. Grasping preternaturally from deep within the self-lionizing world of eighteenth-century continental monarchy the contradictions of social orders both decaying and ascending, he pushed still beyond as only two other thinkers in Western political thought, Plato and Hobbes, to discern what was to come. Our difficulty recognizing and responding to the future, evident in our inability to absorb the gift of his prescience, was for Rousseau fully matched by our inability to grasp what lies before us.

By comparison with early modern theorists of sovereignty like Bodin and Hobbes, Rousseau understood that ‘the most absolute authority is that which penetrates to man's innermost being, and affects his will no less than it does his actions’ (DPE, 251). If a genuinely popular sovereign authority is to prevail over its rivals and control its government, Rousseau argues that it must succeed in doing two things simultaneously: it must both generalise the will that directs it and concentrate the powers that enforce it. On the one hand, the more general a will, the more equitable are its concerns and the more imposing its commands: ‘the most general will is also the most just’ (DPE, 246), and by definition ‘the more the State expands, the more its real force increases’ (SC 3:2). On the other hand, Rousseau accepts that ‘interest and commiseration must in some way be constricted and compressed in order to be activated’ (DPE, 254), and he recognises in any struggle for sovereignty ‘the people's force acts only when concentrated, it evaporates and is lost as it spreads, like the effect of gunpowder scattered on the ground and which ignites only grain by grain’ (SC 3:8). Appreciation of the tension between these two requirements helps to shed light on the way some of Rousseau’s Jacobin followers conceived of the relation between popular sovereignty and executive authority, and it remains a helpful way of clarifying some of the recurring challenges confronted by emancipatory political organisations all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the final part of this article, I will try to illustrate what’s at stake in these tensions through brief discussions of two very different French figures who might be said to dramatise the opposing poles of Rousseau’s legacy: Jean Jaurès’ defence of a revolutionary reformism mediated by maximally ‘generalised’ state institutions, and Pierre Clastres’ fascination with maximally ‘concentrated’ societies organised in wholesale opposition to the emergence of state power.

Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau does not use the term “recognition” in the sense that it has been known since Fichte and Hegel, he has had an influence on various theorists of recognition. Undoubtedly, the key reason for this is his insightful writings that deal with various aspects of human sociality. In this essay, I shall reconstruct key elements of Rousseau’s work to highlight how he understands human sociality. The second task of the essay is to highlight the meaning of Rousseau’s insights to contemporary recognition theory. Rousseau is well known for his scepticism of modern social life. This shows especially in his analysis of amour-propre, a self-love that appears as a desire for social recognition and distinction from others. Unlike recognition theorists, Rousseau focuses on the inequalizing force of pride and search for esteem. In other words, Rousseau emphasizes the potential social harms that might rise from various struggles for recognition. In his view, individuals face a challenge to balance amour-propre in a healthy, and not inflamed manner. If the balancing is unsuccessful, the unchecked desire for social value leads into increasing (and institutionalized) inequality. However, Rousseau is also aware of the more positive and constructive elements of human sociality and puts value on the social bonds that are built upon respect and goodwill. Furthermore, although Rousseau is highly sceptical of the possibilities of respect and freedom in modern society, in Emile he outlines how freedom could be achieved through upbringing that invites (or even forces) one to be free—not unlike Fichte’s idea of summoning one to realize one’s own agency. Ultimately, Rousseau presents an ambivalent picture of the nature of social relationships. This is a position that has been developed in detail recognition theories only recently (e.g. Ikäheimo et al., Recognition and Ambivalence, Columbia University Press, New York, 2021). Although Rousseau does not have all the conceptual tools of the recent recognition theories at his disposal, he arguably has a developed picture of the positive and the negative effects that stem from the very same desire for recognition.

The chapter shows that we can best understand Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Olympe de Gouges’ views on women when we interpret them as part of an ongoing discussion about the equality, similarity, and differences between the sexes. The first section examines Rousseau’s early writings on women from the 1740s. Contra previous scholarship, it is argued that Rousseau never defended a view of the equality of the sexes. Section two presents a close reading of the first pages of book five of Emile. It is argued that in these passages, Rousseau is positioning his view of sexual difference against previous views on the equality, superiority, or inferiority of women. It is concluded that the main difference between the early and later writings is that Rousseau drops the view that men’s rule over women is a form of tyranny. The final section examines Gouges’ critical dialogue with Rousseau. It is argued that she radicalizes rather than rejects his views on sexual difference. Joan W. Scott has famously argued that Gouges’ attempt to combine equal rights and difference is doomed to fail, because the discourse of universal rights has in itself constructed the concept of sexual difference. The chapter argues that rather than adding women to a universal ideal of rights, Gouges is questioning the very idea of gender-neutral universality. Her approach is truly radical in its attempt to gender men.

In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that in order to form a more expansive ecological perspective, we must do away with the idea of nature. As he states, nature “a transcendental idea in a material mask” is “getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” (2007, 14, 1). More specifically, we need an ecology that forgoes reliance on binary oppositions and naturalized identities if our ecological imaginary is to accommodate feminist, queer, and anti-racist leanings (Morton, 2010, 274). Rousseau, I argue, is an early and unlikely advocate of an “ecology without nature” and thus provides an ecological perspective that is potentially feminist and queer. In order to elaborate this, I focus on two key texts in Rousseau’s œuvre: The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, or Second Discourse (1755) and his last unfinished autobiography, Rêveries of a Solitary Walker (written from 1776–1778). Though these two texts bookend Rousseau’s literary career, there is a complement of themes and preoccupations that lend themselves to thinking the two together, especially in thinking about an ecology without nature.

Rousseau placed sovereignty at the center of his account of political legitimacy and human freedom, but most democratic theorists in the twenty-first century set out to defang or altogether eliminate sovereignty. We argue that not only is the concept and practice of sovereignty ineliminable, but it also offers the crucial site for emancipatory politics. Sovereignty affords the bridge between the genealogical project of diagnosing unfreedom found in the Discourse on Inequality and the normative project of self-legislation found in the Social Contract. Sovereignty is the moment where we take responsibility for our past—the sedimentation of normative injury that is our history of unfreedom—and self-consciously repair these wounds through new legislation.

This chapter draws on Rousseau’s understanding of property to highlight the problematic association between possession, property and power in the capitalist firm. By subjecting firms to this Rousseauian critique, it has highlighted the possibility for alternative systems such as the workers’ co-operative. The need for this reconsideration of the status quo rests on critiques of the liberal capitalist firm from two interlinked perspectives—firstly, a republican argument outlining the firm as an arena of domination and dependence, and secondly an argument that democratic theory needs to apply to the firm in much the same way as it does to the state given the weaknesses of consent theory and the difficulties of exit. The chapter proposes that legitimate authority within a firm can come only from the members themselves in the form of a general will. Drawing on Rousseau’s democratic theory, it suggests that this general will can be drawn out through deliberative democracy within the co-operative. This form of democracy allows for discussion of what the common good might look like for the members. The chapter suggests that features of the co-operative, notably its small size, established norms and principles, and broad agreements on its terms of reference, allow for deliberative consensus to be reached and for decisions to be made in accordance with a general will.

The essay locates Rousseau’s political thought within nineteenth-century Siamese politics and reveals his contribution to the formation of Thai constitutionalism. The chapter focuses on the translation and the interpretation of his idea of General Will in the “Handbook for the New Regime” [Koo-Mue-Raborb-Mai] published and disseminated after the 1932 Revolution. In so doing, the paper situates the Thai republican traditions within the global history of republicanism, which has been hitherto overlooked by both scholars of Thai studies and intellectual history.

In the first decades of Meiji Era, characterised by the revolts of the warriors and the Movement for the liberty and rights of the people, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the object of a deep interest because he was considered as the main inspiration of French Revolution. Few people were able to read French and able to know what really were his ideas. Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901) played a major role in the history of the Movement, not only as journalist and political man, and also as the translator of On Social Contract, in Japanese in 1874 and in classic Chinese in 1882–1883. This translation had a major impact in Japan and China. But previous researches neglected the fact that translation played a much more important role for Chōmin, since he and his disciples of the French Studies School (Futsugaku juku) translated as well the two discourses of Rousseau and many French authors, through books and the translation reviews Ōbei Seiri sōdan and Ōbei seiten sushi. We will demonstrate that all these translations had a common point: the French authors translated (Emile Acollas, Jules Barni, Charles Renouvier, Etienne Vacherot, Alfred Naquet, Alfred Fouillée etc.), were main figures of French republicanism and fathers of Third Republic. Their fight for democracy was deeply based on Rousseau as well as Immanuel Kant. Recent researches rediscovered them and characterised their philosophy as Liberal-Socialism. Nakae Chômin was aware of this and we can say that his work was a Japanese version of French Liberal-Socialism, which gave birth later to Socialism Anarchism through his main disciple, Kôtoku Shûsui.