This essay is about the relationship between the moral and political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a cluster of concepts whose names became current only after Rousseau's death in 1778. The first is the concept of autonomy, a concept now usually associated with the thought of Immanuel Kant. The second is the concept of social science, a concept initially associated with the thought of the chief theoretical architect of the French Revolution of 1789, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. The third is the now largely forgotten concept of industrialism, a concept sometimes associated with the thought of the French political economist Jean-Baptiste Say and the early nineteenth-century followers of the comte de Saint-Simon. Together, the three concepts help to throw more light both on Rousseau's theory of the relationship between democratic sovereignty and representative government, and on his explanation of the sharply counterintuitive historical trajectory followed by democracy in its passage from ancient to modern times.Footnote 1 In doing so, they also help to capture those parts of Rousseau's thought that have been responsible for the unusually wide spectrum of interpretation to which it has been subject—from Rousseau the neo-Epicurean to Rousseau the proto-Romantic—while at the same time making it easier to see why it has also been said that aesthetic politics, or the bridge between bureaucracy and charisma that has come to be formed by competitive politics, began with Rousseau.Footnote 2 They do so, it will be argued, because all three concepts arose from Rousseau's treatment of the human imagination and, in particular, from his exploration of the relationship between the human imagination and what he called the language of signs.
Usually, the phrase is associated with the thought of the abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and with Rousseau's discussion, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of 1755, of Condillac's examination of the origins of language in the language of gesture, action or signs. As is well known, Rousseau objected to Condillac's argument as circular: signs seemed to presuppose language just as much as language seemed to presuppose signs.Footnote 3 But Rousseau still went on to add the phrase to his own conceptual repertoire, where he associated it with the subject of the imaginative origins of a range of powerful emotions rather than with the more specific question of language acquisition. “One of the errors of our age,” he wrote in his Emile of 1762, “is to use reason in too unadorned a form, as if men were all mind. In neglecting the language of signs that speak to the imagination, the most energetic of languages has been lost.”Footnote 4 This “most energetic of languages,” Rousseau also emphasized, was ancient, not modern. “I observe,” he continued, “that in the modern age men no longer have a hold on one another except by force or by self-interest; the ancients, by contrast, acted much more by persuasion and by the affections of the soul because they did not neglect the language of signs.”Footnote 5 As should be clear, part of Rousseau's self-imposed brief was to call for the creation of a language of signs for modern times. But, as he also emphasized repeatedly, modern economic and social conditions were radically different from those of ancient times. The difference produced both by the absence of slavery and by the modern division of labour meant that ancient politics had no place even in the relatively small-scale setting of a city like Geneva.Footnote 6 What was required was not simply a language of signs, but a language of signs commensurate with modern conditions.
Here too Rousseau had conceptual resources at his disposal. This time, however, they did not come from Condillac but from his own musical experience. Sounds, just as much as images, could be signs. Anything, in fact, could be a sign, although it did not follow that any sign could refer to any thing. As Rousseau noted in his posthumously published Essay on the Origin of Languages, some signs, like painting, worked visually and diachronically, while others worked audibly and synchronically, like melody.Footnote 7 He also tried to show how these different types of sign could be combined by composing what he called a mélodrame, which was his version of Pygmalion. In this context, the details are less relevant than Rousseau's underlying interest in the imagination and its powers. Once recognized, it is not too difficult to identify the imaginative foundations of the concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism in Rousseau's thought and to see how they can be connected to those terms that were unequivocally present in his published work, like the concepts of a social contract, patriotism and the general will, or such conceptual neologisms as identification or perfectibilité that were so central to his investigation of human capabilities and their origins. In earlier times, this type of claim was once better known. It belonged to a much larger and older strand of nineteenth-century German or Swiss interpretation linking the imagination and aesthetics to Rousseau's treatment of politics and political economy. One of its last outcrops was probably Leo Strauss's intriguing claim, made in a note to his book on Hobbes in 1936, that it was “not a matter of chance that la volonté générale and aesthetics were launched at approximately the same time.”Footnote 8 The aim of what follows is to begin to indicate the conceptual hinterland, both in Rousseau and in his immediate intellectual heirs, from which this type of claim emerged.
As should already be obvious, the undertaking envisaged is a tricky one. Names, it is usually said, are not concepts. But, it is also said, concepts without names are often quite hard to describe.Footnote 9 The difficulty in establishing and maintaining the distinction captures something of the deeper tension between the contextual and the doctrinal in the historiography of social and political thought. Focusing on a context makes it easier to distinguish between the historically plausible and the historically implausible in assigning meanings to concepts, just as focusing on a doctrine makes it easier to distinguish between the conceptually innovative and the conceptually commonplace. Getting the history right seems, therefore, to call for both. Here, the mixture of the contextual and the doctrinal is intended to throw fresh light both on Rousseau's thought and on the later cluster of concepts that came to bear its imprint. By setting the three concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism in a Rousseauian context while positioning Rousseau's thought in the corresponding conceptual contexts, the further aim of this article is to try to clarify both.
This, in the first instance, means building on the range of reassessments of Rousseau's concept of amour-propre that have become so prominent a feature of Rousseau scholarship since the late twentieth century.Footnote 10 In doing so, however, the focus falls less immediately on self-love itself than on its two constituent parts, namely the subjects of love and the self. Starting with these two subjects rather than with amour-propre as such makes it easier to identify the significance of the human imagination in Rousseau's moral and political thought and, as will be shown in the following three sections, to see why his treatment of the imagination presupposed much of the content of the concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism. The concept of autonomy presupposed a divided self, or a capacity to think of oneself as both the subject and object of one's own decisions. The concept of a social science presupposed a common self, or a capacity to think of oneself as part of something larger than oneself. The concept of industrialism presupposed a multiple self, or a capacity to think of oneself in a variety of different roles, particularly those arising from the interplay between social norms and social complexity built into the division of labour. As the following three sections are designed to show, each of these concepts of the self can be found in Rousseau's works. In Rousseau's thought, however, their content was also determined by his unusual examination of the origins and nature of love. By showing that love was a real feeling based on imagined foundations, Rousseau opened a way to explain why its power and plasticity made it the source of the various conceptions of the self required by the concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism. From this perspective, it was Rousseau, long before Benedict Anderson, who first established the possibility of thinking of a political society as an imagined community and of patriotism as a species of the same artificial genus as the emotion of love.Footnote 11 This further aspect of the relationship between Rousseau's thought and modern politics forms the subject matter of the fourth section of this article.
AUTONOMY
The procedure of identifying concepts before they came to be crystallized into words has several well-known precedents.Footnote 12 Here, the most relevant can be found in recent commentary on the Social Contract. As Frederick Neuhouser, one of the most accomplished recent analysts of Rousseau's concept of amour-propre, has described it, Rousseau's book was “the founding text in the now centuries-long tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature of personal autonomy.”Footnote 13 This was the case even though the term “autonomy” was “nowhere to be found” in the passage from the Social Contract that, as Neuhouser put it, “captures perfectly the essence of autonomy, as defined by its two components, auto (or ‘self’) and nomos (or ‘law’).”Footnote 14 The passage in question was a comparison between the natural and civil states that was designed to highlight the merits of the latter. One might, Rousseau wrote, “add to the credit of the civil state moral freedom, which alone renders man truly the master of himself; for the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”Footnote 15 Although the word is not there, the idea of autonomy as “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself” is plain enough to see.
It was this idea, Neuhouser went on to argue, that made it possible to see how to reconcile law and liberty with Rousseau's broader claims about morality and politics because, as Neuhouser put it,
autonomy is free choice carried out in accordance with a conception of one's own essential identity, a self-conception that supplies the autonomous being with reasons for endorsing some of its desires as worthy of being acted on and for rejecting others as incompatible with one's essential nature.Footnote 16
Sustaining this capacity called, he wrote, for social and political arrangements that could prevent social inequality and dependence from interfering with self-determination. In this sense, the key to autonomy was non-domination. “This,” Neuhouser explained, “is because, for Rousseau, autonomy consists in prescribing to oneself not just any laws but those laws that create the conditions under which each of us can avoid social domination.”Footnote 17 Only these “bring about conditions in the world that promote freedom by giving individuals the real ability, and not merely the legal permission, to obey only their own wills.” This, Neuhouser concluded, was why autonomy “requires that citizens expand their area of concern beyond their own particular interests” and “regard themselves as members of a larger society, whose vital interests include the interests of others (their interests in life, security and, above all, freedom).”Footnote 18 It followed, therefore, that autonomy, at least in this rendition, had as much to do with “the collective consensus of the larger community” as with “the judgement of the individual” in “what is an essentially collective quest to determine what is right and to legislate the principles that specify our obligations.”Footnote 19
Since words are not concepts, there is no reason to doubt the initial claim about the presence of the concept of autonomy in Rousseau's thought. In this sense, what has become the modern concept of autonomy was simply Kant's name for Rousseau's concept.Footnote 20 There is, however, still reason to wonder whether the concept itself was quite as other-regarding as it has come to seem. Applying the procedure followed by Neuhouser to another passage in the Social Contract not only helps to reveal a more self-centred concept of autonomy (although one that is still compatible with the passage cited by Neuhouser), but also to throw the more abrasively political side of Rousseau's thought into sharper relief. This alternative concept of autonomy also makes it easier to see how Rousseau's thought came to be connected so readily and rapidly to the later concepts of social science and industrialism. In this sense, describing the concept of autonomy in a somewhat different, but still textually authorized, way not only helps to throw fresh light on the concept itself, both in Rousseau and Kant, but also reveals rather more of its conceptual proximity to the now apparently entirely unrelated concepts of social science and industrialism.
In this version of the concept, Rousseau's analytical attention fell less immediately on the “moral freedom, which alone renders man truly the master of himself,” than, initially, on the complex quality of the self that was presupposed both by the idea of being “master of himself” and, more fundamentally, by the idea of a social contract itself. Here, the concept of autonomy had less, in the first instance, to do with its potential moral effects and more instead to do with its initial basis in the concept of the self. As Rousseau pointed out in his description of a social contract, the type of contract that he envisaged was, fundamentally, a contract with oneself. “Each of us,” he wrote in Book I, Chapter 6 of the Social Contract, “puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will: and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” This formula, he went on immediately to explain in the first sentence of chapter 7,
shows that the act of association involves a reciprocal engagement between the public and private individuals, and that each individual, contracting with himself so to speak, finds himself engaged in a double relation: namely toward private individuals as a member of the sovereign and toward the sovereign as a member of the state.Footnote 21
In this, somewhat fuller, rendition of the concept of autonomy, the self, and its capacity to imagine itself as both a member of the sovereign and a member of the state, or as both a citizen and a subject, preceded Rousseau's description of the higher level of freedom produced by the civil state. The resulting characterization of the social contract as, ultimately, a contract with oneself clearly went together with the subsequent claim, but its explicit association with the subject of sovereignty gave this version of the concept of autonomy a more immediately political dimension. This was because the more the emphasis fell on the idea of the social contract as a contract with oneself, the less it was necessary to emphasize the idea of representative political sovereignty as its outcome. In this sense, Rousseau's formulation of the concept of autonomy was the other side of his version of the concept of the general will.Footnote 22 Autonomy implied sovereignty without representation, but, as Rousseau went on to show, it was still compatible with the idea of a larger common self, or a moi commun. This common self was the cumulative product of both the initial act of association and the sequence of legislative decisions enacted subsequently by the sovereign. It was an artificial, legal, self that was the outward guise of the general will.
The positive side of this concept of autonomy was that it indicated how it was possible to have a strong concept of sovereignty and, at the same time, to keep the state out of politics. The state and its institutions would have a contractual foundation but the day-to-day business of government would be the product, as Rousseau put it, of the “double relation” between citizens as members of the sovereign and the same individuals as members of the state. As he went on to show in the third and fourth books of the Social Contract, switching between the two roles allowed individuals (in Rousseau's case, men) to elect their governments and, under the very specific conditions to be described in the next section, made governments accountable to the sovereign. Democratic political sovereignty was, in this sense, coupled with a form of government that Rousseau called an elective aristocracy. The first and most remarkable example of the plasticity involved in this dual relationship between the same people as both citizens and subjects arose with the initial choice of the government itself. According to the logic of the Social Contract, the sovereign, meaning the citizens, would decide on a specific form of government, but it would not be able to choose the members of that government because entrusting some people with power while denying power to others was an act of government, not sovereignty. It looked, therefore, as if there had to be an existing system of government before a government could actually exist, and this, Rousseau explained, was exactly what would happen. To elect a government, the sovereign would turn itself into a democracy while the citizens in their turn would become magistrates, so that the choice of a government would then indeed be an act of government. “This change of relation,” Rousseau wrote, “is no speculative subtlety without practical examples”:
It occurs daily in the English parliament, where the lower house on certain occasions turns itself into a committee of the whole house to discuss business better, and in so doing becomes a simple commission rather than the sovereign court of preceding instant. It then reports to itself as the House of Commons on what it has just settled as a committee of the whole house, and it deliberates once again under one title over what it had already decided under another.Footnote 23
The switch relied on a widely shared imaginative capacity that allowed sovereignty to be democratic, but government to be elected. Just as it was possible for Kant to find the concept of autonomy in Rousseau's account of the advantages of the civil state, so it is not particularly surprising to find that what Rousseau called an elective aristocracy came, a generation later, to be called “representative democracy.”Footnote 24
SOCIAL SCIENCE
If the concept of autonomy was associated initially with Kant, the idea of representative government was, at least in a French context, associated initially with the thought of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. Here, it was the problem of majority rule and its bearing on the relationship between representative government and individual liberty that gave rise to Sieyès's concept of science sociale.Footnote 25 In this sense, both the phrase and the concept originally had a more obviously political set of connotations than they now seem to have. Both made their appearance in the first edition of Sieyès's polemical pamphlet Qu’est-ce qu’est le tiers état? (What Is the Third Estate?) published late in January 1789 before they disappeared from the two further editions that Sieyès published in the same year. There, in place of science sociale he referred instead to what he called la science de l’ordre social, or the science (or knowledge) of the social order, to support his claim that political decision-making in the forthcoming meeting of the French Estates-General would have to be based on the principle of one member, one vote, in order, as he put it, “to bind and engage the totality of representatives by one common will.” This, Sieyès wrote in the passage in which the neologism first appeared, was the form of decision-making that best fitted the principles of science sociale, or the science de l’ordre social. Those principles, he asserted, were “made [faits] to throw the most light” on the subject of political deliberation because they transcended claims based on particular interests, including those given solely by the greater size or putatively more economically productive composition of the French third estate.Footnote 26 From this perspective, social science was an eminently political type of knowledge, with a distinctly moral orientation. It supplied the reasons underlying Sieyès's assertion that the last word in legislation did not belong to one or other of the various estates, houses or chambers making up any actual legislative assembly, or even to the numerical difference between the majorities and minorities involved in any particular legislative decision. It belonged instead, and in a more final sense, to the one common will that bound them all, independently, and also in a more final sense, of the various interests, parties or other types of grouping that were also evident when the votes themselves were counted. On Sieyès's terms, social science was a meta-political body of knowledge that justified the idea of majority rule.Footnote 27
In its initial incarnation, the concept was designed to address the moral and practical problems involved in explaining why sovereign power was binding or, in Rousseau's terms, how his concept of autonomy could be reconciled with the idea of a general will and his concept of representative government. It is not obvious, for example, how individual autonomy can be reconciled with the idea of majority rule, or why 51 per cent of the vote can bind the other 49 per cent and still be compatible with each voter's autonomy. Nor, if the division between majorities and minorities were to become larger, making the outcome either more predictable or less acceptable, is it obvious why anyone would vote at all.Footnote 28 In terms of either alternative, the concept of autonomy seems to lack the larger moral and motivational ability to generate the level of political or cultural integration needed to make an elected government compatible with democratic political sovereignty. From this perspective the concept of autonomy seems to be a misleadingly positive name for what, less positively, was called, famously, an unencumbered self.Footnote 29 In the light of these problems, it is not surprising that Sieyès's coinage soon lost almost all of its original connotations and, when the concept of social science became current in the early nineteenth century, mainly in the publications of the followers of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, that it was the moral, rather than the political, sense of the term that soon took hold.Footnote 30
Here, too, however, going back to Rousseau helps to throw more light both on the original concept and on Rousseau's thought itself. On his terms, the related problems of an unencumbered self and a democratic deficit were not, in the first instance, to be solved by an extra injection of altruism, but by the same imaginative and comparative capabilities that allowed the members of a political society to be both members of the sovereign and members of the state. In this case, however, what mattered was not only the outward-looking capabilities of the moi, but also the inward-looking capabilities of the moi commun, or the individual ability to recognize those attributes of the larger, artificial self that it could identify as common both to itself and to other members of a political society. In a more immediate sense, the link between majorities, minorities and the larger whole was formed by the combined effects of public opinion and the fiscal system. The first was ancient, while the second was modern. Combining the two, Rousseau argued, was the way to make amour-propre the cement of society. The first step was to add the shame culture of the ancients to the guilt culture of the moderns because, in contradistinction to many more recent historical assumptions, Rousseau took the power of public opinion to be a property of ancient societies. “The art with which this mechanism, altogether lost among modern peoples, was set to work among the Romans and better still among the Lacedemonians cannot be sufficiently admired,” he wrote in the Social Contract.Footnote 31 As with the language of signs, modern politics called for its revival.
In showing how it could be done, Rousseau noted that he was simply rehearsing an argument that he had first set out in his Letter to d’Alembert. There, he used the example of the French prohibition on duelling to show how an apparently archaic feudal institution could be turned into a modern equivalent of the Spartan ephors or the Roman censors. As things stood, Rousseau pointed out, the prohibition on duelling was totally ineffective. But, he argued, if the existing Tribunal of Marshals of France (whose military standing gave them the required status and authority in this kind of matter) were given a discretionary power to make some duels real trials by combat (as, according to Montesquieu, they had once actually been), then private duelling would begin to fall into disrepute. Once it was clear that some duels could, on public inspection, be deemed to be lawful, private duelling would start to lose its moral status, and begin to look like any other case of premeditated murder. The way to get rid of duelling was, therefore, not to prohibit it, but to distinguish some duels from others, so that some would look honourable, while the rest would look shameful. The real trial would then no longer be between two duellists, but would instead be about the duel itself, and depend on the type of evaluation it was given by the military tribunal. Gradually, this new public source of honour and shame would eclipse private judgements and, as the court began to apply increasingly strict criteria for defining an honourable duel, duelling itself would cease gradually to exist. If, Rousseau speculated, the Tribunal of Marshals of France were ever to become a real Court of Honour, then France too might begin to change into something other than an absolute monarchy. “Opinion,” he wrote, “the sovereign of mankind, is not subject to the power of kings, but they themselves are her principal slaves.”Footnote 32 It is easy to connect this idea to the creation, nearly fifty years later, of the French Legion of Honour.Footnote 33
The second step was to combine the power of public opinion with the power of the fiscal system. This, Rousseau explained, rehearsing the argument of his entry on political economy in Diderot and d’Alembert's Encyclopédie, was because the long-term survival of liberty was determined by the relationship between government expenditure, the fiscal system and the social distribution of income. Here, the key variable was the distribution of income. In the cold, inhospitable environments of Europe, or the north, Rousseau argued, considerable labour would be required to enable individual households to produce enough wealth for there to be a taxable surplus. In the warm, fertile environments of Africa, or the South, the opposite would be the case. There, natural endowments, rather than human labour, would be the prime underlying source of government revenue, allowing it to rely on its power to tax windfalls or confiscate resources from small numbers of well-endowed oligarchs without having to encroach significantly on the property of most people. The resulting fiscal regime would, accordingly, be one that favoured fear and apathy. Where, however, intense productive labour was required to produce small individual surpluses the relationship between the government, the fiscal system and the population would be different. The large number of small taxpayers meant that the government would have a strong incentive to spread its fiscal net as widely as possible, while the taxpayers would have an equally strong incentive to ensure that the tax burden was distributed as widely and fairly as they could ensure. These variations, Rousseau wrote, meant that the relationship between fiscal and political accountability amounted to one of those “general laws which can be distinguished from those individual causes that can modify their effects”:
Even if all the south was covered with republics and all the north with despotic states, it would be no less true that the effect of climate makes despotism suited to warm countries, barbarism to cold countries and good policy to intermediate regions.Footnote 34
In the political economy of liberty that Rousseau envisaged, a fiscal state would also be a free state because the combination of a widely distributed tax burden, a comprehensive system of fiscal surveillance and a commensurately high level of governmental accountability would work to produce and maintain the equality that was the most easily identifiable marker of the general will. On Rousseau's terms, there could be no representation without taxation, just as much as there could be no taxation without representation. A generation later, and in the context of the fierce political argument that had developed in France over the subjects of taxation and representation, Sieyès called science sociale the source of the principles that allowed minorities and majorities to coexist.
Behind the neologism, with its bearing on the joint relationship of public opinion and taxation to political integration and motivation, lay a further echo of Rousseau's examination of amour-propre. This relatively neglected examination was set out in the very short outline of his system that Rousseau included in the Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris that he published in 1763, soon after his Emile had been condemned by the Church and banned by the Parlement of Paris. Its starting point, Rousseau wrote, and the “fundamental principle of all morality,” was that “man is naturally good.”Footnote 35 This natural goodness, he added, was not moral goodness, but simple self-love, or amour-de-soi. It was “the only passion which is born with man” and was “in itself indifferent either to good or evil.” Since, he continued, “none of the vices imputed to the human heart are natural to it,” he had, he wrote, “traced, as it were, their genealogy” to show how, despite their original natural goodness, “mankind are become what they are.” This “genealogy” involved three stages or “states of mankind.” The first was pre-social, and revolved around self-liking or amour-de-soi. This feeling, Rousseau emphasized, was a compound passion, made up of “two principles,” not one. The first applied to the body and the satisfaction of its physical needs. But the second applied to the mind and entailed pleasure of a different type from simple physical well-being. This intellectual satisfaction was the product of what Rousseau called “the love of order” (amour de l’ordre) which, he continued, “expanded and become active, is denominated conscience.” The first principle gave rise to the initially self-centred feeling of pity, but the second led to a more moral awareness of others.
The difficulty was to find a way to keep amour-de-soi and amour de l’ordre in balance. The absence of any natural capacity to do so was the cause of the double bind built into early social interaction. To get conscience going, there had to be some sort of knowledge of order. But to get knowledge of order going there had to be relations and comparisons. Relations and comparisons, however, gave rise to amour-propre, which set the self and its interests alongside conscience and amour-de-soi. The two could coexist in a kind of precarious equilibrium for as long as common knowledge took precedence over the self and its interests. So long, Rousseau wrote, “as the opposition of their interests is less than the concurrence of their knowledge, men are essentially good.” This, he added, “is the second state of mankind.” But, he continued,
when all the particular interests of individuals interfere and clash against each other, when self-love (amour-de-soi) is converted by its fermentation into self-interest (amour-propre), and opinion, by rendering the whole universe necessary to each individual, makes them all enemies from their birth and causes the happiness of one to depend on the misery of another,
then conscience turned into “a mere empty word which mankind reciprocally make use of to deceive each other.” This, he wrote, was humanity's “third and last state.”
This, in fact, was the state of the moderns. “Then,” Rousseau continued,
everyone pretends to sacrifice his own interest to that of his country, and all are liars. Not one is desirous of the public good, unless it coincides with his own; and hence this coincidence between the public and private good becomes the object of that true policy which alone is calculated to make men virtuous and happy.
Under modern conditions, old-style republican virtues no longer applied because the self and its interests now stood between the republic and its interests. Instead of the private good having to give way to the public good, the public good now had to coincide with the private good. Rousseau drove home the point about the unusual character of the move by adding immediately, “I am now beginning to talk a strange language, as little understood by the majority of readers as by your Lordship.”Footnote 36
The stimulus for this turn towards what, in the nineteenth century, came to be called individualism was supplied by Montesquieu.Footnote 37 “The science of political right [le droit politique] is yet to be born, and it is to be presumed that it never will be born,” Rousseau wrote at the beginning of the brief summary of the Social Contract that he inserted into the final part of his Emile. “The only modern,” he continued, “in a position to create this great and useless science was the illustrious Montesquieu.” Yet, while Montesquieu had, in an unspecified way, superseded the two great founders of modern natural jurisprudence, Grotius and Hobbes, he had also been careful “not to discuss the principles of political right” and had focused instead on “the positive right of established governments.” But, Rousseau insisted, it was still essential to “unite the two” because it was “necessary to know what ought to be in order to judge soundly about what is.” The way to do this, however, was not simply a matter of defining the requisite principles. “The greatest difficulty in clarifying these important matters,” Rousseau wrote, “is to interest an individual in discussing them by answering these two questions: What importance does it have for me? and, What can I do about it?”Footnote 38 The strongly individualistic orientation of the two questions complemented Rousseau's analysis of humanity's “third and last state.” His answers followed from his endorsement, in Book Three of the Social Contract, of Montesquieu's remark that “liberty, not being the fruit of every climate, is not accessible to all peoples.” The “more we consider this principle established by Montesquieu,” Rousseau wrote, “the more we perceive its truth.”Footnote 39 In its initial usage, social science was the new name for the principles underlying both the questions and the answers. It fitted Rousseau's earlier, Montesquieu-inspired, call for a post-Grotian and post-Hobbesian alternative to what he called droit politique. In this sense, as the founders of the French Institute recognized when it became responsible for overseeing the subject, science sociale was the new name given by Sieyès to natural law.
INDUSTRIALISM
The economic and social arrangements that Rousseau singled out both as the basis of his claim about the fiscal foundations of modern liberty and as confirmation of Montesquieu's claim about the special conditions that liberty required are an initial indication that his own moral and political thought had rather more to do with the later concept of industrialism than is often assumed.Footnote 40 As with the concepts of autonomy and social science, however, working out the relationship calls as much for clarifying the concept of industrialism as it does for clarifying Rousseau's thought itself.
The link was first highlighted in the third decade of the nineteenth century when the word “industrialism” had become current. It was made by a now forgotten royalist journalist named Ferdinand, baron d’Eckstein (1790–1861) in a survey of French political alignments and divisions that he published in January 1826 as an “Introduction” to the first issue of his own periodical, Le Catholique. Alongside the group known as the doctrinaires, Eckstein noted, whose ranks included “all that is most honourable and most worthy of esteem that liberal France possesses,” there were three other varieties of “liberalism,” adding up to what he had no hesitation in calling “the left.” These latter three types of liberalism, he wrote, were variously “Voltairian, sentimental and industrial” (voltairien, sentimental et industriel). The first took its largely anticlerical cue from Voltaire's intellectual allies, the eighteenth-century French Encyclopedists, while the two others followed the system of what he called “the economists” insofar as they agreed with, or diverged from, the opinions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (here, Eckstein did not specify whether he had in mind the original economists, as the advocates of Physiocracy were called or, as is more likely, the economists he associated with either with the followers of the comte de Saint-Simon or Jean-Baptiste Say). These latter two strands of liberalism, he continued,
divided into a productive and industrial school on the one hand and a sentimental school that takes pride in its religiosity on the other, sometimes fall into quite entertaining disputes, but, at the least sign of danger, are always ready to unite and place their Rousseauesque theory [théorie à la Jean-Jacques] under the auspices of their doctrine of industrialism.Footnote 41
On Eckstein's terms, although the word “industrialism” was not available in Rousseau's works, the “doctrine of industrialism” was still compatible with Rousseau's thought.
Industrialism, Eckstein wrote in a later article published in Le Catholique in February 1827, was a new name for what had previously been called “luxury.” To pretend that it was the basis of the prosperity of states, he wrote disdainfully, was “a shameful doctrine, if ever there was one.”Footnote 42 Industry, he conceded, was certainly useful because it maintained a taste for elegance and helped to develop the genius of the arts. This, he acknowledged, had to be recognized, just as it was also right to recognize that it was a mistake to make landed property the sole basis of the well-being and security of states. But to turn acknowledgement of industry into a dogma named industrialism was, Eckstein stated flatly, “to turn the social order into a republic of beavers, ants or bees.”Footnote 43 This drift into dogma had occurred, he argued, because, after the failed republicanism of the French Revolution and the despotism of Napoleon, nothing else was available to the supporters of the revolution's original principles to stand as an object of political allegiance. “Liberalism's present-day tribunes and pamphleteers,” he wrote, “are obliged to preach industrialism as the unique guarantee of what remains of the Revolution's last breath.” In one version, industrialism had become the “new industrial religion” of the comte de Saint-Simon and had gone on to become the version of industrialism that is now best known. But Eckstein also gestured towards another version of industrialism. This was what he called the “transcendental industrialism” of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte's book Der geschlossene Handelstaat, a title that is usually translated as “The Closed Commercial State” but which Eckstein translated as “The completed social order, such that industry serves as its base.”Footnote 44
The concept fitted Rousseau's description of Geneva as the archetype of his broader analysis of the social foundations of modern politics. As Eckstein later registered, the starting point of Rousseau's description was an acknowledgement that the elaborate social and technical division of labour underpinning what was standardly described as luxury had now to be recognized as industry. (Inequality, not luxury, it is worth noting, formed the subject matter and, importantly, generated the causal dynamics of Rousseau's second Discourse.) “Go to the suburb of St Gervais,” Rousseau wrote in 1758 in his Letter to d’Alembert,
and you imagine you see all the clockwork in Europe. Proceed thence to the Molard, and the low streets [rues basses], and you see such an appearance of wholesale trade, namely bales of goods in heaps, hogsheads scattered about confusedly, and the fragrant odour of spices, as to fancy yourself in a sea-port. At the pasture ground [Pâquis] and the springs [Eaux-Vives], the bustle and noise of the manufactures of printed calico and painted linen seem to transport you to Zurich.Footnote 45
In Geneva, individual survival needs were directly dependent on industry and trade. As Rousseau noted, the republic was rich and, although it did not have “those monstrous disproportions of fortunes that impoverish a whole country,” it was still the case that “the affluence and ease of the greatest part is more owing to constant labour, to economy, and moderation, than to positive riches.” Without “lands to support us,” its people depended “entirely on our industry,” supplying themselves with necessaries, “merely by denying themselves superfluities.” Although the city was the source of many of the luxuries consumed all over Europe, its own economy relied on industry. “Manual labour, management of time, vigilance, and rigid parsimony,” Rousseau concluded, “these are the treasures of the citizens of Geneva.”Footnote 46
As Rousseau emphasized, these conditions were the basis of modern politics, with their reliance on elections, representation and majority rule. “The people of antiquity,” he wrote in his Letters from the Mountain of 1764, the work that was his one direct intervention in Geneva's political divisions, “are not proper models for modern policy.” In the republics of the ancient world, slavery allowed those who were free to have the time to govern themselves. But, as he had also emphasized two years earlier in the Social Contract, the absence of slavery and the modern division of labour required “other maxims” and other political arrangements.Footnote 47 These, certainly, included recognition of the popular basis of political power. But they also required a clear institutional distinction between sovereignty and government. “The democratic constitution has been hitherto very superficially examined,” Rousseau argued in the same Letters from the Mountain:
All those who have treated this subject were either ignorant of it, too little interested in it, or interested to misrepresent it. None them have sufficiently distinguished the sovereign from the government, the legislative power from the executive. There is no other mode of government in which these two powers are so separate, and in which they have been so much confounded, by the affectation of writers.
But, Rousseau continued, once the distinctions were recognized and established, the “democratic constitution is certainly the masterpiece of the political art; but the more admirable the mechanism of it, the less are common eyes capable of inspecting into it.”Footnote 48
The fullest description of how to establish and maintain the distinction between sovereignty and government was set out in Rousseau's posthumously published Considerations on the Government of Poland. There, the system that he described amounted to a scaled-up version of the form of government that he had outlined in the third book of the Social Contract. Unlike Geneva, however, Poland was a large territorial state. But, Rousseau argued, “the constitution of a large kingdom” could still have “the solidity and vigour of a small republic.”Footnote 49 The first prerequisite was to make the system of government a federal system based on the thirty-three palatinates into which Poland was divided. The second was what Rousseau called a system of “graduated” or “gradated promotion,” meaning an electoral system in which eligibility for election would depend on successful completion of a term in office at a lower level of the whole system. Election to high office would, accordingly, start at the bottom and involve moving step by step up the whole elected official hierarchy. The system, Rousseau wrote, was “the strongest, most powerful” means to maintain liberty and, “if well implemented” would be “infallibly successful” in “carrying patriotism to the highest pitch in all Polish hearts.”Footnote 50 All the “active members of the republic” would be divided into three classes or grades. Eligibility for election to the Polish Diet would depend initially on some earlier form of public service in local administration. Eligibility for the second grade would require election to the Diet on three occasions. Membership of the Polish Senate would be drawn from this class of citizens. Finally, those who had been elected to the Senate on three separate occasions would be eligible to become guardians of the law, from whom the heads of the Palatinates and other high offices would be drawn. Thus, “after fifteen or twenty years of being continually tested under the eyes of the public,” the “foremost positions of the state” would be filled by a suitably qualified combination of talent, experience and virtue.Footnote 51 These, Rousseau went on to emphasize, would include the monarchy itself. “A hereditary crown prevents trouble,” he observed, “but brings on slavery; election preserves freedom, but shakes the state with each new reign.”Footnote 52 To avoid either possibility, he proposed that candidates to the throne should be chosen by lot from among the thirty-three heads of the palatinates. Three candidates would be selected in this way and one would then be elected by the Polish Diet to become king. With this form, Rousseau wrote, “we combine all the advantages of election with those of hereditary succession.”Footnote 53
At first sight, the outcome looks a long way away from the concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism. In a recognizable sense, however, the Polish outcome began and also ended with amour-propre and with Rousseau's determination to show what happened to individual liberty once the dynamics of amour-propre had run their course and humanity had reached its “third and last state.” Then, as he emphasized in his assessment of Montesquieu and the science of political right, the key questions in politics were “What does it matter to me?” and “What can I do about it?” The difficulty, as Rousseau indicated in the same assessment of Montesquieu, was to find a way to answer these self-centred questions without arriving at the type of outcome that was already available in Grotius and Hobbes. Part of the answer was autonomy, because it transferred much of the onus of political obligation and political responsibility from states and their sovereigns to individual judgement and the general will. Another part was social science because it explained why that onus remained binding even when, under electoral conditions, the wrong side had won and what looked like the wrong policy had prevailed. A third part was industrialism because free states were also fiscal states and the resulting nexus was what gave governments the incentive to tax and ordinary people the corresponding incentive to maintain the endless process of social and legal comparison built into the idea of the general will. The names may not have been there, but the concepts were still central features of Rousseau's political thought.
THE IDEA OF AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY
In the deepest sense, the connection between the concepts and their later names arose from Rousseau's treatment of the emotion of love. For Rousseau, love was an artificial emotion, with no original place in humanity's natural state. Like amour-propre, it presupposed self-awareness and a capacity for communication that were not naturally available to the silent, sentient creatures of humanity's first times. But it was also a more determinate product of the sexual relationship between men and women than amour-propre (which, Rousseau noted, first arose when humans began to compare their proficiency as hunters or trappers to that of animals). Rousseau's analysis of the origins and effects of its intense emotional power was connected to two of his best-known linguistic and conceptual innovations, namely the words perfectibilité and identification, and to the radical re-evaluation that he made of the established term enthousiasme (enthusiasm).Footnote 54 Tracking these terminological innovations and their articulation goes a long way towards explaining why the imagination was so central a feature of Rousseau's political thought.
“There is no true love without enthusiasm,” Rousseau wrote, “and no enthusiasm without an object of perfection, either real or chimerical, but always existing in the imagination”:
What will inflame lovers for whom this perfection no longer exists and who see in what they love only the object of sensual pleasure? No, it is not thus that the soul is warmed and delivered to those sublime transports that are the delirium of lovers and the charm of their passion. Everything is illusion in love, I admit it. But what is real are the sentiments for the truly beautiful with which love animates us and which it makes us love. This beauty is not in the object we love; it is the work of our errors. So! What of it? Because of this, does the lover sacrifice any the less all of his low sentiments to this imaginary model? Does he any the less fill his heart with the virtues he attributes to what he holds dear? Does he detach himself any the less from the baseness of the human I? Where is the true lover who is not ready to immolate himself for his beloved, and where is the sensual and coarse passion in a man who is willing to die? We make fun of the Paladins. That is because they knew love, and we no longer know anything but debauchery. When these romantic maxims began to become ridiculous, this change was less the work of reason than of bad morals.Footnote 55
The passage also makes the emotional sequence clearer. First there was an “object of perfection,” then a feeling of “enthusiasm,” and finally the feeling of love. “Love,” Rousseau wrote in the second preface to his Nouvelle Heloise,
is only illusion. It makes, so to speak, another universe for itself. It surrounds itself with objects that do not exist or to which it alone supplies a being; and, since it turns all its sentiments into images, its language is always figurative. But those figures are always imperfect and without direction. Its eloquence is disordered; it proves the more as it reasons the less. Enthusiasm is the last degree of this passion. When it is at its height, it sees its object as perfect; it turns it into its idol and places it in the heavens so that, just as the enthusiasm of devotion borrows the language of love, so the enthusiasm of love borrows the language of devotion.Footnote 56
Even here, however, it is not clear what made it possible for the imagination to come up with the initial idea of what Rousseau called “an object of perfection.” One possible explanation, which Rousseau simply suggested, was connected to female modesty or pudeur. This explanation implied that women not only were responsible for taking humanity's first steps into the world of the imagination but also were the real source of humanity's capacity for morality. It is an explanation that chimes well with one of Rousseau's most famous statements about the relationship between men and women. “The supreme being,” he wrote in Book V of Emile, “wanted to do honour to the human species in everything”:
While giving man inclinations without limit, he gives him at the same time the law which regulates them, in order that he may be free and in command of himself. While abandoning man to immoderate passions, he joins reason to these passions in order to govern them. While abandoning woman to unlimited desires, he joins modesty to these desires in order to constrain them. In addition, he adds yet another real recompense for the good use of one's faculties—the taste we acquire for decent things when we make them the rule of our actions. All this, it seems to me, is worth more than the instinct of beasts.Footnote 57
At the same time, however, the explanation also suggested that love began as an unintended outcome of feelings generated by misrecognized physical behaviour and, more specifically, by the feelings produced by the first blush, the first sigh or the first averted gaze.
Rousseau was careful to avoid rehearsing a well-established argument about the connection between menstruation and modesty at much length, but was still prepared to refer to its bearing on the female imagination and, by extension, on modesty's natural character. The move was consistent with Rousseau's emphasis on the initially solitary character of natural human life. Unlike every other explanation of the origins of the imagination, beginning with a woman's physically generated awareness of herself allowed Rousseau to avoid question-begging assumptions about social interaction as the key to the sources of the self while, at the same time, enabling him to give the imagination a content that could go with the grain of his broader account of human capabilities. It also allowed him to attack the idea that modesty was an acquired quality. According to the “new-fangled philosophy which has its rise and declension in the corner of a large city [meaning Paris],” Rousseau wrote in his Letter to d’Alembert, “modesty has no foundation in nature; it is only a contrivance of society to secure the privileges of fathers and husbands and to maintain some order in families”:
Why should we blush at the wants we receive from nature? Why should we find reason to be ashamed of an act so indifferent in itself and so useful in its effects, as that which contributes to perpetuate the species? Since the desires are equal on both sides, why should there be any difference in disclosing them? Why should one sex be less ready than the other to comply with inclinations common to both? Why should man in this respect have any other laws than those of brutes?Footnote 58
The argument about the value of women's modesty was still valid, Rousseau wrote, here making his only gesture towards the subject of menstruation, even if “the fear, modesty and shame by which their sex is so agreeably distinguished are social inventions.”Footnote 59 Modesty began with women and centred on sex because, he argued, shame about sex was neither acquired nor pointless.
Love, therefore, was the outcome of a sequence of misrecognized signs. It allowed someone to identify imaginatively with someone else's feelings and, equally imaginatively, to turn an image of perfection into an experience of reality. Once it began to work its magic, serial promiscuity gave way to durable monogamy. More importantly, however, both love and patriotism were the product of the same imaginative capacity that gave the language of signs its syntactic and semantic power. “Reason alone is not active,” Rousseau wrote. “It sometimes restrains, it arouses rarely, and it has never done anything great. Always to reason is the mania of small minds. Strong souls have quite another language. It is with this language that one persuades and makes others act.”Footnote 60
CONCLUSION: LATE POLITICS
There is, of course, a lot more to this story, both in terms of its origins in the Europe-wide explosion of interest in natural jurisprudence and its historical dimension that occurred after the publication of Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws in 1748, and in terms of the many responses to Rousseau's vision of the long historical process that, in Montesquieu's intellectual wake, led from the natural self to the social self and the final reversal of the relationship between the public and the private that lay at the journey's end. The posthumous publication of both the Essay on the Origin of Languages and the Considerations on the Government of Poland was one reason why both the content and the implications of the story as a whole began to take shape only after Rousseau's death. But, as Rousseau emphasized in his assessment of Montesquieu's legacy that prefaced his summary of the Social Contract in the final part of his Emile, its fundamental message was clear. Modern politics had come to turn on subjectivity and on the range of institutions, resources and imaginative abilities that, in conditions of economic and social interdependence, helped to give the social self a home. Rousseau may not have used all that many of the words now used to describe these conditions, but there is every reason to think that its conceptual history began with what, in his Letter to Beaumont, he called his strange language and with a range of concepts that had yet to be named.
It is important, in conclusion, to highlight the continuity between Rousseau's historical vision and the intellectual setting in which both the concepts and the words really did become current. Although there is no reason to assume that many of Rousseau's readers adopted his vivid predictions of the modern age as an age of crisis and revolution, there is still enough evidence to show that the type of disenchanted analysis of the foundations of modern politics that he applied to the republic of Geneva was widely shared. Interestingly, this type of disenchantment applied most forcefully to what was once taken to be the original formulation of the concept of industrialism. As Charles Dunoyer, a French political economist whose assessment of industrialism was far more positive than Eckstein’s, noted in an article entitled “A Historical Sketch of the Doctrines That Have Been Given the Name of Industrialism” that was published a year after Eckstein's article (and might have been a reply to it), “it was to the glory of M Benjamin Constant to have been the first writer, at least to my knowledge, to have pointed out the goal of peoples’ activity in our times and to have indicated the true object of politics.” This, he continued, could be seen in Constant's assertion in his pamphlet on The Spirit of Conquest of 1814 that “the sole aim of modern nations is repose, and with repose comes comfort, and, as source of comfort, industry.” It was, Dunoyer commented,
the first time that the difference between the ancients and moderns was set out clearly and the first time that it was pointed out to modern peoples that they should orient their activity towards industry. The observation, which would now seem trivial, was then extremely novel and, as I recall, was taken to be very striking.Footnote 61
Dunoyer's attribution of the original concept of industrialism to Constant converged with Eckstein's characterization, a year earlier, of the two strands of French liberalism that consisted of a productive and a sentimental school but were both, ultimately, willing to place what he called their Rousseauesque theory (théorie à la Jean-Jacques) under the auspices of industrialism. There was, of course, a point to both attributions, but the retrospective identification of both Rousseau and Constant with the later concept of industrialism helps to capture something significant about the bleak historical vision shared by the two Swiss political theorists.Footnote 62 Rousseau's “great, sad system” needs no rehearsal.Footnote 63 Constant's was set out at greatest length in his private correspondence with his younger friend, Prosper de Barante, in the years that led up to the publication of The Spirit of Conquest. “We are artificial creatures even in what we have that is good,” was one, fairly characteristic, example of their content.Footnote 64 His broader analysis was set out most vividly in a late, 1829, essay entitled “Reflections on Tragedy,” prompted, as its subtitle indicated, by reading a German tragedy entitled “The Power of Prejudice.” The point of the essay, which took its cue from an essay by Diderot on the nature of modern comedy, was to make an argument about the nature of modern tragedy to explain why the genre now had to be a product of a new, distinctly modern, insight into the tension between social conditions and the subjects that had once given earlier types of tragedy their content and form. Earlier forms of tragedy, Constant claimed, had centred on a passion, like love, or a character, like Hamlet, and owed their dramatic effect to the conflict between the passion or character in question and the choices and consequences generated by these individual qualities. Modern tragedy, however, arose from the Janus-faced character of society itself. “We have,” Constant wrote,
in the action of our present social order, and in those that preceded or adjoin it, compared to the inclinations, rights and needs of our nature, a sufficiently dramatic set of mechanisms and resources. I do not wish to enumerate them here, since what is intended to be a simple factual presentation would be taken to be a satire of society. There are things that, in a given state, are indispensable, but which can still have an odious aspect. Lining up together two against one, for example, is cowardice in the eyes of natural sentiment. But society lines itself up a million against one in the name of justice. This of course is necessary for the maintenance of order and, in many cases, it would unpleasant if it were otherwise. But it is not difficult to imagine, if one were to choose a social order that imposed unjust or oppressive laws on individuals, how that union of so much force to secure obedience to those laws, that conspiracy of so many heads to cut off just one head, that cooperation among so many armed hands against two bound, defenceless hands, that society that can take a life which it has not even given, that cannot create a single existence, but can shatter them by the hundred, and will break them, using the logic of the sword, once humanity has come to substitute that logic for being broken at the wheel—all this will form a picture that is able to interest and, above all, to move.Footnote 65
The new awareness of the tension between social arrangements and individual lives did not rule out the older dramatic potential of character and the passions. It meant, however, that they themselves would now be part of the larger social drama. “As a result,” Constant observed,
what Diderot had to say in a very narrow sense about the various social conditions, which was applicable solely to comedy, could be said, with much more truth, about the action of society when taken as a whole. Passion and character are now accessories; society is the principal.”
The primacy of social arrangements even in tragedies set somewhere historically remote was also the reason why what Constant, echoing Victor Hugo, called “local colour” and the type of awareness of historical particularity that was to be found in the works of his friends and political allies, Guizot, Barante and Thierry, had come to matter more in modern tragedy than had been the case in earlier versions of the genre with their classical concern with the unities of time, place and action.Footnote 66 Individuality, Constant emphasized, came late. So, by extension, did the politics of individuality. In making the claim, it could be said, Constant used Rousseau to turn an argument by Diderot about comedy into his own, more comprehensive argument about tragedy. By then, it could be said in reply, he had the huge conceptual resources of German idealism at his disposal.Footnote 67 The argument of this essay has been that it was the Rousseauian nexus of the concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism that was the starting point of both.
