Giving the devil his due
A long extract from Richard Whatmore’s helpful little book on intellectual history, in which he highlights that the ‘fashions of today are themselves the product of accident and unintended consequence’ and as a result the works of major figures we consider to be of significant importance today may not have been considered as such in the past:
Endless examples might be given: One argument runs like this: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) is today widely seen to be one of the foundational texts of modern democratic argument, the proof that it inspired the age of democratic revolutions that culminated in the French Revolution from 1789: the French revolutionaries, everyone knows, venerated Rousseau…Once Rousseau is studied in the context of the ideas of his own time, however, a different picture emerges. Rousseau’s Social Contract was the least successful of his books. By comparison with his novels such as Emile, also published in 1762, it was little read. Part of the reason was that it was an unfinished work, an element of a larger project called ‘Political Institutions’ that Rousseau hoped would explain how small states could maintain themselves in a world dominated by large commercial monarchies. Rousseau’s aspiration was not to see democratic government everywhere. In fact, he attacked democracy as a ‘government for gods rather than for men.’ Rousseau was convinced that aristocratic government was preferable to democracy, as long as people had rights collectively to accept or to reject legislation proposed by governments…
In order to understand Rousseau’s politics it is necessary to read the works he wrote around the Social Contract, and especially his letters, in which he responded to the endless requests for advice addressed to him and also to his numerous critics. If we only read Rousseau’s Social Contract, and do not study anything else he wrote or any of the texts that he was engaging with, we construct a Rousseau who never did exist. Worse still, we fail to understand any of his arguments.
Rousseau, or any productive thinker for that matter, can of course be slotted into courses in the history of thought. At the same time, to study him properly requires detailed scrutiny of his works, those of his predecessors and those of his contemporaries. The point is rather that we should not be simplifying the history of democracy or of politics more generally by presenting Rousseau’s ‘contribution’ to the subject founded on the assumption that what he meant by democracy is directly relevant to what we are doing today. Studying even the Social Contract alone means being led to a statement of relationships between constitution building, practical politics, the economy, religion and law. As such, Rousseau teaches that we cannot study politics without knowing about ideas in related fields. By reconstructing his grand view of the world, we gain knowledge of a sophisticated system of thought, and one that necessarily challenges the dominant philosophies of our own time, without requiring us to make a choice between them.
A political philosopher might reply to this with the argument that in the third book of the Social Contract Rousseau presented us with a justification of a democratic sovereignty, as opposed to democratic government, that was more powerful than any claim that had been made before about democracy; furthermore Rousseau’s vision of democratic sovereignty might be adapted to politics today…In other words, take from historic authors whatever ideas can be seen to be directly relevant to the present, and ignore those that evidently are not relevant to the present, and ignore those that evidently are not relevant…I am not against political philosophers doing whatever they want, and especially in the classroom, but would counter that getting a deeper sense of what an author in history was doing will ultimately yield a more sophisticated view of their politics and ideally the limits upon present politics.
I would be tempted to say that the intellectual historian’s setting limits upon present politics is tremendous fluff but Whatmore is undoubtedly correct on how past thinkers are commonly used in the present by many political philosophers, writers, tweeters etc. This, of course, is not to say that there isn’t an important conceptual distinction, in this instance, between the democratic state and democratic government. But why suffer Rousseau to make it?