Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Basic Political Writings (Second Edition)

Rousseau

BASIC POLITICAL WRITINGS
Second Edition

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

BASIC POLITICAL WRITINGS
Second Edition

Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men
Discourse on Political Economy
On the Social Contract
The State of War

Translated and Edited by
Donald A. Cress

Introduction and New Annotation by
David Wootton

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis / Cambridge

Copyright 2011 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17121778.

[Selections. English. 2011]

Basic political writings / Jean-Jacques Rousseau ; translated and edited by Donald A. Cress ; introduction and new annotation by David Wootton. 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60384-673-8 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-60384-674-5 (cloth)

1. Political science. I. Cress, Donald A. II. Title.

JC179.R7 2011

320.01dc23

2011025946

ePub ISBN: 978-1-60384-873-2

{vii}

With the exception of The State of Warmy translation of which is new to this edition, and whose textual basis is given in the headnote to that workthe translations contained in this volume are based on the excellent Oeuvres Compltes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Volume 3 (Paris: Pliade, 1964). My translations of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Discourse on Political Economy, and On the Social Contractearlier versions of which appeared in the first edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writingshave been revised in light of generous and invaluable suggestions offered by David Wootton, all of which I have considered with enormous gratitude and most of which I have adopted. Any errors or infelicities that remain are my own.

Square brackets [ ] enclose editorial annotations, most of which were provided for this edition by David Wootton; square-bracketed items embedded in the text typically provide the term translated by the rendering that immediately precedes the bracketed item, but occasionally they offer a clarifying editorial comment. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, angle brackets < > enclose passages added or revised by Rousseau in the 1782 edition.

D.A.C.

{viii} {ix}

We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions.

The tutor in Rousseaus novel mile (1762)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778) is a great political theorist, but he is read for the wrong reasons. Three social contract theorists, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Rousseau, are at the center of any introduction to political theory: Hobbes, for his intellectual rigor; Locke, because he is the theorist of the American Revolution; and Rousseau, because he is the theorist of the French Revolution. Locke may or may not have been an important theorist for the American Founding Fathersthe matter is much debated. Rousseau was not regarded as an important political theorist prior to the French Revolution of 1789; his major work of political theory, On the Social Contract, was published in French in 1762, but not translated into English until 1791, and his books were not a cause of the revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins admired him greatly, but they misunderstood him profoundly (their Rousseau was invented to serve their own purposes). It is scarcely worth reading Rousseau if we want to understand eighteenth-century politics, either before or after 1789, but it is certainly worth reading his works if we want to understand ourselves and our own politics. For Rousseaus importance lies, as he always insisted, in his remarkable understanding of the nature of human beings. He, more than any other political theorist, has something important to say about who we are and what politics is for.

In order to understand Rousseau we need to bear three things in mind. First, Rousseau is always writing about Jean-Jacques. The first word of his Social Contract is I; the last word is me. In order to understand Hobbes or Locke, it helps to know something about seventeenth-century politics, but one need not know much about their lives. It really does not matter that Hobbes was employed as a tutor, or Locke as a doctor. Rousseau is different. Everything he writesand not just his Confessions or Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacquescomes directly out of a meditation on his own experience of life and is consequently about himself. Not entirely surprisingly, he was the author of a play, Narcissus, or the Man Who Fell in Love with Himself (1752). Who is Rousseau? When he writes about politics he consistently describes himself as Citizen of Geneva. To understand his politics, we will need to start with his relationship to Geneva.

{x} Second, Rousseau is acutely aware that his contemporaries think that he is the author of paradoxes.

Third, Rousseau was incapable of seeing into the future. He writes often about revolutions, but even he could not imagine the American and French revolutions. When Rousseau writes of revolutions, he has in mind the major political upheavals described by Ren-Aubert de Vertot (16551735) in his books on the revolutions of ancient Rome and of modern Sweden and Portugalcivil wars and coups dtat we would call them, rather than revolutions. Rousseau has been accused of being the author of a totalitarian political theory, but of course Rousseau could never imagine Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia; he was familiar with what he called despots, a term that covered ancient Roman emperors such as Caligula, contemporary Ottoman rulers (though Rousseau never explicitly said so), the contemporary ruler of France, Louis XV, and, above all, his predecessor Louis XIV. It seems paradoxical indeed to accuse someone who hated despotism, who described himself as having an indomitable spirit of liberty, with seeking to establish totalitarianism.

It is easy for us to think that every sensible person is hostile to despotism, but that is because our politics is the long-term product of the English Revolution of 1688 and of the American and French revolutions. In the mid-eighteenth century, the consensus was that some form of despotism represented the political future. David Hume, for example, argued that absolute government could be civilized and could represent the likely future for {xi} Britain. The leading figures of the French Enlightenment declared their support for despotic rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia; their objection to French despotism was not that it was despotic but that it was unenlightened.

The term Enlightenment comes from the German Aufklrung, and it is not one with which Rousseau was familiar. He often uses the adjective clair, which means literally well lit (an artists studio should be clair) and was used metaphorically to mean well educated. For Rousseau and his contemporaries, clair does not have the specific meaning of enlightened. Rousseau knew that he was supposed to live in a