Brian Hamilton » Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Things to consider in Rousseau

Brian Hamilton — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:32:54 +0000

Posted at Memoria Dei, a few salient points arising from my recent reading of Rousseau.

Absolute power over all its members

Brian Hamilton — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:55:53 +0000

Further evidence, in the case of Rousseau, to confirm Nancy’s thesis that forms of community premised on a single, collective subject can’t help but tend toward totalitarianism:

bq. As nature gives to each person an absolute power over all its members, the social pact gives to the body politic an absolute power over all of its members, and it is this very power which, directed by the general will, bears the name of sovereignty. (Du contrat social II.iv)

Le moi commun

Brian Hamilton — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:12:24 +0000

As I began to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, I assumed (in my ignorance of most modern political theory) that his attack on “communities of fusion,” on the idea of community as a transcendent subject into which the individual members are dissolved, was primarily an attack on the Christian conception of communion, where the members of the church are made one in the body of Christ. And indeed, Nancy does name the Christian conception as the example of fusion par excellence.

But now I’m in the middle of Rousseau’s Social Contract, and his language fits Nancy’s criticisms possibly even better. Here’s a passage from I.vi:

bq. In an instant, in place of the particular person of each contractee, this act of association [the declaration of the social pact] produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this very act its unity, its common moi, its life and its will. This public person, who is thus formed by the union of everyone else, in other times took the name of City, and now takes that of Republic or of body politic…

There are at least two points of Nancy’s critique that stick against Rousseau better than they do to Christianity:

Christian theology doesn’t speak quite as unambiguously of the person of Christ replacing the particular Christian as Rousseau does of the Republic replacing the natural person (though it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that a very similar dynamic is in play).

Rousseau’s Republic is explicitly “immanent” in Nancy’s sense, in that it claims to be the product of human beings determining their own essence, whereas becoming a member of Christ is supposed to be a matter of surrendering the claim to determine our own essence.

Rousseau on natural law

Brian Hamilton — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:34:17 +0000

“[For Rousseau,] droit politique is not a droit naturel, even if the law of nature is the foundation of all legitimate political order. The expression droit naturel, then, covers two distinct notions. One designates that which is not truly a law [droit], because it can’t be made the object of a public declaration: that’s the law [loi] of nature. The other gestures towards that which is not truly a law [droit] because it needs no such declaration. The Manuscrit de Genève shows this clearly: the true natural law [droit naturel], which he calls ‘reasoned natural law [droit naturel raisonné],’ is not anterior but posterior to political law [droit politique], ‘because the law is anterior to justice and not justice to the law.’ It is only by the institution of political societies that it will come about, perhaps, that we be driven to ‘a en user avec les autre hommes à peu près comme avec nos Concitoyens.’ For, ‘we do not properly begin to become human beings except after having been Citizens.’ Between the nature of a person and humanity, between anthropology and morality, the droit politique is a necessary mediation.”

—Bruno Bernardi, Introduction to Rousseau’s Du contrat social (Paris: Flammarion: 2001), p. 19–20.

I don’t yet understand the difference between droit and loi in French. The quote I leave untranslated, I can’t understand.