¹ Emile, ed. P. Richard (Paris: Garnier, 1951), pp. 347, 332. More specifically, Rousseau twice says that the cosmic physical order guarantees a corresponding moral order: Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. la Pléiade, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959- ), i, 1018–19, and letter quoted in n. 1. (Œuvres complètes hereafter cited as OC.) He also makes this point, with political connotations, in Fragments, OC, iii, 554. (Quotations in this paper are limited to exemplary or striking statements and do not constitute a complete repertoire of supporting texts.)

² “Quel spectacle! Où est l'ordre que j'avais observé? Le tableau de la nature ne m'offrait qu'harmonie et proportions, celui du genre humain ne m'offre que confusion et désordre!” (Emile, p. 337.) In La Nouvelle Héloïse (hereafter NH in parentheses), Julie writes to Saint-Preux, in her “grande lettre” of explanation: “je serais à lui si l'ordre humain n'eût troublé les rapports de la nature” (Pt. iii, Letter 18; OC, ii, 340). In other words, the natural order is both contradicted and superseded by the human order, which, however, wreaks havoc with the lives of the protagonists.

³ For the nonspecialist reader, I recall that in the summer of 1749, while Rousseau was walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot, who was imprisoned there, he rested under a tree and in the Mercure de France came upon the announcement of a prize contest proposed by the Académie de Dijon. The subject, “Si le progrès des sciences et des arts a contribué à corrompre ou à épurer les mœurs,” produced a “mystical” experience, or “illumination,” an intuition of what was wrong with human societies. The grand scheme of a remedy was to develop in his mind over the next few years. In his prizewinning essay, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, he makes a tentative suggestion that the king should take into his counsel men of genius who are not necessarily noblemen. Although this suggestion, which follows the reformist “line” of the philosophes, is completely at variance with the scheme he will develop, we can already glimpse in it the elitist quality of his thinking.

⁴ Fragments, in The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914), H, 326. (Political Writings hereafter cited as Vaughan.)

⁵ Du Contrat social (hereafter CS in parentheses), 1st vers., Bk. i, Ch. ii; OC, iii, 289. It is the “natural” that tells men in society to disregard the common good: “mais que fait cela contre mon intérêt particulier, et lequel au fond m'importe le plus, de mon bonheur aux dépens du reste des hommes, ou du bonheur des autres aux dépens du mien?” (NH, Pt. iii, Letter 18, p. 358).

⁶ CS, 1st vers., Bk. i, Ch. ii; p. 282. Emile, p. 596. Dialogues, OC, i, 887–88, 926. Also, in the Confessions, he speaks of “je ne sais quel ordre apparent, destructif en effet de tout ordre” (OC, i, 327).

⁷ “De quoi s'agit-il donc précisément dans ce Discours? De marquer dans le progrès des choses le moment où le droit succédant à la violence, la nature fut soumise à la loi; d'expliquer par quel enchaînement de prodiges le fort put se résoudre à servir le faible, et le peuple à acheter un repos en idée au prix d'une félicité réelle” (Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, ed. J.-L. Lecercle [Paris: Editions Sociales, 1965], pp. 67–68).

⁸ The idea of the obligatory pursuit of selfish enhancement at the expense of others, who are considered objects to be exploited, was not lost on Karl Marx.

⁹ “Un troisième ordre de besoins qui, nés après les autres, ne laissent pas de primer enfin sur tous, sont ceux qui viennent de l'opinion” (OC, ni, 530). See Lester G. Crocker, “Rousseau et Topinion,' ” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century [Geneva], 55 (1967), 395–415.

¹⁰ Lewis Feuer, “What Is Alienation?” in New Politics, 1, No. 3 (1962), 4.

¹¹ “Rousseau's writings contain the first and clearest statement of the human problem of bourgeois society. It consists in the fact that man, in bourgeois society, is not a unified whole” (Karl Ldwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964], p. 235). If we keep in mind that “bourgeois” is used in the Hegelian sense of absence of community, the statement is correct and pertinent. Marx's thesis that political democracy cannot overcome the individual's alienation from the community or state was essentially an updated version of Rousseau's rejection of liberal reformism.

¹² CS, Bk. i, Ch. ii; p. 288. Cf. Emile: “il faut beaucoup d'art pour empêcher l'homme social d'être tout à fait artificiel” (p. 393).

¹³ He had given the reason in the first version of the Contrat social: “Ainsi la douce voix de la nature n'est plus pour nous un guide infaillible. ... la paix et l'innocence nous ont échappé pour jamais” (Bk. I, Ch. ii; p. 283). Rousseau's dualism thus stipulates two “natures” in man, the given and the acquired.

¹⁴ “Economie politique,” Vaughan, I, 239.

¹⁵ I choose at random one example of many: “Celui qui se croit capable de former un peuple doit se sentir en état de changer, pour ainsi dire, la nature des hommes. Il faut qu'il transforme chaque individu, qui est par lui-même un tout parfait et solitaire, en partie d'un plus grand tout, dont cet individu reçoive en quelque sorte sa vie et son être; qu'il mutile, pour ainsi dire, la constitution de l'homme” (“Fragments,” Vaughan, i, 324. This contention is made even more strongly in CS, Bk. ii, Ch. vii; p. 381). See also the forceful statement in Emile, p. 9.

¹⁶ “Or, former des citoyens n'est pas l'affaire d'un jour; et, pour les avoir hommes, il faut les instruire enfants. ... Si, par exemple, on les exerce assez tôt à ne jamais regarder leur individu [i.e., their self] que par ses relations avec le Corps de l'Etat, et à n'apercevoir, pour ainsi dire, leur propre existence que comme partie de la sienne, ils pourront parvenir enfin à s'identifier en quelque sorte avec ce plus grand tout …” (“Economie politique,” pp. 255–56).

¹⁷ “Economie politique,” p. 241. Cf. Henry Adams: “without thought in the unit, there would be no unity; without unity, no orderly sequence or ordered society” (The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels [Boston: Houghton, n.d.], p. 429).

¹⁸ “Economie politique,” p. 245. Since the state is an “Etre moral,” there is no inherent contradiction between it and the individual conscience; both are based on divine precepts, on the awareness of right and of the general good. That is why Rousseau can say that the law teaches the individual “not to be in contradiction with himself.” However, the individual conscience, in the social situation, does not easily operate “dans le silence des passions”—as Rousseau explains in the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité. Because of the clash between men's egoistic (“original”) instincts and their supervening moral and social nature, they need “guides” to teach them to differentiate between desire and obligation.

¹⁹ “Trouver une forme d'association qui défende et protège de toute la force commune la personne et les biens de chaque associé, et par laquelle chacun, s'unis-sant à tous, n'obéisse pourtant qu'à lui-même, et reste aussi libre qu'auparavant” (p. 360). This idea is restated at the beginning of Ch. viii, with some amplification.

²⁰ E.g., “Dans l'ordre social, où toutes les places sont marquées, chacun doit être élevé pour la sienne. Si un particulier formé pour sa place en sort, il n'est plus propre à rien” (Emile, pp. 11–12). See Lester G. Crocker, “Rousseau and the Common People,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century (Canberra: Australian National Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 73–94.

²¹ P. 121. My colleague Roger Shattuck has suggested to me the similarity between this way of thinking and Christian belief as expressed in the liturgy: “O God … whose service is perfect freedom.” By accepting bondage to the good, one achieves inner freedom. A religious residue subtends much of Rousseau's thinking, though it does not direct it.

²² How far it is just stage play and ceremony to ensure total commitment to, or identification with, the will of the moi commun I have discussed elsewhere (principally in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Prophetic Voice [New York: Macmillan, 1973], pp. 180–82, and in “Rousseau et la voie du totalitarisme,” in Rousseau et la philosophie politique [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965], pp. 108–14). The general will is already known to those who formulate the proposals, and ratification may even be dispensed with when advisable. Rousseau's problem is to convert a metaphysical entity into a political reality. This is the purpose of the vote. Participation makes the result an act of sovereignty, makes it therefore the will of each and all, hence a political reality.

²³ Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon, 1968), p. 20.

²⁴ About Wolmar, one of his great imaginary models, Julie says: “L'ordre qu'il a mis dans sa maison est l'image de celui que règne au fond de son âme, et semble imiter dans un petit ménage l'ordre établi dans le gouvernement du monde” (NH, Pt. m, Letter 20; P. 371).

²⁵ Cf. Bertrand Russell: “The time-process, according to Hegel, is from the less to the more perfect, both in an ethical and in a logical sense. Indeed these two senses are, for him, not really distinguishable, for logical perfection consists in being a closely-knit whole, without ragged edges, without independent parts, but united, like a human body … into an organism whose parts are interdependent and all work together towards a single end; and this also constitutes ethical perfection” (History of Western Philosophy [London: Allen and Unwin, 1961], p. 706).

²⁶ The two are specifically contrasted in a passage of his Lettres à Grimm, OC, m, 63–64. Rousseau, of course, is not without his apparent contradictions. In the Confessions he explains that he studies plants to know them in their natural state, “avant qu'ils aient été cultivés et dénaturés par la main des hommes” (p. 643).

²⁷ “Sans culture,” he writes to Beaumont, men would have no idea of the divinity (OC, IV, 952). In the Confessions, he attributes his own virtues to study and cultivation (pp. 264–65), but he is one of the few exceptions (p. 371).

²⁸ Proust, La Fugitive, ed. la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), iii, 629.

²⁹ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: VintageRandom, 1967), p. 362. The French phrase betrays the influence of Nietzsche's lifelong reading of Rousseau.

³⁰ Pp. 578–79, 584–85. Here, as in the political treatises, the strategy of deception is carried out by those who wield power and do the planning. See Lester G. Crocker, “Docilité et duplicité chez Rousseau,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 68 (1968), 448–69.

³¹ Other word or image fixations of Rousseau's could be studied profitably—for instance, “joug” and “subjuguer,” “prendre le change” and “donner le change.” Of the latter phrases we may briefly remark that “prendre le change” often means a movement away from nature, “donner le change” a way of accomplishing its ends.

³² Because it develops too late, after the passions have made it powerless; see also CS, Bk. H, Ch. v; pp. 376–77. Since we cannot count on a sense of personal moral obligation in men or expect them naturally to separate themselves from themselves so as to put their duty first (CS, pp. 478, 686), Rousseau ultimately concludes that all men need guides (CS, Bk. n, Ch. vi).

³³ See n. 5 above and “Economie politique,” p. 243, whence the definition of virtue as an unnatural attribute requiring sacrifice.

³⁴ OC, i, 670, 823, 1027, 1052. The “silencing of nature” refers, of course, to the selfish “original” nature of man, not to the moral dimension of his nature that unfolds in the realm of social life.

³⁵ Letter of 2 Feb. 1757, in Correspondence complete, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1967), iv, 162.

³⁶ Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, Vaughan, n, 473.

³⁷ “Que d‘écarts on sauverait à la raison, que de vices on empêcherait de naître si l'on savait forcer l‘économie animale à favoriser l'ordre moral …” (Confessions, p. 409).

³⁸ Marx, like Hegel, found in Rousseau the source of his major commitment to the idea of the fulfillment of individual selfhood in oneness with the political community or state. Marx's emphasis on total participation is clearly anticipated in Rousseau.

³⁹ Pocock, “Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the World View of the Late Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1977), 302. Twice Rousseau insists that we must give laws an inflexible, natural force, impervious to personal interests and passions; this transformation would unite “liberty” and morality (Emile, p. 70; “Economie politique,” p. 239).

⁴⁰ Men, writes Lewis Feuer, can become “desperate in this collective microcosm for a sense of their own individualities. ... It is a closed circle, a squirrel cage from which there is no release ... an oppressive perpetual absorption in which the individual longed to become an independent norm. This recovery of the sense of one's own individuality, as distinct from the roles which … the group imposes, is what lies behind what is often called ‘the quest for identity.‘ … Alienation lies in every direction of human experience where basic emotional desire is frustrated, every direction in which the person may be compelled by social situations to do violence to his own nature” (pp. 13–17). This analysis applies exactly to the world Rousseau created in his novel. The enterprise of overcoming alienation in a “total” world may only inflict new forms of alienation.