Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Chains of Modernity

On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, 2016

In this essay I argue that because of a fierce controversy regarding the legitimacy of using ideals inspired by the so-called Spartan myth to criticize contemporary European society, one which raged throughout the Enlightenment, classical Sparta was the preeminent exemplar of the modes and values of classical politics during the 'long' eighteenth century. Sparta’s militarism, repudiation of commerce and the arts, suppression of the individual, and elevation of the political over the social and economic, appealed to those troubled by, or outright hostile to, the profound changes that transformed Europe during the 1700s, such as the progress of the arts and commerce, the triumph of great territorial states, and a growing recognition of the aspirations of the individual. Sparta represented a bastion against the encroachments and enticements of an age inimical to the ideals Fletcher, Ferguson, Rousseau, Mably, and others believed integral to the preservation of society: the concord of private and public interest, the civic virtue and engagement of the citizen, a widely diffused martial spirit, the denial of luxury and a concomitant vigilance against corruption, and especially a civic solidarity anchored in a unitary conception of the common good binding on all. Such champions of modernizing Europe as Voltaire, Hume, Priestley, Montesquieu, Condorcet, and Constant, on the other hand, anathematized Sparta as an obsolete barbarism because they feared its resurrection would imperil the century’s considerable material and moral progress, as well as its catalyst, a new understanding of the future that saw it not as closed and unalterable, but as open and indeterminate. This reconceptualization of the future was the crux of the new consciousness of modernity that the Enlightenment bequeathed to posterity and, as such, one of its primary legacies. On this view change is not only possible, but desirable. Sparta had to be rejected because the purpose of the Spartan system was to prevent change, to stand immutable against the ravages of time; the very quality that attracted so many of Sparta’s admirers in the first place. Thus Sparta came to be regarded, no less by its friends than by its enemies, as the antithesis of modernity. In this way it justified the convictions both of those who opposed the transformations remaking European society and those who welcomed them. To this duality did Sparta owe its significance as the Enlightenment’s dominant model of civic republicanism. All acknowledged that the past may serve as guide. The question was whether humanity could – and should – chart a new course into the future. The answer would determine the fates not only of Sparta, but of the Enlightenment, and ultimately, of modernity itself.

Sparta

I. The Mirage/Myth George Grote in the mid-19th century was not the first, nor the last, to marvel at what he called 'the astonishing ascendancy which the Spartans acquired over the Hellenic mind'. In our own century Francois Ollier coined the useful phrase 'le mirage spartiate' to describe that ascendancy's most striking effect. By 'mirage' he meant the series of more or less distorted, more or less invented images whereby Sparta has been reflected and refracted in the extant literature by non-Spartans, beginning in the late 5th century with Kritias of Athens, pupil of Socrates, relative of Plato, and leading light (or Prince of Darkness) of the 30 Tyrants (of whom more anon). For historians of 'how it actually was' in Sparta and Spartan society, this 'astonishing ascendancy' creates a major historiographical problem. Since practically all our detailed evidence for what they were really like comes from within the mirage, how can we be sure that any one alleged detail, let alone the totality, is not just a figment of the writer's imaginative projection? Actually, the problem's worse even than that. The mirage in its written form began to take shape at just the same time as-and in part precisely because of-a mega crisis that was coming to a head in Spartan polity and society: to put it very simply, and paradoxically, Sparta's prolonged involvement and eventual victory in the Peloponnesian War during the last third of the fifth century brought about or at any rate hastened the downfall of the model military state.

Krakowskie Studia MIędzynarodowe, 2013

The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. 1 Since Machiavelli, man and woman have become the center of political theory as the sole source and the ultimate sanction of political order. The theoretical ordercontemplated by classical Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition as the origin, the measure and the limit of political order -was rejected, at first as irrelevant and later on as non-existent. During the Enlightenment, theories of progress, the state of nature, and the social contract replaced the transcendent order. Man and woman were to lift themselves by their own bootstraps from misery and despotism, and usher humanity into a secularized paradise.

2016

This dissertation investigates Rousseau's normative defence of democracy, beginning with his thoughts on the best kind of political practice. Despite recent attempts to highlight parts of his thought that are sympathetic to cherished liberal principles, current readers still struggle to defang what appear to be Rousseau's populist excesses: his acceptance of majority-rule and his admiration for oppressive societies like ancient Sparta, Rome, or puritan Geneva. Rousseau Abbreviations vi Corresponding Editions vi INTRODUCTION 1

2017

It was widely believed after WW2 that totalitarianism could be traced back to Rousseau’s rationalistic utopia. This idea conveyed, in particular, by Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty and Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, is still popular in some political circles. This article intends, however, to demonstrate that rather than originating from Kantian readings of the Social Contract, the totalitarian interpretations of Rousseau’s work essentially arose from his literary and autobiographical writings. It is Romanticism, and its alleged political and moral deviances, that is indeed targeted through Rousseau. Ironically, this prompted some intellectuals—including Cassirer—to revisit and to reappraise his political thought.

This paper explores the use of the Spartan ideal in eighteenth-century debates about the relationship between society and the individual. One of the most important political legacies of the Enlightenment, both in philosophical and in practical terms, was the reorientation of this relationship to place the needs of the individual above those of society. While by no means total, the consequences of the two great Revolutions at the end of the century confirmed this development. Because it was a reversal of a nearly two-millennia-old consensus that society should take precedence over the individual, it was profoundly controversial. Proponents and opponents alike turned to history to justify their stances. One historical example used again and again was ancient Sparta, represented by both sides as the embodiment of a polity in which the individual was subsumed within society. Those who upheld Sparta as a viable model for this relationship in the eighteenth century provoked a furious reaction from those who rejected it as incompatible with modern European civilization. These competing visions received their canonical form in Benjamin Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern liberty. Constant’s rejection of ancient liberty and its Spartan synecdoche, however, was but the culmination of a century-long debate about the plausibility and desirability of using ancient Sparta as a model for defining the relationship between society and individual in contemporary Europe. In this paper I will follow the trajectory of this controversy from the Enlightenment through the revolutionary period, as manifested in the writings of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Sieyès, Constant, Ferguson, Hume, Priestley, and others, to delineate the process by which the Spartan ideal was delegitimized in order to secure the individual’s triumph over society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée was written in 1771 at the request of the confederates of Bar and published for the first time in 1782. It was published in a Polish translation by Maurycy Franciszek Karp in 1789. By far the best analysis of the sources and arguments of the Considérations remains Jerzy Michalski’s Rousseau i sarmacki republikanizm, published in 1977, which has until now made no significant impact on worldwide Rousseau studies. Michalski showed the extent and limits of the consanguinity between Rousseau’s doctrine and Polish-Lithuanian republicanism. The present article argues that Rousseau threw down a fundamental challenge to his readers: did Poles want to be themselves or did they want to be modern Europeans? He counselled a reconception of the Polish – and by extension any – nation on the basis of a fundamental rejection of enlightened and cosmopolitan modernity.