tarun kumar
Name dropping Rousseau, even around his 300th anniversary amongst liberal cognoscenti is bound to evoke a knee-jerk denigration. Questions will be asked: What is more perverse, his thought or his personal life? During the Cold War epoch, liberal intelligentsia consistently dubbed him as the intellectual forerunner of totalitarian projects. The crimes of the Left, from the Great Terror to Gulag, all seem to draw inspiration from Rousseau’s bizarre sense of collectivism. His rural sentimentalism was presented as an irrational hostility to science and progress.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are others who see him as a prophet with an insight into the false promise of modernity and nothing could be closer to truth than this as we face environmental degradation and economic dilapidation. He was indeed a philosopher who could smell foul in the future and provided a therapy for an ill that was yet to manifest itself fully. His thought is a primer on how to lead a healthy life in a world full of vanity, jealousy and competition.
Rousseau’s formulation of collective human action as the touchstone of social and political life at once made him the modern Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire from the Gods and thereby liberated mankind from the guilt of the biblical original sin. His rediscovery of nature and civic virtue of the ancients brings him in tandem not only with Socratic thinking, but also in tune with ancient Oriental philosophy of Taoism.
Born in an artisan family on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, a Calvinist Republican city state amidst Catholic Kingdoms, his personal life was trying and unconventional, interlaced as it was with a live-in relationship with his lady mentor and then wedlock with a long-time companion, producing many children all of whom were quietly dumped at orphanages. But he was bold enough to admit his ill doings in his work Confessions.
By 1749, Rousseau had interned as a domestic servant, a horologist, a tutor and even a musician; he was also a casual hanger on in the Enlightenment salons frequented by Denis Diderot and his group. Interestingly, it was on one of ‘solitary’ walks to visit an interred Diderot that he claimed to have been overwhelmed by a reverie that provided him with an insight into the Academy of Dijon literary question: Whether the arts and science have contributed to or undermined morals. Rousseau ingeniously crafted his central thesis that ran against the Enlightenment mainstream: Man is naturally good but has been corrupted by society.
Natural flow of humans, Rousseau was convinced, had been vitiated by the sediments of civilisation. These inchoate thoughts cobbled up with some Montesquieu inspired ideas went on to constitute his now famous, Discourse on the Science and the Arts.
His train of thought made him address the problem of instinctive human desire for freedom and recognition in an increasingly interdependent world. It inspired him to put forth a comprehensive critique of civilisation, in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men. In this evolutionary essay, he intended to judge "the original constitution of human beings"; the preface opened with the Delphic precept, "Know thyself".  "The trappings of civilisation had fooled everyone", he wrote, "all ran headlong to their chains…they had just enough wit to perceive the advantages of political institutions without experience enough to see the dangers."
No wonder then, "Man is born free and but is everywhere in chains." Society, with its inducements of rivalry and ambition, had trapped man into adopting a social self that stifled the authentic or natural self. Knowing oneself without the garbs of civilisation was the key to resumption of normal natural self that is endowed with the essential feeling of ‘pity’ and the ability to overcome habits through free will. To overcome the snares of civilization, one can strengthen one’s will by seeking classical virtue, an idea Rousseau took from the Greeks.
To build upon his sense of classical virtue and natural sentiments, Rousseau penned a romantic novel Julie or the New Heloise; the main characters were not sophisticates or even the French, but young people including rurals, foreigners, recluses who in their romantic imagination take the frenzy of their innocent minds to be philosophy. Set up as an epistolary Romance in the Alps, the novel was an unprecedented success as it got swiftly printed into English and German and sold multiple additions. It made Rousseau a cynosure of classical virtue and natural sentiments.
The stage was now set for his serious texts. Emile was an implicit critique that took education to be a form of fantasy, an account of a young man being raised in ideal circumstances by a solitary tutor ~ Rousseau imagined himself perhaps as tutor. The idea behind Emile was child-centred motivational education beyond mere rote learning. Emile also outlined Rousseau’s complex views on psychology and religious heterodoxy that got him into trouble and had him secretively taking refuge in Staffordshire in England with Hume’s help.
In his magnum opus, "The Social Contract", an attempt was made by Rousseau to politically reconcile Freedom and Interdependence. A properly cultivated free will was the route to deliverance as it endowed the individual with the ability to resist temptation and in its generic form, "General Will" was to be the basis of an ideal self-governing community. Unbridled exercise of Will of man is the bedrock of Governance and popular sovereignty. Rousseau had emerged from his texts as a paragon of civic republicanism that lay in a periodic assembly of citizens coming face to face to govern themselves.
His posthumous fame was indeed grotesque, perhaps as grotesque as his notion that citizens are constrained to obey the "general will" and "forced to be free" ~ a superficial linkage between Rousseau’s thinking and ecstatic Jacobin revolutionaries. A few years after his death, during the halcyon days of French Revolution, he was eulogised as a luminous star on the firmament of European history. In 1794, five years after the storming of Bastille, the state Prison, a symbol of ancien regime in France, his body was exhumed to be reburied with full state honours in a three-day celebration at the Pantheon, a church that was converted into a Mausoleum for the internment of this great French philosopher where he lays ironically with his arch rival Voltaire.
At the age of three hundred plus at least, there is more to Rousseau than just a wacky connection with the French Revolution, which in any case stood severed when revolutionary theorists like Abbe Seyes converted the Third Estate to represent the nation and later the Committee of Public Safety was considered as an expression of general will.
In terms of sheer political philosophy, Rousseau has proved to be somewhat distinct. He is at once the naturalist precursor to Immanuel Kant exploring the linkages between the moral and animal dimensions of humans. At another level, the totalitarian Rousseau, as liberals would want us to believe, coexists with a liberal Rousseau as an intellectual ancestor to John Rawls and his theory of Justice, a Rousseau whose citizens relate to each other in terms of shared political identity ~ an abstraction as in Rawls, apart from their real and unique identities.
There is obviously a Marxist Rousseau who comes home with a critique of exploitation, alienation and private property that dwarfs the citizen into a mere appropriator or an appendage. We also find a Habermasian Rousseau, who seeks the reinvigoration of public space and democratic spirit. Of late, there has been a resurgence of civic republicanism in the works of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, which echo Rousseau’s assertion that any political system worth its salt must free fellow beings from the arbitrary wills of others.
With burgeoning civic assertion and a growing sense of citizenship in terms of new rights of information and service, it is time we acknowledge the philosophical fountainheads and their intellectual legacy. The days of passivity seem to be over and citizens are now keener than ever to have their voice heard, instantly, despite choosing representatives who claim to speak for them.
Governance, Representation and Legislation need a serious rehash. The variants of mass media and virtual public space resulting from cybernetics are producing a potent ingredient of directness in our Democracy. It is time we learn from the champion of civic participation, the nuances of an active citizenry in a polity that is mired in labyrinths of representation.
At least at the ideational level, there is perhaps no one better than Rousseau to be our friend, a philosopher and guide to iron out the current angularities of our public life. Rest assured, Rousseau, we have enough moral medicine in our scriptures to take care of your personal angularities and whims!

The writer is a bureaucrat