Liberalism's Lawgiver Problem: Villa's Teachers of the People

A familiar paradox lies at the heart of Dana Villa's Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill. Villa simply calls it "Rousseau's paradox" because its canonical articulation is Book II, Chapter 7 of the Social Contract, where Rousseau writes that "for a people to be able to relish sound principles of politics and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law." Or as Rousseau restates the problem in the same chapter: "How will a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wants, since it rarely knows what is good for it, by itself execute so great and difficult a project as a system of legislation?"

This paradox has been explored and contested at length by contemporary democratic theorists, where it is usually said to model fundamental dilemmas of authorization that haunt the theory and practice of democratic politics. Rousseau invoked the great lawgiver in response to this paradox as a way of dramatizing the unauthorized heteronomic requirements of democratic autonomy. Villa, however, is not primarily focused on these debates or on the dilemmas of popular authorization that they emphasize. Instead, he turns to the educational project Rousseau assigns to the lawgiver, namely the ability to "so to speak, change human nature itself."

The project of creating a people capable of ongoing practices of collective self rule—of giving shape to "the people" properly so-called—was a central preoccupation of political theorists and activists across the ideological spectrum as popular sovereignty emerged as a hegemonic legitimating norm in the nineteenth century. As Villa writes, "an autonomous and self-governing people must first be taught to be autonomous and self governing" (29). Villa's examination of what constitutes this "teaching," and what kind of epistemic or moral authority can be claimed by these "teachers" in a rapidly democratizing political context, is one of the most illuminating aspects of this learned and engaging book.

Teachers of the People explores how the problematic of "education to autonomy" came to preoccupy four canonical political theorists—Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill— in the era of democratic revolutions in the West, which witnessed the epochal shift from royal to popular sovereignty, from feudal heteronomy to democratic autonomy. While we can clearly see antecedents to this general problematic in the ancient world—whether in the Book of Exodus, say, or in the problem space of Plato's Republic—and while it becomes an essential feature in the early modern revival of classical republicanism, with Machiavelli being its essential figure, according to Villa, it assumes a distinctively modern form in the era committed (at least in principle) to universal civil equality and popular sovereignty. In this context, political theory no longer offered advice to princes, Villa argues, but became centrally preoccupied with "the question of popular political education" (6).

After examining Rousseau's theoretical articulation of the problem in Chapter 1, Villa devotes the bulk of his book to three important—and I want to stress broadly liberal—attempts to navigate the theoretical and practical dilemmas it poses without falling back on what each of these thinkers perceive, in different ways and along different theoretical registers, as the premodern and illegitimate "formative projects" of classical republicanism and premodern political theory more broadly construed. It is important to stress the liberal orientation of the book, even if Villa himself never explicitly articulates or defends this orientation. Villa views the problem posed by Rousseau's paradox from the perspective of liberalism in two different senses. On the one hand, his three chosen theorists after Rousseau are canonical nineteenth-century liberal theorists who in their different ways would agree with Tocqueville that they needed to construct a new...