The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

4. The Social Contract

83 4 The Social Contract The Social Contract is Rousseau’s crowning work of political influence. Its preeminence comes not only from its influence in the realm of political theory, but also its moment of influential grace during one of European history’s most intemperate events. It is an incongruous phenomenon that one of political theory’s most timeless constructions could have had such a momentous and timely moment of prestige in the French Revolution. The forlorn histories, the temporal despairing, the search for origins, and the raging against the present that I have discussed so far have their final moment of transcendence in the theoretical purity of the Social Contract. In this work time and history are hypothetically conquered, resolved, escaped, and lifted; but then almost ironically, in the incredible historical hour of French Revolution, the timeless ideas of this work energized the revolutionary zeal of its major participants. Ideas of this nature can only have the most fleeting moment of historical grace. Its revolutionary content must inevitably be used by history in a blinding flash by minds turned toward the eternal hopes of humankind; but rarely can these ideas be utilized in the evolutionary cycle of politics. Nor can it explain the reality of historical legacies. This chapter will outline the converging timeless threads that make up the historical surpassing of the Social Contract. 84  Jean-Jacques Rousseau Spinozian Elements of the Social Contract At first glance to talk of the influence of Spinoza’s thought on Rousseau ’s social contract seems an absurdity. The thinker who railed so vehemently against the materialist tendencies of his day cannot be thought to have fraternized with the devil incarnate of European materialism. There is nothing so diametrically opposed as Spinoza’s necessity and Rousseau’s freedom. But as I have observed in the “Second Discourse,” Rousseau was not uncommon in his age for mixing elements of materialist and scientific thought into his grander project of freedom stemming from the immaterial. However, what is illuminating is how the adoption of certain Spinozist themes lends to the Social Contract a degree of timelessness , purity, circularity, and theoretical certainty that is so endemic to Rousseau’s thought. It is not so far-fetched that two of the most adamant modern democrats would share similar tendencies in thought. In his work Radical Enlightenment, Jonathon I. Israel ends his study of the rise of philosophical radicalism and Spinoza’s conspicuous role in that rise, with a short section dealing with how Rousseau fed on that radical tradition. He also alludes to Rousseau’s “Janus-headed mixing” of material and immaterial elements, and in so doing highlights many of the similarities that Rousseau and Spinoza shared. This common heritage is characterized by the “sweeping rejection of tradition and authority , its delegitimizing of the social and political structures of the day, its egalitarianism, underlying pantheism and, above all, in the doctrine of the ‘general will,’ it is aligned unmistakably with a radical philosophical tradition reaching back to the mid-seventeenth century.”1 Israel makes the link between Spinoza and Rousseau through Rousseau’s one-time good friend but eventual loathsome enemy, Diderot. Rousseau’s Social Contract was dependant for much of its influence upon Diderot’s own work on the “volonté genéralé” in the Encyclopedia. That Diderot was an exponent of the theory of necessity and among the new Spinozists goes some way to confirming the link, as if the philosophical freight of Spinozian necessity was always residual when discussing the general will. However, what is incontestable about the Rousseau and Spinoza connec1 . Jonathon I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 720. The Social Contract   85 tion is that their philosophies both summon a deracinating power that radically puts into doubt all existing institutions. This type of radicalism makes them the oddest of political brothers. In much the same manner as Hobbes’s position in the realm of political thought, Spinoza looms as a philosophical specter whose influence is denied and decried, but is obliquely and obscurely prevalent in much Enlightenment thinking. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the German thinker most noted for divining the encroaching Spinozism within the Enlightenment , spent most of his career accusing philosophical luminaries of Spinozist- related atheism. To Fichte’s “self positing self” philosophy he sarcastically posed the question, “Strange that the thought never occurred to Spinoza of...