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

1. Rousseau’s Convoluted Personal Relation to Time

1 Rousseau’s Convoluted Personal Relation to Time [t]he child does not explain the man but, perhaps, the man the child.         Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speech In studying the timelessness of Rousseau’s political scheme, perhaps the most fertile starting point is Rousseau’s vast autobiographical project. Not only does it furnish the investigator with many illuminating and disturbing bookmarks in his journey through life, it is also a rich pool of his personal attitudes to time. His desperate need to explain himself to his time, defend his past, to both create and annul his future, has left to history an awesome testament to self-understanding, or indeed self-deception. These works represent the headstone that Rousseau composed for himself. They are the legacy and memory he wished to bequeath to future reading and judging of his life and work. But most importantly , these literary testaments show a mind animated by the timeless while using various temporal measures, with various levels of success, to bring this atemporal state into being. There are problems and reservations regarding this approach. Why begin with autobiographical works embarked on at the end of Rousseau’s literary life, in a work concerned principally with the political and social works formulated earlier? What possible bearing could these later works have on the political, social, and 35 36  Jean-Jacques Rousseau philosophical timelessness already cast? What from the products of a man’s later life can be isolated to throw light upon his development? One answer is to follow Rousseau’s example and forage through his earliest making for the seed of his life. He himself pointed in this direction when he wrote, “I was almost born dead, and they had little hope of saving me. I brought with me the seed of a disorder which has grown stronger with the years.”1 Certainly one legacy of Rousseau’s ideas is the now popular assumption that one’s life is shaped and formed in one’s childhood. In his Confessions Rousseau scoured his life for the key to his woes, discovering the hypersensitive child to be the specter of his adult life. Rousseau considers his supposed uniqueness to be forged in youthful experience. Rousseau’s educational novel Emile also bears witness to the belief that a child’s experiences are the locus of its future path. Rousseau rebuked the thinkers of his day by saying, “We know nothing of childhood.... They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.”2 The modern obsession with discovering our nucleus within the explicitness of our infancy is pure Rousseau. Rousseau opened the Pandora’s box of childhood, whose spillage seeped not only throughout the rest of his life, but through history itself. Indeed we will see that Rousseau is attempting, politically, nothing less than the rebirth of humanity itself. His philosophy is built on the promise and malleability of a society’s regained childhood. But perhaps for us the reverse is true, a reverse expressed by the quote at the beginning of this chapter. The man explains the child, and not the other way around. Could not the complex array of hopes, prayers, desires, fears, and resignations of adulthood provide richer illumination for a life than the unformed, unelaborated simplicities of the child? If we accept the direction of Rousseau’s thinking, then his later work becomes detached from previous work. The three autobiographical writings would have little connection with the discourses or the social contract. There becomes nothing but a succession of events, each one pushing the next further from its origin—works divided by time contributing to the remoteness of their influence on each other, the progress of thought reaching no culmination and hence no ultimate explanation. If we reverse 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, selected and translated with an introduction by J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), 19. 2. Rousseau, Emile, translated by Barbara Foxley (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1974), 1. Personal Relation to Time   37 the investigation, however, we can give all of Rousseau’s life and work a richer, stronger unity than the thin, impoverished unity that childhood affords it. The man looking back on his life provides a totality and comprehensiveness to that life, akin to a rebirth, that more profoundly illustrates his movements, motivations, and actions. In other words, in order to study how time...