H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 7
James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau Considered as One of
the First Authors of the Revolution Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000. xiii+ 320 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 U.S.
(cl). ISBN 0-8047-3555-7.
Review by Richard Lebrun, University of Manitoba.
Though it bears a perhaps rather naive and certainly eighteenth-century
sounding title, and though is takes up the very old question of Rousseau's
role in the coming and course of the French Revolution, this is an impressively
original study that offers a deliberately deconstructionist and highly
sophisticated "reading" of Rousseau's works and then traces the vicissitudes
of the reading of Rousseau's texts during the revolutionary period. In
the author's own words, this is a book "about reading as a historical
problem" (p. ix). It is about reading Rousseau, but it is more than that
because the author, who is a literary critic, intends, by concentrating
on the problematic character of "reading" and "influence," to formulate
"a new interpretive framework of old questions concerning the relation
between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution." Swenson does not
claim to resolve these questions, but "to understand why they are so thorny,
and so necessary" (Ibid.).
As early as 1791, Louis-Sébastien Mercier proclaimed Rousseau to be "one
of the first authors of the Revolution" (whence Swenson's title), a filiation
that many others of the time, including both his admirers and critics,
seconded, and that historiographical tradition has never ceased to echo.
As Swenson notes, there are at least three sets of difficulties bearing
on the relationship of Rousseau to the Revolution. First, there is the
fact that in the pre-revolutionary period the publication of Rousseau's
political works was hardly noticed by the public, while his literary works
were widely read and acclaimed. Second, with the outbreak of the Revolution,
Rousseau's pre-revolutionary admirers would be found in all political
camps. Third, "readings" of Rousseau's works in the course of the Revolution
were often very contradictory and highly partial. Swenson's basic contention
is that "these paradoxes stem from the structure of Rousseau's discourse
itself" (p. x), and he argues that if Rousseau was "one of the first authors"
of the Revolution, it was "because he provided the terms in which the
logic of events could be interpreted" (Ibid.).
In accord with the purpose of his study, the first chapter of Swenson's
book addresses the "intellectual, cultural, and ideological origins" of
the Revolution. It includes a concise and extremely useful review of the
historiography of the debate about the relationship of the Enlightenment
to the Revolution and a discerning examination of the issues posed by
the attempts (by Daniel Mornet and his successors) to measure influence
by such methods as counting editions and books in private libraries, and
the attempts by historians and literary critics to understand how readers
of past generations "read," understood, and interpreted the texts of complex
authors such as Rousseau. The section concludes with an exploration of
the new forms of sociability characteristic of the eighteenth century
(voluntary institutions such as the salon, the academy, and the lodge),
the kinds of "discourse" that occurred within this new kind of "public
sphere," and the contentious issues raised by the leading scholars who
have tried to relate these developments to the question of the "influence"
of literary texts. Swenson finds in these debates a general consensus
that the late eighteenth-century saw "a growing incompatibility between
the form and content of Enlightenment sociability" (p. 52). He identifies,
in particular, "the presence or even the dominance of recognizably Rousseauian
motifs within a cultural context that is both theoretically and sociologically
inimical to them" and argues that "disturbances" related to this kind
of incongruity, already present in the Enlightenment, were most often
and most forcefully "signified by the name, person, and work of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau" (Ibid.). For example, the Rousseuian theme of "persecuted virtue"
was often utilized by lawyers in court challenges to what were increasingly
portrayed as decadent and self-interested abuses of power by those who
held authority under the political and judicial institutions of the old
regime.
Swenson's second chapter, on "the unnatural order of Enlightenment universal
history," examines "the presence in Enlightenment historical discourse
of a number of models of historical causality, particularly with respect
to the role of ideas in history" (p. 56). The emphasis is on the contrast
between the views of Rousseau and Condorcet, but Scottish writers (including
Adam Smith, William Robertson, and David Hume) and other French writers
(Turgot in particular) are introduced to contextualize the discussion.
The argument here is complicated, but appears designed to elucidate Rousseau's
peculiar definition of "the state of nature" as "excluding, to as great
an extent as possible, any elements of continuity between nature and civilization"
(p. 114). History for Rousseau, in contrast to Condorcet and a majority
of Enlightenment thinkers who see it as a record of progress, is a "process
of denaturalization" brought about by a series of accidental "revolutions"
(such as the discovery of iron).
In his third chapter, exploring further what it might mean to call Rousseau
an "author of the Revolution," Swenson examines how Rousseau himself conceived
of "authorship". Since many of Rousseau's works (and not merely his Confessions)
were autobiographical, there is ample grist for the literary critic's
mill. Again, the argument is complex, subtle, and difficult to summarize,
but hinges on the "singular character of the personality of the author"
(p. 125), with Rousseau portrayed as a "fundamentally divided" writer
characterized by "an original and inexpugnable contradiction" (Ibid.).
In this perspective, Swenson suggests, the unity of Rousseau's works is
exhibited in "an inimitable and eminently consistent breakdown [...] of
narrative and causal logic" (Ibid.). Citing chapter and verse at considerable
length, Swenson concludes that "Rousseau's description of causal narratives
demonstrates that any reading of his texts that seeks to become effective
will necessarily include a constitutive moment of discontinuity and misunderstanding"
(p. 158). For example, in developing the conception of nature as having
an author, Rousseau presents the relation between cause and effect as
semiological (as figurative representation) rather than metaphysical in
the classic sense, but at the same time uses the concept of author to
banish chance and assure intelligibility." When the revolutionaries adopted
"Rousseau" as the "author" of their experience, they were, in effect if
I read Swenson's argument correctly, seeking to assure the intelligibility
of their own experience of discontinuity and misunderstanding. To take
(or in Swenson's prose to "(re-)invent") Rousseau as the "author" of the
Revolution, the revolutionaries were (as Rousseau had done) interpreting
the relation between cause and effect as semiological or figurative."
In the fourth and final chapter on "the author of the revolution," in
weighing claims that the Revolution in some way fulfilled Rousseau's political
theory, Swenson begins with an analysis of the paths by which his reception
travelled. This involves first establishing that Rousseau's political
works, and in particular the Contrat social, were more widely available
than Mornet and that others had concluded--or that at the least it was
not unknown. It was, in Swenson's judgment a "potentiality waiting to
be actualized" (p. 170). To get at just how the actualization occurred,
Swenson uses the appearance of Rousseau's definition and understanding
of sovereignty of the people (as opposed to a more diffuse sense of majority
rule) as a touchstone of his influence. Through a careful reading and
analysis of official documents such as the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the Citizen, the writings of influential theorists such as Emmanuel-Joseph
Sieyès, and the debates over the issue of the royal veto, he demonstrates
a very visible presence. Yet for Swenson, the "fundamental question" is
not whether Sieyès or any other figure was "subjectively" Rousseauist,
but the extent to which he (and very many of his colleagues) were "objectively"
Rousseauist in the sense that they were "led by a combination of available
concepts and tactical exigencies to recapitulate certain problems [...]
that Rousseau had laid out with particular force and perspicacity" (p.
211). This perspective, Swenson believes, "situates the importance of
Rousseau's thought for the Revolution at a theoretical rather than at
an ideological level" (Ibid), which means that it was important for the
understanding of the dynamics and dilemmas of democratic politics it made
available; it was not merely a question of the "influence" of its themes
or rhetoric.
In his conclusion, citing Lynn Hunt and her reference to Jacques Derrida's
On Grammatalogy as bearing on her exposition of the "violence of
conspiracy politics" and her statement that "revolutionary rhetoric was
constantly 'deconstructing' itself, that is, at once positing the possibility
of a community without politics and inventing politics everywhere,"[1]
Swenson notes that Derrida's book was a study of Rousseau, and that his
own argument has "been simply to say that this is no accident, and that
the relationship between Rousseau and the Revolution is to be found not
in a logic of linear causality but rather in a shared constitutive instability,
in their practice of 'deconstruction'" (p. 225). Swenson continues: "Rousseau
is the first author of the Revolution precisely because the Revolution
could not make its reading of him coincide with itself any more than it
could make its political discourse coincide with itself" (p. 226). It
was, he thinks, "the combination of a passionate longing for unity and
a rigorous experience of division" that "represent the Revolution's greatest
fidelity to Rousseau" (Ibid).
Whether or not Swenson has been able to formulate a new interpretive
framework for dealing with the relationship between the Enlightenment
and Revolution, he has produced a very well written, well organized, interesting,
and provocative study of Rousseu and his relationship to the Revolution.
The sophistication of the argument may restrict its appeal among undergraduates
and non-specialists, but this study can certainly be recommended as a
significant contribution towards a better understanding of Rousseau, the
Enlightenment, and the Revolution.
NOTES
[1] Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 49, n85.
Richard Lebrun
University of Manitoba
lebrun@cc.umanitoba.ca
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 7
ISSN 1553-9172
