Left in Dark Times by Bernard-Henri Levy

Author:Bernard-Henri Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781588367570
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

IT ALL STARTED with Rousseau.

It all started with that unprecedented book called The Social Contract, whose thesis provoked—first in France and then in Europe—a thrill, a shock, almost a spiritual earthquake.

What?

All people needed was a “general will” to create a society?

All people needed was to say “We want to be joined into a society; we don’t have anything in common but we’ve decided to join together” for such an association to exist and take effect?

Starting with a transcendental purity—an abstract and empty form, whose only principle would be the well-negotiated exchange between each member’s freedom and a superior liberty guaranteed by an agreement—a true community of men and women could come about?

People might have nothing in common—nothing, neither heroes, nor great events, nor shared miseries, nor even a common place of birth—and found a nation by a simple act of understanding—by one of the purely mind-based decisions described in the Encyclopédie, in the same terms Rousseau used in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, as reasoning “in the silence of human passions” and of “associations”?

People are never quiet about passions and associations, grumbled the Contract’s outraged readers.

Counterrevolutionaries like Burke and Carlyle mocked Rousseau, saying that nobody had ever seen a society come about through such vain and artificial methods.

When, on December 26, 1815, Bonald went before the National Assembly to plead for—and obtain8—the abolition of the divorce law that the Assemblies of the French Revolution had voted for, he insisted that history had never known a society that was not based on this common principle, these primary and natural units, that were, for example, families.

What’s all this about the “contract,” Lamartine himself wondered, in issues 65 and 67 of his Cours familier de littérature?9 Societies don’t come about thanks to contracts! They can’t be decreed! They are “instinctive.” They are “inevitable.”

How could you possibly imagine—thundered Maurice Barrès, once again in the National Assembly, on June 11, 1912, during a session dedicated to celebrating the bicentennial of Rousseau’s birth—how could you even conceive that the national congress could wish to glorify this “false spirit,” this “extravagant creature,” this prince of lies and artifice? I admire “the artist,” he allows. I admire “the musician.” And “the man himself, that poor and crabbed virtue allied to that lyrical love of nature and solitude, I won’t attack him.” But as for signing up for “the social, political, and pedagogical principles of the author of the Discourse on Inequality, the Social Contract, and Émile”—as for celebrating the person who “established as a principle the idea that the social order is entirely artificial,” and that it is “based on conventions”—as for anointing with the holy republican chrism the big bloated head of someone who preaches everyone’s right to “reconstruct society at whim”—as for letting France look ridiculous by celebrating that lunatic, drunk on himself and his own correctness, one whose whole life was dedicated to chasing the pipe dream of “placing all of life on a Procrustean bed”—as for following, therefore, this false prophet in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.