Rousseau Between Nature and Culture by Anne Deneys-Tunney Yves Charles Zarka

Author:Anne Deneys-Tunney, Yves Charles Zarka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

There is a paradox of sovereignty in Rousseau. The Social Contract from 1762 arguably provides the definitive expression of the modern conception of politics, namely an egalitarian conception of association rooted in popular sovereignty: the only sovereign in a legitimate polity is the people itself. In other words, Rousseau provides an entirely immanent conception of political legitimacy. This finds clearest expression in his conception of law: namely, the only law that can be followed in a legitimate polity is the law that gives itself through acts of the general will. In other words, law must be self-authorizing and correspond to autonomy.

Yet – and here’s the paradox – what authority can law have if it is self-authorizing? This question leads Rousseau to the famous problem of the legislator: namely, in order for law to have authority over a community it becomes necessary to posit the existence of a legislator who stands outside that community: a foreigner, a stranger who initiates the constitutional arrangements of a polity, as Rousseau himself might have done with his plans for Corsica and Poland. Namely, the autonomy of law needs a heteronomous source in order to guarantee what some see as law’s empire.

The dependence of an immanent conception of legitimacy on some transcendent instance becomes even more acute in Rousseau’s treatment of the relation between politics and religion, which is my focus here. On the one hand, in the early draft of The Social Contract, the Geneva Manuscript, Rousseau insists that the question of legitimate political institutions is a philosophical issue that must not be resolved theologically. Yet, on the other hand, the published version of The Social Contract concludes with an infamous discussion of civil religion, namely those political articles of faith – which include a belief in a beneficent deity and an afterlife – that Rousseau believes are necessary in order to provide the motivational set of moral intuitions that will affectively bind together a polity and ensure that citizens take an active interest in the process of collective legislation that constitutes a self-determining political life. Such is the source of Rousseau’s appeal to Voltaire in 1758 that there should be a catechism of the citizen, analogous to the articles of Christian faith, that would underpin the functioning of any legitimate polity.

Following Louis Althusser’s essay on The Social Contract in L’Impensé de Jean-Jacques Rousseau closely,109I see Rousseau’s extraordinarily inventive thinking as marked by a series of décalages, displacements, moments of tension, ambiguity or seeming contradiction, which, for me, find a particularly intense focus around three key concepts: politics, law and religion. An avowedly immanent conception of political autonomy requires an appeal to transcendence and heteronomy that appears to undermine it. But perhaps the truth is more complex. The logic of Rousseau’s writing is a movement of articulation and disarticulation.

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