410
MARSHALL BERMAN
that no one should see that France would
be
far more powerful
if
Paris were annihilated."
Burn it down!
Rousseau's tone here is far
more typical of the nineteen sixties than of the seventeen sixties.
(Typical of the nineteen sixties too, that he should be shocked and
perplexed when some Parisians treat him as a menace.) But he in–
sists that his feelings about Paris are nothing personal; he aims his
malevolence at the modern city
per se:
"a big city, full of scheming,
idle people, without religion or principle, whose imagination, de–
praved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs"
engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes...." Thus "Men
are not made to be crowded together in antheaps; they should
be
scattered over the earth which they have to cultivate. The more they
gather together, the more they corrupt themselves." We can see here
the birth of a distinctively modern apocalyptic language and one–
dimensional vision - a language which we survivors of the nineteen
sixties have heard, and a vision we have seen, all too well. This lan–
guage and vision borrow the rhetoric and imagery of Jewish, early
Christian and medieval apocalypse, raging against the Great Whore
Babylon (an image of which the Black Panthers and their white
followers are particularly fond), hoping for its destruction. But the
perspective now is secular and post-Christian: these radicals yearn
not for a transcendental, purely spiritual redemption, but for a king–
dom that
will
be
immanent, material, in and of this world.
In fact, Rousseau's one-dimensional view of the city was only a
small part of a much larger one-dimensional picture. He was well
aware that, at the very moment he was condemning the "great
cities," they were just emerging as the centers of energy in a vast
social, political and cultural evolutionary process - a process of de–
velopment which
is
still going on today. In condemning them, Rous–
seau was condemning the
esprit generale
of modern society, and the
historical movement that was bringing this society into being.
We can find somewhere in Rousseau's work just about every
objection to modern society that anyone has thought of, left, right
or center, in the last two hundred years: it is too free, it is not free
enough; men are too "levelled," they are too unequal; people can–
not get close to each other, they are thrown into intense and inde–
cent intimacy. But Rousseau's most concrete account of his confron–
tation with modern society
is
in his romantic and political novel,
