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MARSHALL BERMAN
Every modem people, he said, is "noisy, brilliant and fearsome,"
"an ardent, avid, ambitious people, ... given to the two extremes
of opulence and poverty
(misere),
of license and slavery." The basic
trouble with people like this is that they
can't be counted on:
they
are never fully
committed
to anyone or anything except the pursuit
of their personal interests. "A prey to indolence and all the passions
it excites, they plunge themselves into debauchery, and sell themselves
for satisfaction; self-interest makes them servile, and idleness makes
them restless;
they are either slaves or rebels, never free men."
III
When Rousseau turned away from the great city in search of
"love, happiness and innocence," he turned toward those traditional,
rural societies in the backwaters and backwoods of Europe (or be–
yond Europe altogether) not yet affected by the process of moderni–
zation. For it was only in undeveloped societies, he often argued,
that radical democracy could take root. The impact of Rousseau's
thought here has been enormous: we can see his influences on the
Russian Narodniks and American Populists of the nineteenth cen–
tury, and, more recently, on Mao and Fanon and many ideologues
of the Third World today.
Rousseau did not think rural societies of his period were fine
just as they were: he despised the fashionable pastoral conventions,
and saw, as clearly as anyone in his time, the starvation and op–
pression and misery that choked the countryside. Still, he believed
that the very misery of rural life generated human qualities that were
indispensable to a democratic citizenry. Peasants know how to en–
dure, to hold on; thus they are "attached to their soil" far more
tenaciously than modern men are committed to their cities. The life
of the traditional peasant commune is "happy in its mediocrity"; it
leaves its members "incapable of even imagining a better way of
life." What is striking and disturbing about these views is that they
glorify narrowness, rigidity, ignorance, even stupidity - precisely
those qualities Marx later stigmatized as "the idiocy of rural life."
One of history's most compelling collective dreams has been
that the last shall be first. Rousseau made the dream seem plausible:
backward people, he argued, by virtue of their very backwardness,
are really able to preserve virtues which advanced peoples have had
