PARTISAN REVIEW
415
to repress in themselves in order to get ahead. Two centuries of
populism, anarchism, socialism and communism have given Rous–
seau's language an elaborate and complex vocabulary, which we can
use to translate
his
ideas into ideologies of our time. The dream
that the last shall be first emerges as the contemporary political
theory - or, maybe, political myth - that the undeveloped societies
can make the leap from feudalism or colonialism to socialism direct–
ly, without having to pass through a capitalist stage.
Rousseau's most fully realized vision of the unmoderruzed
radi~
cal democracy occurs in
The New Eloise
when the Swiss mountain
community of the Upper Valais is experienced and evaluated for uS
through the eyes of Saint-Preux. In the structure of the novel, it
corresponds to Saint-Preux's evocation of Paris; in the structure of
Rousseau's ideas, the Upper Valais is an antithesis to Paris, an arche–
type of the Rousseauan alternative to modernization. This idyllic
society, however, contains inner contradictions of its own, contra-'
dictions even more severely destructive than the ones they were meant
to overcome; and the radical democracy of the rural commune turns
out to be most inauthentic for precisely the people who need and
want it most avidly.
Saint-Preux, in search of a world that he and Julie can live
in, has been wandering through the mountains in despair when he
stumbles on the Upper Valais. He greets the new society with a
rush of exaltation, which Rousseau presents to us as a sudden illum–
ination, an ecstatic vision. For the first time in Saint-Preux's life,
people are going out of their way to be nice to him. Unlike the
Parisians, who constantly try to pull him into their worlds, the Valais–
ians, he reports, "went about their lives as if I wasn't there, and
I was able to act as if I had been alone." They are totally devoid of
avidity. Their hospitality flows from a "disinterested humanity," a
genuine "zeal to please every stranger that chance or curiosity sends
them."
Saint-Preux discovers the social foundations of these lovely quali–
ties. The Valaisians are small independent farmers and artisans; their
community
is
a democratic republic. The basic social units here are
the extended family and the village commune. There is only the most
rudimentary division of labor or exchange, and money is virtually
non.existent, for it
is
superfluous. The community as a whole is seU7.
