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the unfortunate results have been
all
too painful.
Division and balance of power in England and America, unity m
France. The French Revolution's answer to the good sense of Mon–
tesquieu was Rousseau. The Revolution was all his from the beginning,
for, as Mona Ozouf asserts, only Rousseau "abandoned all consideration
of what was possible." Rousseau's originality, and the basis of his concept
of government, lay in his strange vision of the nation as a
collective being.
His idea was that heterogeneous individuals could be transformed into a
unified society through the absolute submission of every individual to the
"nation," the nation conceived as a single, unitary,
collective person
who
had one mind and one will and an infallible will at that. As the American
historian Keith Baker phrased it, the Revolution transferred sovereignty
from the natural person of the king to the abstract, collective person of
the body of citizens as a whole. And just as monarchical sovereignty was
expressed through the unitary will of the king, the will of the sovereign
nation had to be as unitary as it was inalienable. "By this logic," Baker
notes, "unity was the condition of sovereignty; the nation was
unanimous or it was nothing. Hence the constant aversion to any form
of political activity that threatened the unity of the sovereign will." The
myth of a sovereign collective being to whom belonged an infallible
"general will" replaced the old monarchist myth that the king's body
was the body politic and that "the king can do no wrong," but the
new myths, although the product of the Enlightenment, were just as
magical and supernatural as the old ones.
Twentieth-century political theorists have wrestled with the question
of the intellectual origins of the ideology of unanimity that forced the
elimination of dissent and gave birth to revolutionary government in all
its lawlessness and terror. Albert Camus, Jacob Talmon, Hannah Arendt,
and others have pointed to Rousseau not only as the Revolution's mas–
termind but as the father of totalitarianism. Yet in his essay on Rousseau,
Manin attempts to exculpate Rousseau. He credits Rousseau with the
idea that the people are one, possessed, like an individual, of a single will,
but he insists that Rousseau played no part in the Revolution's treatment
of political adversaries as enemies, arguing that "of course the
'revolutionary government' and the subordination of individual rights to
the general will
could
have been justified with the aid of the
Social Con–
tract.
The fact remains that they were not." For my part, I find Mona
Ozoufs characterization of the revolutionary cult of unity as the "rotten
fruit of Rousseauism" more to the point.
The Rousseauian idea of a united and indivisible Republic implied
that the Convention and the Convention alone, inasmuch as it repre–
sented the will of the nation, must govern. And this absolute primacy of
