infinite range of opportunity. “Nothing is shocking, for everyone is accustomed to everything.” No society has ever been more “full of original men,” because none has ever opened up so much social space for individuality to develop.
Why should anyone want to burn down a place like this, in which all human potentialities can be fulfilled? This potentiality itself turns out to be the city’s greatest pitfall. In an age when individuality has become freer and more important than ever, Rousseau sees nothing more precious, more valuable, than the wholehearted commitment of one individual to another. Personal commitment, for him, is what gives romantic love a moral dignity. Indeed, by virtue of its power to generate commitment, romantic love acquires a political dignity as well: The romantic couple is the primary community, the nucleus of the social contract. Early in The New Eloise, after the young lovers have secretly slept together and pledged themselves to one another, Julie is racked with guilt; she considers rejecting the man she loves and marrying instead the noble lord her father is trying to force on her. But Saint-Preux insists that her guilt is misplaced: Their love springs not from immorality, but from a new morality, in which fidelity becomes the highest virtue, a political as well as sexual issue. Lovers must be steadfastly, monogamously devoted to one another, in the same way, and for the same reasons, that the true citizen must be faithfully devoted to his community. Moreover, for lovers and citizens alike, fidelity will be valuable only if it is freely given, given out of “the soul of a free man,” given by a person who has the power to withhold it. For modern men and women, in the modern metropolis, at a time when a bourgeois economy and society is just coming to life—in other words, in a world of infinite options—fidelity takes on a unique, irreplaceable human value. Ironically, however, the same social conditions that make free personal commitment possible seem at the same time to make it impossible. This contradiction is what makes Saint-Preux and Rousseau feel that modernity has got to go.
“Everyone,” says Saint-Preux, “constantly places himself in contradiction with himself … and this opposition doesn’t bother anyone”—because self-contradiction is what makes this world go round. But indeed, if “nothing is shocking, because everyone is accustomed to everything,” doesn’t it follow that “everything is absurd”? Amid all these quick changes, what is worth hanging onto? If anything (or anyone) that is here today can be gone tomorrow, what standards can we legitimately use to decide what is right? For that matter, in the great city, do words like legitimate and right have any meaning at all? All the old moral touchstones seem to crumble in this new world. “Of all the things that strike me, none of them holds my heart, but the totality disturbs my heart, and dislocates my feelings, to the point that I forget what I am and whom I belong to.” The modern city enables the self to expand its activity enormously; but where is the self to find a center, a core that will hold its identity together? The endless parade of possibilities which modernity presents disturbs the heart, dislocates the feelings, and forces the individual to choose, to decide, every day, every night, not only where he or she is going to go, whom he or she is going to belong to, but what he or she is going to be.
Paradoxically, the enormous range of possibilities destroys the possibility of a stable, integrated, indissoluble “being” which the self can securely call its own.
When one night Saint-Preux goes to bed with a girl he has met, his hysterical guilt leads him to draw reactionary political conclusions from the sexual politics of the affair—he was led astray by freedom; from now on, he will seek escapes from this ambiguous, dreadful freedom.
The impulse which Saint-Preux blames for his infidelity, and tries to reject in himself, is an impulse which he shares with all modern men, a force that animates them and drives them all, and gives modern society its distinctive form: this is what Rousseau calls avidité, “avidity.” In the Social Contract it will appear as the motive force behind “the turmoil of commerce and the arts, the avid pursuit of profit”—a force which Rousseau considers absolutely incompatible with democracy. Here it appears at the heart of Parisian life, and Saint-Preux condemns it as the real motive for his crime. “They looked at me with a violent avidity”—and he looked back. Avidity is linked with avarice, the bourgeois desire for money and profit; but it is a great deal more than avarice. As Rousseau sees and feels it, it can express itself just as well in sexual desire or in aggressive violence. Indeed, it floats freely between one object and another. This ambiguity is a key to the deeply ambiguous character of the social system it sustains. In modern society, sex, money, and violence are hopelessly entangled with one another, need and greed are intertwined, for modern society both liberates impulses and mixes them up, with catastrophic results. What is to be done? From this point, Rousseau went off in two radically opposite directions. Sometimes, as we will see later, he tried to make distinctions, to disentangle the different kinds of avidity, to separate need from greed, creative from destructive energy. At other times, as we have seen already, he saw them all as one, condemned them all, root and branch, and tried to reject modernity as a whole.
The same logic that led Rousseau to despair of Saint-Preux’s capacity for fidelity in the modern city also led him to despair of the capacity of modern men for democracy or community. What made them such bad material for democratic citizenship and participation in communal life, Rousseau believed, was their free-floating avidity. Every modern people, he said, is “noisy, brilliant and fearsome,” “an ardent, avid, ambitious people … given to the two extremes of opulence and poverty (misère), 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 beyond Europe altogether) not yet affected by the process of modernization. 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 century, 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 oppression 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 endure, 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 to repress in themselves in order to get ahead. Two centuries of populism, anarchism, socialism, and communism have given Rousseau’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 directly, without having to pass through a capitalist stage.
Rousseau’s most fully realized vision of an unmodernized radical democracy occurs in The New Eloise, when the Swiss mountain community
