to Saint-Preux’s evocation of Paris; in the structure of Rousseau’s ideas, the Upper Valais is an antithesis to Paris, an archetype of the Rousseauean alternative to modernization. This idyllic society, however, contains inner contradictions of its own, contradictions 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 greets the new society with a rush of exaltation, which Rousseau presents to us as a sudden illumination, 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 Valaisians, 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 qualities. 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 nonexistent, for it is superfluous. The community as a whole is self-sufficient; it seeks nothing outside itself. Its economy has no luxury, but no poverty either; it is free from the economic extremes that tear the modern city apart; it produces a modest but real “abundance for all.” Valaisian society is not classless, but it eliminates the inequities of feudal stratification. There is plenty of freedom here, but unlike the dreadful freedom of the metropolis, it leads to no trouble. The children seem to accept freely their parents’ institutions and forms of life—forms and institutions which have brought them a freedom which they cherish deeply and use sparingly. The basic psychic fact about the Valaisians, which enables them to live at once freely and traditionally, is that their needs and desires are structurally limited. They work until certain basic needs are fulfilled, and then they stop; as a result, they have ample leisure and look upon their work as a pleasure.
Rousseau has shown us here the deep affinity between the ideal of romantic love and that of radical democracy. He has created the vision of a world—“a new world,” high in the mountains, remote, serene, unknown or ignored by the world below, free from time and change—in which these two dreams, the personal and the political, can be fulfilled. Rousseau’s vision prefigures the one moving so many of our young people today—up in the mountains, out in the desert, away in the undeveloped Third World, they can feel free from the pressures of modern life. And many of Saint-Preux’s successors—many of my students—have done just this, dropping out of the modern world and into old yet “new” ones. And yet Saint-Preux himself doesn’t. Why? Because he gradually realizes that something is wrong with the idyllic picture.
What is wrong becomes visible in the kind of sexual experience it generates. Up here, too, Saint-Preux is free and alone, surrounded by attractive women, committed to another woman who is far away. Saint-Preux is in the most provocative situation we could imagine, yet he is not in the least provoked. What is lacking, Saint-Preux comes to realize, is in fact avidity, that power that animates the metropolis. In the Upper Valais, nothing leads anywhere, thought and action are totally disassociated from one another—this is what makes social life so free of tension. The happiness that men pursue up here is a “peaceful tranquility” which comes to them “not through the enjoyment of pleasure, but rather through exemption from pain.” Indeed, “all our desires which are too alive are deadened here.” At the heart of the idyllic dream, Rousseau makes clear to us, is a wish for death.
For some time, we have recognized the death wish—conscious or unconscious—as an ominous undertone in the cultural mythology of romantic love, but Rousseau’s vision of the Upper Valais shows us how the self-destructive impulse can animate radical politics as well. We can see it now as a longing to turn off. If only, as Baudelaire said, we could make a leap “anywhere out of the world”; if we could detach ourselves from body, weight, movement, time; if we could be less ardent, less avid, less passionate, less profound, less human, less alive; if we could turn off “all the desires that torment men in the world below”; if, once and for all, we could just stop being ourselves—then we could be happy! Rousseau’s image of the Valaisian republic projects this longing onto a social and political plane. The recipe reads like a morbid parody of the Social Contract. It is as if the Valaisians have mutually agreed to turn off and tune out, to tranquilize themselves. When people are drained of avidity—or brought up in such a way that avidity will never develop—freedom will no longer be risky; men and women can be secure in their fidelity, and citizens will be perpetually loyal and totally committed to the state. Here, at last, a final solution to the problems of modernity. The urge to get away from it all is, in the end, a death trip.
IV
Avidity is at the heart of Rousseau’s dialectic. On the one hand, avidity compels men to pursue profit and power, to compete against and exploit one another. On the other, avidity alone can infuse men with the daring to get through the masks, to feel and know themselves and each other, and to fight to fulfill their real potentialities. Avidity has liberated human energy for bourgeois society—it has set men and women free to develop their powers in pursuit of power over one another, ending only in death. Now, Rousseau argues, it will take avidity to liberate human energy from bourgeois society—so that people working together, in a genuine community, can develop themselves and each other more fully than possible before.
Rousseau persistently felt an urge to run away from modernity, and he was inexhaustibly brilliant in imagining idyllic ways out. But he saw that though idyllic rural society, untouched by modern life, could indeed generate an “equality of soul,” a “perfect tranquility” that modernization would shatter forever, there was something barren here. If mankind remained fixed at this point, turned off to his desires and impulses, unaware of the freedom (and hence not possessed of any genuine freedom) to choose, “there would be no goodness in our hearts, no morality in our actions.” And, “our understanding would not … develop itself; we would have lived without feeling anything, and we would have died without having lived; all our happiness would have consisted in not knowing how miserable we really were.” If the great thing is to be fully and intensely alive, then we must affirm the life-giving force of modernity—even if it makes us too alive for comfort. Thus the impulses and ideas that led Rousseau away from modernity, when they are pursued most avidly, must lead him back, and back into his own life as a modern man.
For despite its decadence, the metropolis develops in its men and women “that exquisite sensibility which moves the heart when friendship, love and virtue are manifest, and makes us cherish in others those pure, tender and honest feelings which we no longer have ourselves.” The presence of this sensibility among the Parisians was no accident; it was integral to the character of modern men—indeed, it was a survival skill which they could not do without. The very moral imagination which enabled modern men to use ideals as screens, behind which to manipulate and exploit each other, preserved for them an inner sense of what these ideals might really mean. The insight which empowered them to see through one another today might drive them tomorrow to see through themselves.
What did Rousseau want them to see? Above all, the contradiction between the fullness of their powers and potentialities and the bourgeois imperatives which had brought these powers and potentialities into being. The necessities of the social struggle had put a premium on reason, imagination, spirit, beauty, strength—insofar as they could be used as competitive assets; beyond this one use, however, everything was excess baggage. This process had infused men and women with a newly intense sense of themselves, devotion to their personal interests, love of their individuality. But insofar as modern men defined themselves in competitive terms, they were forced “always to ask others who we are, never daring to ask ourselves”; to be “happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of other people, rather than on their own”; to “live constantly outside themselves,”
