object will be political power not as a task to be accomplished, not as a contingent relationship of being to nothingness, nor as event or beginning; rather, its object will be political power as existing, as existent [étant], and this object will be thought in the categories of the existent and the essence of the existent. Natural law philosophy accordingly discusses society, civil law and public law not in terms of chance occurrence and encounter, of event and advent, but in terms of existence and essence. It relates these essences (of natural law, civil law, and public law) to an originary essence, that of the natural law of the originary subject: man in the state of nature.
Whereas Machiavelli thinks in the fact to be accomplished and the beginning, natural law philosophy thinks in the accomplished fact and the origin. The origin, which I am opposing to the beginning here, is obviously altogether different from the beginning. The origin is not the event in which the beginning of a form of eternity supervenes on the ground [sur le fond] of a matter that is already present, always already present, but formless or formed differently. The origin belongs to a completely different mode [mode] of philosophical reference, a completely different world [monde] of philosophical reference. What is the origin? It is the manifestation of titles of legitimacy in the self-evidence of nature: the titles of legitimacy of the truth as well as the titles of legitimacy of every essence and, in particular, the titles of legitimacy of the essence of civil law and the essence of public law.
Why is this so in natural law philosophy? For a simple reason which, obviously, would call for a great deal of explanation, but which we can begin to state as follows: because the idea of the origin that identifies the origin with nature and makes nature self-evident for a subject of law – because this idea of the origin, in the form I have indicated, was then, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the form par excellence of philosophical thought. These terms must be taken in the strong sense: the form par excellence of philosophical thought, that is, the form of foundation, the form of justification, the form of legitimization of philosophical thought, of philosophical thought as founding, justifying, legitimatizing. If, in this period, natural law theorists thought in the origin, it is because the origin was the philosophical form of legitimization of the titles of every essence, and because these theorists had to proceed by way of this common form to justify their own divergent political positions with regard to their common object, absolute monarchy, which had, accordingly, become their common philosophical problem.
So it was that the problem of absolute monarchy became for all of them, pro or con, the philosophical problem of the origin of the state, setting out from the state of origin, the state of nature, and natural law: the problem, the transition from the state of nature to the nature of the state, which was resolved, as you know, by the social contract. I shall go no further for now; I would simply like to say that, in moving from Machiavelli to Rousseau, we change worlds. As we just saw, we change the object of reflection and, simultaneously, we change the form of philosophical thought.
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We know who Rousseau is. We know it officially, as it were. Why? Because he has been inscribed in the history of philosophy. And he has been inscribed in the history of philosophy by philosophy itself, which has thus inscribed him in its own history: for example, between Locke and Condillac on the one hand and Kant and Hegel on the other. Thus Rousseau occupies a well-defined place. This place has been accorded him on the basis of the observation of, and reflection on, a certain number of concepts which he put forward and which have been recognized as philosophy by the history of philosophy, by philosophy in its history: the concepts that Kant, for example, singled out in Rousseau.
I would like to try to show that, beyond this official recognition of Rousseau, this inscription of Rousseau in the history of philosophy, there exists an aspect of Rousseau, there exist words of Rousseau’s and arguments of Rousseau’s which, like Machiavelli’s – this is why the comparison does not seem to me to be entirely arbitrary – have practically remained a dead letter. To put it differently, there exist words in Rousseau, and perhaps concepts and arguments as well, which were not registered by philosophy in its history when philosophy drew up the accounts of its history or settled its accounts with its own history. The philosophy that has inscribed Rousseau in its history for one or another merit has drawn up its accounts, and its tallies are accurate – but with the figures it has registered. The drawback, or the boon, is that a few figures, a few words, a few concepts have been left out of account, have been neglected. I would like to try to sketch not an exhaustive inventory of these Rousseauesque words and concepts left out of account by the history of philosophy, but an inventory of just a handful of them.
To this end, I shall be focusing my lectures on the second Discourse, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men. To pose the problem, I shall set out from the following aporia or contradiction. With Rousseau, we are quite obviously (since I’ve already discussed Machiavelli on the one hand and natural law philosophy on the other) in the same problematic and the same basic concepts as those of the whole natural law school, that is, the same concepts we have found in Hobbes and Locke.3 There are doubtless differences between Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, but there were also differences between Locke and Hobbes, between Grotius and Pufendorf, between Burlamaqui and Locke; ultimately, the difference between Rousseau and his predecessors is no greater than the differences between his predecessors themselves. If we were able to speak of a thought common to his predecessors, we have to extend it to Rousseau as well: for the basis is plainly the same.
Let us put that more precisely. The form of thought which we see at work in Rousseau, and which commands everything, is the same form of thought as in his predecessors: it is the thought of the origin, the thought that has recourse to the origin. Rousseau very clearly says in several passages that we must go back to society’s origins to expose its foundations, that there can be no other way: this way is mandatory for everyone. He adds that this origin is man’s nature, man in the state of nature. He repeats, then, what his predecessors have said.
Here, for example, is a passage from the second Discourse: ‘this … study of original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principle of his duties, is also the only effective means for doing away with the host of difficulties that present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and countless other similar matters whose importance is equalled only by their obscurity.’4 Elsewhere, Rousseau writes: ‘about [the state of nature] we should … have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly’.5
The procedure is thus perfectly clear. It is essential to go back to the state of nature, the state of origin, in order to discover man’s nature there: only on this condition can we come to know natural right [droit], natural law [loi], the foundation of societies, civil law, political institutions, and the inequality that reigns among men in our present state. Thus the general form of philosophical discourse remains the same. And, in the general form of recourse to the origin, we see the same major categories of thought come into play in Rousseau as in all his predecessors, namely: the state of nature, the state of war, natural right, natural law, the social contract, sovereignty, civil law. This is the obligatory arsenal of this thought of the origin in the field of law.
These categories are grouped together under three basic moments of reflection that punctuate the manifestation of the essence of law. You know these three moments: the state of nature (the first moment), the social contract (the second moment), and the civil state (the third moment). In Rousseau, as in his predecessors, this originary genesis that sets out from the state of nature does not function like a historical genesis. Rather, in Rousseau, as in his predecessors, it functions like an analysis of essence grounded in the self-evidence of its original credentials, nature.
You may recall that Hobbes proposed to consider society as ‘dissolved’, as he puts it, in order to discern its original elements. Rousseau, for his part, calls on a different image: that of foundations buried in dust and sand. ‘Human institutions’, he writes, ‘appear at first
