86 Chapter V
among humane and ingenious authors who proposed this or that change in gov-
ernment, or the economy, or education, or the law, Rousseau alone went straight to
the absolute foundation. He revolutionized the nature of authority itself. He de-
nied the existence of authority apart from the individual over whom it was exer-
cised. For him there were by rights no governors and governed, no rulers and no
ruled. There was even no law except law willed by living men—this was his greatest
heresy from many points of view, including the Christian; it was also his greatest
affirmation in political theory. He was the revolutionary par excellence because it
was a moral revolution that he called for, a revolution in the personality and in the
inclination of the will. Man, according to Rousseau, should act not from custom
nor rule nor command, divine or human; nor from laboriously learned principles of
proper behavior; he should act freely and spontaneously according to his own bet-
ter self, the divine spark within him, the virtue which might be suffocated by a bad
form of society, but which a good form of society could nourish and keep alive.
It must be added that Rousseau, the great revolutionary, was revolutionary in a
somewhat negative way.^2 He produced no blueprint and wrote no Utopia for the
future; he pointed out what was missing in existing society. He joined no move-
ments; indeed, when approached by certain Genevese intent on a small “revolu-
tion,” he would not offer to aid them. He gave no practical advice; or when he did
give it, as to the Poles, was notably conservative in some of his opinions. What he
did, and it was revolutionary enough, was to undermine the faith of many people
in the justice of the society in which they lived. In a neurotic and exaggerated way,
because he felt it more keenly, he expressed the malaise that many people of the
middle class came to feel in an aristocratically oriented world. But many men and
women of the nobility also came to feel, in reading this eloquent and moving au-
thor, that inequalities and barriers and constrictions that they had hitherto ac-
cepted were absurd.
The great change in Rousseau’s own life, his personal and internal revolution, or
realization that he and humanity had been pursuing a wrong path, came in 1749
and 1750. “I began my reform,” he later said, “by my articles of dress; I gave up
gold lace and white stockings, took to wearing a round wig, and put aside my
sword; I sold my watch, telling myself with an unbelievable joy: Thank heaven, I
shall never have to know what time it is again.” The simple life was made easier
when one of Therese’s brothers absconded with his twenty- two best shirts, a left-
over from his days in the embassy at Venice.^3
There were two things that he now idealized, the better to show the faults of
existing society—“nature,” and Geneva. In 1749 he wrote his Discourse on the Arts
and Sciences, propounding the “paradox,” as it seemed to complacent contempo-
raries, that technical and scientific and purely intellectual achievement, with all the
wonders and complexities of modern civilization, in and of themselves made men
no better. To make his point he idealized the life of the bon sauvage, the state of
2 See the discussion by Peter Gay, and his valuable review of the literature on Rousseau as a
political thinker, particularly p. 27, in his introduction to his translation of E. Cassirer, The Question
of Jean- Jacques Rousseau (N.Y., 1954), to which I am much indebted.
3 Cf. the chapter entitled “La ‘Reforme’ de Jean- Jacques” in J. Guehénno, Jean- Jacques Rousseau,
vol. II, Roman et Vérité (Paris, 1950); the quotation, from the Confessions, is on p. 21.