A Clash with Democracy 95
lished government must never be touched unless it has become incompatible with
the public good; but this circumspection is a maxim of policy, not a rule of right.”^17
Rousseau, while asserting the right, even doubts the possibility, as well as the pru-
dence, of sweeping change. Old peoples, he says, are incorrigible; they have too
many established customs and prejudices to be capable of renovation. The only
possibility that he sees is in the analogy of disease. “Just as some diseases unhinge
men’s minds and take away their memory of the past, so there may be epochs of
violence in the life of States, when revolutions have the same effects upon peoples
that certain crises have upon individuals, when horror of the past acts as forgetful-
ness, and when the State, consumed in the fires of civil war, is born again, so to
speak, from its ashes.”^18 This was not a prophecy, of course, and still less a call to
revolt; but it was not a bad description of what happened in France in 1793.
Rousseau’s skepticism about the practicability of the ideas in the Social Contract
was justified. It is not that these ideas were essentially visionary; most of them are
better embodied in the United States today, where his influence has been slight,
than in most states of Europe. They were impracticable, however, in direct propor-
tion to the strength of those who refused to accept them. In proportion as a coun-
try lacked a real general will or sense of community, in proportion as it had a dis-
tinct ruling or privileged class insistent upon remaining so, the attempt to apply
the ideas of the Social Contract might be self- defeating. The attempt to impose a
general will where no general will existed, to create a nation in a country where
influential persons preferred to remain an estate, to force people into a kind of
community that they did not want, could lead only to dictatorial rule. Something
of this kind happened in France during the Revolution. Revolution by its nature is
a time when the general will has collapsed, the bonds of association have snapped,
change by agreed upon and legal methods has become impossible. The attempt, or
rather the necessity, to create a general will or solid front in France during the war
with Europe after 1792 was often justified by citations of the Social Contract, and
did in fact contribute to the quasi- totalitarianism of the Terror. But Rousseau was
not, like Lenin, writing as a tactician of revolution. He did not pretend to tell how
a people should go about becoming democratic. Indeed, he confused this whole
issue by identifying legislative with sovereign power and by his negative attitude
toward representative institutions. Primarily, he was writing a critique of the world
as he knew it, of what came in due course to be called the Old Regime.
And what, in summary, was likely in his book to appeal to men in a mood of
rebellion, and to be intolerable to those in positions of government, even at Ge-
neva in 1762? First of all, the theory of the political community, of the people, or
nation, was revolutionary in implication: it posited a community based on the will
of the living, and the active sense of membership and voluntary participation,
rather than on history, or kinship, or race, or past conquest, or common inheri-
tance, or the chance of birth into an already existent political system. It denied
sovereign powers to kings, to oligarchs, and to all governments. It said that any
form of government could be changed. It held all public officers to be removable.
17 Bk. III, Chap. XVIII, Ibid., 281.
18 Bk. II, Chap. VIII, Ibid., 190.