Many of the most familiar characterisations of the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau rely on condensed or truncated approaches to what, in fact, was a large, complicated and incomplete philosophical system, comparable in ambition and scale to those associated with Kant and Hegel. This is a book about how Rousseau came to identify the components of that system and an examination of what was involved in his long struggle to turn its largely implicit structure into something more analytically and logically explicit. Although Rousseau himself set out something like an executive summary of his published works in his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris of 1763 (described in chapter 5 below), it still skated over large parts of the content of the whole system and ended on a characteristically stylish but intractably enigmatic note. An overexcited summary of that content would be to say that this is a book about how Rousseau invented advertising, imagined bitcoin and redefined the politics of public opinion or, more recklessly, to say that this is a study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the first theorist of the politics of charisma and the first advocate of the idea of a blockchain. None of these claims looks particularly compatible with the standards of historical evidence usually required for a contextual history of political thought. Part of the point of this book, however, is to suggest that they do still capture something resonant, not only in Rousseau’s half-buried moral and political system, but also for its bearing on thinking about politics now. As will be shown in what follows, Rousseau was a theorist of a federal system of government, and there is good reason to think that there is still something to be learned about what that term might mean, not only in the context of Rousseau’s time, but also in our own.

The concept of a context is a slippery one, at least as it applies to the history of ideas. It has as much to do with the historicity of a problem as the historicity of an author’s intentions, meanings or concepts. Getting the problem right, by trying to meet the standards of historical evidence required to make sense of a bounded set of difficulties, dilemmas and possibilities, can sometimes make a big hermeneutical difference to getting an author right, whether in terms of intentions, meanings or concepts. This book is about a problem that now seems to belong to another age because the world seems, for a very long time, to have managed to live with social inequality and political centralisation without having fallen to pieces. In another sense, however, it is a problem that is still very much alive because it is not clear how the world has managed to live with a combination of social inequality and political centralisation without having fallen to pieces. The resulting uncertainty about whether the problem is an old one, a new one or even a real one is, it could be claimed, mainly an effect of successive formulations of the many more limited and immediate solutions that have been given to one or other aspect of the problem and how, cumulatively, the lengthening sequence of more limited solutions has come to obscure the underlying continuity of the problem itself. This is why the history of political thought is worth doing and why doing the history of political thought calls as much for dealing with problems in context as with ideas in context. This is a book about both.

It is, in the first instance, a product of a feeling of surprise and curiosity provoked by two characterisations of Rousseau’s thought that I came across several years ago. The first was made in a book entitled Natural Rights by a nineteenth-century Scottish historian of political thought named David George Ritchie. “Rousseau’s distinction of ‘the general will’ from ‘the will of all’”, Ritchie wrote there, “and his seemingly mystical idea of the common self (moi commun), are anticipations of the political theories of the great German idealists. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel are disciples of Rousseau in a truer sense than those Jacobin Puritans, Robespierre and St. Just, by whom Rousseau has too frequently been compared.”¹ The second characterisation is shorter because it was simply a footnote in the book published in 1936 by the now more famous German and American historian of political thought Leo Strauss on The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. “It is”, Strauss wrote in that note, “thus not a matter of chance, that la volonté générale [meaning the general will] and aesthetics were launched at approximately the same time.”²

The mixture of surprise, curiosity, and excitement produced by these two quite cryptic pronouncements was caused less by the connection between Rousseau and German idealism made by both Ritchie and Strauss because there were, particularly before the two World Wars, many acknowledgments of the reception of Rousseau’s thought in the German speaking parts of Europe.³ It was caused instead more by the sense that both Ritchie and Strauss had noticed – or were simply more familiar with – something that was once taken to be interesting and important in Rousseau’s thought but was no longer visible in the many, largely late twentieth-century, studies of Rousseau that I knew. Despite the coincidental similarity of the subject of natural rights in the titles of their two best-known books, both Ritchie and Strauss’s characterisations of Rousseau seemed to indicate that there was something more to his thought than the assorted concepts of natural rights, the general will, civil religion, or even the idea of a social contract itself. The next question was to try to identify what that something was and, by extension, to try to work out how what Ritchie called “the seemingly mystical idea of the common self” (and here, the word “seemingly” is important) was connected to what Strauss, in a book about Hobbes, described as the relationship between Rousseau, “la volonté générale, and aesthetics”. As time has gone by, I have come to think that the connection was based on what, in the eighteenth century, was then a rather unusual concept of a political society, even though the concept in question has, at least in one sense, become very much more familiar. It is, simply, a federal concept of political society. In the eighteenth century, it was a concept that was used in a Swiss context and, although it can sometimes be forgotten, Rousseau grew up in what is still called Switzerland, even though there is now also a Swiss state.

As more time has gone by, and as the distinction between a Swiss Land and a Swiss state is designed to suggest, I have also come to think that a federal concept of political society is a lot more elusive and unusual than it seems.⁴ It is not as easy as it looks to decide whether the differences between, for example, a federal state and a unitary state, or a unitary state with a federal government as against a federal state with a unitary government, are mainly verbal or really substantive. Each is, minimally, a unit made up of other units. Each can house several different types and levels of office and accountability, but are still sufficiently integrated to remain externally independent but internally interdependent. One alternative is a more bounded definition, as in a modern republic, a federal republic, a monarchical republic, a bourgeois republic, a pluralist republic or, as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay called it in 1788 in numbers 51 and 62 of The Federalist, a compound republic.⁵ The common name is consistent enough, but it is less clear whether the proliferating range of adjectives refers to a number of different things or helps to disguise a more uniform range of fundamentally similar attributes. Nor, in the light of these somewhat imprecise differences, is it easy to decide how much these distinctions have to do with the relationship between sovereignty and government, the state and the market, the public and the private, centralisation and decentralisation, or any of the other binaries that, at first sight, seem to provide a basis for an answer.⁶ The difficulty in deciding on the right answer also has a considerable bearing on the earlier question about the sources of stability under conditions of inequality and political centralisation because, in several different guises, that earlier question about stability was the eighteenth century’s question. The further difficulty is then to decide whether, in the light of subsequent intellectual developments, it is an old question that has now been given a twenty-first century answer, or whether, instead, it is the eighteenth century’s answer that has now been forgotten. Together, these add up to two good reasons to find out more about the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau because Rousseau’s thought is a very good starting point for trying to identify what the respective attributes of states, unitary states and federal states might be. It could even be the case that it offers the richest and most theoretically elaborated theory of federalism available in the history of political thought.

Rousseau produced almost all his major works in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In purely chronological terms, they followed Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (as the English translation of his De l’esprit des lois was originally entitled), published in 1748, and, soon after Rousseau’s death in 1778, they were followed by the publication of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s three great Critiques, of pure reason, practical reason and judgment. In more analytical terms, Rousseau’s publications came to be seen to contain an alternative to the two conceptions of government and the two ways of thinking about political stability with which the thought of Montesquieu and Kant was often associated. The first, associated with Montesquieu, was the concept of monarchy, or the rule of one, while the second, associated with Kant, was the concept of polyarchy, or the rule of many. Both concepts had a long history in European thought but both subsequently came to refer to versions of monarchy and polyarchy that differed considerably from earlier usage because both, in Rousseau’s intellectual wake, began to be associated with the concept of a new and rather different type of republic. This type of republic was a kind of synthesis of monarchy and polyarchy. It is now better known as a federal republic. This, it could be said, was Rousseau’s legacy. During the several generations that spanned the careers of David Ritchie and Leo Strauss, the many different types of dualism – between sovereignty and government, government and opposition, public and private, states and markets, centralisation and decentralisation – that have come to be seen as a feature of modern political societies, irrespective of whether they are federal or unitary, were once associated with Rousseau. This is a book about what that claim once meant and, in a more muted sense, what it could mean now.

The account that follows is an organised sequence of developments of a number of apparently small, but intriguingly thought-provoking, details of Rousseau’s thought which, I think, have tended to be overlooked or neglected by many far better Rousseau scholars than I am. The first is a claim about the imagination and its apparent ability to endow a general idea with a particular feeling. The second is a claim about the feeling of concern for one’s own well-being that Rousseau called amour-de-soi. It was, Rousseau emphasised, a feeling common to all living beings but one that has a particular importance to humans because, while humans do not have the instincts that enable animals to take care of themselves, they do, apparently, have a natural love of order and, by extension, a sense of justice. To Rousseau, both these feelings were part of amour-de-soi and he went to some lengths to try to explain how they work. The third detail is a claim about the natural quality of the feeling of shame and, by extension, a question about how that feeling could be reconciled with Rousseau’s better-known description of humans as naturally solitary, silent, sentient creatures with no initial involvement with others. The final detail is a claim that Rousseau made about what he called human perfectibility and a further set of questions about its bearing on the relationship of industry to agriculture and, more broadly, to the many, under-examined, predictions of revolution that Rousseau scattered over almost all his published works.

Fuller descriptions of all these, as well as many other, aspects of Rousseau’s thought can, and will, come later. Here, it is enough to suggest that understanding these details and fitting them into a more comprehensively integrated account of Rousseau’s thought has the effect of making it possible not only to see what Ritchie and Strauss could have had in mind in making their respective assessments, but also to understand rather more of what Rousseau himself, quite early in his intellectual career, called his grand sad system. Piecing together the components of that system also has the effect of explaining the continuing significance of Rousseau’s thought in the line of nineteenth-century German political thought with which both Ritchie and Strauss were familiar. If, as is well known, that line included Kant, Fichte and Hegel, it also included several individuals who are now less well known, like Lorenz von Stein, Rudolf Jhering and Georg Jellinek. Jellinek, in an otherwise fairly conventional essay, produced a striking characterisation of Rousseau’s thought towards the end of a comparison between Rousseau and Hobbes which he published in 1891.⁷ After describing some of the similarities between the two, Jellinek noted how well Hobbes’s political thought lent itself to the idea of a monarch as the first servant of the state as it had been proposed by the eighteenth century’s most famous absolute sovereign, Frederick ii of Prussia. Given the similarities, Jellinek pointed out, the same idea should also have been applicable to Rousseau’s thought, but it was not easy to see how it could. If, as was clearly the case with Rousseau, the sovereign was democratic, it was – and still is – not easy to see how or why a people can ever be a servant of a state, even its own state, as readily and seamlessly as a single individual. At best, the answer seems likely to require a great deal of smoke and mirrors, with a large number of metaphors about representation coming into play. At worst, it seems to entail aligning Rousseau’s thought either with Ritchie’s Jacobin Puritans or with the charge of totalitarianism that became one of the leitmotifs of early twentieth-century Rousseau studies. One, glib, answer would be civics, but it has never been clear what civics actually involves or where and why whatever it does involve has been most likely to occur.⁸

Much of the content of this book has been supplied by the range of questions about the relationship between unity and multiplicity or singularity and plurality implied by Jellinek’s comparison between Rousseau and Hobbes. Some of the questions were actually raised and answered by Rousseau himself. Others owed more to the staggered reception of a number of Rousseau’s earlier answers because several of both the questions and answers were taken up and addressed only after the posthumous publication of some of Rousseau’s previously unknown works, like the Essay on the Origin of Languages, the Plan of a Constitution for Corsica, the Considerations on the Government of Poland and, even, his Confessions. In this sense, Rousseau’s thought had an afterlife that made it possible to integrate a number of previously unrecognised subjects into the established framework of his thought. Here, two subjects came to have a particular significance. One was the subject of money, while the other was the subject of the law. While the first has not been a particularly prominent feature of Rousseau studies, the second has been associated mainly with Rousseau’s concept of the general will.⁹ It is less clear, however, what the general will might be, or how the rule of law might work, under the aegis of a federal system. Here, the key to understanding the relationship between money, the law, the general will and a federal system was supplied by the concept of civil society. Although the name came from Hegel, the concept came from Rousseau. What follows is, in part, designed to show what Rousseau’s moral and political thought begins to look like in the light of the addition of these subjects. It is also, more cautiously, designed to suggest that recovering rather more of Rousseau’s thought, both from his own texts and in the light of those produced by some of his more acute nineteenth-century critics and commentators, is still a thought-provoking basis for trying to get a better understanding of the origins and nature of what, variously, has come to be called a modern republic, a bourgeois republic, a democratic republic, a federal republic or, simply, democracy.