Fugitive Rousseau: Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom

By Jimmy Casas Klausen

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with “noble savages” and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau’s thought and argues that a fresh, “fugitive” perspective on political freedom is bound up with Rousseau’s treatments of primitivism and slavery.

Rather than trace Rousseau’s arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau’s famous sentence “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Mar 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823257317

Jimmy Casas Klausen

Jimmy Casas Klausen is Associate Professor in the Instituto de Relações Internacionais at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

Book preview

FUGITIVE ROUSSEAU

just ideas

transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought

series editors

Drucilla Cornell

Roger Berkowitz

FUGITIVE ROUSSEAU

SLAVERY, PRIMITIVISM, AND POLITICAL FREEDOM

Jimmy Casas Klausen

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klausen, Jimmy Casas, 1976–

Fugitive Rousseau : slavery, primitivism, and political freedom / Jimmy Casas Klausen. — First edition.

pages cm. — (Just ideas : transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5729-4 (hardback)

1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778—Political and social views.   2. Political science—Philosophy.   3. Primitivism.   4. Slavery.   I. Title.

JC179.R9K53 2014

320.01—dc23

2013035840

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14   5 4 3 2 1

First edition

In memory of Michael P. Rogin

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Slavery

1. Displacements

2. . . . and Condensations

II. Freedom?

3. Cosmopolitanism

4. Nativism

5. Fugitive Freedom

Afterword

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. Title page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse

2. Title page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social

3. Frontispiece of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse

4. Plate from Voltaire, Candide, ou l’optimisme, chapter 19

Abbreviations

CPC

Constitutional Project for Corsica, in Political Writings, trans. Frederick Watkins (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953).

É

Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

ÉS

Émile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969).

FD

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse), in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

GM

Geneva Manuscript, in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush et al. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994).

GP

Considerations on the Government of Poland, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Ld’A

Letter to d’Alembert, in Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960).

LP

Letter to Philopolis, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

LV

Letter to Voltaire, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

OC

Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols., ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–95).

OL

Essay on the Origin of Languages, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

PE

Discourse on Political Economy, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

PF

Political Fragments, in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Masters and Kelly, trans. Bush et al.

PN

"Preface to Narcissus," in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

SC

Of the Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

SD

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (Second Discourse), in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

SW

The State of War, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch.

All of the above works are cited by page numbers, followed by references to OC, which include volume number first. Citations to SC include book and chapter numbers and then page numbers. Citations of other works by Rousseau not listed above appear in endnotes.

Acknowledgments

Pace Rousseau’s own identification with the protagonist of Defoe’s novel and his desire that Émile too identify with Robinson Crusoe, Fugitive Rousseau could never have been the product of a man in isolation. This book, as Karl Marx would have agreed, has always been a social labor and will continue to be such in its reception. I am grateful to my friends, parents, sister, grandparents, and teachers for making this labor possible. For fear of trying readers’ patience, I will not exhaustively name you all.

This work comes from research I began under the direction of Wendy Brown and Michael Rogin at the University of California, Berkeley, on cross-cultural encounters in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. Wendy served as sole director when Mike passed away in November 2001. I have dedicated Fugitive Rousseau to Mike’s memory. In an unsurprising Freudian twist, my thinking and the book’s concerns became more and more evocative of Mike’s work after his death.

Wendy has been a fierce supporter and challenging critic of all my work, and I will always be in her debt. Paul Thomas, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and David Bates also oversaw my research, and this work bears the marks of each. I could not have asked for a more generous group of scholars to guide me. Kiren Chaudhry was an important interlocutor in the initial conceptual stages, as was A. A. Long in its final stages. The works-in-progress group that Wendy Brown convened stands as a model of constructive yet unstinting feedback, and I thank all who suffered through my labors.

The research for Fugitive Rousseau has benefited from questions, concerns, conversations, and refutations by audiences at Harvard University, Grinnell College, the University of Virginia, the New School for Social Research, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I was also fortunate to have presented papers at two American Political Science Association annual meetings to receptive audiences. I thank Christopher Brooke and David Williams, a fellow panelist, for having continued to grapple with my Rousseau since APSA 2004 in Chicago. Lawrie Balfour and Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo were too kind as respondents at APSA 2008 in Boston; I also thank Neil Roberts, another fellow panelist, and his Creolizing Rousseau collaborator, Jane Anna Gordon, for upholding a shared intellectual horizon.

During my two years as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Grinnell College, my colleagues always went beyond the call of duty, and I must single out both Ira Strauber and Alan Schrift for their mentorship. Ira read the original manuscript and rightly judged it to be doing too much.

My colleagues here in Madison, in theory and beyond, welcomed my concerns and way of doing political theory. John Zumbrunnen has been a model senior colleague in political theory and has, asymmetrically, read more than enough of my writing. Helen Kinsella and Dan Kapust have been supportive interlocutors, as has Ed Friedman. Keisha Lindsay shared my concerns within and orientation to political theory. I am grateful to her. Fan Guangxin has reaffirmed my difficult love for Rousseau, and I look forward to his doctoral thesis on the Chinese reception of Of the Social Contract at the turn of the twentieth century. It humbles me that Patrick Riley claimed that I know my Rousseau. It has been in his former office in North Hall that some of Fugitive Rousseau was written.

Perhaps not so oddly after all, it was for Elizabeth Povinelli’s anthropology seminar Human Nature that I recall having first read Rousseau; my studies of anthropology under Beth at the University of Chicago have shaped my subsequent approach to political theory. I did not take Michael Warner’s advice on how to organize the concerns that became this book, but I thank him for what must have been a boring conversation in the middle of a thrilling city in the summertime. John Neff provided daily conversation during the initial trials of the book project and continues to be an excellent friend. My beautiful dog Hambone was a scholar and artist in his own right.

Time and space to think and write are hardly possible without fellowship and grant support, and I very gratefully acknowledge the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Graduate Opportunity Program at UC-Berkeley, the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the Committee on Support for Faculty Scholarship at Grinnell College, and the Graduate School and WARF Fund at UW-Madison. All have enabled my scholarly pursuits on Rousseau and the Enlightenment.

I must thank six theorist-friends individually for their piercing and gracious insights. All have proven themselves dedicated scholars and allies, and I promise to continue to reciprocate. First, Julie Cooper and I kept in constant contact for daily encouragement and commiseration during our roughest stretches of writing. We shall have to celebrate lavishly if exhaustedly once again. James Martel has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work, as well as a collaborator on other projects. I always look forward to opportunities to carry on our tradition of catching up and talking anarchism in queer proximity to conferences. Robyn Marasco and Sharon Stanley are incomparable fellow travelers and such intense and acute interlocutors. Rome again awaits us. Finally, Alex Dressler and Annie Menzel have each advanced and refined my interpretations in conversations on Hellenistic philosophy and on the biopolitics of race and the legacies of slavery. Madison became positively delicious upon your arrival.

The reviewers for Fordham University Press gave invaluable feedback, and each cheered on the overall project. I am so, so appreciative of their and the editorial board’s support. I am honored to be part of the Just Ideas series and am grateful to the series editors, Drucilla Cornell and Roger Berkowitz, for their interest. Finally, I cannot thank Thomas Lay and Helen Tartar enough for their forbearance throughout the review process at Fordham. They and Eric Newman have seen Fugitive Rousseau to publication thoughtfully, graciously, and elegantly.

. . . if not a counterprimitivism as such, then at least a model of how the otherness of the primitive might be thought disruptively, not recuperated abstractly.

—HAL FOSTER, The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art

Introduction

Camarade Depestre

C’est un problème assurément très grave

des rapports de la poésie et de la Révolution

le fond conditionne la forme.

—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, Le verbe marronner / à René Depestre, poète haïtien

ROUSSEAU’S EMPIRE

Why have political theorists whose work is marked by critiques of colonial modernity rejected Rousseau so vociferously over the past decade, while those who still champion Rousseau play a tug of war between liberal and communitarian accounts unmarked by postcolonial concerns? Fugitive Rousseau suggests that, although the charges of Rousseau’s critics are not unfounded, they are wrong to dismiss him, and that, symmetrically, liberal and communitarian interpretations are wrong to ignore imperial and colonial themes in Rousseau’s projects for freedom.¹ This book argues that Rousseau’s political theory of freedom, especially collective freedom, must be reconstructed by way of, not in spite of, a reassessment of themes of empire, cosmopolitanism, and Eurocentric globalism. It thus offers a fresh perspective by bringing questions of empire and civilization to bear on studies of freedom in Rousseau and bringing Rousseau to bear on empire studies. Taking both interventions together, this book thus suggests that those peoples most radically displaced by colonial modernity—the black Atlantic diaspora and indigenous peoples—can productively draw on Rousseau for developing contemporary practices of freedom.

In what follows I read Rousseau as a theorist of political freedom who has been shaped by a contemporary history of European empire and settler colonialism, the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe and abroad, the related massive displacement of persons as chattel or indentured labor, the rise of a state system increasingly centered on Europe, the exportation of Western European lifeways, and accompanied domination by large-scale sedentary civilizational societies abroad.² To say that Rousseau has been shaped by these histories I do not mean, and no one who has carefully read him could take me to mean, that he is their ideological apologist. Nor do I mean that he, of the exoticism, of so-called noble savagery, and latterly of the proto-Orientalist Armenian costume, straightforwardly occupies the position of these histories’ victims.³

This project, then, deepens the recent effort by political theorists in the Caribbean and North America to creolize Rousseau. Whereas C. L. R. James himself and the scholars whom Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts have gathered in a special issue of the CLR James Journal extend Rousseau’s arguments by reference to twentieth- and twenty-first-century questions,⁴ Fugitive Rousseau situates Rousseau’s political theory in the frame of a black Atlantic world that would have been broadly recognizable to him and refracts his arguments through the long tradition of the concepts of slavery and freedom—particularly marronnage—from Mediterranean antiquity through African American modernism in interwar Paris. Specifically, I extend the project of creolizing Rousseau by offering two interpretive points that simultaneously criticize Rousseau’s political theory for generating confusions and blind spots and yet find ways to recuperate aspects of his argument for contemporary projects of freedom.

First, I note the fact that Rousseau rhetorically invokes slavery in all his major texts yet, in the main, rarely acknowledges modern race-based slavery. However, I balance this fact with a careful analysis of Rousseau’s rhetoric of slavery and conclude that Rousseau’s use of overstatement and analogy suggests that he is reaching for a language that comes to terms with the centrality of domination in constituting the institutions of political modernity (commerce, civility, complex society, and large-scale administrative states). Rather than seeing modernity as bringing about the revolutionary progress of freedom, Rousseau suggests by his rhetoric that he is developing a counter discourse on unfreedom. His simultaneous invocation of chattel slavery and rhetorical displacement of human trafficking must be seen in this light. Reading Rousseau rhetorically is central to any rigorous attempt to come to terms with his concept of freedom, and reading Rousseauian rhetoric means juxtaposing infrequent references to African slavery with more frequent references to moral slavishness and despotic subjection. Rousseau may be remiss in not acknowledging the African slave trade more squarely, but he does not dismiss its importance.⁵

Second, Fugitive Rousseau grapples with Rousseau’s primitivism in a way that, again, both reveals his deep ambivalences and conflicting impulses yet reconstructs from it an alternative and productive critique of historical-civilizational development—what Hal Foster refers to as a counterprimitivism.⁶ Rousseau’s thinking on so-called savages is usually considered a legacy of early modern social contract theory. On this view he follows in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke even as he criticizes them.⁷ However, I argue that it is more fruitful to place Rousseau’s thinking on savages and human development in an alternate tradition, that of Epicurean and Stoic philosophy—specifically, the stories of human progress offered by Lucretius and Seneca.⁸ Situating Rousseau’s thinking in terms of the reception of Hellenistic accounts of human development reveals central tensions in his own account, because Hellenistic philosophy offers three limit cases for Rousseau’s thinking on freedom: the savage, the sage, and the moral slave. In his chilly perfection, the Stoic sage represents a superhuman form of freedom and thus a poor role model for mere mortals. The moral slave represents what Rousseau calls the political repose of one who may be legally free but morally unable to enact freedom because she succumbs to corruption. The savage is ambiguous: according to Seneca, the savage is solipsistic, premoral, and thus not properly free; according to Lucretius, the savage expresses freedom and justice in vernacular but underdeveloped social forms and so is eligible for freedom. Rousseau, I argue, wants to subscribe to both accounts, but they pull him in divergent directions.

Thinking through these limit cases, I show that Rousseau remains conflicted about the status of morality in relationship to freedom: sometimes it is a natural and premoral remainder such that only peoples uncontacted and uncorrupted by European civilization are free; sometimes freedom involves unremitting moral exercise, and therefore only advanced, nonprimitive peoples can be free. On the first account, political freedom still looks like natural liberty: it is primordial and can only be safeguarded on reservations of cultural purity. I call this Rousseau’s reservation politics and show that it is no surprise that liberals and communitarians place Rousseau in their camps, since reservation politics takes both rationalist and nativist forms. On the second account, political freedom involves moral vigilance in resisting unfreedom, and so its best representatives would be those who risk bodily danger to liberate themselves from any threat of slavery. I reconstruct this second, positive account of freedom from reading moments of political resistance across Rousseau’s political writings. The models for this freedom are fugitive slaves and noncivilized peoples who refuse the European political order. Whereas the first account is strictly primitivist, the second, Rousseau’s theory of fugitive freedom, is counterprimitivist: fugitive freedom may seem superficially primitivist, but since its practice of freedom depends on active flight from and therefore an educated intuition about dominating powers, it cannot claim ignorance of the varieties of domination in modernity. Although I do not offer a wholesale reconstruction of the argument in Of the Social Contract, I do argue that the case for fugitive freedom allows us to see elements of that important tract with fresh eyes.

In the remainder of this Introduction I want to present the three thematics that structure these two interpretive points. The concept of exit, discourses of primitivism, and the problem of moral-philosophical naturalism frame the possibility of freedom for Rousseau and are threaded throughout the book.

OF EXITS—OR, FUGITIVITY

In a follow-up article to his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman nominates the corpus of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as representative of his theory of exit in the political realm. Hirschman writes, the exit-voice model [has] something useful to contribute to the analysis of the state.⁹ Rousseau’s work somehow holds the key, and Hirschman goes on to quote from the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (Second Discourse) and Essay on the Origin of Languages (SD 198–99; OL 253; OC III.203, V.380) and then discusses ethnological data gathered by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others on so-called primitive stateless societies in existence around the middle of the twentieth century. In Hirschman’s hands the assembled data and Rousseau’s corresponding theory reveal a tendency toward fission among segmentary lineage societies (i.e., tribal societies). Rather than to instigate internecine violence, disgruntled bands of people are more likely simply to exit their current society, to hive off from the original group, "without necessarily entering or joining some other group that seems to them better managed. This regular access to exit by way of group fission serves to explain some forms of statelessness" for Hirschman: after all, dispersive fission prevents an aggregate of persons from reaching the critical mass necessary for state formation.¹⁰

This present book is inspired by but complicates Hirschman’s claim about Rousseau. What unfolds over the next five chapters is a study of the means, limits, structured possibilities, and difficulties of exit, exodus, and fugitivity in Rousseau’s work. I think Hirschman is in some sense correct about Rousseau, though I will detail a few caveats. For, in spite of Hirschman’s specific deployment of Rousseauism alongside midcentury ethnology, there is more than primitivism and tribal fission at stake in identifying exit with Rousseau. Primitives are indubitably central in the oeuvre of this so-famous expositor of noble savagery—however, I will refer almost exclusively to Rousseau’s primitives and not to ethnologists’ data.

Yet the problem of exit in Rousseau’s political writings is far stranger than Hirschman lets on and involves far more than primitives. The exit option touches on slaveries and practices of freedom—chattel and metaphorical slaveries, natural liberty and political freedom—it involves, too, mobility and immobilization, the origin and ends of human association, and nativism and cosmopolitanism. Insofar as exit also draws from and simultaneously troubles personal ethics and relations among peoples, then it involves Rousseau’s reception of a Hellenistic philosophical background and its Roman, and his French, imperial political context. Finally, although it would not be apparent from Hirschman’s deployment of Rousseau, exit after the passing of the state of nature is entangled with states (not just peoples) in Rousseau’s thinking, though in rather curious ways: not via the analogues Hirschman draws, though abstains from pursuing—namely, secession (exit in spatial proximity) and emigration (exit with spatial distance). Rather, radical exit in the world of states is enacted above all via fugitivity and marooning, practices that scramble proximity and distance.

Exit, however, is a problematic concept—problematic enough that simply to assimilate it to Rousseau’s theoretical work, as though either his oeuvre or Hirschman’s concept were univocal, simply will not do. Broadly, exit refers to the capacity for individual consumers to take advantage of competition among business firms by moving—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes gladly—from one firm to another in response to a relative, perceived, or real decline in the original firm’s products or services. Exit also refers to the exercise of this option.¹¹ The exit option impersonates economics for Hirschman, though it is not unknown in politics (especially when one votes with one’s feet). Likewise, its fraternal twin, the voice option, impersonates politics because, for the most part, citizens or party members or other political actors in sedentary, large-scale societies cannot simply take their business elsewhere in response to their territorial nation-states’ declines; instead they can only voice their grievances by official and unofficial channels. Despite its primary association with economic actions of customers and firms, Hirschman and his book’s early followers found applications in political domains—declarations of independence, switching of political party loyalties, even the eventual fall of a regime that cannot stem departures.¹² Hirschman’s deployment of Rousseau was only one case among others.

Over the course of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, it is clear that Hirschman wants to see exit and voice as restraints or pressure mechanisms that ought to make organizations perform better (rather than fold altogether). While his units of analysis are corporate firms and disgruntled clients, he more specifically takes the point of view of the disgruntled (i.e., their rational choices) in behalf of the firm or organization. That is, Hirschman writes in the interest of corrections and regulations internal to an institutional system and in opposition to neo-laissez-faire economists’ refusal to consider catastrophic collapses produced by the negative externalities of (former) clients’ completely unfettered, utility-maximizing decisions.¹³ Though Hirschman criticizes free marketeers such as Milton Friedman (arguably one of the major specters haunting Hirschman’s book), his own model of more responsive and responsible decision-making inhabits the same choked horizon: Hirschman, just as much as Friedman, presumes very specific—secularist, liberal, unattached—subjectivities and institutions. He may write of contests over loyalty, but his individual subject-agents do not presumptively seem to act from within fields of power that shape their choices and to which they cannot quite be loyal or disloyal, since they themselves are products of those powers.¹⁴ Because I appropriate the exit model and apply it to the writings of one who considered himself a historian of nature and morality,¹⁵ it behooves me to give due diligence to the fact that Hirschman’s mode of analysis, while case-specific, arises within a specifiable conceptual history yet nonetheless deploys exit ahistorically.

Since, as I have noted, exit touches on so many nodes in a network of problems in Rousseau’s writings, I will be presenting Rousseau as a theorist who tests and historically schematizes the concept of exit rather than simply founding and applying it. My critical conceptual exposition of exit in Rousseau’s writings will consequently trouble some of Hirschman’s apparatus. First, rather than there being simply cases of exit, I will be multiplying a cluster of concepts around exit to analyze Rousseau’s political writings. I do so because, second, Rousseau casts exit differently for different epochs—it is more or less constrained by degree or altogether distinct in kind as times vary. These two points are related. For Rousseau is quite clear that new modes of exit (as well as voice) are generated by specific turning or tipping points in the history of humanity, underwritten by perfectibility. Meanwhile, as new modes of exit arise, others close off. Thus, just as Rousseau thinks an aggregation of persons different than their association, likewise I would insist on qualitatively distinguishing exit during the state of nature from fugitivity in the world of civil society: the former features physical departure from a person or group, as Hirschman describes; the latter may evade government by physical distance but is just as likely to be characterized by techniques of cultural distancing amidst physical proximity.

If Rousseau’s writings analytically historicize the varieties of exit available from epoch to epoch, then we must take note of its epochal changes. In the pure state of nature there was almost nothing to exit from, since any would-be captor’s finite physicality could never overcome the would-be captive’s constant access to escape into infinite nature. In other words, there was nothing but exits, which rendered capture, so rarely ventured, impossible. Even in the second state of nature independence made the availability of exit constant in principle, even if nascent society’s sort of property, which late primitives carved from nature and secured by mutual aid, rendered exit less likely in effect. Nonetheless, as Hirschman seemed to understand (and commandeered ethnology to support), exit’s availability produces a stable equilibrium in what Rousseau refers to as nascent society (SD 164, 167; OC III.167, 170).

What happens to exit after the state of nature? The utterance "this is mine" initiates a process that results in the universal invasion of private appropriation and the global spread of civil societies. The effect, Rousseau notes, is such as to inaugurate a new state of affairs, which I describe in Chapter 1:

in whatever hidden recess of the world a man would take refuge against oppression, he perceives everywhere over his head a menacing hand always ready to crush him. There is no longer any region where it is not a crime to dare claim the right of nature, and nowhere is it permitted to be a man. Our Tyrants are doubtless right to cover the universe with their fetters like this. If there remained a single desert where it were possible to be free with impunity, it would soon become the fatherland of the human race. . . .¹⁶

Now there is no exit from the system of private property or system of states, because no spaces of primitive liberty remain. If such a pure space had remained, then all who yearned for uncompromising freedom would have braved hell or high water to reach it—but presumably this would have outraged our Tyrants, who would have redoubled their efforts to conquer a pays so draining on their despotic designs. While there is no exit from this global territorial system, there is, however, ceaseless mobility within it. These total systems have managed to deform and co-opt exit’s mobility for themselves: the system of private property and the territorial state system shore themselves up in practices of conquest and expropriation and in the infinite interchangeability between master and slave. Furthermore, for Rousseau, they eventually give birth to an ideology called cosmopolitanism that gently chides them for excesses while airing an apologia for their broader worldview: latter-day cosmopolitanism would have no (human) exits either, since it encompasses all humanity. I consider these vast transformations in the first two chapters. That both chapters focus on slavery says a lot about Rousseau’s assessment of the changes that the exit option undergoes.

How is it possible to regain freedom when the totalizing systems and doctrines of civil society capture all terrestrial space and, worse, englobe all humanity? Rousseau theorizes two possible responses and gives occasional indications of a buried third. In response to the moral slavery of cosmopolitanism, Rousseau proposes in Émile a form of political education via counter cosmopolitan travel, which simultaneously encourages Émile to attach himself to his natal community yet prepares him to live anywhere in the world that fortune displaces him. Countercosmopolitan travel, then, both keeps the exit option alive in a new form for a world overspread by mediocre enchaining states and yet settles Émile in one place so that he does not wander as a homeless, stateless vagabond. To the Émilean strategy corresponds a second strategy, which responds to conquest qua political enslavement. Given that the brave new postlapsarian world abides by the maxim conquer or be conquered, the strategy Rousseau theorizes for coping with this Hobbesian international system recommends that well-disposed small or marginal states remain autarkic nonparticipants. In other words, they exit the interstate system by abstaining from its compulsions, by striving (at best) to render themselves innocent of external forces—and Rousseau believes small states or marginal peoples can succeed if they pursue truly nativist self-sufficiency. The writings on Corsica, Poland, and Geneva bear this out.

Émile’s countercosmopolitanism (Chapter 3) and small states’ autarkic nativism (Chapter 4) resist slavery in the form of abstract and international domination, respectively—the moral slavishness of cosmopolitanism in its vernacular and philosophical forms and the political enslavement of conquest. Likewise, the final strategy of exit, fugitivity (Chapter 5), attempts to escape from slavery in any of its forms by transforming exit into an intimate, unremitting practice of freedom in flight. For reasons I discuss in the penultimate section Fugitive Rousseau, this strategy is not one Rousseau details explicitly but must be reconstructed from several moments in his writings. In such textual moments, fugitivity is characterized by mobile self-assertion and either geographic or cultural distancing from dominating others.

PRIMITIVISM

The objective of Rousseau’s recourse to the varieties of exit is to theorize the recovery or reinvention of freedom—but liberté is a complex concept in Rousseau’s oeuvre and bears strong, even necessary relations with problems of dependence, autonomy (making law for oneself), and, that most slippery of terms, nature.¹⁷ Freedom also and consequently owes a lot to Rousseau’s thinking on primitive humanity. Rousseau is an expositor of cultural primitivism, which Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas have defined as the discontent of the civilized with civilization or with some conspicuous and characteristic feature of it¹⁸—specifically in Rousseau’s case, discontent with civilized societies’ inexorable tendency toward slavery and domination—that is, illegitimate dependencies in their many guises. Cultural primitivism is often conjoined to chronological primitivism, which locates the most highly valued primitive way of life—for there can be many primitive ways of life, variably valued—by way of a philosophy of history characterized by, say, decline, cyclicity, undulation.

Rousseau sets out the stakes of cultural primitivism most dramatically in the Second Discourse, for therein he sets up a schema that, I argue, he pursues in the rest of his political theory. This schema is fourfold: (1) alegitimate, asocial independence; (2) alegitimate, social independence; (3) illegitimate social dependence; (4) legitimate social interdependence. The chronological dimension of Rousseau’s cultural primitivism is complicated, for he favors two periods or two positions in this schema: the second and fourth. Although he values them for different reasons and, in his stricter moments, distinguishes them in regard to morality, as we shall see, he sometimes collapses these two periods or positions.

The Rousseauian state of nature covers the first half of the schema. In the pure state of nature, when human animals roved about and almost never encountered one another in the spatial vastness of the natural world, they exhibited an independence that was both asocial and alegitimate. After many of them began to gather together in the fixed or semi-fixed settlements that marked nascent society, they still retained their independence, yet this independence was now social: they lived with, but did not require, one another, and each could manage to procure independently all she needed for self-preservation and the first inklings of commodious life. This socially experienced independence still remained alegitimate, however, because morality, though nascent with society itself, was inchoate.

The advent of private property—and with it the fateful, fatal double penetration of terrestrial space by civil society and states—introduces the second half of the schema. It also introduces the focal politico-moral quandary of life after the state of nature: the increased social interaction that civil society brings in its train accelerates the development of human perfectibility—the artful cultivation of natural human capacities—but in so doing, civil society simultaneously promises and thwarts properly moral action in the same double gesture. Hence, even though, in the resounding words of Of the Social Contract, the transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked (SC I.8, 53; OC III.364), nevertheless the way civil society actually unfolds pushes this promise of legitimate social interdependence beyond the horizon and installs illegitimate social dependence instead. In short, the transition from nascent society to civil society should have brought political freedom, characterized by autonomy and interdependence, but generated slaveries, heteronomy, and mutual dependency instead. The main body of the Second Discourse concludes on this grim note—in the civil state humans now qualify as morally responsible creatures even as they commit and multiply acts that violate morality.

How can natural human perfectibility fulfill its own promise and facilitate the transition from illegitimate social dependence to legitimate social interdependence? Does the fourfold schema trace not a unilinear sequence of four stages but rather a path that forks such that, at the birth of the civil state, a nascent society can develop its perfectibility in one of two ways: legitimate interdependence or illegitimate dependence?

One point is clear: retrogression is impossible. Just because morally responsible creatures have employed their perfectibility for vicious ends does not mean that humans should destroy society, annihilate mine and thine, or return to live in forests with the Bears (SD 203; OC III.207). As for the human boy who in 1694 had in fact been found living in the forests with bears—a case discussed by the Abbé de Condillac¹⁹—Rousseau suggests that this feral child of Lithuania represents no counterproof about nature’s ultimate ends. The example of the wild boy only proves that perfectibility and nature qua origin go their separate ways: a creature naturally constructed for bipedalism but perfectibly adapting himself to his ursine nursery, the feral boy habituated himself to walk on all fours, just as a person lacking one or both hands will, by artful application, have learned to manipulate dexterously with his feet (SD 190–92; OC III.196–98). His case does not indicate retrogression but rather the physical adaptability of natural organs. However, at the same time, an adult human who developed bipedalism would find it impossible to rehabituate himself to quadrupedalism or to subsist[ence] on grass and acorns (SD 203; OC III.207).

The feral boy raised by bears suggests, likewise, that humans who have developed in moral responsibility’s nursery cannot unlearn morality. After pushing through its threshold, return to an amoral state is impossible. They still remain moral creatures, even if morality itself is eminently malleable and the majority of humans have fostered vicious moral adaptations. Thus, in answer to those who impute to him advocacy of a return to ancient and first innocence, Rousseau protests, Those [like himself] . . . who are convinced that the divine voice called all Mankind to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial Intelligences; all of them will try, by practicing the virtues they obligate themselves to perform as they learn to know them, to deserve the eternal prize they must expect for it (SD 203–4; OC III.207). Hence, whatever series of accidents pushed human perfectibility past the threshold of morality, humans’ newly achieved knowledge of morality brings new obligations along with its new powers. For Rousseau, the obligation exists because the power does.

For example, although humans naturally were organized in a way that facilitated speech even if language itself is unnatural, nevertheless, once they gained the power thereof, they obligated themselves to its moral use. So there are moral ends to language, even if many abuse it. With all the languages in the world and all the types of speech, and with natural origin as no guide after the definitive break from the natural state, how can we identify virtuous and vicious uses of language? Just as the organ of speech is natural to man while speech itself is nevertheless not natural to him (SD 207; OC III.210), so likewise Rousseau would distinguish natural origin from moral ends. More broadly, the example of speech implies that we must distinguish natural genesis from the exodus out of nature that human perfectibility allows. Furthermore, since we cannot with certainty determine a finis ultimus, we must judge perfectibility not by the many and variable paths exodus can take, but rather by the structure of perfectibility itself. As such, what matters is not the content of any given instance of perfectibility, but its structural sustainability overall.

Which epoch presents the greatest sustainability in the history of human faculties? The answer to this question will seem to confirm Rousseau’s primitivism and also his naturalism. For he identifies nascent society, often called Rousseau’s Golden Epoch, as most sustainable:

this period [viz., nascent society] in the development of human faculties, occupying a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour propre, must have been the happiest and the most lasting epoch. The more one reflects on it the more one finds that this state was the least subject to revolutions, the best for man (XVI), and that he must have left it only by some fatal accident which, for the sake of the common utility, should never have occurred. The example of the Savages, almost all of whom have been found at this point, seems to confirm that Mankind was made always to remain in it, that this state is the genuine youth of the World, and that all subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species. (SD 167; OC III.171)²⁰

This golden epoch would have lasted forever if some exogenous cause had not befallen these humans. Indeed it happily continues in locales only just contacted in the Age of Discovery, although direct or indirect contact with civilization’s travelers will serve as the fatal accident that so rudely upsets the savages’ just mean and interrupts their timeless lives. In itself the way of life of nascent society is most sustainable, for nothing internal to its structure would knock it out of its eternal, stable equilibrium—only an exogenous accident, whether a natural or an alien human catastrophe, can do so.

The passage and the way of thinking that it crystallizes would seem to corroborate Rousseau’s primitivism. It is not the earliest, pure state of nature that he calls the best for man, but this second part of the fourfold schema, which represents a simple, balanced way of life. Hence, it is not the natural savage—that is, not Condillac’s feral boy of Lithuania—but primitive natives who provide the model. Moreover, their nascent society occupies the near end of the other side of the rupture that closes the state of nature. In other words, the best for man belongs to a natural, therefore premoral, state.

If we cannot go back to the forest to live with the bears, if beings given to morality cannot recede to amorality, then how can nascent society, the late state of nature’s primitive sociability, provide a model after the breach? What is the relationship between this society of alegitimate independence and an association of legitimate interdependence? What characteristics, if any, does nascent society’s primitive liberty share with political freedom?

These are central questions of this book and introduce a recurrent problematic that I grapple with in the chapters that follow. I grapple with this problem by interpreting Rousseau’s political writings with reference to Hellenistic philosophy. For not only does he frequently refer to Stoicisim and Epicureanism,