Crisis and renewal: The political imagination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Writing at the dawn of liberal modernity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes some of its key features as both source and symptom of a cultural crisis, and he explores the conditions for a renewal. He analyzes both “crisis” and “renewal”, most significantly, through heavy reliance on a single metaphor: cultural change is a life-journey, specifically a “(re)birth” followed by passage through “childhood”, “youth”, and “maturity” to “old age”. This metaphor, it is argued in this study, proves fundamental to Rousseau's thinking about politics and society in each of the four most ambitious works of his pre-autobiographical phase. It is central to the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (or Second Discourse) (1754), which gives Rousseau's assessment of the cultural crisis, and it is equally pivotal to the three works that explore the way to renewal, Julie or the New Heloise (1760), the Social Contract (1762), and Emile or On Education (1762).; Viewed through the prism of the life journey metaphor, Rousseau emerges as a theorist not exactly of “revolution” or “reform”, but of something like “regeneration”, my term for a process of positive transformation, both spiritual and material, that is fundamental and cumulative in character. “Regeneration” in this meaning involves both the radical change of a cultural “rebirth” and the developmental sequence of a journey of cultural “growth”. Rousseau conceives such a transformation as a series of passages, philosophical and symbolic as much as literal, through certain kinds of material and spiritual landscapes.; His conception of those landscapes is remarkable, even uncanny, for the way it repeats across the four texts. Each text poses the same set of theoretical problems in the same sequence: the problems of beginning, membership, judgment, action, and conservation. The dynamics deemed central to those problems, and the familial imagery that Rousseau enlists to figure those dynamics, also repeat across the texts, and interestingly anticipate the insights of contemporary psychoanalysis. Together, these patterns shed light on Rousseau's strengths and weaknesses as a theorist, on what is insightful and what is problematic about his conception of modern crisis and the way to renewal.