4.4 Virtue
Roman republican references, in the hands of Rousseau and his followers, could be sharp weapons turned against the smug champions of enlightened modern monarchies. Leaving it at that, however, would amount to missing the positive and constructive purpose these references fulfil.
In his Discourse on political economy (DPE), Rousseau (1755: 53) defines ‘virtue’ restrictively as ‘this conformity of the particular will to the general’ and claims that one of the maxims of a legitimate government must be to ‘establish the reign of virtue’. Though using an ‘example’ is a less efficient means for the government than developing a ‘love of country’ (55) in citizens, Rousseau resorts to such examples in order to clarify his view of patriotism: ‘Let us dare to oppose Socrates even to Cato’ (56), since the former is ‘more of a philosopher… instructing some persons’, and the latter ‘more of a citizen…defending the state, freedom and the laws against the conquerors of the world’. Already perceptible is the difference both in the kind of goods (philosophical wisdom/political freedom) and in their scope (some/the citizenry). But Rousseau makes it still clearer: ‘the virtue’ of a contemporary Socrates ‘would make himself happy’; ‘a worthy emulator of Cato…would look after his own happiness in the happiness of all’. This difference ‘alone’, Rousseau concludes, ‘would settle the preference, for no one has ever made a people of sages, but it is not impossible to make a people happy’ (Rousseau 1755: 56, emphasis mine).
As we can already see, Rousseau is here dissociating philosophical wisdom and political happiness, while bringing the latter closer to freedom. But in choosing Cato to establish this assessment, is Rousseau not assimilating happiness and virtue nevertheless, with philosophical Stoicism scoring over philosophical Socratism? It is true that what immediately follows suggests so, with Rousseau asking: ‘Do we want peoples to be virtuous? Let us begin by making them love their country’ (1755: 56; see Lepan 2002) and capable of this ‘sublime virtue’ (Rousseau 1755: 49, 61). At least three reasons militate against such an assimilation.
First, this passage should be read in light of a fragment comparing Socrates and Cato (Rousseau 1972). The same opposition is constructed – ‘Socrates would have made them [i.e. the people] wise, Cato would have made them happy’ – but he also rephrases it with a twofold shift. One is general, subsuming both terms of the opposition under the heading of freedom; the other is specific, revealing the political standpoint from which Rousseau wants the difference to be assessed: while Socrates’ inward or philosophical freedom did not make him hostile to tyranny, ‘Cato abhorred tyranny for it was not enough for him to be free, he also wanted all citizens to be so’ (54, my emphasis). Rousseau startlingly expresses here the notion of republican freedom, which is already evident in a Letter to Voltaire in which he describes himself as ‘republican’ (Rousseau 1764: 842 n.), written to defend the general causes of ‘religion, freedom and justice’ in the aftermath of the troubles caused by the publication of Of Social Contract and Émile: as Tacitus knew, to love freedom as a ‘republican’ means to strive for the freedom for all. As a result, Rousseau’s rephrasing the opposition in terms of happiness in the DPE does not rule out, but on the contrary takes for granted, the intimate association of happiness and republican freedom.
A second consideration, bearing on the general rationale of DPE, confirms that Rousseau does not equate happiness and virtue. While making the people they govern happy constitutes the rulers’ ‘obligation’ (1755: 44), this happiness mainly overlaps the ‘only motive’ having prompted men to join and create civil societies: ‘that of assuring the goods, the life and the freedom of each member by the protection of all’ (49). It is thus to contribute to the satisfaction of this primary motive that virtue, for all its sublimity, is first needed. Indeed, this is illustrated by Cato’s virtuous efforts aimed at ‘defending the state, freedom and the laws’ (56, emphasis mine). Now, Rousseau asks, how can we hope to create such virtuous citizens? His answer is that citizens will be virtuous when they understand that they owe their personal safety to the good government they are under. This claim leads to a sturdy defence of an uncompromising individualist conception of the salus populi:
Is the safety of one citizen (le salut d’un citoyen) less the common cause than that of the whole state?… The safety of the particular is so tied to the public confederation that… this covenant (convention) would be dissolved by the law (le droit) if one single citizen should perish while he could be rescued. (57)
Consequently, far from giving the state a blank cheque to control the citizens’ private existence in order to make them virtuous, Rousseau completely reverses the argument: it is only by ‘protecting its members’ and ‘respecting’ their ‘persons’ that the state can hope to have virtuous citizens (58). By no means new, this argument can be traced at least back to the account Algernon Sidney gives of the Romans’ ‘republican spirit’ in his Discourses concerning government (Hamel 2011: 243–264), the French translation of which Rousseau knows and uses.6 Moreover, Rousseau (1755: 57) flanks his radically individualist conception of the ‘commitment of the body of the nation’ with two Roman references: the first is Cato triumphing over Socrates, as we have seen; the second is the Roman illustration of the last step of Rousseau’s argument. We know that protecting the goods, life and freedom of each private citizen (see 49 and 56–57) is a prerequisite to having a virtuous citizenry; but where should we look for illustrations of such peoples?
The Romans distinguished themselves above all other peoples on earth by the consideration (égards) the government had for private individuals (particuliers), and by its scrupulous care to respect the inviolable rights of all the members of the state. There was nothing as sacred as the life of ordinary citizens. (58)
Among the different Roman laws or institutions he refers to, the leges Porciae, known as the ‘stronghold of Roman liberty’ (Nicolet 1979: 430–432; Arena 2012: 41), are interpreted here as evidence of the important Roman republican concern for individual safety (see Diderot 1753: 489; 1774: 190 for the same reading of the Porcia laws; Ducos 1991: 59–61).
The intellectual significance of this move can hardly be overestimated: not only do Roman republican references provide Rousseau with the adequate means for articulating what is arguably one of the strongest eighteenth-century defences of individual rights (Spitz 1995: Chapter 11), but they also illustrate one of the most important rules of legitimate government, namely that protecting individual rights is at the same time the main precondition of civic virtue and its prime raison d’être.
4.5 The Republic of Letters
Many of the purported ‘classical republican’ uses of Roman references are not devised to castigate modern individualism and glorify the necessary submission of individual interests to the unifying general will (see Saige 1775: 1–3, 39–40, 85). But more importantly, some Roman republican themes can be traced in those very philosophes – Diderot and d’Alembert – who most emblematically personify the modern Enlightenment against which Roman republicanism purportedly struggles (for Diderot see e.g. Quintili 2004; Hamel 2009; Goggi 2013). By contrast with the wonted opposition, the same republican ideal of freedom could also be used by some of these propagators of modern Enlightenment both to diagnose and to suggest quite drastic remedies to the fatal disease suffered by the members of the Republic of Letters.
In