The impulse which Saint-Preux blames for his infidelity, and tries to reject in himself, is an impulse which he shares with all modern men, a force that animates them and drives them all, and gives modern society its distinctive form: this is what Rousseau calls avidité, “avidity.” In the Social Contract it will appear as the motive force behind “the turmoil of commerce and the arts, the avid pursuit of profit”—a force which Rousseau considers absolutely incompatible with democracy. Here it appears at the heart of Parisian life, and Saint-Preux condemns it as the real motive for his crime. “They looked at me with a violent avidity”—and he looked back. Avidity is linked with avarice, the bourgeois desire for money and profit; but it is a great deal more than avarice. As Rousseau sees and feels it, it can express itself just as well in sexual desire or in aggressive violence. Indeed, it floats freely between one object and another. This ambiguity is a key to the deeply ambiguous character of the social system it sustains. In modern society, sex, money, and violence are hopelessly entangled with one another, need and greed are intertwined, for modern society both liberates impulses and mixes them up, with catastrophic results. What is to be done? From this point, Rousseau went off in two radically opposite directions. Sometimes, as we will see later, he tried to make distinctions, to disentangle the different kinds of avidity, to separate need from greed, creative from destructive energy. At other times, as we have seen already, he saw them all as one, condemned them all, root and branch, and tried to reject modernity as a whole.
The same logic that led Rousseau to despair of Saint-Preux’s capacity for fidelity in the modern city also led him to despair of the capacity of modern men for democracy or community. What made them such bad material for democratic citizenship and participation in communal life, Rousseau believed, was their free-floating avidity. Every modern people, he said, is “noisy, brilliant and fearsome,” “an ardent, avid, ambitious people … given to the two extremes of opulence and poverty (misère), of license and slavery.” The basic trouble with people like this is that they can’t be counted on: They are never fully committed to anyone or anything except the pursuit of their personal interests. “A prey to indolence and all the passions it excites, they plunge themselves into debauchery, and sell themselves for satisfaction; self-interest makes them servile, and idleness makes them restless; they are either slaves or rebels, never free men.”
III
When Rousseau turned away from the great city in search of “love, happiness and innocence,” he turned toward those traditional, rural societies in the backwaters and backwoods of Europe (or beyond Europe altogether) not yet affected by the process of modernization. For it was only in undeveloped societies, he often argued, that radical democracy could take root. The impact of Rousseau’s thought here has been enormous: We can see his influences on the Russian Narodniks and American Populists of the nineteenth century, and, more recently, on Mao and Fanon and many ideologues of the Third World today.
Rousseau did not think rural societies of his period were fine just as they were: He despised the fashionable pastoral conventions and saw, as clearly as anyone in his time, the starvation and oppression and misery that choked the countryside. Still, he believed that the very misery of rural life generated human qualities that were indispensable to a democratic citizenry. Peasants know how to endure, to hold on; thus they are “attached to their soil” far more tenaciously than modern men are committed to their cities. The life of the traditional peasant commune is “happy in its mediocrity”; it leaves its members “incapable of even imagining a better way of life.” What is striking and disturbing about these views is that they glorify narrowness, rigidity, ignorance, even stupidity—precisely those qualities Marx later stigmatized as “the idiocy of rural life.”
One of history’s most compelling collective dreams has been that the last shall be first. Rousseau made the dream seem plausible. Backward people, he argued, by virtue of their very backwardness, are really able to preserve virtues which advanced peoples have had to repress in themselves in order to get ahead. Two centuries of populism, anarchism, socialism, and communism have given Rousseau’s language an elaborate and complex vocabulary, which we can use to translate his ideas into ideologies of our time. The dream that the last shall be first emerges as the contemporary political theory—or, maybe, political myth—that the undeveloped societies can make the leap from feudalism or colonialism to socialism directly, without having to pass through a capitalist stage.
Rousseau’s most fully realized vision of an unmodernized radical democracy occurs in The New Eloise, when the Swiss mountain community of the Upper Valais is experienced and evaluated for us through the eyes of Saint-Preux. In the structure of the novel, it corresponds to Saint-Preux’s evocation of Paris; in the structure of Rousseau’s ideas, the Upper Valais is an antithesis to Paris, an archetype of the Rousseauean alternative to modernization. This idyllic society, however, contains inner contradictions of its own, contradictions even more severely destructive than the ones they were meant to overcome; and the radical democracy of the rural commune turns out to be most inauthentic for precisely the people who need and want it most avidly.
Saint-Preux greets the new society with a rush of exaltation, which Rousseau presents to us as a sudden illumination, an ecstatic vision. For the first time in Saint-Preux’s life, people are going out of their way to be nice to him. Unlike the Parisians, who constantly try to pull him into their worlds, the Valaisians, he reports, “went about their lives as if I wasn’t there, and I was able to act as if I had been alone.” They are totally devoid of avidity. Their hospitality flows from a “disinterested humanity,” a genuine “zeal to please every stranger that chance or curiosity sends them.”
Saint-Preux discovers the social foundations of these lovely qualities. The Valaisians are small independent farmers and artisans; their community is a democratic republic. The basic social units here are the extended family and the village commune. There is only the most rudimentary division of labor or exchange, and money is virtually nonexistent, for it is superfluous. The community as a whole is self-sufficient; it seeks nothing outside itself. Its economy has no luxury, but no poverty either; it is free from the economic extremes that tear the modern city apart; it produces a modest but real “abundance for all.” Valaisian society is not classless, but it eliminates the inequities of feudal stratification. There is plenty of freedom here, but unlike the dreadful freedom of the metropolis, it leads to no trouble. The children seem to accept freely their parents’ institutions and forms of life—forms and institutions which have brought them a freedom which they cherish deeply and use sparingly. The basic psychic fact about the Valaisians, which enables them to live at once freely and traditionally, is that their needs and desires are structurally limited. They work until certain basic needs are fulfilled, and then they stop; as a result, they have ample leisure and look upon their work as a pleasure.
Rousseau has shown us here the deep affinity between the ideal of romantic love and that of radical democracy. He has created the vision of a world—“a new world,” high in the mountains, remote, serene, unknown or ignored by the world below, free from time and change—in which these two dreams, the personal and the political, can be fulfilled. Rousseau’s vision prefigures the one moving so many of our young people today—up in the mountains, out in the desert, away in the undeveloped Third World, they can feel free from the pressures of modern life. And many of Saint-Preux’s successors—many of my students—have done just this, dropping out of the modern world and into old yet “new” ones. And yet Saint-Preux himself doesn’t. Why? Because he gradually realizes that something is wrong with the idyllic picture.
What is wrong becomes visible in the kind of sexual experience it generates. Up here, too, Saint-Preux is free and alone, surrounded by attractive women, committed to another woman who is far away. Saint-Preux is in the most provocative situation we could imagine, yet he is not in the least provoked. What is lacking, Saint-Preux comes to realize, is in fact avidity, that power that animates the metropolis. In the Upper Valais, nothing leads anywhere, thought and action are totally disassociated from one another—this is what makes social life so free of tension. The happiness that men pursue up here is a “peaceful tranquility” which comes to them “not