For some time, we have recognized the death wish—conscious or unconscious—as an ominous undertone in the cultural mythology of romantic love, but Rousseau’s vision of the Upper Valais shows us how the self-destructive impulse can animate radical politics as well. We can see it now as a longing to turn off. If only, as Baudelaire said, we could make a leap “anywhere out of the world”; if we could detach ourselves from body, weight, movement, time; if we could be less ardent, less avid, less passionate, less profound, less human, less alive; if we could turn off “all the desires that torment men in the world below”; if, once and for all, we could just stop being ourselves—then we could be happy! Rousseau’s image of the Valaisian republic projects this longing onto a social and political plane. The recipe reads like a morbid parody of the Social Contract. It is as if the Valaisians have mutually agreed to turn off and tune out, to tranquilize themselves. When people are drained of avidity—or brought up in such a way that avidity will never develop—freedom will no longer be risky; men and women can be secure in their fidelity, and citizens will be perpetually loyal and totally committed to the state. Here, at last, a final solution to the problems of modernity. The urge to get away from it all is, in the end, a death trip.
IV
Avidity is at the heart of Rousseau’s dialectic. On the one hand, avidity compels men to pursue profit and power, to compete against and exploit one another. On the other, avidity alone can infuse men with the daring to get through the masks, to feel and know themselves and each other, and to fight to fulfill their real potentialities. Avidity has liberated human energy for bourgeois society—it has set men and women free to develop their powers in pursuit of power over one another, ending only in death. Now, Rousseau argues, it will take avidity to liberate human energy from bourgeois society—so that people working together, in a genuine community, can develop themselves and each other more fully than possible before.
Rousseau persistently felt an urge to run away from modernity, and he was inexhaustibly brilliant in imagining idyllic ways out. But he saw that though idyllic rural society, untouched by modern life, could indeed generate an “equality of soul,” a “perfect tranquility” that modernization would shatter forever, there was something barren here. If mankind remained fixed at this point, turned off to his desires and impulses, unaware of the freedom (and hence not possessed of any genuine freedom) to choose, “there would be no goodness in our hearts, no morality in our actions.” And, “our understanding would not … develop itself; we would have lived without feeling anything, and we would have died without having lived; all our happiness would have consisted in not knowing how miserable we really were.” If the great thing is to be fully and intensely alive, then we must affirm the life-giving force of modernity—even if it makes us too alive for comfort. Thus the impulses and ideas that led Rousseau away from modernity, when they are pursued most avidly, must lead him back, and back into his own life as a modern man.
For despite its decadence, the metropolis develops in its men and women “that exquisite sensibility which moves the heart when friendship, love and virtue are manifest, and makes us cherish in others those pure, tender and honest feelings which we no longer have ourselves.” The presence of this sensibility among the Parisians was no accident; it was integral to the character of modern men—indeed, it was a survival skill which they could not do without. The very moral imagination which enabled modern men to use ideals as screens, behind which to manipulate and exploit each other, preserved for them an inner sense of what these ideals might really mean. The insight which empowered them to see through one another today might drive them tomorrow to see through themselves.
What did Rousseau want them to see? Above all, the contradiction between the fullness of their powers and potentialities and the bourgeois imperatives which had brought these powers and potentialities into being. The necessities of the social struggle had put a premium on reason, imagination, spirit, beauty, strength—insofar as they could be used as competitive assets; beyond this one use, however, everything was excess baggage. This process had infused men and women with a newly intense sense of themselves, devotion to their personal interests, love of their individuality. But insofar as modern men defined themselves in competitive terms, they were forced “always to ask others who we are, never daring to ask ourselves”; to be “happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of other people, rather than on their own”; to “live constantly outside themselves,” so that the individual “depends on the judgment of others for the very sense of his own existence.” The amour propre which the bourgeoisie defined and celebrated as “self-love” was actually an inner emptiness, a total poverty and bankruptcy of self. Modernization had indeed developed the spirit to “almost the highest point of its perfection”; but the embourgeoisment which animated modernization had alienated it radically from actual human feelings and needs.
I think we can find in Rousseau a strategy that may be even more fruitful in our time than it was in his. It is to appeal to modern men on the basis of their own sensibility and awareness of life. Rousseau believed such an appeal was possible because modern society had developed in its men and women a mode of consciousness capable of transcending it. If this consciousness could be developed further, into self-consciousness and into social consciousness, then modern people—people who were intensely “ardent, avid, ambitious,” who strove constantly to turn their thoughts into actions, their fantasies into realities—might be able to resolve their personal and their political problems together, to reform radically their society and themselves from within.
Rousseau’s strategy was profoundly dialectical: it was to “draw from the evil itself the remedy that can cure it.” The first step was negative: to show modern man, “who thinks he’s happy, how miserable he really is.” This was the purpose of Rousseau’s most probing and penetrating psychological and political writing. The next step was positive: “to illuminate his reason with new ideas, and warm his heart with new feelings, so that he’ll learn that he can best multiply his happiness and expand his being by sharing them with his fellowmen.” Even the most avid egotist could be made to understand “how his own personal interest demands that he submit to the general will.” Then, “with a stout heart and a sound mind, this enemy of mankind would give up his hatred with his fallacies; the very reason that drew him apart from humanity would lead him back to it. Then he would become a good, virtuous, sensitive man. Instead of a vicious outlaw, he would want to be the firmest pillar of a good society.”
I remember an SDS meeting at the New York Community Church on a sweltering July night in 1966. A black man spoke, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) I think, and told us—as Malcolm X had been telling us for a year or so before he was killed—that there was an important role for white radicals in “the Revolution,” but that this role wasn’t in the black ghetto. What we needed to do, he said, was to go back home, wherever we came from, and “work with our own kind.” The white radicals in the audience didn’t take this very well. One of the ablest and most courageous I know, a community organizer in Newark, said: “So you’re telling us to go back to our parents?” In effect, said the SNCC man, yes. “But I have more in common with oppressed blacks in the ghetto than I have with my parents in Scarsdale. I have more in common with sharecroppers in Georgia, Indians on the reservation, Bolivian tin miners, Vietnamese—for Christ’s sake, I have more in common with anybody than with my parents! That’s why I’m in the movement in the first place.” Most of us agreed. But the man from SNCC persisted: We had more in common with our parents than we liked to think.
For a great many of us there could be no greater insult. But the truth is that there are some very deep impulses which we and our parents share; impulses which are frighteningly ambiguous, but which are in themselves nothing to be ashamed of; impulses which have radical possibilities for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters alike. They are what Rousseau called perfectibility and—in its most distinctively modern expression—avidity. Perfectibility: the unwillingness to settle back and rest content, the need to change constantly one’s life for the better. Avidity: the desire to turn thought into action, to do it, here and now. It is perfectibility and avidity that lead our parents, in Scarsdale or wherever they are stuck, to