LESSONS ON ROUSSEAU
LESSONS ON ROUSSEAU
Louis Althusser
Edited with an Introduction by Yves VargasTranslated by G.M. Goshgarian
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni)
as part of the Burgess Programme
Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie
du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et du Service Culturel de
l’Ambassade de France représenté aux États-Unis. This work received support from
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French
Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
First published in English by Verso Books 2019
First published as Cours sur Rousseau © Éditions Le Temps des Cerises 2012 Translation © G.M. Goshgarian 2019
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Contents
Lecture Two
Lecture Three
Notes
Index
THE TEXT THAT FOLLOWS is a faithful transcription of a course that Althusser gave in 1972 at the Paris École normale supérieure for students preparing to sit the agrégation. It is based on a tape recording made with Althusser’s permission; he agreed to have a microphone placed on his lectern. Only a few words have been left out of the transcription: words that mark a hesitation (‘well’, ‘uh’, and so on), repetitions of the same word, and a few bits and pieces of sentences that were lost because a few seconds were needed to change the audio cassette. The reader may consult the original recording, which has been made available to the public by the Fondation Gabriel Péri.
Reading the courses edited by François Matheron and published by Le Seuil under the title Althusser, Politique et histoire, I was struck by the thought that this tape recording, which had been slumbering in my drawer for forty years, might serve as a source of ideas, suggestions for further research, and new knowledge not to be found in Althusser’s 1956 and 1966 courses on Rousseau. That led to the deposit of the audio cassettes with the Fondation Gabriel Péri and publication of the present volume.
TO TALK ABOUT A PHILOSOPHER who explains another philosopher is a paradoxical enterprise. Should one explain an explanation?
There should thus be no mistake about the objective of this introduction. Those who know Rousseau’s texts well enough can read Althusser’s course directly, and the same holds for those familiar with Althusser’s thought.
The present introductory notes are meant for readers who are curious and attentive, but are not specialists, know the one philosopher and the other only by way of a few quotations or by hearsay, and might be discouraged by the rather abstract nature of the course or wearied by its repetitive features, forgetting that what is involved is a course intended for students taking notes, not a lecture intended for a public interested in acquiring information quickly. We have therefore extracted a few basic themes from the course, a few noteworthy original ideas, in order to provide a guide to a reading of it with the help of a few signposts, a few words, expressions and arguments that we have thrown into relief.
We have also attempted to reassess these remarks on Rousseau – which seemed remote, at the time, from Althusser’s preoccupations with Marxism – by setting them in relation to his posthumous texts. Talking about Rousseau, Althusser was also talking to himself – as a reading, forty years later, of the pages on the ‘materialism of the encounter’ shows.
In these three lectures delivered in 1972, Althusser sets out to explicate a well-known text, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,1 a text elucidated many times before him. He proposes to analyse the ‘less current’ aspects of the text, for, he says, the history of philosophy ‘has left these aspects aside’ in ‘drawing up its accounts’ or ‘settling its accounts’.
Rousseau’s text
Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, as its title indicates, examines inequality, that is, political and social life, by setting out from the origin, that is, the period preceding the advent of society, in order to follow society’s emergence and development with reference to this origin. This was a well-worn subject in the eighteenth century, in what was known as ‘natural law philosophy’ or, again, the ‘philosophy of the Enlightenment’. Philosophers go back to the origin, before society, in the ‘state of nature’, and, on the basis of a discussion of this first state, they explain why society came into existence: since this state is not viable, since men kill each other in it (that is the ‘state of war’), they have to leave it by agreeing to abolish the freedom to do what one likes and by making laws and choosing leaders to enforce them (that is the ‘social contract’). Hobbes and Locke after him produced two different scenarios from this common stock, but this theoretical configuration (state of nature/state of war/social contract) forms the absolute horizon of Enlightenment thought: every philosopher, including Rousseau, thinks within this model. Many different scholarly works (notably those by Robert Derathé2 and Jean Starobinski3) have shown Rousseau’s differences and borrowings from his predecessors; some scholars, surprised to see so many similarities between Rousseau and the others, had come to the conclusion that Rousseau is not at all original from a theoretical standpoint, and that his originality stems from the political uses he makes of theories in general circulation.4 In his course, Althusser proposes to bring out the radical originality of Rousseau, who thought in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and against this philosophy, on the basis of a completely unprecedented philosophical dispositive. We shall see that Althusser