Lessons on Rousseau. Louis Althusser
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talk about Rousseau after talking about Machiavelli is not just to change periods, since it means crossing two centuries of history and, in particular, two centuries of natural law philosophy, but it is also to change worlds. It is a matter not just of changing historical worlds, but of changing theoretical worlds too – of changing, quite precisely, the object of reflection and, still more, the form of reflection, the form of thought, the modality of thought. From that standpoint, in order to bring out these differences, however paradoxical the idea may seem, it is perhaps not without interest to compare Machiavelli’s world in thought to the natural law philosophers’ and Rousseau’s.
I think we can regard the following condition as determinant and as a distinguishing criterion: what is at issue, what is at stake and in question in Machiavelli as well as the natural law theorists is absolute monarchy as a form of realization of the nascent and the developed bourgeois nation – and thus as an objective referent common to their different histories. In Machiavelli, however, that same historical referent plays a role altogether incommensurable with its role in the natural law theorists. That is what makes their theoretical worlds different; for the absolute monarchy does not occupy the same place in them. The absolute monarchy does not have the same significance as object in them, and that is why their worlds are not the same. We could say that, like Pascal’s sea, which changes because of a rock,2 the political, theoretical, and philosophical worlds of Machiavelli and the natural law philosophers change because of a mode, because of the modality of existence of the object that absolute monarchy, absolute political power, comprises in their thought.
To mark this difference, we can say the following: Machiavelli’s world is one in which the absolute monarchy, the national state, exists not as a real, existent, instituted object, but as a political objective to be realized. For Machiavelli, in other words, national unity is not an accomplished fact, but a fact to be accomplished. We have already shown that Machiavelli’s thought in its entirety is geared to this task, the task of constituting a new state under a new prince in order to bring about national unity. We have also shown that, for defined political reasons, Machiavelli’s thought had to set itself the altogether unprecedented, radical theoretical task of thinking the conditions of possibility of the existence of that which does not yet exist: that is to say, the task of thinking radical beginning. For, since the initial political basis for national unity was nowhere in existence, it was necessary that it begin; it was necessary to create it. Thus it was necessary to think its absolute beginning; it was necessary to define the conditions of possibility of this absolute beginning. The consequence is that Machiavelli’s object, absolute monarchy, exists in the mode of the political objective, of a political objective. Machiavelli has to think this object under exceptional theoretical conditions that can be summed up as follows. On the one hand, he has to think the fact to be accomplished, he has to think in the fact to be accomplished, in the element of the fact to be accomplished, in the question of the fact to be accomplished. On the other hand – this comes down to the same thing – Machiavelli has to think the beginning as such, and he has to think in the beginning, in the element of the beginning, in the element of the question of the beginning, and so on. There you have the two decisive terms: the fact to be accomplished and the beginning.
Should we say that these two words are two concepts? I shall leave the question in abeyance and say that, even supposing that they are two concepts, these two words are in any case complementary; they define what might be called both the object and the form of Machiavelli’s thought, his specific form of thought. We may add that, in their conjunction, the fact to be accomplished and the beginning are played, in the musical sense of the word, if you like, as if they were the score of a silent philosophy, a philosophy that has not succeeded in expressing itself in philosophical form, the score of a philosophical beginning that has never taken place because no one has ever noted its existence. Thus it is no wonder that Machiavelli should have remained a stranger to all philosophy, to classical philosophy; it is no wonder that dominant and even dominated classical philosophy should have taken Machiavelli to be foreign to philosophy and left him out of account. For that matter, if we consider classical philosophy for a moment, has it ever, for its part, thought in the pair formed by the fact to be accomplished and the beginning? Has that philosophy ever attempted to think the fact to be accomplished and the beginning?
The situation of natural law philosophy is obviously completely different from the situation of Machiavelli’s not-yet-philosophy. Natural law philosophy is dominated by a completely different question. The reason is simple: in the world of these theorists, absolute monarchy or national unity was an accomplished fact – if not a wholly accomplished fact, then, at least, an irreversible fact on its way to being accomplished on perfectly well-known, perfectly well-defined political bases, the history of which shows that they were in the process of expanding sufficiently to accomplish their mission. And, from this simple fact, which still concerns the same referent, but in another mode, there results a first radical difference from Machiavelli.
These natural law theorists think in the accomplished fact; they think the accomplished fact. That, of course, does not prevent them from taking, in their theories, political positions on this accomplished fact of the absolute monarchy: for example, by declaring or demonstrating, like Hobbes, that they are absolutists (in other words, partisans of the monarchy, of the dictatorship of the absolute monarchy in the development of the first forms of bourgeois capitalism); or, like Locke, in a later phase, by declaring that they are liberals; or, like Rousseau, by declaring that they are democrats. At any event, the pros and cons with respect to the accomplished fact, as well as the ‘cons’ directed against certain forms of the ‘pro’ – all these positions observable in the history of natural law are adopted in the element of the accomplished fact. They have nothing to do with Machiavelli’s problematic of the fact to be accomplished.
All this has, consequently, nothing to do with Machiavelli’s question of questions, the question of the beginning. When natural law theory enters, Machiavelli exits; or, rather, we realize that he never made his entrance onto this scene. He was, always and for all time, somewhere else. Thus natural law philosophy thinks the accomplished fact and in the accomplished fact: its object and its form of thought will be determined, as I shall to try to show, in a way quite different from the way Machiavelli’s object is.
Natural philosophy’s object will be political power not as a task to be accomplished, not as a contingent relationship of being to nothingness, nor as event or beginning; rather, its object will be political power as existing, as existent [étant], and this object will be thought in the categories of the existent and the essence of the existent. Natural law philosophy accordingly discusses society, civil law and public law not in terms of chance occurrence and encounter, of event and advent, but in terms of existence and essence. It relates these essences (of natural law, civil law, and public law) to an originary essence, that of the natural law of the originary subject: man in the state of nature.
Whereas Machiavelli thinks in the fact to be accomplished and the beginning, natural law philosophy thinks in the accomplished fact and the origin. The origin, which I am opposing to the beginning here, is obviously altogether different from the beginning. The origin is not the event in which the beginning of a form of eternity supervenes on the ground [sur le fond] of a matter that is already present, always already present, but formless or formed differently. The origin belongs to a completely different mode [mode] of philosophical reference, a completely different world [monde] of philosophical reference. What is the origin? It is the manifestation of titles of legitimacy in the self-evidence of nature: the titles of legitimacy of the truth as well as the titles of legitimacy of every essence and, in particular, the titles of legitimacy of the essence of civil law and the essence of public law.
Why is this so in natural law philosophy? For a simple reason which, obviously, would call for a great deal of explanation, but which we can begin to state as follows: because the idea of the origin that identifies the origin with nature and makes nature self-evident for a subject of law – because this idea of the origin, in the form I have indicated, was then, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the form par excellence of philosophical thought. These terms must be taken in the strong sense: the form par excellence of philosophical thought, that is, the form of foundation, the form of justification, the form of legitimization of philosophical thought,