The Rousseau Strain in the Contemporary World/ 对卢梭的思考

[卢梭（1717-1778）的油画像，寻自 Wikipedia。]





Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Rousseau Strain in the Contemporary World” (1978) in China and Other Matters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 217-218, 220-221.

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With the strong emergence of the notion of an impersonal, progressive history after the French Revolution, one witness the transformation of both the Rousseau strain and the engineering strain in modern thought. They are, as it were, both “historicized.” History itself, it was now proclaimed, would bridge the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be. Yet both strains continue to find expression in quite different images of historic progress. Technology itself, instead of being a transaction between the technologist and the material on which he works, becomes “the process of technological development.” “Industrialization,” “economic forces,” “technological development” become the dominant categories in what might be called the technicoeconomic version of inevitable human progress. Rousseau’s influence, however, also finds its own transformation in those versions of history which treat history as primarily an ethical drama. Despite all of Hegel’s reservations about Rousseau, his account of human history as a march to the realization of freedom as he understands that term is essentially an account of history as a spiritual-ethical drama. When one looks at the work of Marx from this perspective, one finds that what makes him so fascinating is that his later work seems to create an impressive synthesis of both strains. While sharing with Rousseau the view that the progress of the arts and sciences in its broadest sense as technicoeconomic history has been the occasion of enormous injustice and exploitation, he nevertheless finds it “objectively progressive.” He is thus able to regard the progress of industry with both the somber indignation of a Rousseau and the complacent self-congratulation of those who marvel at man’s technical genius. He would have us believe, as it were, that Satan himself may carry to completion the work of the Lord. His good society is, of course, not the same as Rousseau’s Spartan utopia. Individuals in that society would reap the fruits of both the arts and the sciences even while embodying the social virtues dreamt of by Rousseau. These social virtues would furthermore no longer depend on the religion of la patrie.

However impressive this Marxist synthesis may be, I would urge that it has proven unstable among his followers. The question of how history as ethical drama relates to history as technicoeconomic development and as “rationalization” of society remains unresolved. Rousseau has not yet been fully reconciled with Saint-Simon.

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It might also be added that the historicization of eighteenth-century thought has itself not been entirely successful. The need for legislators has not wholly vanished. The great nineteenth-century accounts of human progress had by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries become subject to serious doubts. There was the growing feeling that, in order to realize the hopes projected by these various schemes of historic progress, one would no longer be able to rely wholly on the operation of larger impersonal forces. Human intervention, whether by revolutionary vanguards or a social engineering elite, would be necessary to guide the historic processes along their proper channels. This may not have amounted to a full rehabilitation of the great legislator of the Enlightenment nor a full retreat from faith in the forces of history or “development,” but it would indicate that the role played by the legislator in Enlightenment thought had not been rendered entirely superfluous.

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