Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Fragments of an Essay on The State of War
Fragments of an Essay on The State of War
By Jean-Jacques Rousseau (written in the mid 1750's)
Translated by C. E. Vaughan
.... I open the books on Right and on ethics; I listen to the professors and jurists; and, my mind full of
their seductive doctrines, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order; I bless the
wisdom of our political institutions and, knowing myself a citizen, cease to lament I am a man.
Thoroughly instructed as to my duties and my happiness, I close the book, step out of the lecture
room, and look around me. I see wretched nations groaning beneath a yoke of iron. I see mankind
ground down by a handful of oppressors. I see a famished mob, worn down by sufferings and
famine, while the rich drink the blood and tears of their victims at their ease. I see on every side the
strong armed with the terrible powers of the Law against the weak.
And all this is done quietly and without resistance. It is the peace of Ulysses and his comrades,
imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops and waiting their turn to be devoured. We must groan and be
silent. Let us for ever draw a veil over sights so terrible. I lift my eyes and look to the horizon. I see
fire and flame, the fields laid waste, the towns put to sack. Monsters! where are you dragging those
hapless wretches? I hear a hideous noise. What a tumult and what cries! I draw near; before me lies
a scene of murder, ten thousand slaughtered, the dead piled in heaps, the dying trampled under foot
by horses, on every side the image of death and the throes of death. And that is the fruit of your
peaceful institutions! Indignation and pity rise from the very bottom of my heart. Yes, heartless
philosopher! come and read us your book on a field of battle!
What soul of man but would be moved at these woeful sights? But in our days it is forbidden to be a
man, or to plead the cause of humanity. Justice and truth are commanded to give way before the
interest of the powerful: that is the rule of the world. No pension, no office, no chair in the
Academy is in the gift of the people. Why then should the people be protected? High-souled
princes! I speak in the name of the literary profession. Oppress the people with a clear conscience!
It is to you only that we look for advancement. To us the people is good for nothing.
How can a voice so weak as mine make itself heard through the din of corrupt applause? Alas! I
must hold my peace, though the cry of my heart would fain break the cruel silence. And without
entering into hateful details, which would be taken for satire just because they are the truth, I will
confine myself to testing the institutions of man by their first principles; to correcting, if so it may
be, the false notions which the self-interest of writers strives to spread among us; at least, to making
it impossible that injustice and violence should impudently usurp the names of Right and justice.
The first thing I notice in looking at the state of mankind is a palpable contradiction which makes
all stability impossible. As individuals, we live in the civil state, under the control of the Law; as
nations, each is in the state of nature. And it is this which makes our position worse than if such
distinctions were unknown. For, living as we do at once in the civil order and in the state of nature,
we find ourselves exposed to the evils of both conditions, without winning the security we need in
either. The perfection of the social order lies, doubtless, in the union of force and Law. But such a
union is only possible when force is controlled by Law; whereas, so long as the prince is regarded
as absolutely uncontrolled, it is force alone which speaks to the subject under the name of Law and
to the foreigner under the name of reason of State: (so taking from the latter the power, and from the
former the very will, to offer resistance.) The result is that, in both cases, brute force reigns under
the empty name of justice... Download the full essay here
- and here
************
By Jean-Jacques Rousseau (written in the mid 1750's)
Translated by C. E. Vaughan
.... I open the books on Right and on ethics; I listen to the professors and jurists; and, my mind full of
their seductive doctrines, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order; I bless the
wisdom of our political institutions and, knowing myself a citizen, cease to lament I am a man.
Thoroughly instructed as to my duties and my happiness, I close the book, step out of the lecture
room, and look around me. I see wretched nations groaning beneath a yoke of iron. I see mankind
ground down by a handful of oppressors. I see a famished mob, worn down by sufferings and
famine, while the rich drink the blood and tears of their victims at their ease. I see on every side the
strong armed with the terrible powers of the Law against the weak.
And all this is done quietly and without resistance. It is the peace of Ulysses and his comrades,
imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops and waiting their turn to be devoured. We must groan and be
silent. Let us for ever draw a veil over sights so terrible. I lift my eyes and look to the horizon. I see
fire and flame, the fields laid waste, the towns put to sack. Monsters! where are you dragging those
hapless wretches? I hear a hideous noise. What a tumult and what cries! I draw near; before me lies
a scene of murder, ten thousand slaughtered, the dead piled in heaps, the dying trampled under foot
by horses, on every side the image of death and the throes of death. And that is the fruit of your
peaceful institutions! Indignation and pity rise from the very bottom of my heart. Yes, heartless
philosopher! come and read us your book on a field of battle!
What soul of man but would be moved at these woeful sights? But in our days it is forbidden to be a
man, or to plead the cause of humanity. Justice and truth are commanded to give way before the
interest of the powerful: that is the rule of the world. No pension, no office, no chair in the
Academy is in the gift of the people. Why then should the people be protected? High-souled
princes! I speak in the name of the literary profession. Oppress the people with a clear conscience!
It is to you only that we look for advancement. To us the people is good for nothing.
How can a voice so weak as mine make itself heard through the din of corrupt applause? Alas! I
must hold my peace, though the cry of my heart would fain break the cruel silence. And without
entering into hateful details, which would be taken for satire just because they are the truth, I will
confine myself to testing the institutions of man by their first principles; to correcting, if so it may
be, the false notions which the self-interest of writers strives to spread among us; at least, to making
it impossible that injustice and violence should impudently usurp the names of Right and justice.
The first thing I notice in looking at the state of mankind is a palpable contradiction which makes
all stability impossible. As individuals, we live in the civil state, under the control of the Law; as
nations, each is in the state of nature. And it is this which makes our position worse than if such
distinctions were unknown. For, living as we do at once in the civil order and in the state of nature,
we find ourselves exposed to the evils of both conditions, without winning the security we need in
either. The perfection of the social order lies, doubtless, in the union of force and Law. But such a
union is only possible when force is controlled by Law; whereas, so long as the prince is regarded
as absolutely uncontrolled, it is force alone which speaks to the subject under the name of Law and
to the foreigner under the name of reason of State: (so taking from the latter the power, and from the
former the very will, to offer resistance.) The result is that, in both cases, brute force reigns under
the empty name of justice... Download the full essay here
- and here
************
the modern
nation-state, which I take to be an invention of the French Revolution, not
only distorted but betrayed the Enlightenment Project in the very course of its
legislators’ attempts to fulfil its noblest ambitions in a particular way,
which was unheralded in any pre-revolutionary constitutional scheme… The
primal patricide of modernity, as I describe it here, constitutes the murder of
the Enlightenment Project, the destruction of the international republic of
letters by way of the birth of the nationstate, conceived as a form of
republic whose members are bound together in a quite different way. On my
reading of its principles, the Enlightenment Project was not fulfilled or
realized in the course of the French Revolution but, on the contrary, suffered
a kind of cot death through strangulation by way of the zealous embrace of
admirers who loved it too well but unwisely, once they seized the opportunity
to put its ideals into practice. I do not agree that the Enlightenment loved the
thing it killed, but I hope to show here that modernity killed the thing it
loved… ’
The
Enlightenment, the Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity; Robert Wokler in Norman Geras, Robert Wokler (eds.) - The Enlightenment
and Modernity, p 162
