Category Archives: Close Reading

“The Beautiful and the Constant Imoinda”: A Consideration

Peter Lely, Portrait of Aphra Behn (before 1680)

“The beautiful and the constant Imoinda” (77). These are the last words of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave, a work justly celebrated for its exploration of race and power through the figure of Behn’s titular protagonist, the “royal slave” Oroonoko. It is Oroonoko’s story that captures our attention and arouses our admiration, frustration, and horror, and it is Oroonoko who gives the book its title. Yet in a narrative that foregrounds issues of names and naming, Behn’s female narrator ends not with Oroonoko’s name but that of his wife and lover. And, as is not the case with Oroonoko, the narrator expresses no ambivalence toward her. Indeed, while the second half of the novella refers to Oroonoko by the name his European purchasers impose on him—Caesar—Imoinda’s original name is restored to her in Behn’s final sentence.

Why all of this should be is a question worth asking, for it tells us that Imoinda is as important as Oroonoko to Behn’s analysis of power in a ruthless colonial world where heroic ideals of beauty, constancy, and honor are under siege. Literary historians know that Behn published a number of romances like Oroonoko in the last years of her life, and that they tended to spotlight female protagonists, who usually appear in their titles: The Fair Jilt, The History of the Nun; The Adventure of the Black Lady; The Unfortunate Bride. If Oroonoko had been titled Imoinda, what kind of story would it have been? Would we like Oroonoko himself less or more? And in relegating Imoinda to the edges of the story we have, is Behn perhaps drawing our attention to the ways women are invisible or marginalized in all of the cultures she explores in her tale? Who is Imoinda and why and how does she matter?

In an important essay also cited in Vivian Folkenflik’s blog post on Oroonoko’s market scene, the literary critic Laura Brown observes that Behn’s “narrative must have women, and it generates […] female figures at every turn, as observers, beneficiaries, and consumers of Oroonoko’s romantic action” (235). Brown is referring partly to Behn’s female authorship and female readership at the time of the book’s original publication. But she also reminds us that Behn is interested in Oroonoko’s relationship to women—a relationship that is presented as a key component of his virtue and identity as a romantic hero. His undying ardor for Imoinda in the decadent court of Coramantien is one of the things that elevates him: he was, claims the narrator, “as capable of love as it was possible for a brave and gallant man to be; … for sure, great souls are most capable of that passion” (16). Behn’s female narrator wryly leaves it an open question as to how “capable” of love Oroonko might actually be, but Imoinda is first introduced in the context of his “passion” for her. This is treated as a source of equality and ultimately as the source of Oroonoko’s subjection to her: “To describe her truly, one need say only, she was female to the noble male the beautiful black Venus to our young Mars, as charming in her person as he, and of delicate virtues. I have seen an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet…and she was, indeed, too great for any but a prince of her own nation to adore” (16). Sure enough, the instant Oronooko sees Imoinda, she “gained a perfect conquest over his fierce heart” (17). The narrator stresses Imonda’s power over the warrior Oroonoko while also stressing the purity of their love in a “country, where men take to themselves as many as they can maintain” (17).

But if Imoinda is at first presented as powerful, her reality in a world where “men take [women] to themselves” is somewhat different. Oronooko himself “vows that she should be the only woman he would possess” and seems to regard her as his property at the same time that he idealizes her and acknowledges her sway over his heart. More to the point, their love story unfolds in the decadent court of Coramentien, bound by customs that privilege male sexual authority. Thus Oroonko’s hundred-plus-year-old grandfather, the king, identifies the “maid” Imoinda as the perfect woman to serve his own sexual desires in the “sort of seraglio” he maintains (21). The king is obsessed with Imoinda’s physical virginity, as is Oronooko, and equally obsessed with being the sole possessor of this “treasure” (21). Imoinda is valued as property belonging to men and despite the ways Behn’s imagery makes her Oroonoko’s equal, she—unlike him—has no real control over her body. She is forced to grant the old king unspecified sexual favors and all of the conflict that erupts at court is over the question of which man has the right to own her. As Brown puts it, “the desirable woman serves invariably as the motive and ultimate prize for male adventures” (334).

The critic Charlotte Sussman is even more pointed: “Imoinda is a possession even before she is a slave,” Sussman writes, and her “exile in Surinam […] is not so much a transition from freedom to slavery as a transition from one code of property relations to another” (247). At issue here is the “transition” itself. It contrasts with Oroonko’s transition into captivity: where he is tricked by  a slave trader and is in that way complicit in his own domination, Imoinda is passively sold by the king. She has no choice about the fate of her body—a state that persists in the New World. Here her owner, Trefry, is tempted to rape her and her pregnancy prompts Oroonoko (now Caesar) to revolt against European colonial rule because her child (which he regards as his) will belong to her owners, not to her. Hence, though Imoinda and Oroonoko are equally matched in many ways—Venus to Mars, elite courtier to elite courtier—Behn reminds us again and again that Imoinda’s body has never belonged to her. While most of our attention is drawn to the domination of one religious and ethnic group by another, Behn also suggest that, the world over, one gender is programmatically dominated by the other.

Most feminist criticism, like that of Brown and Sussman, focuses on the ways Imoinda is depicted as a “possession” rather than a person. Clemene, the name she is given in the so-called New World, seems to claim her as the property of those who rename her, and when Oroonoko slits her throat not long before his own death, he not only characterizes her as “the price” he has paid for his own “glory,” but buries her only up to the neck so that “only her face he left yet bare to look on,” as if to claim her as an art object that belongs to him (72). At the same time, however, we are told that once Oroonoko had done so, ”he had not power to stir from the sight of this dear object” and we also learn that she herself wanted to die: “He found the heroic wife faster pleading for death than he was to propose it” (71). It is also Imoinda who urges Oroonoko to revolt. Once she “began to show she was with child, [she] did nothing but sigh and weep for the captivity of her lord, herself, and the infant yet unborn” (61). And during the rebellion itself, Imoinda fights heroically beside her husband on a continent whose major river, the Amazon, is named after the legendary women warriors of the Greco-Roman past: “Imoinda who, grown big as she was, did nevertheless press near her lord, having a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, which she managed with such dexterity that she wounded several and shot the governor in the shoulder” (65). (Tellingly, it is another woman—“an Indian woman, his mistress”—who has the power to heal the governor by sucking the venom from his wound.)

Behn’s Imoinda can thus express her power and heroism only in limited, oblique ways. She is constrained by the realities of cultures that privilege men whether they are in Surinam or in Coramantien, or indeed in England, where Behn’s implied (female) reader resides. But, as Sussman observes, within these constraints, Imoinda finds ways to “take [her] biology into [her] own hands” (253), paradoxically controlling her own physical life by giving power over it away to her husband. Oroonoko’s spectacular brutalization commands most of our attention, but Behn wants us to see Imoinda’s as well. Unlike his, hers happens in the day-to-day and as a matter of course. When Behn celebrates her great beauty—the beauty that marks her as Oroonoko’s romantic equal—she thus also makes us see Imoinda’s pain, her scars. Praising Imoinda’s “modesty and her extraordinary prettiness,” Behn’s narrator also notices that she is “carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body” (48). Imoinda’s body registers an indigenous African body art not constrained by the European standards that Behn asserts elsewhere: “I had forgot to tell you,” says Behn’s narrator,

that those who are nobly born of that country are so delicately cut and ra[z]ed all over the fore part of the trunk of their bodies that it looks as if it were Japanned, […] the works being raised like high points round the edges of the flowers. Some are only carved with a little flower or bird at the sides of the temples, as was Caesar; and those who are so carved over the body resemble our ancient Picts that are figured in the chronicles, but these carvings are more delicate. (48)

Why did the narrator almost “forg[e]t to tell” us about Imoinda’s beautiful scars? Why is she telling us about them now? Perhaps because they have always been there, taken for granted in something of the way that the earth itself—evoked in Imoinda’s “flowers and birds,” the tree-like “trunk” of her body—is taken for granted, and wounded so “you” can live. The word “world” appears again and again in a novella whose action covers a good part of the globe. Imoinda’s body here is a world. Not just a natural world but a world of nations: it is “japanned” (seeming lacquered), it recalls the “ancient Picts” of Britain who were also tattooed, it is created through the indigenous arts of Africa, and it brings to mind the vegetation we see in Surinam. Imoinda is the world, Behn seems to say, the world at its best, harmonious and fertile and diverse.

So it is no wonder that “Imoinda” is the last word of Oroonoko. It’s an unusual name that Behn probably made up. But we cannot help but notice the first letter—“I”—that links her to the “I” of the female narrator. And the second syllable, “moi,” is the French word for “me,” tightening that link while reminding us that this is a name that incorporates the beauties of many different languages. The slave name imposed on Imoinda, Clemene, is all but forgotten. But the word “Clemene” recalls the idea of “clemency,” meaning forgiveness and, ultimately, grace. In the brutal world of power that Behn depicts, “the beautiful and the constant Imoinda” leaves open the possibility of grace.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd. Penguin, 2003.

Brown, Laura. “The Romance of Empire; Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves.” In Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton, 1997, pp. 232-46.

Sussman, Charlotte. “The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.”  In Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton, 1997,  pp. 246-55.

Jayne Lewis is a professor of English at UC Irvine, a faculty lecturer in the current cycle of Humanities Core, and the director of the Humanities Honors Program at UCI. Her most recent book, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) looks at how, when and where “atmosphere” emerged as a dimension of literary experience–an emergence which links the history of early fiction with those of natural philosophy and the supernatural. She is also the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Documentary History (Bedford, 2000). Her present research and much of her ongoing teaching focuses on middle modern generic forms in relation to changing narratives of illness and healing, including a course on the “sick imagination” that explores illness narratives from the Book of Job through 21st-century poetry and graphic fiction.

The Intersection of Race and Gender in Oroonoko

Why might it be valuable for our students to read race and gender together to understand the power structure of empire in Aphra Behn’s novel – not only in the plight of handsome prince Oroonoko and his beautiful Imoinda as individuals, but also for the economic and social structure of the slave trade? What could students learn about reading both categories together, rather than just for one? The instability of the woman narrator’s voice in her description of a slave market in the triangle trade is a useful place for students to begin understanding this intersection:

Those then whom we make use of to work in our plantations of sugar are Negroes, black slaves altogether […]. Those who want slaves make a bargain with a master or a captain of a ship, and contract to pay for them when they shall be delivered on such a plantation. So that when there arrives a ship laden with slaves, they who have so contracted go aboard and receive their number by lot; and perhaps in one lot that may be for ten, there may happen to be three or four men, the rest women and children; or be there more or less of either sex, you are obliged to be content with your lot. (12-13)

Edward Francis Finden, Slave market in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1824)

In lecture Prof. Jayne Lewis spoke about keywords that locate the narrator among white slaveowners and buyers by starting off in the first person: “we make use of” the Africans for the sugar plantations on which she was a guest. She establishes some distance from “those who want slaves” as employers, though her visit benefits from slaves’ “work”. “They” as buyers “bargain,” “contract,” “pay,” terms that continue to identify them in the third person: here, slave buyers are white. They are also most likely male, as illlustrations indicate, and ownership makes probable. The recently licensed commerce to use Africans for profit seems almost fair: in this marketplace, buyers do not know who will be in any “lot” they have contracted for: perhaps “three or four men,” with as an afterthought “the rest women and children”? (For immediate profit in the sugar fields, the men are singled out.) But this poses a moral problem that the narrator cannot solve in first and third person narrative: in the key moment: “you are obliged to be content with your lot.” The decision may be a choice of the captain or master, but the word “lot” suggests it is something you accept as some sort of economic if not social contract. But who or where are “you”? You are a buyer – context makes it clear that you are not a slave, because slaves have no ability to contract and therefore no obligation in this situation. The slave market is a scene of identity shock. Tamara Beauchamp suggested to me that the ordinarily feminized reader of the romance, the ‘you’ in the passage, may be in an identificatory relationship with the slaves, but I don’t read the “you” that way. However, I would agree that there is irony floating around here: as a woman, the narrator is obliged to be “content with her lot” in some ways: she cannot rescue the lovers, much as she sympathizes with them. But neither can she articulate the relationship of her realistic scene to her romantic tale of the lovers. Perhaps this break is signaled by the sudden move to “Coromantien,” the first word of the next paragraph, where the narrator reclaims her authority.

Frontispiece to Irish edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equino (Dublin, 1791)

Among secondary sources for research on the intersection of race and gender, I would recommend Laura Brown, in her Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Cornell, 1993). Brown does not use this passage, but she takes Oroonoko as “a theoretical test case for the necessary connection of race and gender.” Brown argues that the “reductive normalizing” of the romantic narrative must be read together with the experiences of the slaves “because they are oriented around the same governing point of reference, the ubiquitous and indispensable figure of the woman.”

For compare and contrast work, I would recommend The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself; here the slaves are divided into “parcels,” or as he later says “lots,” and the buyers rush to “make choice of the parcel they like best.” But Equiano, an ex-slave, writes from the point of view of the “terrified Africans,” men, women, and children. The question of fairness here is seen from the slaves’ point of view. (I would agree that Equiano’s task is different as a man writing in 1791, but that too would be worth comparing.) Behn’s narrator could perhaps glimpse the possibility of describing the slave market this way, but her use of first-, second-, and third-person pronouns shows that she cannot yet articulate or integrate it into the story.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.

Equiano, Olaudah. Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program.

How to Make a Barbarian in Three Steps

South African road sign (1956). Image via Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

South African road sign (1956). Image via Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

The election of a man with no political experience that won the hearts and minds of many in America by loudly proclaiming what for years the political Right has been saying has been denied them by PC culture: the ability to say out loud that religious minorities, blacks, women, gays and transgender folk, non-white immigrants, non-white citizens, feminists, fatties, and uglies have gotten too uppity and comfortable and need to be reminded of their place; that we represent the limit to the America dream (and not the forms of economic dispossession that enable the .1% to hold onto obscene amounts of wealth and resources). There is a firm belief that the ills of society are caused by the barbarians that have infected America from within and the barbarians that remain at the gate waiting to take from us what ours. In this configuration, I have been rendered the barbarian (though I have been before, as many of us have): I am a Muslim-born, middle eastern immigrant, a divorced childless middle-aged feminist with a doctorate in the Humanities. I am now the intersection of the axes of the new barbarian explicitly articulated by the Trump campaign.

In this moment of wild political uncertainty in the United States and as a barbarian myself, I am immensely grateful to be able to teach Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a text written in apartheid South Africa. Coetzee was eight years old when apartheid was formally instituted in 1948, and witnessed the emergence of the 1950 Population Registration Act, which registered and classified all South Africans racially into one of three categories, “white”, “black”, or “colored”, the latter which included mix-raced as well as Indian and Asian individuals. It should be noted that these distinctions were based on appearance, often dividing members of the same biological family into different racial categories. Thus, Coetzee’s ability to describe and deconstruct patterns of institutional separation and quotidian and routinized cruelties against an “other” is informed in no small part by having lived the dystopian reality of apartheid South Africa, the institutional organizational of which was largely influenced by a real-life white fraternal conspiracy called the Broederbond. It is not insignificant that Coetzee was born to Afrikaner parents and, while he openly resisted Apartheid, nonetheless was a privileged member of South African society: In this book, he beautifully relays the subtle truths about privilege and its many losses.

* * *

South African apartheid-era sign (date unknown). Image via the BBC.

South African apartheid-era sign (date unknown). Image via the BBC.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a mapping of colonial relationships, a philosophical challenge to the cruelties of civilization hidden behind paranoid invocations of the “other”, and a cautionary tale of privilege as itself a momentous loss.

The text is an exquisite breakdown of how the other, in this case the barbarian, is a construction informed largely by paranoia and projection. Early on in the narrative, we learn that Colonel Joll’s soldiers capture a dozen local fisherman for no other reason than they were hiding, a fact that the Magistrate characterizes as “[t]he reasoning of the policeman” (18). This reasoning to which he points is, of course, circular: The distrust of the policeman for the “other” renders any act by this “other” ipso facto suspicious. By definition, there is no benefit of the doubt for the barbarian, the truth of which justifies the expansion of the security apparatus of the empire at every turn.

Overcrowding in American Federal prisons, Image via Criminal Justice Information

Overcrowding in American Federal prisons, Image via Criminal Justice Information.

Moreover, the conditions which produce “the barbarian” are the conditions mandated by the empire itself. These nomads, now prisoners, are forced into a small space in the yard, using a corner as a latrine, entirely limited in their movement to the enclosed area and fully dependent on the care of those who imprison them. Then — and here’s the kicker — the locals begin to complain about these “barbarians” because they are intrusive: “[t]he filth, the smell, the noise of quarrelling and coughing become too much….A rumour begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town….the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals” (20). The other as lazy, as violent, as uncouth is a fact made of the institutions of power, not merely adjudicated by them.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray of Naval Base Guantanamo Bay (January 11, 2002). Image via Reuters File.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray of Naval Base Guantanamo Bay (January 11, 2002). Image via Reuters File.

Thus what this scene does is reveal to the reader the patterns of subjugation, and it seems to take a mere three steps: (1) Those invested with power are taught to distrust them and imprison them because they are others/“barbarians.” (2) They impose conditions which are vile and inhuman, and limit their scope of life to satiation of immediate biological needs, and thereafter (3) justify their prejudices and the exclusion of the barbarian/other with reference to the filth and their “animal behaviors” of the other as proof of natural differences. Thus, in this scene we see the use paranoia and fear as a justification for dispossession, and dispossession as key to the maintenance of institutions of power and control. Of course, in case we missed this lesson the first time in the text, this process is repeated when the Magistrate is imprisoned (e.g., 80, 84) showing how the process of dehumanization is the one stable in the functioning of power, and where we can most clearly apprehend the vicissitudes of privilege.

The book reveals that privilege blinds one to the obvious, a sentiment eloquently expressed by a thought attributed to the Magistrate: “There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it” (155). When he is imprisoned and denigrated, the magistrate is surprised, taken unawares, even as he has watched so many suffer before him: “’Why me?’ Never has there been anyone so confused and innocent of the world as I. A veritable baby!” (94). He continues a few lines later:

Deliberately I bring to mind images of innocents I have known: the boy lying naked in the lamplight with his hands pressed to his groins, the barbarian prisoners squatting in the dust, shading their eyes, waiting for whatever is to come next. Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? (94)

Operations in the Warsaw Ghetto in April and May of 1943 to empty the Ghetto and deport its remaining holdouts — men, women and children. Image via the New York Times.

Operations in the Warsaw Ghetto in April and May of 1943 to empty the Ghetto and deport its remaining holdouts — men, women and children. Image via the New York Times.

This perfectly encompasses the main lesson of the novel: If routine forms of cruelty can be used against “others”, you cannot be surprised when that same law and order comes to oppress you as its other. Moreover, just as you once believed the law was just even in its violence, you cannot be surprised to find yourself alone when you desperately need the protection of others (as they needed yours). And yet, we will be surprised. The truth of privilege is both that one is blind to the injustices hiding behind the letter of the law, and caught alone the moment when the law reveals its irrationality.

The final lesson is that we need the protection of others. In his own process of being othered — through denial in prison, through torture, through ritualized humiliations that conscript the townsfolk into the process of punishment and dehumanization — the Magistrate finds himself alone, wishing he had come to know his townsfolk better and to know if they, like he, detested the things unfolding around them since the arrival of the men of the capital. Observing the cruelty he fantasizes about the kinds of people that may surround him but which he does not know, people who are as bothered by the sound of the suffering inflicted on others around them: “If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them” (104). Solidarity is a cornerstone of political protection, the Magistrate comes to realize at the moment when he is already taboo. Privilege will always be a loss at the moment in which the law turns from its false promise of protection to a mechanism of cruelty, punishment, and dispossession.

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Japanese-American child with family belongings en route to California internment camp (Spring 1942). Image via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Japanese-American child with family belongings en route to California internment camp (Spring 1942). Image via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

What the book does not let us forget is that the force of law, while real, and routinely exercised to dispossess the already vulnerable, is nonetheless localized, limited, and ultimately, fragmentary. In a political world where racism is proclaimed openly, where acts of violence are following the new empowerment of hate in America, where it is unclear what laws will be enforced and against whom in the months and years to come (not to mention the laws to passed and undone), we must remember once and repeat to ourselves daily what our own UC Irvine Comparative Literature Professor Etienne Balibar says in Politics and the Other Scene: “[t]here is autonomy of politics only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (10). Let us take this seriously and remember that we are the source of support and liberation for one another. We can no longer assume a caring state will help the dispossessed, that the law answers the distress of the victim of hate and violence, that the person terrorized in front of you will be saved by someone else, that calling the police will end in what you would call justice. The fact we did for so long in the face of testimony by those subjected to the cruelty of the state betrays the extent that we are also under the spell of disavowal that marks the existence of the Magistrate until he becomes “othered” (see for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Works Cited

Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002).

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 1980).

FrouzeshSharareh Frouzesh is a seminar leader in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on identity formation and the privileging of particular identities through an exploration of the concept of guilt. Her interdisciplinary work engages with 20th and 21st century Iranian and Iranian-American Literature, postcolonial Anglophone and World Literatures, as well as literary theory, political philosophy, and postcolonial, critical, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. 

Rousseau and the Nature of Human Freedom

Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau (replica of 1753 portrait, image dates to the last third of the 18th century). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau (replica of 1753 portrait, image dates to the last third of the 18th century). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Rousseau’s thought experiment on the state of nature[1] produces some interesting insights into our moral psychology and the social mediation of identity, as well as offering some provocative claims about the nature of human culture. And Rousseau’s influence on subsequent political theory has been substantial, in directions that might seem surprising, given the focus in the First and Second Discourses on the individual and the value of independence. As one of the editors of our edition points out, some accuse Rousseau of being “the author of a totalitarian political theory.”[2] This is precisely Bertrand Russell’s view, asserting that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau.”[3] Such an assessment clearly points to the arguments presented in Rousseau’s essay On the Social Contract, published in 1762, principally the view presented there that the citizen of a polity must identify absolutely with the infallible general will of the state, and that whoever refuses to obey the general will must be “forced to be free.”[4] How does Rousseau get from his utter rejection of human society in the first two discourses to an enthusiastic, absolute affirmation of the state? The answer must lie in Rousseau’s account of the crucial transition from the state of nature to civil society.

Frontispiece to Continental European edition of Rousseau's The Social Contrast (1762)

Frontispiece to Continental European edition of Rousseau’s The Social Contrast (1762)

But on this point there is also significant ambivalence in Rousseau. Despite his insistent privileging of the state of nature as the site of natural virtue, and his characterization of human society as depravity in essence, Rousseau ultimately asserts that early life in society “must have been the happiest and most durable epoch” in human history.[5] In The Social Contract, one finds this thought even more profoundly and emphatically stated, where Rousseau argues that entrance into the civil state results in the transformation of the human being “from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.”[6] Although in both passages he still considers the potential for abuse and corruption to be a significant concern, the exit from the state of nature also eventuates in the development of the human faculties and the acquisition of moral liberty, “which alone makes man truly master of himself. For to be driven by appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty.”[7]

Bracketing the possible inconsistencies of Rousseau’s account here, what I find most problematic about this conjectural picture of the entrance of human beings into society are the conditions on which the social compact depends. Rousseau defines human beings as distinct from other sentient beings by virtue of two essential characteristics, which are already present in the state of nature: 1) human freedom, and 2) perfectibility.[8] But just what are the features of human freedom in the state of nature, and how can a human possess a faculty of perfectibility without possessing the category of the moral? Remember that the moral conception is one of the products of the social world in Rousseau’s account, and that solitary human beings would have no sense of moral duty, just as they would lack all other categories of judgment.

Bertrand Russell in 1965. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Bertrand Russell in 1965. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

To put it plainly, the quality of freedom that Rousseau attributes to human beings in the state of nature does not sound like freedom worth having. More importantly, it does not seem to offer a basis for the radical reconfiguration of the world effected by entrance into this contract with other consenting human beings. Other than the impulsive aversion to suffering, which Rousseau terms the natural virtue of pity, and from which all other social virtues derive, it is hard to see just what freedom a human being is supposed to possess. Indeed, as quoted above, Rousseau ultimately suggests that true freedom is only a result of the binding together of individuals into society, but freedom is also a necessary precondition of the founding of society. What is called for is a robust account of human freedom divested of the circularity that I have tried to describe in Rousseau. True human freedom would have to be self-legitimating, self-authorizing, in order to offer sufficient ground for the developmental account that Rousseau wants to offer: the liberty that Rousseau describes as “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself.” This is a thought that German Idealism (e.g., Fichte, Kant, Hegel) will take to be the central problem of modern philosophy—it is also this line of thinking that results for Russell[9] in the terrific destruction of the Second World War, at the hands of totalitarian empires.[10]

Notes

[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, ed. David Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), p. 40. Rousseau repeatedly admits that his speculations about natural man are pure conjecture, thus a thought experiment, and this thought-experimental framework had been used many times before him (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu) and after him (e.g., Rawls, Nozick). More generally, thought experiments have become a conventional genre is the practice of philosophy, although there is some dispute as to just what these contrived, fantastic narratives are actually capable of establishing. For an example of resistance to this type of theorizing, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1985).

[2] David Wooton, “Introduction” to Rousseau’s Basic Political Writings, ed. David Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), p. x.

[3] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 685.

[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 167. The point is also made very emphatically in the “Discourse on Political Economy,” where he suggests that ideally citizens would be educated from birth to accept total identification with the state, “never to consider their own persons except in terms of being related to the body of the state, and […] not to perceive their own existence except as part of the state’s existence” (137).

[5] Rousseau, p. 74.

[6] Rousseau, p. 167.

[7] ibid.

[8] Rousseau, p. 53.

[9] Russell wrote his monumental, Nobel Prize-winning History of Western Philosophy in the midst of that war, with no certainty as to the outcome.

[10] Hitler’s “Third Reich” [Drittes Reich] literally means the Third Empire.

Kurt BuhananKurt Buhanan earned his PhD at UC Irvine, and has published on German literature and film, visual culture, and critical theory. He has articles on the poet Paul Celan and the contemporary filmmaker Christian Petzold forthcoming in the journals Semiotica and The German Quarterly, respectively. Unlike Bertrand Russell, he does not hold Rousseau responsible for the rise of Hitler, but he would be happy to discuss the point.