Jim Devine wrote:
> I think the link between Marx and Rousseau would best be found through
> Hegel (though Marx was of course familiar with Rousseau).
Knowledge of Rousseau is the gap in my education which I lament
most -- so I may be way off here. But it seems to me (going in part
from consideration of the amount of attention Wollstonecraft gives
to refuting Rousseau's idiocies on women) that the great service
Rousseau performed for later radical reformers and revolutionaries
was to perceive "society" as a work of art rather than a "natural"
expression of human nature. The development of markets (and the
subsequent growing triumph of abstract individualism in practice
if not in theory) was breaking the hold of spontaneous hierarchical
and analogical thought in Europe -- the sort of thought embodied
in the very language in such expressions as "body politic" and "head
of state" -- but formal thought still tended to this hierarchical mode.
Rousseau's denial that the State was a *natural* product theorized
this break, and hence prepared the way for the revolutionary thinking
that reached (at least so far) its culmination in Marx. Just as Marx
can be described as "Aristotle with an attitude," so he can be
described as "Rousseau minus individualism." Rousseau's radical
individualism helped prepare the context for historical materialism
(or the rejection of metaphysical individualism).
As I say -- I'm way beyond my scholastic limits here, so I won't
cling to all or much of this.
Carrol
