Come Together VI: Live While You Live, A History Boy, 23/03/2017

Read the Come Together series of posts on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract from the beginning.
• • •
Continued from previous . . . I ended yesterday with a question. If even the most virtuous will inevitably fall, why should we even hope?

The question underlies the whole point of writing about utopias and political or ethical ideals at all. Well, no, it underlies rather more than that. Taken rhetorically, it’s the sigh of despair for every aspect of life. It’s the possibility that death nullifies the value of life.

It’s the challenge of mortality. Everything ends eventually. Realizing this thought is sobering, and sometimes terrifying. Funny thing is, it’s actually defined my work since I started publishing philosophy.

My first published essay in an official philosophy venue was an essay in the first Doctor Who and Philosophy collection. Because of course it was. It grappled with that existential question, of what the value of life could be if death negated all its achievements.

The answer to the question is to deny its validity. Just because the effects and knowledge of your actions won’t last forever doesn’t rob them of their value. The value of our actions are in the actions themselves, and the immediate time frame of their effects.

The city rises and will fall one day. Its dignity is in its life.

If I help one old poor woman get a good lunch one day, it doesn’t matter that she died that very evening of a catastrophic coronary in her sleep.* If you go to any figure in the general canon of Western philosophy, you’ll find this concept most clearly in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

* I sometimes feel like I don’t do enough to help people who need it.

But I see it asked in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and I’m left wondering about its status in that very ambiguous text. Before I picked up Rousseau’s books again for this string of classical research, I hadn’t really touched his writing since I was an undergraduate.

I learned a very simple Rousseau back then, one that doesn’t quite jive with the ambiguous thinker I see here. My education in political philosophy suffered from the unfortunate trend of undergraduate teaching – making the ideas clear, too clear.

Rousseau’s work is remembered because of his ambiguity. He’s a genius at describing the hidden potentials of humanity – freedom, happiness, social harmony, all the aspects of our perfection. But he’s also a genius at explaining what it is about human society that keeps us from realizing that potential.

We can conceive of this potential and approach it, even though we might only inch toward living a more perfect existence in our own lifetimes. Circumstances might conspire against us completely in trying to become more perfect creatures.

I’m reading Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy right now. He, most stereotypically of anyone else in the tradition, is a thinker of contingency and crap circumstances. You can tell, when you read these two books one after the other, how scholars are on target when they discuss the deep influence Machiavelli had on Rousseau.

Scholarship aside, it’s not as though Machiavelli’s pragmatic sensibility survives in Rousseau. The Social Contract and all his major works are aporetic – they leave you hanging. There are no certainties, no comforting paths forward.

You understand the human condition better than before you read it – our possibilities for social harmony and perfection along with our tendencies to corruption, greed, violence, and ruin. Understanding leads to wiser action.

Wisdom is not a correct answer on an exam. Never confuse the two.

Come Together V: Even the Best Will Fall, Research Time, 22/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . Say freedom explodes in a society. Tyrants fall. The corrupt oligarchs and bloodthirsty generals either flee or are strung up. People look around them when the fires die down and see a wide field of potential. And they smile.

The truly insightful ones, underneath their smiles and their joy at finally being free, are also scared shitless.

A tyrant can be so exalted among his people that
he appears invincible, as if he'll always be their
ruler.

Because when you literally get the chance to form an entirely new republic, constitution, institutions and all, you’re faced with a tremendous burden. You have to build a state that does justice to your people, especially if you really have overthrown a dictator and have a chance to grow a democratic society.

It’s interesting, in that context, to read Rousseau steadfastly refusing to say anything like what the best government for people would be. That’s what a good chunk of traditional political theory is – analyzing and arguing over state institutions, their powers, and their affects in shaping a political culture, to identify the best form of government.

Thinking about this question is where Rousseau’s pessimism begins to emerge. However much he’s known as a utopian thinker – and however much he really is a utopian thinker – he’s a deep pessimist about real human potential.

He shies away from answering this question with any content for two reasons. One is an empiricist’s humility. Rousseau knows that there’s a huge amount of cultural and economic variety just among the different states and societies of Europe.

You can’t, given that variety, give an account of the best forms of government that will be universal. Not if you want that account to have much content other than the will to freedom. Which doesn’t get our hypothetical fellow in the ruins of his old tyranny out of his problem.

Because you don’t escape the problem of how best to govern people. Rousseau explains that all governments – no matter how virtuous in their beginning – will always eventually fall apart. As he puts it, any unified government of free people will eventually collapse into either another tyranny or violent anarchy.

So our man in the rubble can build with all the ambition and wisdom his people can muster. It will all be a tyranny again eventually.

Only a few tyrants are ever really so fortunate. And you think Qaddafi
got it rough in the end. You should have seen Rome.

Rousseau uses a concept of corruption in this argument that I think has roots in Aristotle. I may dig around for a copy of On Generation and Corruption to examine the concept there. But in the context of The Social Contract, this corruption is a kind of cultural erosion.*

* Here's another welcome sign of Rousseau's materialism. Nowhere in his account of the reasons for humanity's corruption does he fall back on any Christian concepts of original sin. He relies on no talk of the soul or our fallen relationship with God. He speaks only of the material processes of culture, the social forces among classes as some communities tend to work as private citizens and some communities tend to produce governors, bureaucrats, and other powerful people.

Any stable state maintains itself in tension between a few fundamental social forces. As Rousseau puts it, that tension is between the sovereign power of the people themselves, and the institutional power of the governing classes.

In a well-structured society, it’s a creative tension – incredible achievements arise from the battles and rivalries among the popular and institutional classes. But the heat will always wear away the machinery of the government. That creativity may make a state last longer and achieve greatness, but things will begin to creak.

They’ll be near-silent, but audible.

That’s the tragedy of human society. We can achieve so much when we can encourage freedom in society while building institutions that solve our coordination problems for large-scale activity. But the energy in any culture is fuelled through the tension and conflict of people and institutions.

Such greatness occurs only in the most virtuous governments, which are rare enough as it is. Most real states are far more vicious. Cruel. The 20th century even saw the perfection of government through mass murder-suicide. Our virtue is rare.

If even the most virtuous will inevitably fall, why should we even hope? . . . . To be continued

Come Together IV: Liberation Through Communication, Research Time, 20/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . Rousseau offers us conceptual resources to understand how political power is rooted not in the state or any institution, but in ordinary people themselves. If I can throw a bone to my right-wing populist friends, Rousseau is a classical source of critique against “the elites.”*

* Whoever these elites actually are, since the definition gets more than a little slippery.

Here’s the structure that “the sovereign” has when you read The Social Contract. It’s the energy of a whole community acting in harmony, the kind of self-conscious social harmony I described on Friday.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 and 2012 were attempts to overthrow
oppressive, tyrannical governments and replace their corrupt practices
with democratic, accountable leadership that served the common
interests of citizens. Citizens came to know their common interests
through talking with each other, which allowed them to come
together as one social body to demand change. Never forget this.

Sovereign power emerges from the expression of thousand (or maybe even millions) of people in a community acting together on their known common interest. That's the immanent power of political action.

Practically, you’re now forced to ask how to produce this intense solidarity in your community. It would be wonderful to live in that kind of community, where every interaction with your neighbours is defined by mutual aid and friendship.

Even though Rousseau often talks as though his ideals are impossibilities – a utopian through and through, that hypocritical old Genevan – he does give a few possibility conditions, even if in a roundabout way.

Communication is a necessary condition of the general will, the spontaneous unity and harmony of a whole community. He doesn’t argue for this directly in The Social Contract, but it’s implied by what he says about the conditions where a despot thrives.

By this, he means the material conditions. The most important one is the dispersal of a people in a country. If there are a lot of small, relatively isolated communities, dictators can do remarkably well.

Keep your eyes on the material conditions of the world where Rousseau was writing too. This is a world where real-time communication is pretty much impossible except between people standing literally right next to each other and physically speaking.

Rodrigo Duterte uses intense public relations through Facebook to
manage his public image in The Philippines, where as president he's
leading a radical and violent campaign against drug use and the drug
trade. Communications technology is a condition of liberation, but
can easily turn against the interests of free people.

To people of my generation, this is a strange, alien world. A 21st century person taken to the technological context of 1762 Geneva would probably have a mental breakdown from information starvation.

I’m not just talking about the internet – email, videoconferencing, all the social media and messaging platforms we use daily, casually. We’re a culture that’s just so accustomed to things like telephones, radio, and television that a world without these things is disorienting.

We take vacations camping in the middle of the woods to escape these networks for a few days, but if we ever had to live in these conditions for our entire lives, we’d curse the god who sent us there. Now imagine if this is the only world you ever knew.

Communicating over any distance whatsoever, with more than a few hundred people in your life, depends on mass media. And in Rousseau’s day, any kind of media transmission – printing presses, pamphlets, mail – depends on state institutions to guarantee their stability. Or just straight-up building the media networks in the first place.

It’s such a contrast to our lives, where the physical architecture of the internet – server farms scattered around the world, enormous cables strung under the sea, consumer ISPs hitching onto phone and cable lines, satellites – is beyond the control of any single government.

The Street Enters the House, a 1911 painting by Umberto Boccioni.
Boccioni's paintings often depict the mass movement of people and
technology recreating the physical world itself, always a unified,
harmonious movement.

Communication is necessary for building a community. It’s a truth that goes beyond just the similarity in words. Communication lets us know each other as people, lets us figure out together what ideas and goals our society will share. It helps us harmonize our beliefs and interests.

That’s the earliest, most rudimentary steps of harmonizing a society around common interests. In Rousseau’s time, this can happen only among small communities without the direct help of the state.

But in our time, like-minded people can connect with each other all over a country, and all over the world, for real-time communication limited only by the languages they speak. Communication technology has been central to democratic revolutions from the 1700s to today.

Of course, oppressive regimes can also use the communication technology that otherwise liberates. Having the technology doesn’t mean freedom will follow. But the technology for real-time mass communication would appear to be an important condition for an explosion of freedom.

But what shall we do with our freedom if we gain it? . . . . To be continued

Come Together III: In Perfect Harmony, Research Time, 17/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . An impossibility is an inspiration. It is Eden. Heaven on Earth. Rather, it’s Earth becoming Heaven.

That’s the movement Rousseau makes from the reality of humanity to its perfection. In real life, we’re a bunch of incurably corrupt, inescapably ignorant bastards. But in our perfected state, we damn near perfectly understand the common interest of our whole community, and are kind enough always to act on it.

Submitting completely to an authority that speaks with the voice of God
has never been a request that turns out well for anyone of whom it's
asked. Usually, it's a submission to slavery, as when Indigenous
Canadian children literally had Christianity beaten into them.

This is the mind-set of the individual when the will of a community is expressed as the general will. The harmony of thought across the whole society isn’t somehow imposed from above.* It’s a perfectly harmonized expression of every individual spontaneously.

* I haven’t read nearly enough Rousseau scholarship to say authoritatively whether my hypothesis is generally on target. Nor would I really want to, even if I had time. It’s not like I would have had time as a professor either – I’d have had budget meetings to attend with the associate vice-deans.

When he says that “Gods would be needed to give men laws,” he isn’t talking about God as a person standing over obedient humans. This isn’t any divine absolute despot, giving orders to which you submit.

If that were the kind of god that was on order, then Rousseau is quite the totalitarian. That’s what it means to submit all of human existence to the orders of an authority. But I’m taking Rousseau as a thinker of radical freedom, and it’s easy to do so if you just think of God in that line differently.

Remember that he’s said that the only true laws that a legislature could write were rules and institutions written as the expression of the general will. Only when the entire community (politicians and bureaucrats included) act in perfect harmony and love spontaneously is any legislation a truly legitimate law.

In any case less perfect than that, the laws are just rules backed up by threats of punishment (like jail time) or rewards (like tax credits). The law has only moral significance.

No ethical significance. The general will is the immanent expression of a community itself. Now you see it.** I’m using Rousseau in Utopias as part of a tradition of political materialism, whose fulcrum is Spinoza.

Well, hello there, good sir.

** And so do I.

I have one question for any of my scholar friends who might come across this. I may actually just write a former professor of mine who I remember has published academic articles on Rousseau. I’m not sure how believable this reading is. Maybe I should call it an appropriation. I feel like that’s a more accurate term for what I’m doing with the historical research for this book.

One of the problems with Rousseau is that he knew his audience too well. This is what makes it difficult – as a scholar or just an attentive reader – to be sure he’s really thinking what you think you read in his writing.

So when he uses terms like “the sovereign” or tosses off flourishes like that line above about gods, he sounds like he’s referring to monarchs and God the Father. Because that’s what his audience of reasonably intellectual literate people in 1760s Europe thought of when they heard those terms.

It’s how Rousseau’s own audience thought of power, authority, kingship, and the divine. This conception of divinity as a perfect material expression would have gotten someone strung up for some hardcore heresy.

Geneva was a Calvinist country at the time, and that is not a religious authority known to tolerate leniency. At the time, “Spinozist” was an insult you hurled at someone when you wanted to destroy their reputation. Materialism of Spinoza’s expressive, free kind was considered just as corrosive as atheism.

So how plausible would it be for me historically to make Rousseau a chain link in a semi-underground Spinozist tradition? Should I even care about plausibility to the scholarly community when I don’t even plan on making Utopias a scholarly book? . . . To be continued

Come Together II: When a Person Becomes a Legion, Composing, 16/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . Inescapably, we’re all individuals. Easy thing to say. But it can quite often be very difficult to live as an individual. Social contact is a required part of human life – a socially isolated person becomes unhinged, deranged, profoundly broken.

Consider Garry Davis and Mike Gogulski, the men I wrote about yesterday who’d renounced their citizenship, purposely become stateless. They lead (or led, in Garry’s case) active lives, have (or had) circles and networks of friends and colleagues.

Of course, the problem with Rousseau's philosophy is that people often
read his very abstract text – literally writing impossibilities – as
empirical or historical accounts of primitive humanity. That's how he
got the reputation of promoting his free pre-civilized individual as the
"noble savage." Rousseau himself never used this phrase, but he did
pepper The Origin of Inequality with a whole bunch of other racist
bullshit about indigenous Americans.

But there’s a loneliness to statelessness. A drift. Floating. Not purposeless, but empty of at least one purpose.

Rousseau is one of those classical Enlightenment writers who embodies paradoxical complexities. Few people worth reading for literally centuries don’t.

The seeming paradox I want to concentrate on in this series of posts running through The Social Contract is between a vision of the free individual and the power of community. Rousseau famously imagines humanity before the social complexity of large communities as a contented wanderer.

Imagine an individual with no cares in the world, no serious obligations, a life of leisure, his only cares (and it is always a him) are gathering the abundant food, bedding down comfortably for the night under temperate, friendly skies. That’s the image of human freedom that Rousseau is most famous for propagating.

He’s also famous for introducing another concept, the general will of a community. Now, I don’t know that this concept is famous in the same way his free pre-civilized man is. The free wanderer is a pop culturally famous image. General will is something else.

No, general will is famous because figuring out precisely what Rousseau means by the term has become a cottage sub-discipline in academic philosophy. The term is very complex in The Social Contract, and Rousseau scholarship has never settled on anything like a consensus.

It probably never will, since scholars are incentivized to fragment their fields with proliferating new takes on their primary material. You make your name in scholarship by advancing and defending an interpretation that no one else yet has. If a field were to decide on one absolutely correct conclusion for a debate, they’d put themselves out of work.

So I'm not about to say I have anything like the totally accurate take on Rousseau’s general will. I’m not that kind of raging egomaniac. Even if I worked in academics still, I couldn’t pretend to be a raging egomaniac like you’re supposed to.

The closest I'd say we've ever come to making Rousseau's general will
real is in North Korea's mass games. I don't think I need to say much
about how fucking terrifying that is.

No, I’m just going to give my own interpretation, developed for my own purposes. I’m doing a long period of research for Utopias, a book about the relation of our political imagination with our real-life activism and beliefs. I’m looking into the classics for a retroactive tradition-building – historical ideas that can be useful guides to the present situation.

I’m not arguing that this was what Rousseau truly meant. What he meant was what he wrote – he’d look at all of us arguing and be amazed that we didn’t understand.

I’m saying – here’s how the ideas about the general will in The Social Contract connect with my priorities as a philosophical writer today.

The general will of a community is the spontaneous and simultaneous arrival of complete social harmony among all its individuals. Not only does this total, community-wide, all-at-once synchronicity and sympathy happen in feeling, but every individual intellectually understands the common interest of the whole community perfectly.

And in that complete, fully self-conscious harmony, the community acts on its common interest.

That is the only circumstance in which law can be legitimate, says Rousseau. When the entire community, acting together in perfect sympathy and mutual understanding, legislates its own activity.

Anything short of that is an imposition on people’s freedom, because that general will is the only circumstance in which literally everyone in a community agrees.

So what can a writer do with an impossibility? . . . To be continued

Come Together I: A Citizen of the World or Nowhere, Research Time, 15/03/2017

I'm looking through some classics of Western political philosophy for ideas and concepts to help understand and live in our own turbulent times. You can’t apply a 300 year old idea directly to the problems of the current era.

But the classics are fertile launching points for a complex engagement with perennial problems as they appear in different forms and contexts. You need as many concepts in your thoughts as you can if you want to build a versatile, adaptable politics and way of thinking.

So read the classics. Read them critically. Let the ideas that have inspired people for literally centuries inspire you too.

In one of Theresa May's most infamous speeches since becoming UK
Prime Minister, she threw down a challenging gauntlet: that if you
considered yourself a citizen of the world, you were really a citizen
of nowhere. The speech was an expression of May's curious new
vision of conservatism: paternal nationalist communitarian. But it
also showed the power that remains in citizenship and membership.

The West’s most fraught and volatile ethical conflict today is about the right to citizenship. Who should have it? Whose citizenship deserves respect? Whose doesn’t? Who do we want to be part of our community? Refugees? Migrant workers? Hyper-wealthy businessmen with eight passports? Stateless people with no citizenship protections at all?

All of these questions reflect different aspects of that core ethical question – Who deserves to join my community?

Citizenship isn't just the brand name of our passports. It's a set of institutions in which we're deeply enmeshed, relationships that determine significant parts of our identities. Citizenship implies a bond among all those who share it that the same set of institutions will, to some degree, protect you.

That umbrella of institutional responsibility defines the boundaries of our community just as much as national borders. It’s a promise of the institutions themselves to the people, that you are welcome here. Yet at its heart, your membership in that community remains voluntary. You really can give it up.

That’s the fact that anchors a lot of Rousseau’s thinking in The Social Contract. That citizenship is always voluntary became a point of political activism. What more blatant way to demonstrate your broken faith in the promise of the state than to give up your citizenship?

A few months ago, I was reading a short book about the – very twisted – politics and economics of citizenship in the 21st century. Atossa Abrahamian described a man named Garry Davis.

I hadn’t heard of him until I read her book, but he was a fascinating and admirable man. Disgusted by the violence of the Second World War, he renounced his American citizenship and literally became a world citizen.

An elderly Garry Davis holding the latest edition of the World Passport.

Technically, he was stateless, but he helped found a non-governmental organization that distributed the World Passport. Oddly, he actually got this travel document accepted as legitimate by many governments around the world. The World Passport was Davis’ lifelong demonstration that a post-national order based on peace and brotherhood was possible.

Mike Gogulski is an American computer programmer Abrahamian wrote about for VICE a couple of years ago. In the mid-2000s, he was living in Bratislava with his girlfriend at the time.

Disgusted with the violence of the American state in Iraq, he gave up his US citizenship. He’s made a living as a bitcoin trader (and launderer) ever since. His wife is a Slovak who works at the Chinese embassy processing visa applications.

His life is happy, if a little dreary. He’s not a globetrotting peace activist like Davis. Instead, he’s content to live in Slovakia with his wife and cat, plugging away in relative at crypto-currency projects.

In their own way, Davis and Gogulski demonstrated in real life what Rousseau argues in The Social Contract. No matter how much we may rely on our governments for a lot of our needs in life, that relationship is voluntary. Fundamental human freedom means that we can walk away at any time.

The practical question is whether you’re willing to live with the consequences. . . . To be continued

Original Equality VI: Dying Like Qaddafi in a Sewer Pipe, Research Time, 14/03/2017

Read my whole series of posts about ideas in Rousseau's On the Origin of Inequality starting here.
• • •
Continued from previous . . . So you have a problem. Law does function as a chain. Rousseau is a flamboyantly over-the-top writer, so he describes it as a retreat into slavery. That’s the heart of his most charismatic line, that man is born free but lives everywhere in chains.

But it's been a busy weekend, so here’s the question I left with last time I was talking about political equality.

“We’ll always need the law. And the law will always require some element of coercion. And Rousseau writes with a mix of trolling, theatricality, and ironic honesty when he says that the law amounts to slavery. So is there a way out of this?”

Not as such, no. At least not in The Origin of Inequality itself. The rest of this week will be follow-ups of reading The Social Contract, so I’ll continue the idea there. Because The Origin of Inequality ends on an impasse.

If human nature inevitably corrupts our institutions until they crush us
like the most brutal dictators, then are we stuck with always having to
explode in violence for even the most unlikely shot at rebuilding
a fair society?

It’s an impasse that’s meant to challenge you, leave you thinking. An ambiguous ending where there seems to be no escape from either growing slavery or chaos. It ends with such a note of pessimism, but it strangely fits with the image of humanity as inherently peaceful and loving.

Human nature is to embrace peace, but the complexity and stress of large-scale social life in a world of scarce resources brings humanity to embrace conflict and mutual irritation instead. The conflicts of daily life corrupt our inner virtue.

So we turn to laws and institutions to relegate our complexity with moral dogma and police. Yet this traps human society in a trap. State institutions can’t regulate human life to the nanometric degree necessary to remove all human corruption and dickishness.

Slicing our dickishness out of humanity would be just as destructive as slicing our virtue away. Our grimier qualities are an integral part of expressing our virtues anyway. Purely virtuous behaviour, goes Rousseau’s analysis, can’t even really happen beyond small groups. At most, the size of a large family.

Then you're left with a society that will always wear away at the edges. People will always be corrupt to some degree. There will be just as much, if not much more virtuous, kind behaviour in society. But erosion is inevitable.

Human nature is always going to be just as mean, egotistical, and
even cruel as it is kind, sympathetic, and generous. Human dignity is
our unity of all these chaotic traits in a single soul.

A threshold is crossed somehow. Maybe some disaster happens like a huge crop failure, pollution event, or military invasion. Maybe rage, corruption, and resentment become an overwhelming part of daily life. So there’s a clampdown of more laws and more ruthless enforcement to restore order.

But our desires chafe against these tougher rules. Our desire to be free, as well as our desire to be a cheating jerk. Those virtues and vices destabilize even this tougher social order until the only institutions that can contain them is despotism, dictatorship, tyranny.

And even the iron fist of the most brutal tyranny is susceptible to the same slow erosion of the law under that natural human chaos of social and personal complexity. That’s the greatest vision of hope Rousseau has left for the future of any real government.

When the oppression has become unbearable, humanity can always drag our dictators out of the sewer pipes where they fled to hide from the masses, beat and shoot them dead in a dirt road. Then we can start again.
• • •
A tidy narrative. Comprehensive? Absolutely not. Rousseau’s narrative of inequality is exquisitely simple.

Given the current situation of global politics, I very much hope
violence is not the only way to scale down from authoritarian
behaviour in democracy. Because it's already getting pretty bad.

Most obviously, it never accounts for the other most important vectors of human society. Yes, there’s virtue, but there’s also economy and ecology.

Economy: The consumption and production processes by which, at the minimum, people eat and maintain their lives. Ecology: The environmental conditions which have so many complex effects on all aspects of human health individually and socially.

But given the purpose of the book, I don’t blame him. Rousseau isn’t building a comprehensive guide to the means by which real states and governments collapse. He’s presenting an aspect of human nature that inevitably corrupts and erodes our goal of building a peaceful society of equals.

He imagines the kind of society in which humanity would be happy, but shows how that happiness is incompatible with any possible circumstance of real people. He shows us the power of our impossible aspiration, yet lets it remain inspiring despite its impossibility.

Original Inequality V: Laying Down the Law, Research Time, 09/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So why do we need the law if we’re naturally good to each other? When you read Rousseau, he lays out a vision of human nature where we’re fundamentally good to each other.

Our instincts toward each other are naturally for sympathy and pity. When we see someone in pain, even a face expressing sadness or stress, we have an almost autonomic instinct to help them somehow. If only to ask if there’s a way we can help.

Most of you may not experience that kind of universal kindness every day. Most of the time, we probably walk around in a constant hum of mutual irritation. When I’ve worked in customer service jobs at different points of my life, I’d meet people who seemed constantly on the verge of exploding with rage just from interacting with strangers all day long.

Judge Dredd is the most intense, clear, and hilarious demonstration of
the terrifying violence in the idea that there's a moral obligation to
obey the law, or of the violence underlying any regime of laws at all.
I sometimes want to hang out with my friends from McMaster legal
theory again, but we live such different lives. I always found it
really rewarding conversation to throw an outsider's radical ideas
at them, because I'd learn so much and inspire creativity all around.

This, goes the stereotypical argument, is why we live in nations of laws. Because we’re really just constantly annoyed with each other all the time. When you learn the history of Western political philosophy, you inevitably cover Thomas Hobbes’ much worse thesis – that we’re naturally at constant war with each other, always paranoid, deranged with fear that we could be attacked and killed at any moment.

Society, says Hobbes, requires the strong hand of a police power who must never be questioned. The sovereign is the force that keeps us in line. Fear is the goal of the law.

Yet our natural state is more along the lines of that annoyance. We can still live together without having to suppress the urge for violence. But we do get pretty irritated with each other.

And that vision of a complicated society of mutual irritation is much more like Rousseau’s conception of how humanity lives together. It fits with his vision of a fundamentally kind humanity because of the context of where and how human kindness emerges.

It’s in the face-to-face interaction of people. And the better we know someone, the closer they are to us in our daily lives, the more powerful that face is in evoking our sympathy and love.

The problem is that when larger numbers of people live together, society gets complicated. We find ourselves reliant on many strangers for a lot of our needs – our food, shelter, education, entertainment, general well-being. And our networks of mutual need become so big and complicated that it stresses us to maintain them.

We experience stress, irritation, and pain that separates us from each other. We need to accumulate far beyond our personal needs when our society depends on each of us supplying the needs of others. The need to accumulate all-too-easily tips over into greed, which is at the root of so many destructive human behaviours.

Yet sometimes, we learn to rely too much on others to look after our
neighbours who are in great material need. That's the lesson I take from
the modern parable of the homeless pastor. When you expect an institution
– whether the church, a charity, or a government welfare program – to
care for the poor, you can erase your pangs of guilt when you look in
the face of people who ask you for help but still look through them.

So we turn to the law to regulate the complexity of agricultural and industrial human society. When humanity becomes the holocene, and not just the scattered interactions of wandering bands of humans, we need institutions to shape our societies through laws and regulations. Otherwise, greed and mutual piracy really will overtake us.

But civil laws don’t restore the original equality all people shared in simpler social structures, when each of us could provide for our own needs with our own efforts. Far from it.

Laws lock in some specific regime of inequality. Maybe it would be the state of political and social affairs at the time of an institution’s birth. Maybe a community would refine their legal institutions and regulations over time to become more equal, more fair. To redress past wrongs and build a better future for everybody.

Of course, political pressures of all kinds could push changes in those laws to fuel inequality, stall social mobility, lock in systematic inequities, discriminations, and humiliations. It feels like that’s the trend of the last few decades.

But that law is still the law. It can never restore the genuine equality of a totally self-sufficient population because it can never simplify society to flatten away all those differences and new needs that arise from the complexity of just a few hundred humans living together.

We’ll always need the law. And the law will always require some element of coercion. And Rousseau writes with a mix of trolling, theatricality, and ironic honesty when he says that the law amounts to slavery. So is there a way out of this? . . . . To be continued

Original Inequality IV: Gotham's Greed, Research Time, 07/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So what I want to do with these looks back through the classics of political philosophy is build my conceptual toolbox to analyze contemporary political issues and the role utopian thinking can play in the 21st century.

It’s also about writing a book that explicitly contributes to a particular tradition within the whole history of Western philosophy.* That tradition is a democratic materialism or radical democracy. It starts with Niccolo Machiavelli’s civic republican thought.

* Western philosophy = A particular tradition of developing concepts to understand and analyze the universe, which began in the Greek network of city-states and Mediterranean colonies, spread through the Roman, then Arab empires, blending with Christian theology, diversifying and fragmenting through the development of modern science, nestling in the university sector by the 19th century.

Foucault himself doesn't play a big role in this post. I just like using this
image of him, for obvious reasons.

From there, it gets its metaphysical content from Benedict Spinoza’s work,** blooms again in Karl Marx’s empiricism of ideology, disappeared as marxism was warped by totalitarian Stalinist influence, then surging once more in the new radical democratic thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Bifo, and Antonio Negri.

** Why isn’t Thomas Hobbes part of this tradition? Well, he may be an imperialist, but he’s no democrat.

At our current crisis point for the West – both for philosophy as a discipline*** and our broader political culture – we need radical gestures of peace and diversity. A refusal to give in to nationalism or pressure for conformity of any kind.

*** The disciplinary crisis of philosophy being encased entirely in a university institution, and that institution’s increasingly powerful disincentives from producing any work that could ever be considered primary material – only commentaries and esoteric or technical debates.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I now know Rousseau’s thought fits snugly and dementedly into that tradition of democratic materialism. Any philosopher worth reading is, after all, at least a little demented.

Here’s another example of Rousseau’s thoroughly materialist approach to political thinking. He considers the roots of greed. Writing in 1755 Switzerland, I feel safe assuming that the popular culture of Europe considered human greed rooted in our soul.

Original sin is, in a Christian community, the foundational principle of human corruption. It’s a primal rupture in what should have been a harmonious relationship with God – a spiritual rupture.

Rousseau? The roots of greed lie in our social networks. Here’s the short version of his argument, which is pretty efficient as it is in The Origin of Inequality.

As society becomes more complex, human needs grow more complex. So we can no longer be self-sufficient, and need to co-operate to live well. At a low level of complexity, we can get by with contingent deals and contracts. But as life gets more complicated, we need to build institutions to rely on.

These relationships of mutual reliance and need are the foundation of social solidarity, which is good, because it builds community in practical reciprocal benefits.

As well as the need for cooperation and investment, the size of a social
network is a factor in enabling greed and cheating. If you interact with
people casually, you won't have the same force of solidarity as with
your close friends and family. So you don't feel as bad about swindling
those casual acquaintances who mean little to nothing to you.

But all these cooperative plans and activities require us to accumulate beyond our immediate needs. We have to prepare to invest in long-term strategies for community and personal survival – to invest in cooperative ventures.

Our institutions need to collect taxes and user fees to continue supplying the goods and services they do. Our cooperative plans like charities, businesses, and deals of all kinds likewise need investments and resources to get started.

If we start to accumulate with regard to the future, inequality will start to appear in society. Accumulation is a set of skills, and some will be better or worse than others. Those skills are different depending on how you accumulate your wealth, but luck and talent will result in different rates of accumulation for different people.

You’ll end up with a society of rich and poor. Perhaps where people become so rich that they forget about the human need to rely on others for our well-being – able to buy and sell anyone, you can easily think real solidarity is a fiction. Perhaps where people become so poor than they’re consumed by resentment and depression – unable to build any beneficial relationships at all anymore.

An entirely material root for greed, resentment, hopelessness. A politics with no God and no spirit, only human short-sightedness and selfishness as the root of evil.

For the mid-1700s, and maybe even for the early 21st century, truly radical. . . . To be continued

Original Inequality III: Men of Substance and Matter, Research Time, 03/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . You read Rousseau and he truly is a deeply materialist thinker. One quite unlike any other thinker of his time. He describes human nature entirely in material terms, as the functions and actions of physical creatures. That includes our thoughts and feelings.

Yet we are still free.

He even gives a materialist account of depression in The Origin of Inequality. Not anywhere near the completeness of what you’d find today in the DSM of anything like that.

Until the dominant images of how we popularly understood scientific
principles changed, we couldn't really understand how a material body
could be free. The strong determinism of clockwork imagery could
even feed back from the popular to the professional who should know
that things are much more complicated. Or should he?

Consider the roots of depression and anxiety in your social and physical environment. Your life becomes complicated, filled with obligations, forcing you to keep so many plates spinning all the time. As these social, economic, and other needs and obligations proliferate, the stress of it all overwhelms you.

That’s Rousseau’s analysis of how an individual’s mental breakdown and depression happens. Even in 1755, people had nervous breakdowns.

He lays out this example in an argument about how appropriate our overstuffed societies are to the best-quality lives for humanity. All these are moral and political questions, questions about the happiness of our minds and the freedom of our souls.

Each time he offers an answer, it’s rooted in material existence. The craziness of life in contemporary society – the proper balance of healthy food and everyday exercise – biological and ecological interplays of forces.

From these networks of forces and colliding processes, human freedom emerges. And Rousseau is writing this in 1755.

The stress on your body and your brain from massive overstimulation
on a near-daily basis eventually cause breakdowns. It happens to
plenty of professors in the academic world, especially now that even
protected tenure-track researchers have become overworked by
administrative demands as well as their research and teaching.
Some remarkably successful public intellectuals have left the
academic career they may have been taught to dream for, simply
because of this Kafkaesque bind.

See, at the time, Western thinking was stuck on the problem of freedom and determinism for centuries. In the Enlightenment era people typically thought of nature as a mechanism just like clockwork. Physical movement was fully determined lockstep, as precise as the gears of a clock.

But humanity was the exception. We were free from mechanism, and figuring out how this exemption from causality actually worked was a major problem of philosophy from about the beginning of the Renaissance until the mid-20th century.

The problem always bugged me, and when I learned enough about ecological science and the physics of intensity, I was finally able to put it away. Because there is no contradiction between determinism and freedom – causality is always multiple and conditional.

Rousseau’s vision of a humanity that’s both entirely material and essentially free isn’t nearly so nuanced as I could get from studying scientific and mathematical concepts in 21st-century physics. But it’s in an entirely different headspace from the entire Western intellectual scene of his own time.

I think if I had come to Rousseau at this point in my life, but was an academic, I’d write one of those short monographs that puts an unintuitive twist on it. Like this interpretation of Rousseau as a materialist of freedom.

But I’m pretty sure by now that it’s the branded interpretation of some Rousseau scholar toiling away entirely behind academic paywalls. And I’m just not in the financial position to spend the labour I’d need to write such a book that would only appeal to academic publishers.

I’d rather deal with these ideas in a more mass-market venue where accessible prices and tones of writing can connect with more people. Ultimately, I’d make more of a public impact and make more money from my own writing.

If engaging the public is part of the mission of any humanities field, that question of accessibility has to be at the front of your mind. It’s how your work can do its best work in the world, and how your work will best build a heritage. . . . To be continued

Original Inequality II: A Modern Golden Mean, Research Time, 02/03/2017

Continued from last post (No, really, it just takes a while to get going). . . When I took my first undergrad-level class about Aristotle, we talked about the line that displays the Golden Mean. Virtue, the philosophy goes, is a mean at a perfect balance between two extremes. And it was diagrammed as a line.

A straight line on a chalkboard. On one end, a word for some destructive habit like recklessness. On the other end, the prof would write its opposite, but equally destructive habit, like cowardice. Then he wrote ‘bravery’ in the middle of the line and thought he explained it perfectly well.

Think about equality here in the most just sense. Imagine
the kind of society where every individual would not only
have the opportunity to be as fit and powerful as the most
athletic dancers, but where we would all become so in the
course of everyday, ordinary life.

You can draw it on an exam, but it doesn’t really explore what it means to have your behaviour balance two destructive extremes. Not what it means in your psychology and daily habits. Not in terms of how three different kinds of behaviour can actually express a single tendency.

None of those actually illuminating questions. The line is the easiest thing to draw on the exam.

I thought of this while reading Rousseau, because he seems to think about virtue in a similar way. He discusses this in a totally different context than Aristotle did. And please don’t think I’m trying to make some actual interpretive point about whether and how Aristotle’s idea really did influence Rousseau in this regard.

That’d be a totally unproductive time – a philology important only to a very well-paid scholar. And I don’t want to be a humble scholar anymore. I don’t even think I ever did want to be only a scholar.

I want to put these ideas next to each other so that someone who reads this can understand them both a little better. Understanding a concept better can let a person use an improved tool to understand the world and their life experience.

That’s basically what I think the public purpose of philosophy is. But let’s leave the really hippy-dippy stuff for another time.

So Rousseau is describing the roots of society’s decadence. In simple terms, that’s inequality. But how does this general idea of inequality spell out in everyday life? Inequality is a social corruption that’s expressed as public health problems.

Among the rich, you find diseases of gluttony and overeating – like adult-onset diabetes. Among the poor, you find diseases of poverty and hunger – like malnutrition.* The proper lifestyle is that of free people – you drink when you’re thirsty and eat when you’re hungry. You walk everywhere and exercise constantly.

A clear sign that your society is riven with destructive inequality and
profound corruption: A lot of wealthy people who let themselves
become obese out of laziness and the refusal to take any but the
physically easiest route anywhere at all.

* We’ve reversed the content in the 21st century, but it amounts to the same kind of decadence. More rich people suffer diseases of hunger like malnutrition because wealthy women often express the systemic sexism they experience as eating disorders. Poor people, meanwhile, can only afford heavily processed, starchy food and work crap jobs like call centres where they sit down for 10 hours every day.

Quite literally, an equal society is a healthy society because its people are – on the whole – healthier as individuals. Not the only kind of social and personal health Rousseau is interested in when he thinks about fundamental human equality, but it’s one very important vector.

It’s a very materialist perspective. It reminded me of what Nietzsche wrote about the importance of good health to the virtue of a society. But what matters for a thorough materialism is that social progress and virtue has this expression in the visceral matter of everyday life.

It illustrates the old Golden Mean concept better than that stupid line as well. The image of personal health helps you understand virtue as a perfectly balanced intensity. Feed yourself too much energy and you’re a slob or a decadent fatty. Maybe you undercut yourself and you’re nothing but a skeleton. Either way, you’re barely able to move. . . . To be continued

Original Inequality I: A Taste of Swiss Beats, Research Time, 01/03/2017

So I picked up my old book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau essays. Still diving through some classics, reading the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam.

Even aside from the larger scope of what I’m planning for Utopias the book, as I read him, I’m thinking about our own political situation today. Inequality has become one of the definitive political issues of the 21st century West – fighting inequality is the mission statement of today’s progressive left from Athens to Vancouver.

I'm one of the Bernie-Would-Have-Won folks. Not because of any love
of Sanders himself – I have a lot of problems with how he ran his
campaign for the nomination and the current focus of his public image.
But he and Donald Trump both ran on a platform of dismantling the
freewheeling new liberal economic model that's been dragging
humanity down. I wish his social democratic approach to that
project could have gone toe-to-toe with Trump's nationalism.

From Miami to Seattle, there’s the more pressing issue of resisting and surviving President Agent Orange. But there’s still an underlying idea that growing and catastrophic social and economic inequality laid the conditions of that reactionary wave.

So I picked up one of the classical texts in the Western tradition to think through the problem of social inequality. Rousseau was a rebel against the popular themes of his time – that European civilization was maturing, coming into its own as people learned to live as free citizens of enlightened, open governments guided by knowledge and wisdom of the new sciences and revival of ancient learning.

Absolutely fucking not, he said. The first of not enough punks and rebels in the history of Switzerland.

Instead, he offered an image of 1700s society as inherently corrupt, built on oppression. As a left-wing person taking part in left-wing political conversations in the 21st century, we’d today tend to think of that oppression through the era’s colonial empires. Not Rousseau, though.

Imperialism was at the heart of European culture – when The Origin of Inequality dropped in 1755, the Seven Years War between France and England was about to begin. England, France, Spain, Holland, and Portugal all held colonial territories and outposts throughout the globe. Europe was wealthy from colonial industry.

Rousseau peppers his essay with a few images of savages to illustrate his image of the truly free person. But he uses the same foul language of imperialist, racist thinking. These are almost figures of speech to him, but thankfully not the actual basis of his thinking.

The philosophy scholar Peter Gay wrote an introduction to my edition
of Rousseau's political essays. It struck me, looking at it now, how
important he described Rousseau's own origin and life in Geneva
was to his thought. However abstract and universal your thinking,
there will always be ways that your own history and the problems of
your own society and time shape you.

The Origin of Inequality keeps to an abstract plane. There are moments all over where he talks about how ludicrously difficult it would be for these tribes of 20 or so primitive people to achieve the basics of technology. As if you could just stumble into building the first iron smelter while foraging for apples.

He describes the state of pure human equality as individuals alone. We wander around a world where we’re relatively under-populated, with abundant resources. We only come into contact with others occasionally, hang out for a while, satisfy whatever sexual or social needs we might have, and move on again.

General isolation and no scarcity. These are the conditions in which humanity is at its most equal – the only state where no one has any debts to each other, no one serves another, and everyone is free.

When we meet each other, we aren’t rivals, because everyone has everything they need in such a condition. With life no more complicated than that of a naked wanderer with no worries, all our natural feelings of sympathy and love are never interrupted. Everyone is wonderful to each other because there is no material need for resentment or conflict.

Such a world never existed. But it’s a conceptual exploration. Rousseau is asking: What is the simplest state of human existence in which we could still be human?

But if society gets much more complex than the simplest possible, which it always is, inequalities begin to form. When society is complex enough that no one can provide for all their needs on their own – which is pretty much any population size and any level of relative scarcity – we rely on each other, fall into each other’s debts, exercise power over each other.

So inequality is the condition of the corruption of the happy, caring attitude we’d all have toward each other if we had no troubles in life. Corruption of our better nature constitutes itself in the first exercise of power over another.

The first moment where we push someone, lean on them, coerce them. The moment where we take even just a little bit of someone’s freedom away. . . . To be continued

Dictating Freedom V: The Image of the Nation, Research Time, 31/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . So much has been written over the centuries about what sovereignty is, what it implies, its legitimacy, its nature. Philosophical thought is a method of figuring out the nature of phenomena too complex to describe in simple terms. 

It’s a mistake to enter a philosophical debate with the preconception that your purpose is to settle it. As I hope yesterday’s post made clear, big, complex institutions are at their most dangerous when we’ve settled debate about their nature, function, and existence. When we’ve accepted their existence and taken them for granted. 

When they become so invisible to us that we look right through them, even as we can’t imagine a world without them. Like a glass window through which I see my neighbourhood.

A protestor raises a banner against immigration
restrictions. A little context here.

Think about how complicated real communities of people are, especially in our globalized world of easy planetary travel and frequent migration. But it’s always been the case that any economic centre becomes a culturally diverse, plural community. Once diversity sets in and you leave people alone to get on with life, it compounds as people create whole new identities and cultures.

Human communities tend toward creating more social and cultural complexity. So why do we all take for granted this idea that a peculiar patch of territory controlled by a government institution needs total ethnic-cultural unity, homogeneity, and conformity to be a stable political entity?

How did the nation-state become the default political institution for the entire world?* The answer is in the philosophy of the modern period – attempts to work out a way of thinking that would shut down the violence of Western Europe’s religious wars.

* You can’t just answer “colonialism.” Yes, that’s technically correct. But that only accounts for the spread of that political form. Not its genesis. Europe (mostly Britain) had conquered about half the Earth by the 1930s, and Westerners equated political freedom with having your own nation-state. So decolonization was the institution of 100 or so sovereign states where there were once imperial possessions. It had become the default already.

Etienne Balibar draws from Jean Bodin’s ideas – as he tried to find a common image of France that would prevent Catholics and Protestants from killing each other. His solution – to describe it in very simple terms – was a state whose law was officially secular, unifying all people as subjects to a common crown.

That was fine for monarchies, but things got complicated when Western culture began developing democracy as a political ideal. Democracy means that we can’t be subject to a crown, so can’t rely on that subjection to produce social unity and peace. How can a community of diverse people be free without conflict? 

The West's most important innovator in the
philosophy of what a nation is.

The idea that millions (and now billions) of people could live together in mutual love and respect wasn't really getting much traction at the time. It was the 1700s, and people weren’t really taking Spinoza mainstream yet. 

Instead, we get the man Balibar regards as the principal innovator of the concept of the nation – Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I’m going to try to explain his conception of the nation in the shortest and most direct form I can here. I want to explain the idea to my readers, but I always want to articulate it in very direct and simple forms myself.

Rousseau took a book to explain a concept whose meaning is still being debated today. Balibar took a few pages of an essay to articulate one particular interpretation. I’ll take a few paragraphs of a blog post to explain my take on Rousseau’s ideas after reading Balibar.

The traditional objection to democracy is that it inevitably falls into discord and chaos that facilities an even worse tyranny to return stability. These objections are still at the heart of notable anti-democratic philosophers today. So peace and freedom requires reconciling the difference between rulers and ruled.

A social movement for democratic government expresses in material action the desire for peace and freedom. That desire is what Rousseau calls the “general will.” This is distinct from the “will of all,” which is his term for the collection of all the conflicting, niggling particulars that every individual in a society wants. 

The general will in its pure expression can only ever be vague – “Peace! Freedom!” Quite general, actually. But it’s still a material desire. That material desire constitutes the unity of the nation. 

Representative institutions channel that desire. In the name of peace and freedom, parliaments and congresses permit the reconciliation of all those individual wills into a more concrete expression – the rule of law, of a state’s legislation and institutions. 

Pictured: The last sovereign of Western culture.

So the law of a state is no longer the expression of a single person’s will – that of the king. It’s the mediated expression of the general will of the people for peace and freedom. 

What prevents cultural pluralism from seeming legitimate in a single state is that mediation in the expression. Only those who can participate in building the parliament – representatives and voters – can materially express their will for peace and freedom in state institutions. If the law excludes someone from participation, they’re excluded from membership in the nation.

But the law is still legitimate because it was produced through institutions mediating the general will of all who participate. That expression can desire the exclusion of others who may want to participate, by whatever quality offends the people and the representatives enough that they’re excluded. So we've solved the problem of unity, but only worsened the problem of exclusion.

The solutions of the present become the problems of the future. . . . To Be Continued

Mates of State of Nature II: What If It Was Real? Research Time, 21/10/2014

Continued from last post . . . So what exactly is this Deleuze-on-Rousseau concept anyway? For someone who understands Deleuze’s work, it’s actually of a piece with what we all know about his philosophy already. While it’s an ordinary approach in the context of Deleuze scholarship and the wider philosophical explorations that have flowed from his work, I feel safe saying that it’s a novel or at least strange idea in the context of Anglo-American contractarian political philosophy. 

What should Rousseau's own concerns
have to do with how we understand his
writing today?

One of the cornerstone concepts of contract theory of politics is the state of nature. This is the notion of what human existence would have been like prior to society. The purpose of contract theorizing, after all, is to isolate the essential principles of social interaction and the minimal political obligations we all hold to each other. We achieve this by postulating what would have been the core issues and concerns in facilitating the agreement to begin acting socially in the first place. 

So “the state of nature” is the term for humanity’s imagined pre-social state in which the contract occurs. How a thinker imagines what the state of nature would have been like will influence the core principles of political association that he develops in his theory. Thomas Hobbes, the first social contract theorist, conceived of the state of nature as a “war of all against all,” where the strong strove to dominate the weak but the weakest was always strong enough to kill the strongest.* So Hobbes conceived of the state and political association as primarily about grounding and maintaining physical security.

* That last phrase, succinctly summarizing the key dynamic of Hobbes’ state of nature, is Deleuze’s own phrase, which I consider a bit of a cheap shot against the haters who say everything he wrote was obscure claptrap. 

The central postulate of social contract, however, was that it was always an imagined contract, a thought experiment to isolate what principles should be fundamental to political activity and philosophy. Empirically speaking, humans have always been social creatures, and no one has ever agreed to form society per se as a historical event.

Yet Deleuze: in Rousseau’s thinking, the state of nature is real, and it exists all the time.

No, not this Genesis. That's from Star Trek.

It’s humanity’s virtual being. Deleuze interprets Rousseau as conceiving of the state of nature as the potential of human social and political existence; the state of nature functions in Rousseau as the full range of all that humanity can do. In Deleuze’s words in his course notes, Rousseau’s state of nature is how humanity exists prior to action in “objective circumstances,”** which would fix our nature more concretely as we developed specific faculties to the detriment of others to deal with the situations in which we found ourselves. So we should read Rousseau in the context of the state of nature being humanity’s state of genesis. 

** Another wonderful part of studying Deleuze’s thought and writing is how he fluctuated his terms. He adapted his language to the problems that he faced, and toyed with a variety of different expressions of the same fundamental ideas. If he thought one term didn’t work so well in a recent publication, he’d change the expression in a new work. This makes hell for conventional authors of secondary philosophical material (books on philosophy, as I said yesterday), because of the tendency in that mode of writing to systematize and unify a primary author’s vocabulary, problems, and concepts. Because Deleuze is so flexible in his expression, he frustrates this intellectual desires. Good on him.

No, not this Genesis either.

Is this what Rousseau himself was an about? I have no idea, but the point of Deleuze’s alternative interpretations of philosophical figures isn’t to achieve some perfectly accurate reading of their writings. A perfectly accurate reading of an author’s writings is literally what they mean, understood in the context of the author’s individual perspective and how s/he responded to his/her own objective circumstances. 

Deleuze concentrated his writings largely on understanding this concept of genesis and differentiation. As such, he mutated Rousseau into a tool to help explain a philosophy of genesis. His brilliance as a historical reading was retroactively creating a tradition of genesis theory out of his creative interpretations of philosophy. 

It wasn’t accurate to the intended meanings of the texts he examined, but they were meticulous and insightful interpretations of these historical figures on his own terms. It’s an impressive feat of philosophical reasoning and interpretation, how a man with one lung could still put on an impressive gymnastics show, the only tightrope walking he could do. And it taught readers another angle to think about the philosophy of genesis. As long as you know precisely what he’s doing, there’s no need to take issue with it. Deleuze was a brilliant man.