Isaiah

For Rousseau the whole idea of compromising liberty, of saying ‘Well now, we cannot have total liberty, because that will lead to anarchy and chaos; we cannot have complete authority, because that will lead to the total crushing of individuals, despotism and tyranny; therefore we must draw the line somewhere between, arrange a compromise’ – this kind of thinking is totally unacceptable. Liberty for him is an absolute value. He looks on liberty as if it were a kind of religious concept. For him, liberty is identical with the human individual himself. To say that a man is a man, and to say that he is free, are almost the same.

Rousseau hates intellectuals, hates persons who detach themselves from life, hates specialists, hates people who lock themselves up into some kind of special coterie, because he feels that hearts ought to be opened, so that men may achieve emotional contact; that the simple peasant sitting under the ancestral oak has a deeper vision of what life is like, and what nature is like, and what conduct ought to be, than the buttoned-up, priggish, fastidious, sophisticated, highbrow person who lives in the city. Because he feels all that, he founds a tradition distinct from that of the romantic rebel, which then spreads all over Europe, and then to the United States, and is the foundation of that celebrated concept called the American way of life, in accordance with which the simple people of a society possess a deeper sense of reality, a deeper virtue and a deeper understanding of moral values than professors in their universities, than the politicians of the cities, than other people who have somehow become de-natured, who have somehow cut themselves off from the inner stream which is at once the true life and the true morality and wisdom of men and societies.

The evil that Rousseau did consists in launching the mythology of the real self, in the name of which I am permitted to coerce people. No doubt all inquisitors, and all the great religious establishments, sought to justify their acts of coercion, which subsequently may have appeared, to some people at any rate, cruel and unjust; but at least they invoked supernatural sanctions for them. At least they invoked sanctions which reason was not allowed to question.

Lacking the aid of supernatural authority, he therefore had to resort to the monstrous paradox whereby liberty turns out to be a kind of slavery, whereby to want something is not to want it at all unless you want it in a special way, such that you can say to a man: ‘You may think that you are free, you may think that you are happy, you may think that you want this or that, but I know better what you are, what you want, what will liberate you’, and so on. This is the sinister paradox according to which a man, in losing his political liberty, and in losing his economic liberty, is liberated in some higher, deeper, more rational, more natural sense, which only the dictator or only the State, only the assembly, only the supreme authority knows, so that the most untrammelled freedom coincides with the most rigorous and enslaving authority.

For this great perversion Rousseau is more responsible than any thinker who ever lived. The consequences of it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries need not be enlarged upon – they are still with us. In that sense it is not in the least paradoxical to say that Rousseau, who claims to have been the most ardent and passionate lover of human liberty who ever lived, who tried to throw off every shackle, the restraints of education, of sophistication, of culture, of convention, of science, of art, of everything whatever, because all these things somehow impinged upon him, all these things in some way arrested his natural liberty as a man – Rousseau, in spite of all these things, was one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought.