David Brooks thinks so. But to link the tea parties to the ’60s left by way of Rousseau, he has to draw our attention away from the nationally disaggregate and locally-rooted character of lots and lots of the tea partiers. The recent tea party convention does underscore how the tea parties have been able to leverage themselves into prominence by giving a preexisting minor national movement a bigger stage. But the tea party convention must not be mistaken for the tea party phenomenon itself, even setting aside the internal and external debate over how organic or authentic the convention and its organizers may be. If anything is tempting tea partiers to coalesce around a handful of leaders stars, it’s not the emancipatory psychology of mass revolution — it’s a near-instinctive understanding that, now more than ever, celebrity equals publicity and publicity equals power.
That said, there really are serious overlaps between the Rube Power campaign of the tea partiers and, say, the Freak Power campaign of 1969-70 Colorado immortalized by Hunter Thompson. And Thompson distinguished himself from the rest of the radical left most spectacularly by being a romantic pessimist like Benjamin Constant, not a romantic optimist like Rousseau.
March 5th, 2010 | 10:45 am
General Will…who decides that…you?
March 5th, 2010 | 10:52 am
Who are the “stars” of the tea-party movement?
March 5th, 2010 | 3:52 pm
Rousseau is not an optimist. He was profoundly pessimistic about human nature; that is, the modification of it precipitated by man’s perfectibility, and achieved by our entrance into society. Furthermore, he viewed the perfection of our nature as a one-way street. Once society emerges, it doesn’t just vanish. And the pessimism of his analysis of human nature is in no way repaired by the political doctrine he offers in the Social Contract, where his project is to justify man’s chains, not break them. He was even quite pessimistic about the possibility that his doctrine could be achieved. Check out his letter to Mirabeau (it’s on the Online Library of Liberty), where he says that the necessity of the Rule of Law seemed highly improbable to him. Thus we must decide between a perfect Hobbesian monarchical absolutism and his ideal of Spartan/pre-imperial Roman democracy of citizens (which may depend on slavery). And given the way Rousseau unfolds the conditions for the possibility of his austere democracy, Hobbesian tyranny must have appeared to him more likely to prevail. This is why the very fact that he wrote the Social Contract at all seems so strange, unless we read him as a critic of modernity.
Perhaps by calling him a “romantic” optimist, you mean the Rousseau we find in his late works, the Reveries for example, in which he seemed to come to the conclusion that a certain stillness and repose could be achieved outside society, next to his little lake. But that wasn’t the basis for any kind of politics or human community at all – for it’s only in solitude that man could manifest virtue. Again, I don’t get what’s optimistic about that, at least in any sense that would render Constant the pessimist. I would be interested to see such a comparison defended.
March 5th, 2010 | 10:14 pm
Evan, your pessimistic take on Rousseau is a clever one, and you are right to think that Rousseau’s optimism about the non-nihilistic possibilities of solitude is important. But I don’t think we can deny that somehow Rousseau armed and inspired a movement far more optimistic than you make Rousseau out to be; even if he was as pessimistic as you claim, it doesn’t seem right to conclude that Rousseau’s optimistic heirs read him so wrong, or read so much into him.
I think there must be a way in which the romantic sum of Rousseau applies a pressure to the parts of his political theory that they can’t quite bear. At any rate, it’s not Rousseau’s politics that resonate strongest today but the Rousseau of the Confessions — a book about as different as can be from Constant’s ‘personal’ writing. For Constant, the ‘private’ world of personal love and suffering is something we should approach from a stoic distance, erring even on the side of being jaded into silence about ourselves. For Rousseau, the most important thing was that he was Rousseau, and the second most important thing was that he got this piece of information across. (An ironic, interesting comparison with Nietzsche goes here.)
Finally, I suppose I take Rousseau’s optimism to be an optimism regarding the prospect of publicizing, not hiding, himself, which takes on I think pretty profound social implications as a model for coping with the pessimism-inducing imperfections of politics. Constant would tactfully ease the door to that therapeutic release quite a bit further shut – in what I think is rightly called pessimistic wisdom.
March 5th, 2010 | 11:18 pm
Brooks seem to be really strecthing on this one. It’s not clear to me that the TP movement really has a theoretically coherent core nor would I expect to find one within a group comprised of so many different subgroups, that generated itself in response to a series of very specific policy issues, and that probably hasn’t been around long to enough to have solid philosophical foundations well congealed. On the Rousseau question, it’s hard to simply peg him an optimist or pessimist, and that partly has to do with the emptiness of those categories. He certainly exaggerated the original innocence of human nature, as becomes clear not just in the Origins of Language but also even the footnotes to the 2nd Discourse (which he counsels the reader in the preface not to read). And that original innocence shouldn’t confused with moral goodness, since R insists that moral categories only arise out of the language that follows our original condition. The state of nature is one of instinctual happiness and compassion- but compassion for completely asocial beings is just a notch above indifference (vs Hobbesian hostility) and happiness amount to the to total absorption of man as animal into nature pre-conciousness, or more specifically, before the awareness of time. And “infinite perfectibility” basically means historical elasticity. Evan is right that R resigned himself to the corrupting effects of society, thought the fundamental problems of political life were intractable (as he candidly admits in the Poland book), and that true democracy is but a dream. R’s romanticism is largely a feature of his intentionally hyperbolic depiction of the state of nature as one of tranquil contentment–one could argue this myth gets transformed into reality by those who philosophically appropriate him. I would say that R was deeply pessimistic about the prospect of self-governance and spent an awful lot of time talking up virtue against the modern currents that undermined it without having much confidence in the human capacity for it.
March 5th, 2010 | 11:29 pm
The Tea Party is not as “bourgeois”a Brooks makes them. This opinion piece strains at his BoBo argument. I just don’t think some guy in an American Flag bandana pissed riding a Harley and pissed off at the way his money is spent by the–as Bob Cheeks reminds us–the ‘gummint’ is bourgeois in any meaningful sense. He already shares more with the New Left because as New left historian Staughton Lynd reminds us in his Radicalism in America book, this anti-govt strain has alway been there.
I’m sick and tired of hearing the Hofstadter trope of the “paranoid style”–Hofstadter made the same argument as early as his Age of Reform book. Laurence Goodwyn responded in a much more detailed, but for all that just as tendentious argument regarding local self government and people’s movement interpretation of the populists in his Democratic Promise book.
Yes, the Rousseauvian argument has always been a part of American political argument–including radical solitary walkers like Henry Thoreau.
The guy in the American flag bandana is pissed. It’s surely unreasonable, but understandable. It’s impractical, but a real enough force. But I’m not concerned that this sort of populism is indicative of anything other than frustration at real stupidity of elite action. Surely the blame for dysfunction points at elites and not the ordinary Harley rider (for all his coarse opinion).
Matt Continetti had a word to say about this in the Weekly Standard, but I don’t remember when. Basically, elites are f**king up, and perhaps because they have no idea what they are for in the first place.
March 5th, 2010 | 11:32 pm
Here’s the matt Continetti article.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/178gyufk.asp
March 6th, 2010 | 5:08 am
Bobo reminds me of a nonsense category–kinda like the Cowboy Junkies song “Darkling Days” that sings “The beautiful is not chosen/The chosen becomes beautiful.” This sounds Rawlsian, or even Feuerbachian (insofar as choice is projection), but either way it is surely Brooksian bobonianism. That is, if Brooks hasn’t been reading too many popularized versions of Darwinism and neuroscience attempting to make conscious the myriad of biological impulsive and thereby unthinking or unconscious natural drives making humans what are so-called human.
Tom Tomorrow has pretty much figured out David Brooks in his many spoof of McBobo–such as the following–
http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2005/01/31/tomo/index1.html
March 6th, 2010 | 6:22 am
Thank you both for the responses. As for the “cleverness” of my interpretation, such as it is, I can’t take all the credit. It is influenced above all by Bertrand de Jouvenel, who has several very good shorter works in which he develops, among other things, the idea of “pessimistic evolution” in Rousseau’s political thought. He pays particular attention to Rousseau’s other autobiography, the rarely-read “Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques”, which I had always avoided due to the pretentiousness of the title, but have found to be quite worth the effort to read. As a response to James, I would commend to you the opening lines of that same work, in which he prays the reader to read the whole book before so much as speaking to another about it – but knowing that his request won’t be followed, he “shuts his mouth, and puts everything in the hands of Providence”. Now, is this a pessimistic fatalism that says he may never be truly understood, and that no effort of his own would be completely sufficient to that end? Or is it an ironically optimistic “amor fati” (he “shuts his mouth” at the beginning of a long autobiography)? For me, the jury is out on that question.
As for what I take to be your other main point, James, regarding Rousseau’s reception, I can’t completely agree. We only have to look at Madame Bovary and its withering critique of the “bourgeois” and “society” to see a certain hopelessness about the prospects of western society. I mean, who is the “hero” in that book, exactly? Or take someone like Novalis, whose Romanticism is more or less wailing and gnashing of teeth about the effects of bourgeois society on love.
That there is an optimistic strain in the Romantic movement is true – but I would say mainly under certain English Romantic poets, who were perhaps less influenced by Rousseau. The exceptional case seems, to me, to be Goethe. Not the Goethe of Werther or even Elective Affinities, but above all of Faust. The issue of Rousseau’s reception among all these different authors is fascinating, of course, and I wouldn’t pretend for a second to have the last word. I know far too little about the Romantic strain in philosophy, for example: the Herders and Schlegels and so on. If anyone has written a good book on this topic – the reception of Rousseau by the Romantics – I would love to know about it.
As for Ivan’s points, all of them are well taken and quite correct I think, with one exception. I dispute the idea that “optimism” and “pessimism” are empty concepts. A devout hope in the possibility for philosophy and above all science to solve the political problems of injustice and instability is born in seventeenth century England, and that optimism echoes throughout the Western world through in every major political and ideological conflict of the last 350 years right up until our day. And for every radical attack that has been waged against that hope (which often is, but sometimes isn’t, pessimistic), it has been born again. That’s what I take “optimism” and “pessimism” to be, at least in the modern sense.
March 6th, 2010 | 11:50 am
The rise of the Tpers is the result of a particular destruction of reality expressed as alienation and ignored or unseen by the intellectual elites who were the first to collapse into an incoherent disorder.
What we are observing in the so-called Tea Party Movement is the “producers,” or the doers, or those burdened with the tax bill working through the problems of casting off not only the failed, intellectual elite, but the current radical and statist regime and its efforts at “para-Marxist buffoonery.” And, here we must understand that it wasn’t the content of the publications of our elite that set off the TP firestorm, rather it was the rise of a radical and racially statist regime, immersed in gnostic and hermetic “conceits” and reminiscent of previous megalomaniac behaviorists that has united the last of the Americans.
Amazingly, the Tpers, without financial aide, and largely without benefit of any knowledge of Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare but with, at least, a foundational education, either formally or autodidacticlly, in the Old and New Testament have rallied at the barricades against a formidable foe man symbolized in the person of the POTUS, Barack Hussein Obama.
Our intellectual elite would do well to rally on the Tpers.
March 6th, 2010 | 12:44 pm
Ah yes, this was the Continetti article that suggests that we call on the military to save bourgeois society. I can’t say I was very comfortable with that one, but to each his own taste in Caesarism.
On the TPers, I’m inclined to agree with John. They’re pissed off and don’t quite know why–but that’s as much because there are so many villains as because they’re fools. But Bob, I think, lapses into a different sort of mythology when he describes them as the taxpayers risen. Actually, it’s lawyers and bankers in New York who pay the bills in this country–not “reg’lar folks”. As far as I know, the top 10% of earners pay around 70% of the tab. The true middle class, for all their virtues, can’t convincingly complain of being bilked.
I don’t know of any good book devoted to the influence of Rousseau on Romanticism. But Beiser’s Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism includes a lot of material on this.
March 8th, 2010 | 12:01 am
Samuel Goldman,
Of course the Tea Party folks know why they’re angry. Although they may not entirely agree on all the reasons, in general the fiscal irresponsibility of this federal government and the increasing statism of recent administrations both GOP and Demo are at the top of most lists.
As for who pays the taxes, yes, I’ve seen the figures that the top 10% pay 70% of the taxes. One of the most common rationales for such progressive taxation is the those who have the most to lose should therefore pay the most for the protection of their greater assets. Although I favor a more flat tax system, it is nevertheless important to note that those who make higher salaries would and should pay more in dollar terms regardless of which system (progressive or flat tax) is in place. I’m sure there is no dispute there?
Also, since statistics are being cited, allow me to inject this:
“In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16.
“Their effective income tax rate fell to 16.62 percent, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17 percent in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007.”
(http://fredegrar.newsvine.com/_news/2010/02/18/3916429-tax-rates-for-top-400-earners-fall-as-income-soars-irs-data)
When an economic system experiences such a dramatic increase in top remuneration and then also experiences drastic business problems (the causes of which I would lay at the doorstep of bad government policies as much or more than I would at that of the corporate sphere, but would certainly not acquit certain business practices either), I suggest it is perhaps not the best argument to say that the middle class can’t complain of being bilked! That is just snobby nonsense.
The United States is not all about money, after all. It is a country in which citizens, whatever their income and tax burden, need to be vigilant in order to prevent mishandling of natural resources, human capital, and the powers delegated to government and its agents (both public and private). Many Americans don’t make a lot of money or are even unemployed (some of them can thank globalist government and corporate policy for outsourcing jobs). That hardly makes them a bunch of stupid fools. Theirs is a justifiable anger at the mismanagement by so-called elites which has made a mess that could endanger the stability of our nation for generations to come. It does mean many people have trusted the elites too much in the past. We are all paying for that laxity of vigilance now. Ours is a constitutional republic. It is not a socialist state. Neither is it (or at least it should not be) a corporate state or, even worse, just a piece of real estate in a global corporate/government collaboration. Let’s get our values straight!
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact