Speech And Spectacle

Rousseau, Schmitt, and the Psychological Construction of Sovereignty

Michael N. Di Gregorio
PhD Candidate
McMaster University

ISA Annual Convention

San Francisco, CA
Panel: Theorizing Sovereignty
Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Abstract: For Rousseau and Schmitt sovereignty is the concept at the center of their formal
political theory. Taking its bearings from the Levite d’Ephraim written at the height of
Rousseau’s persecution, this paper emphasizes the role that emotion, affect, and political
psychology play in Rousseau and Schmitt’s competing constructions of sovereignty. Both
provide thoroughgoing pictures of the psychological and anthropological assumptions that lie
beneath the operation and institution of sovereignty. Despite superficial similarities, a
systematic comparison of their understanding of sovereignty and its attendant attributes is
absent. The reasons for this are of Schmitt's making: Rousseau's depiction of human nature
and the natural condition are the antipodes to Schmitt's understanding of the same in his
Concept of the Political. Indeed, Schmitt's outright refusal to address Rousseau's thought at key
points in his presentation indicates Schmitt's awareness of the challenge that Rousseau's
political philosophy poses to Schmitt's political theology and concept of politics. It is this
paper’s task to bring to light the assumptions about human nature, emotions/affect, and
political psychology resting underneath the practice of politics so as to reflect on the
construction of the idea of sovereignty at the heart of the modern political outlook.

Keywords: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, Sovereignty, Emotion, Affect, Political

Psychology, International Relations Theory

Word Count of Text: 7102

Total Count w/notes, references, and abstract: 10042
Speech And Spectacle
Being theorists that share a concern for sovereignty at the centre of their political
thought permits of a comparison between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Carl Schmitt; yet, these
two writers do not make for a common and thus not a ready comparison. In one sense, this is
to be expected. Rousseau, identifying himself in his written work as a “Citoyen de Genève”
was an exiled and reviled figure, whose Social Contract and Emile: Or, on Education were
condemned upon their joint release in 1762. Far from being exiled by his regime, Carl Schmitt
rose to prominence as a legal theorist in the Weimar Republic before becoming a member of
the Nazi Party—in the same month as Martin Heidegger—in May of 1933. Schmitt eventually
earned the title “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich” but his relationship with Nazism is not our
focus at present (PT vii).1 It might suffice to remind ourselves that Rousseau was exiled and
persecuted for his presentation of political theology while Schmitt’s gained qualified
recognition and prominence.
Schmitt has laid the groundwork for avoiding the comparison with Rousseau. Only
rarely does Schmitt mention Rousseau, and almost always is it disparaging. Rousseau is either
presented as a depoliticizer, as in Schmitt’s Neutralizations and Depoliticizations lecture (ND, 83),
or the chief Romantic individualist in Political Romanticism (PR, 25ff). Schmitt sees in Rousseau
a renaissance and retreat into individualism that is the birth of Romanticism, in opposition to
the political philosophy of the seventeenth century, and the death of the political (PR, 27).
Romanticism replaces the anthropomorphized state with “la patrie c’est moi,” or the substitution

1 This is not to say that Schmitt’s Nazism and anti-Semitism are irrelevant. Anyone who reads and writes about
Schmitt must acknowledge this aspect of his life, and the easy segue between his critique of liberal
constitutionalism, his formal political theory, and the most horrific spectacle of the twentieth century. John
McCormick attempts to provide an objective analysis of Schmitt’s (complicated) association with National
Socialism and how it relates to his legal thought and career (1993, 266-70). Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito
gloss over Schmitt’s anti-Semitism as merely “an element of opportunism” on his part, highlighting how he had
his teaching “monitored” starting in 1935, and then faced public criticism for his political and religious views in
1936 (2009, 305). Tracy Strong, in a frank and direct address of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, concludes that in 1938
Schmitt would have us believe he was guilty only of a refined anti-Semitism, and not the crude anti-Semitism of
Hitler: “If there was such a thing as a non-crude anti-Semitism, Carl Schmitt seems to have it. (And I repeat: in
life these distinctions mattered little if you were in Auschwitz.)” (LST, xvii). Odysseos and Petito’s odious gloss
silently and unintentionally affirms Schmitt’s “non-crude anti-Semitism” because it is in The Leviathan in the State
Theory of Thomas Hobbes that Schmitt would have us believe he is critiquing the crude anti-Semitism of Nazism, and
admitting that this presentation of a non-crude anti-Semitism was meant as critique (n.b. PT, ix-xi). Schmitt was
first “anti-Judaic” because, to him, Jews sought to profit from the first “inside/outside” articulated by Hobbes of
private belief and public obedience, diluting the homogeneity of the political community (LST, xiv-xvi; 51, 61,
81). One is obliged to speak these silences given that they are presented in a putative introduction and
adumbration of Schmitt’s relation to critical IR theory. One final point: the substance of Odysseos and Petito’s
remarks focus on Schmitt’s later work, Das Nomos Des Erde, and the spatial legal distinction between the “nomos
of the earth” and the “nomos of the sea.” This distinction first comes to light in the comparison between
Hobbes’s “Leviathan” and his “Behemoth” that Schmitt makes in his “non-crude anti-Semitic” Leviathan in the
State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. That a refined racism can masquerade as moderation should urge reflection on the
political and philosophic bases of Nazism.
1
of one’s person and nationalist identify for the state and therefore the dissolution of the state
(PR, 59). The most pressing proof, however, comes not from something Schmitt says but from
an omission. Despite writing in Political Romanticism that the eighteenth century political
worldview is a Rousseauian one—“Since the eighteenth century, since Rousseau…”—a claim
he restates in the Neutralizations lecture, Rousseau is never mentioned by name in Concept of the
Political (PR, 26).2 This is despite Schmitt’s argument that a concept or anthropology of
humanity must precede a concept of the political: “the problematic or unproblematic
conception of man is decisive for the presupposition of every further political consideration”
(CP, 58). Schmitt goes on to say that the concept of humanity in the eighteenth century was
“universal”, denying friend-enemy groupings thus obliterating any possibility of politics (CP,
55).3 Rousseau’s thoughts on civil religion and political theology are also insufficiently specific
for Schmitt with regards to sovereign power (PT, 46-7; cf. LST, 91-3).
Yet for both Rousseau and Schmitt, sovereignty is the concept around which their
formal political thought revolves. And this revolution regards either a rejection or a
valorization of Hobbes's thought, specifically his state of nature. Even more striking is
Schmitt's dismissiveness of Rousseau despite Schmitt admitting on numerous occasions that
any concept of politics must rest upon and be preceded by an anthropology or psychology.
Rousseau for his part explicitly provides an anthropology and implicitly provides a political
psychology. What is more, Rousseau also has Hobbes’s political anthropology and psychology
in mind as a point of departure. It is commonly understood that Thucydides and Aristotle are
the necessary philosophical antecedents of Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty. Here we will be
concerned with Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes’s account of sovereignty in the name of
freedom, and Schmitt’s attempt to revive Hobbesian politics in the name of the Sovereign.
Thucydides and Aristotle help bring the formation and purpose of Hobbes’s concept of
sovereignty to light; Rousseau and Schmitt develop competing accounts of how sovereignty
operates using Leviathan as a touchstone.
Rousseau famously begins and ends his Social Contract, his treatise on sovereignty, with
the words je and moi, thus placing the problem of the relationship between the individual and

2 The second edition of Political Romanticism appeared a full two years before the first edition of Concept of the

Political in 1927, meaning Schmitt has already established Rousseau’s opposition to his own revival of Hobbes’s
natural condition by the time Concept is written.
3 Note the last words of §7 in Concept, and Schmitt’s judgment of the Reign of Terror in 1793: “spectacle ridicule et

terrible.”
2
politics clearly into view.4 Our attention here will not be on this most famous of Rousseau's
works but on his less famous Essay on the Origin of Languages. It is in the Essay that Rousseau
argues the nation or one’s particular political community is built on language. Language is in
turn built on our passionate and affective reactions to the political. Language is for Rousseau
the product of our passions and coming together into a political community, reversing the
course of events from Aristotle's presentation in the Politics. In Rousseau's presentation,
language depends on the affect of the passions within one’s community and natural
environment; politics presupposes a certain understanding of anthropology in the broadest
sense of the term. The passions, in turn, can be moved through discourse and speech but also
importantly through images and spectacles. Rousseau provides numerous demonstrations of
the breadth of the passions, should one choose to cast their vision over them. Rousseau
therefore compels us to reconsider the relationship between the individual and the state—to
consider the problem of the political psychology of sovereignty—by demonstrating through
his analysis of language that political society is ultimately founded on the basis of the passions,
reinforcing our earlier claim that the institution and concept of sovereignty is the greatest of all
political affects, or an affective state.

A. On Emotions & Nations

Rousseau's thought with regards to the relationship between the emotions and politics
that resembles international relations is primarily accessible through an oft-neglected work that
presents itself to us as a work of imitation. Rousseau's Levite d’Ephraim is an explicitly
logographic imitation of the story of the Levite from the last three chapters of the Bible’s Book
of Judges. The story in Judges, in turn, imitates the famous scene from Genesis (19:4-9) of Lot
extending hospitality to Abraham's family in Sodom. Rousseau’s Levite, written as it is while he
is escaping Paris and seeking refuge after the condemnation of his Emile and the burning of
Emile and The Social Contract in Geneva, dramatically reminds of the apology of Socrates, as this
piece is Rousseau's first response to the accusations against him, his first deed as a political

4 Rousseau begins and ends his fragment The State of War with the same self-referentiality: “I open the books on

right and on ethics, I listen to the scholars and jurisconsults and, moved by their ingratiating discourses, I deplore
the miseries of nature, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order…” and also “I ask my readers
not to forget that I am not inquiring into what makes war advantageous to the one who wages it, but what makes
it legitimate” (SW, ¶¶1, 54; cf. SC, I.i). There is also a clear connection between his conclusion in Social Contract
and the beginning of State of War: “…what remains to be done is to buttress the State by its foreign relations,
which would include international law, commerce, the right of war and conquest, public law, alliances,
negotiations, treaties, etc.” We will note in passing that three out of the seven items so listed to “buttress the
State by its foreign relations” explicitly involve the law.
3
exile, of which the reader is explicitly reminded in its preface (Levite, 351). Within the Levite
itself we witness what appears to be an imitation of Thucydides' famous Mytilenian debate, as
the Levite calls the Tribes of Israel together to wage war against Gibeah in order to avenge the
murder of his beloved, which concludes with the intended genocide of the Benjamites. Thus
this small work is an exercise in literary imitation of Greek and Biblical texts. But it is not
enough to treat the Levite as a work of imitation; it is also a work of abstraction, or an aesthetic
alteration and adjustment of its original sources for the purposes of conveying Rousseau's own
teaching. The particular aspect of Rousseau's broad and deep body of work of immediate
concern to us is his understanding of the relationship between the passions and language
during the founding of political communities (using the language that we have been employing,
between the foundation of sovereignty and affect). Rousseau's Levite certainly speaks to this
theme, given that the movement to exterminate Gibeah is initiated by sending the severed
limbs of the Levite's wife to all of the Israelite tribes to persuade them to make war, and the
Levite concludes with the daughters of Shiloh imitating Axa's memorable self-sacrifice for the
sake of the Benjamites survival (Levite, 365). As such, the Levite is particularly instructive
because of its presentation of the founding of a new political community precipitated by the
murder and mutilation of the body of the Levite's wife.
I fear, however, that this frames our current subject matter too simply. Speaking about
and invoking the idea of imitation necessarily connects us to Rousseau's thoughts on theatrical
imitation, his thoughts on the theatre—le spectacle—in general, and the relationship between the
movements of the passions and the pursuit of the good society. Our task in this section will be
to link Rousseau's political philosophy with his work’s traditional interpretation within the
canon of International Relations (IR) theory, being that discipline that has taken sovereignty as
its orienting principle more than any other.
Beginning at least with Kenneth Waltz's famous meditation, in his Man, The State, and
War, on Rousseau’s image of the stag-hunt from his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau has been
unproblematically associated with the Realist school of IR thought (SD, §II¶9; Waltz 1959,
159-86). In consonance with Waltz, Stanley Hoffman begins his investigation of Rousseau's
thought on international relations with the lack of an international general will. This indicates,
says Hoffman, Rousseau's sensitivity to the fragmented nature of power and politics between
states, because the lack of an international general will means the “patriotism and virtue”
within the state do not translate to “cosmopolitan solidarity and virtue” internationally
(Hoffman & Fidler 1991, xvi). Therefore we must read Rousseau as what Waltz calls a Third

4
Image theorist, because he locates the cause of war in the structure of the international system
itself (ibid.). Michael Doyle (1997, 137-60) also reads Rousseau as a member of the
Thucydides-Machiavelli-Hobbes tradition of Realpolitik, but he classifies Rousseau's realism as
a constitutional realism. Doyle locates Rousseau's realism in his argument that the construction
of foreign policy must be suitable for the variety of different political and social conditions, in
the same way as the pursuit of the just and good regime is attenuated by the particular
circumstances of a particular community. Michael Williams (2005, 57-61) has tried to combat
this ‘international anarchist’ reading of Rousseau by returning to Rousseau's thoughts on the
state of nature from the Second Discourse, arguing that Rousseau's state of nature is a “relational
concept allowing human beings to understand what they are through a comparison to what
they are not” rather than a situation where “essentially unchanging beings existed in time prior
to society and government.”
Proceeding in this way, however, is fraught with difficulty. Trying to properly interpret
Rousseau's image of the state of nature as a way to reduce these disagreements requires
reckoning on the dual sense of natural law to which he is responding. Williams’s approach,
unlike others mentioned, retains the benefit of being open to Rousseau’s obscure but
important distinctions between the “state of nature” and the “pure state of nature”
(Gourevitch 1996, 25-7). According to Roger Masters (1964, 23), Rousseau recognizes that
there is a law of nature of the moderns or the law of physical nature that operates regardless of
its discovery, and there is a natural law of the ancients that operates only after it has been
discovered by reason within society. Rousseau, with “extraordinary audacity,” attempts to
demonstrate that these competing understandings of natural law are not necessarily
inconsistent (ibid.). With this in mind, we will tread carefully as we attempt a response to the
reading of Rousseau in IR theory that has preferred to focus on the place and importance of
anarchy in his state of nature, rather than on how nations are founded or come into being out of
the natural condition, and diminishes Rousseau’s avowed interest in the relationship between
politics and law.
In the Essay, Rousseau provides us with some ability to answer this question of the
beginning of political society, and reminds his readers of the story of the Levite with which we
are concerned. Rousseau opens his discussion by declaring that speech differentiates people
from animals, and it is language that differentiates one nation from another: “where a man is
from is known only once he has spoken” (EOL, 1.1). After establishing voice, gesture, and
touch as the ways of acting on someone else's senses, Rousseau tells the reader to “consult

5
ancient history” where one will find it filled with examples of arguments addressed specifically
to the eyes and to the field of vision. Such visual arguments never fail “to produce a more
certain effect than all the discourses that might have been put in their place” (EOL, 1.7). It is
with this picture of the strengths of images to persuade more successfully than the written
word in mind that Rousseau turns to the example of the Levite. Rousseau recounts the story
of the Levite in this instance as follows:
When the Levite of Ephraim wanted to avenge the death of his
wife, he did not write to the Tribes of Israel; he divided her body
into twelve pieces which he sent to them. At this ghastly sight,
they rushed to arms crying with one voice: no, never has anything
like this happened in Israel, from the day when our fathers left Egypt until
this day! And the Tribe of Benjamin was exterminated. (EOL,
1.8)
This is meant to be an example of the persuasiveness of the language of gesture, that natural
language that is “easier and less dependent on conventions”: objects strike our eyes more than
our ears, are more varied than sounds, and are “more expressive and say more in less time”
(EOL, 1.4).5 The difficulty with Rousseau's presentation of the Levite's story here is that
Rousseau omits the end of his Biblical quotation: “consider it; take counsel; and speak” (Judges,
19:30). Rousseau focuses our attention only on the persuasive power of the image of the
Levite's dismembered wife, suggesting this sight alone is enough to urge the extermination of
the Benjamites. However, in the Biblical original, and in Rousseau's rewriting during his
escape, the Levite also makes a speech to urge the Tribes of Israel to war, though Rousseau
alters the Biblical “give here your advice and council” to “I have spoken the truth; do what will
seem to you just before the Almighty” (Judges 20:7; Levite, 359). The spectacle of the
dismembered body, “ghastly sight” though it may be, is not enough to persuade the tribes to
act; a discourse, a speech is required to move their hearts and inflame their passions (EOL,
1.10).
Stating the issue in this manner, though, implies that discourse or arguments will
supplement the persuasive power of an image, gesture, or spectacle. In the opening of the

5 In this small passage, Rousseau has managed to anticipate many innovations in the area of Affect theory and

visuality. Rousseau's most prescient observation is that images “say more in less time.” This theme has been the
focus of a popular body of neurobiological research in the phenomena of the emotions and affect, under the guise
of the difference between the speed of cellular time and subjective time such that we feel something before we know
it. Cf. Antonia Damasio's Descartes' Error (1994), Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual (2002), and William
Connolly's Neuropolitics (2002).
6
Preface to Narcissus, Rousseau intimates that persuasion requires more than arguments: “I will be
attacked with witticisms, and I will defend myself with nothing but arguments: but provided I
convince my adversaries, I do not much care whether I persuade them” (PN, ¶2). This
juxtaposition of convince and persuade calls to mind some of Rousseau's remarks on the figure of
the Legislator:
Wise men who want to use their own language, rather than that
of the common people, cannot be understood by the
people...Since the legislator is unable to use either force or
reasoning, he must necessarily have recourse to another order
of authority, which can win over without violence and persuade
without convincing. (SC, II.vii)
This method of the Legislator is no different than what has “forced the fathers of nations to
have recourse to the intervention of heaven and to attribute their own wisdom to the Gods”
(SC, II.vii; Kelly 1987, 324-6). In the case of the legislator, as in the case of the prophet, one
must use visible objects—acting on the senses mediately through gesture, extending over the
field of vision—because these “spoke to [the people]” better than “long discourses” (EOL,
1.8, 1.3).6 Christopher Kelly, quoting Judith Shklar, observes that an alteration of public
opinion which will “impinge on behaviour” can only be accomplished through the use of an
example “so impressive” that it imposes “the will to imitate” (Kelly 1987, 325).
Rousseau provides just such an example of the will to imitate impressing and imposing
itself in his Levite, but it is not the image of the Levite and his wife; rather, this imitation is to
be found in the story of Axa, Rousseau's aesthetic addition to the Biblical original. The story is
as follows. Once the Tribes of Israel are convinced to wage war and seek vengeance against
the Benjamites on account of the Levite's ordeal, they first attack Gibeah and are slaughtered
in the first battle by the Benjamite army (Levite, 360). Demoralized, they ask God if they are
right to wage this war against the Benjamites, to which God responds that they should not
have faith in their superior numbers, and if instead they have faith in the Lord who gives and
takes away courage as he pleases Benjamin will be delivered to them (Levite, 361). During the
ensuing battle, the Tribes of Israel are so successful in their defeat of the Benjamites that all
but six hundred Benjamites who fled the battle are killed (Levite, 362). The victorious Tribes
now “bemoan the evil they had done in their anger,” while Rousseau casts this narrative

6 Compare Rousseau’s remark from Social Contract (II.vii): “One must not conclude from all this … that politics

and religion have a common object for us, but rather that at the origin of nations, one serves as an instrument of
the other.”
7
judgment against them: “Unhappy humans who do not know what is good for you, you have
desired well to sanctify your passions; they always punish you for the excesses they make you
commit....” (ibid.). To atone for their actions the Tribes vow to re-establish the race of Jacob
in its entirety. The method the Tribes of Israel employ, however, is highly dubious: their pity
for the Benjamites compels them to meditate on new carnage. They decide to see whether any
tribes had failed to comply with the solemn oaths to attack Gibeah, and discover that Jabesh-
gilead had “turned away from vengeance more atrocious than infamy without considering that
perjury and desertion of the common cause are worse than cruelty” (Levite, 363). Jabesh-
gilead, which saw the original injustice in vengeance, is now being persecuted for breaking its
solemn oaths and not participating in the war.7 All of the Jabes are killed except for four
hundred virgins.
These events spur the following advice from an old man of Lebonah: the surviving
Benjamites will be allowed to kidnap women of Shiloh during a religious festival, and take
them for wives (Levite, 364). When the families of the kidnapped women inevitably protest,
says the old man, the Benjamites will appeal to their pity and compassion and ask them to aide
in the effort to reestablish the race of Jacob, and allow the marriages. The strategy works, and
two hundred women are captured. However, the assembly of Tribes are “torn between justice
and pity” once they hear the indignation of the fathers of Shiloh, and allow the women to
decide for themselves whether or not they will stay with their captors (Levite, 364). It is here
where we reach the culmination of Rousseau’s commentary. The old man of Lebonah, who
had suggested the kidnapping of the women of Shiloh, had lost his daughter Axa to one of the
captors; furthermore, Axa is promised to a young man named Elmacin, whom she cares for
very much. In spite of this, the old man tells Axa that “the salvation of your people and the
honour of your father now win out over [your beloved Elmacin]” (Levite, 365). Axa must do
her duty, suppress her own feelings and desires in order to do what is best for her
“fatherland,” and help to re-establish the tribe of Benjamin.
Axa hears her father's plea and finally “raising her eyes, she encounters those of her
venerable father. They said more than his mouth” (Levite, 365, my emphasis). She makes her
choice and falls into the arms of a Benjamite, leaving her beloved Elmacin “at whom she dares
not look” (ibid.).8 Additionally, by choosing this course of action Axa saves her father from

7 Rousseau follows Thucydides here by recognizing that the area of political relations that exists between nations

and states is hardly lawless: even in the absence of a world state the possibility of oaths still exists. This, however,
only opens up the question of political theology. Cf. Rousseau’s remarks from The State of War: “there is no war
between men; there is war only between States” (¶25).
8 One assumes that she dare not look at her beloved lest she be persuaded to change her mind yet again.

8
the opprobrium of his brothers as he suggested to the council this very solution of which his
daughter is now victim. Axa’s duty requires that she give up the object of her desires and
erotic longing in order to honour her father and save her fatherland (cf. Plattner 1997, 185,
189-91). Axa’s virtue, Rousseau begs us to conclude, consists in moderating her selfish
longings for the sake of the greater goods of her family and her people. As a result of this
display, all the kidnapped young women, “carried along by the example of Axa” imitate her
sacrifice. More than this, Axa's actions inspire her beloved Elmacin to remain moderate and
pure the rest of his days to prove he is worthy of her (Levite, 365).
Axa's virtue is clearly an example so impressive that it “imposes the will to imitate”. It
is this imitation of virtue that allows Rousseau replace the Biblical verse, “In those days there
was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes” with his
exclamation, “There are still virtues in Israel” (Judges, 21:25; Levite, 365).9 The discourse of
Axa's father was not enough to persuade any women to stay with their captors, re-found the
tribe of Benjamin, or bring virtues to Israel. The imitation of Axa's actual virtue, however, was
enough. This is, I believe, worth drawing out. Rousseau is able to claim that there are still
virtues in Israel because of the imitation of virtue; that is, Axa's original virtuous act was not
enough, only the wide imitation of her virtuous act could bring this virtuous refounding of the
Benjamite nation. This sort of imitation is classified by Rousseau as the third order of
imitation, as Axa's actions represent the idea of virtue as it appears to her and the imitation of
her action is an abstraction from her representation: “no image being exact and perfect, the
imitation is always one degree further from the truth than is thought” (OTI, 338). Perhaps it is
of some help that visible signs “make for more accurate imitation” and that we can
characterize Axa and her imitators as obeying nothing more than self-imposed restraints (EOL,
1.10).10

9 The “spectacle” of Axa’s self-sacrifice begs a comparison with Rousseau’s praise of Cato as the “greatest of

men” for his virtue and his willingness to die for Rome (SD, II ¶57).
10 The story of Axa is so pregnant with the politics of gender that it almost defies comment. The relationship

between Rousseau’s thought and gender is fraught with trouble, mostly of Rousseau’s doing. Subtler readings of
Axa’s story, for example, and the important role Sophie plays in the education of Emile, and Rousseau’s famous
praise of the Spartan mother suggest that his crude pronouncements conceal a deeper belief that virtuous women
are the most important members of a political society, and thus deserve any and all praise. Bonnnie Honig (2000,
19-25) focuses our attention on the way that the foreignness of a lawgiver or political founder is a necessary and
ever-present part for any (re)definition of the “nation” in any republic, but especially in a Rousseauan one.
Honig’s thoughts about the Biblical Ruth bear directly on the story of Axa: “Ruth is different from Rousseau’s
foreign-founder in that she is not a lawgiver per se, and her foreignness is not a way of modeling distant
impartiality, objectivity, or neutrality. Her function is not to lead a people nor to address directly the narrowness
of a people caught up in corrupt factionalism and self-interest…Ruth does introduce two new wrinkles into the
foreign-founder script. She is a woman, not a man, and she does not leave when her work of refounding is done.
She stays and so becomes an immigrant” (2000, 42). Also consider that because law and tradition are (re)born as
9
 B. Peace and its Presuppositions
The theme of strangeness or otherness is the focus of Mira Morgenstern's analysis of
the Levite d'Ephraim, and runs throughout Rousseau's interpretation and the Biblical original
(2008, 365). Her focus, however, is a discussion of the feelings of strangeness and
displacement as seen in the Levite himself, the dual status of the women as prisoners of war
and mothers of a reborn nation, and the general exclusion of the Benjamites by the end of the
drama. It is unclear how far Morgenstern is willing to push these ideas. For example, if Axa
will be forever in but not truly of her new nation, is this a metaphor for Rousseau's political
predicament? And can we then pose questions about the relationship between the political and
philosophic communities, the competing inheritances of the citizen and the philosopher, and
the ideas of citizenship and cosmopolitanism? Simply, it seems that Morgenstern's conclusions
compel us to investigate the theme of patrie, and its difference from the theme of le pays in
Rousseau's political philosophy, even if this investigation is beyond the intention of her
analysis (Cf. Meier 1989, 224-7).
Axa, in an important way, reflects the relationship between the theatre and virtue that
Rousseau so vehemently criticizes in his Letter to M. D'Alembert. This political “performance”
ensured questions of virtue and vice were not overawed by the practice of “greatness”; the
corrupted and inhumane state of the Tribes meant that Axa's spectacle was good for her
people, just as the theatre is good for a bad or corrupted people (LD, 28-9, 65). As one
commentator puts it, when political relevance is absent from our lives, “spectacles” become
dangerous (Strong 2010, 97).11 Continuing in this fashion, however, puts us at risk of stating
the case of Axa as a founder or legislative figure too strongly. Jonathan Marks (2010, 477n)
suggests that while Axa reminds of a redemptive Christ figure, Rousseau would also say that
there is nothing distinctly Christian about sacrificing the object of one's desire for one's father
and fatherland.12 A further difficulty is that the parallel in the Rousseauian corpus between
Axa and her father is the relationship between Emile and his Tutor, a relationship which was

a woman, the people’s relation to the law transforms from one of violent compulsion to loving devotion (Honig
2000, 10).
11 We assume Strong to have the re-enchantment of the state and the Schmittean understanding of political

theology in mind here. Tracy Strong and Heinrich Meier devote extensive energy and time to understanding the
thought of both Schmitt and Rousseau. Meier (2011, 98) demonstrates that Schmitt must have Rousseau in mind
as his “true antipode” in the discussion of anthropology in Concept of the Political. Rousseau remains in the
background of Meier’s discussion of the contest between philosophy and revelation in Schmitt’s thought,
precisely because Rousseau asserts the natural goodness of humanity (because of natural autonomy, wholeness,
and freedom from obedience) against the doctrine of original sin (2011, 80-6).
12 A formulation in the current vernacular might be closer to “she who can be sacrificed, but not killed”.

10
not meant to be (nor could be) imitated, but one that was also based on appeals to pity (ibid.).
Perhaps the most we can say about Axa's role as a founder of a political community is that she
is, by virtue of her actions, the new original ancestor—the “mother of all mothers”—in the
rebirth of the Benjamite community (cf. Strauss 1953, 91-2).
Axa was able to persuade without convincing; her example was imitated without an
effort to coerce. Tracy Strong (2010, 94), in addressing how and why one can be persuaded
without convincing in the context of Rousseau's own rhetoric, turns to the problem of the
movement from individual and collective judgment. On Strong's reading of Rousseau, when
language loses its musicality—that is, its ability to represent emotional intelligence—it is unable
to persuade or create real social bonds (Strong 2010, 104). This leaves open the possibility that
the nonvocal communication Rousseau speaks of at the beginning of the EOL has a role in
navigating the gap between individual and collective judgment.
These questions have been taken up on somewhat different terms by Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky, in his Thought and Language.13 Vygotsky’s work is perhaps the
seminal text in a tradition of developmental psychology that gives primacy to the faculty of
language in the development of intellection. He is responding in particular to the psychology
of Jean Piaget, who believed humans are essentially egocentric beings and as such egocentric
speech—that is, inner speech or speech to oneself—must precede external speech, or speech
directed towards an other. Vygotsky responds that human beings are essentially social
creatures, and our egocentrism is a result of our sociability, not our nature (1976, 230). It is
our sociability and our external communications that provide the foundations upon which our
inner, egocentric speech is built:
Understanding between minds is impossible without some
mediating expression ... in the absence of a system of signs, only
the most primitive and limited type of communication is
possible. Communication by means of expressive movements,
observed mainly among animals, is not so much
communication as a spread of affect ... the rational intentional
conveyance of experience and thought to others requires a
mediating system, the prototype of which is human speech
born of the need of communication during work. (1976, 7)
One concept worth drawing out of Vygotsky’s work in relation to Rousseau is his

13 The editor suggests the alternate title translations “thought and speech” or even “thinking and speaking.”
11
understanding of affective contagion, a concept very similar to Rousseau’s understanding of the
movement of the passions from within the field of vision. Imagine, says Vygotsky, a goose,
suddenly aware of danger, rousing its flock with its cries: the goose does not tell the others
what it has seen but “contaminates them with its fear” (ibid.). This type of affective
communication is a very simple form of communication because it cannot carry meaning. To a
great degree this affective communication also prioritizes the needs of the body in politics,
while assuming a stark division between the workings of the mind and those of the body.
Rousseau, however, concerned with sentiment and feeling as he is, is straddling this particular
interiority/exteriority divide: “in its mechanical aspect [the first language] would have to
answer to its primary aim, and convey to the ear as well as to the understanding the almost
inescapable impression of passion seeking to communicate itself” (EOL, 4.2; cf. Abizadeh
2001, 562-3).
Rousseau provides his own well thought out interpretation of the origin and beginning
of language and community. It is due to the moral needs rather than the physical needs that
languages originate (EOL, 3.3). There is some indication, however, that these moral needs are
not universal but particular: the origins of the earliest morals “are a function of the climate and
of the nature of the soil. Hence, the diversity of languages and their opposite characteristics
must also be explained by the same causes” (EOL, 9.20). But this very diversity is what
dictates the form the best government should take in a particular context (SC, III.iii).
Language and politics, both being built upon the passions of our moral needs, will change and
deteriorate as these needs change (EOL, 20.1). One consequence of this is that public force or
coercion has replaced persuasion in the public arena. This parallelism between the origin and
degradation of language and that of the law should encourage us to ask to what extent
Rousseau is rehabilitating the concept of nomos? That is, if moral needs shape language, which
in turn is musical or not, and those same needs shape the form of government, one can use
nomos in any of its traditional senses—law, custom, convention, music—in reference to
Rousseau’s political and philosophic project. Moreover, if we can assume Rousseau to intend
some rehabilitation of this concept, we can easily see how diverse writings about, for example,
French and Italian music belong alongside his writings on civil religion, anthropology, and so
forth. They all speak to the difficulty of contemplating the grandest political questions without
losing sight of the life of the individual within politics.
Rousseau’s remarks on the importance of climate to the cultivation of the passions and
language may help support this point. Rousseau asserts that the cause of the difference

12
between languages is local—a “consequence of the climates in which they are born”—and one
must go back to this truest cause to understand how warm climates encourage the
development of different languages than cold ones (EOL, 8.1). As a result of the different
abilities of the climates of the south and north to meet the physical needs of their inhabitants,
the relationship between passion and language moved in opposite directions.14 In the south,
where nature was prodigal, needs developed out of passion; in the north, where nature was
miserly, passion was born of the needs (EOL, 10.1). Rousseau now takes this opportunity to
launch a critique against Aristotle’s famous picture of the beginning of political society from
the Politics:
Before one could think about living happy, one had to think
about living. Mutual need united men far more effectively than
sentiment would have done, society was formed solely through
industry … and their first word was not love me [aimez-moi] but
help me [aidez-moi]. (EOL, 10.3)
Rousseau here is clearly trying to use the innovation of the method of the natural sciences to
establish a science of politics based on the particular history of a people, for the sake of laying
the groundwork for a proper reflection on the regime appropriate to this people and climate.
If we can return for a moment to the assumption that Rousseau can be described as an
adherent of realpolitik, we see that he in fact uses the passions and the pursuit of justice to
orient his theoretical investigations, rather than rationality and necessity. But this conscious
orientation of politics towards passion and justice does not refute the opinion that Rousseau is
an adherent of realpolitik. It is still possible that he merely provides a new psychological basis
for realism in place of the assumption that fear and self-interest are the primary compelling
political forces.
These thoughts require us to question whether we could have been correct to say that
Rousseau is after the revival of the full sense of nomos, given his meditation on the nature
(physis) of politics and human life. Turning to the nineteenth chapter in his EOL, we find the
following remarks discussing the degeneration of music:

14 We take Rousseau to be recapitulating on the one hand his “science of the Legislator” from Social Contract, but

on the other to present the “science of the Legislator” rather as a dialectic between the natural world and the
conventional one. That is, our assertion that Rousseau is rehabilitating a more comprehensive idea of “the law”
can easily be construed as Rousseau merely being a conventionalist, or concerned solely with what Hans Kelsen
later calls the “pure science of the law” or that the study of the law must be divorced from political concerns.
This is not our intention. One can certainly draw out a connection from Kelsen’s nomostatics, or the rejection of
the confluence of law and morality that results from a political psychology, to Rousseau (Kelsen 2006, 20-37).
Certainly, Kelsen has a critique of Schmitt in mind and would have at least this much in common with Rousseau’s
presentation (cf. Dyzenhaus 1997, 108ff.).
13
 As language became perfected, melody imperceptibly lost some
of its former vigor by imposing new rules on itself … the study
of philosophy and the progress of reasoning, having perfected
grammar, deprived language of the lively and passionate tone
that had originally made it so songlike. (EOL, 19.1-2)
Philosophy, the study of nature from within society in the language for the few, deprives the
many of their language that developed out of a natural process (cf. SD, Ex.6; LD, 3; SC, 78,
69). The problem, therefore, is a problem of the grammar or structure of the language of
political inquiry (Edkins 2003, 211-4; cf. Pin-Fat 2010, 7-37).
Language, as we have seen, depends on the affect of the passions within one’s
community and natural environment. The passions, in turn, can be moved through discourse
or images. Rousseau, therefore, demonstrates just how wide the field of passion is, should one
wish to attend to it. Rousseau compels us to reconsider the relationship between the
individual and the state by demonstrating through his analysis of language that political society
is ultimately founded on the basis of the passions.

C. The Psychological Structure of Sovereignty / “The Bond Among the Beings”

To paraphrase a thought belonging to Emmanuel Levinas: if war presupposes peace,
peace presupposes the “face-to-face.” According to the usual order of things the state of war
is negated in order to enter a peaceful civil society. What Levinas compels his readers to
recognize is that peace is prefaced on the first interactions with others, or what Rousseau has
depicted as our initial affective responses to the political. Rousseau’s picture of the origin of
political society in the passages that have caught our attention has a counterpart in his
fragment The State of War, a small and unfinished essay where he develops explicit thoughts on
the nature of international politics.
The social state is a “new order of things” where the “artificial concord” of society is a
sure way to bring about the horrors of war in hopes of preventing them (SW, ¶21). “With the
first society formed” Rousseau says, “the formation of all the others necessarily follows. One
must either belong to it or unite to resist it. One must either imitate it or let oneself be swallowed by
it. Thus the whole face of the earth has changed” (SW, ¶22, my emphasis).15 We began with
some broad and general comparisons between Rousseau and Carl Schmitt, and one can detect
a trace of Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy grouping in Rousseau’s remarks. The difference at this
15“The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political
entity. As long as a state exists, there will always be in the world more than just one state” (Schmitt CP, 53).
14
point is that Rousseau’s picture of union and resistance is fundamentally a result of
circumstance or chance than about a conscious relationship of political intensity. But it would
also be incorrect to deny that Rousseau shares with Schmitt the opinion that political society
resembles Hobbes’s warlike natural condition, though Rousseau laments this fact while
Schmitt seeks to reinforce it. Rousseau takes aim at Hobbes (but also Spinoza) for narrowing
the gap between popular enlightenment and philosophic education in order to create the
ground from which a critique of theology can be launched (cf. Strauss 2011, 91-7). Schmitt
looks at the same thinkers and the same turn to the interior mind and discerns the dilution of
the homogeneity of the political, with an especial distaste for the freedom this logic affords
minority groupings. Rousseau rejects the distinction between the freedom of interior
consciousness and external obedience found in Hobbes and Spinoza, in the name of the
community, of the general will, and ultimately of the law: “man in society seeks to expand,
isolated man contract” (EOL, 9.7). Schmitt rejects this same distinction between “outer and
inner” by turning not to the generality of sovereignty but to its particularity; that is, he rejects
the logic of inside/outside in the name of an obedience to a sovereign that decides on
exceptions to the law (LST, 53).16 Rousseau turns sovereignty “inward” for the sake of
autonomy; Schmitt turns sovereignty “outward” in order to politicize it.
These superficial oppositions belie more fundamental antagonisms between these two
thinkers. These antagonisms result from the fact that Rousseau and Schmitt take aim at
Hobbes’s founding of modern sovereignty but proceed along lines of critique that move in
opposite directions. Rousseau apparently rejects Hobbes’s diagnosis and solution; Schmitt
valorizes what Hobbes’s seeks to negate. Consider Schmitt’s remarks on the “huge man” of
Leviathan:
The decisive step occurred when the state was conceived as a
product of human calculation…Through the mechanization of
this “huge man,” the ma&kros a!nqrwpos, Hobbes leapt
decisively ahead of Descartes and made a significant
contribution to the anthropological interpretation of man.
Nevertheless, the first metaphysical leap was made by Descartes

16 This seems absolutely counter-intuitive, given that Schmitt’s entire political theory is premised on the idea of

friends on the inside and enemies on the outside. Yet, a political community is strongest when it is most
homogeneous, when there is as little internal dissent as possible. Internal dissidents will make the fact of a friend-
enemy grouping difficult to discern, and bad for the “friends” in this equation. The inside/outside logic has its
place for Schmitt, but its place is not within political communities, with the sole exception of rooting out
dissidents.
15
 at precisely the moment when the human body was conceived
to be a machine and the human being, consisting of body and
soul, was postulated in its entirety an intellect intent on a
machine. The transfer of this conception to the “huge man,”
the “state,” was thus near. It was consummated by Hobbes. It
led, however, to the transformation of the soul of the huge man
into a part of a machine. After the body and soul of the huge
man became a machine, the transfer back became possible, and
even the little man could become a homme-machine. (LST, 37).
In Schmitt’s interpretation one’s individual political psychology is the result rather than the
presupposition of politics. That is, after the “myth” of the Leviathan turns into the machine of
the state, the “anthropological image of man” is fashioned after this initial myth, and one’s
political psychology becomes part of a mechanization of politics. “By extension” says Schmitt,
“the machine, as all of technology, is independent of every political goal and conviction and
assumes a value-and-truth neutrality of a technical instrument” (LST, 42).17 Schmitt is clear on
how he understands the functioning of this “state machine”: “law became a means of
compulsory psychological motivation and calculable functioning that can serve different aims
and contradictory contents” (LST, 68). Schmitt goes on to say that the “formalizing and
neutralizing of the concept of the state” is essentially “legal positivism” (ibid.). What he does
not say, but begs his readers to conclude, is that the concept of the state that prefers
decisionism and partisanship to “formalizing and neutralizing” is the properly political state.
This political state, like any other, constructs a psychology that then serves to reinforce the
political.
As early as his Political Theology, Schmitt speaks of the motion and rest of the law,
associating rest with a fixed and neutral state and motion with the moment of sovereign
decision (PT, 3, 32). Motionlessness is associated with the “eternity” of the law or what is

17 Compare Schmitt’s restatement of these arguments in the Appendix on Hobbes and Descartes: “The
mechanization of the concept of a state thus complete the mechanization of the anthropological image of man.
Just as a mechanism is incapable of any totality, the here and now of an individual’s existence cannot attain a
meaningful totality. For the word and concept totality to remain meaningful and not to become a misleading
catchword, it must rest on a specific philosophical connection…Totalization thus means mythization” (LST, 99-
100). The “philosophical connection” that Schmitt has in mind to critique is that “decisive metaphysical step”
taken by Hobbes and Descartes that splits body and soul, and enables the mechanization of politics. These
remarks from Rousseau’s Geneva Manuscript (I.ii) are not irrelevant: “Certainly, the term human race suggests only a
purely collective idea which assumes no real union among the individuals who constitute it. Let us add to it, if
you wish, this supposition, and conceive the human race as a moral person having…a universal motivation which
makes each part act for an end that is general and relative to the whole. Let us conceive that this common feeling
is humanity, and that natural law is the active principle of the entire machine.”
16
normal in the widest sense, and unrest with the moment of decision: “Unlike the normal
situation, when the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to a minimum, the norm is
destroyed in the exception. The exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence
because both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the
juristic” (PT, 12-3; cf. CP, n.9). Yet, if this antagonism between the norm and the decision is
the presupposition of Schmittean sovereignty then it must be the case that the being of
sovereignty18 itself is fundamentally political in the way that Schmitt understands that concept:
“The phases of [sovereignty’s] development are characterized by various power struggles, not
by a dialectical heightening inherent in the characteristics of the concept” (PT, 6-7).
Schmitt’s answer to the question of how sovereignty operates presupposes and depends
on a specific anthropological picture of humanity. This said, Schmitt’s use and understanding
of “anthropology” is very much political, speaking to the assumptions about the motivations
for human action—simply, psychological assumptions—that ground political theories: “The
problematic or unproblematic conception of man is decisive for the presupposition of every further
political consideration” (CP, 58, my emphasis).19 All concepts of the political presuppose an
understanding of human nature, and it is this understanding that Schmitt elucidates with his
friend-enemy opposition. However, Schmitt’s presentation of how to understand a “people”
and the political is far more reciprocal and relational than it at first appears. Schmitt is clear
that the friend-enemy opposition cannot be understood “as a psychological expression of
private emotions and tendencies” (CP, 28). To this point he stresses that the image of a people
receives its meaning “from the further distinctive trait of the political” or the friend-enemy
grouping (CP, 20). But this is already to make the political the presupposition of anthropology
and psychology, which reverses Schmitt’s explicit argument. Still, war “which has its own
grammar” is an “ever present possibility which determines in a characteristic way human action
and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior” (CP, 34). This is what war

18 Compare Rousseau: “If the general society did exist…it would be, as I have said, a moral being with qualities
separate and distinct from those of the particular beings constituting it” (GM, I.ii.159).
19 Schmitt’s small treatise is divided into eight sections, and each section basically conforms to a discussion of one

theme relating to the political (sovereignty, decisionism, foreign policy, anthropology, liberalism, and so on). In
the seventh section of Schmitt’s treatise he deals with the anthropological presuppositions of politics. What is
rather striking about his presentation is that unlike Political Romanticism, when it appears that Rousseau would be
the ideal interlocutor he remains unnamed. It is Hegel, not Rousseau, identified as offering “the first polemically
political definition of the bourgeois…under the justification of his possessive individualism” despite Rousseau’s
clearly “polemically political” presentation of the bourgeois in Discourse on Inequality and Emile, both written before
Hegel was born. In a gloss at the end of this section, Schmitt points out that “the aristocratic society in France
before the Revolution of 1789 sentimentalized “man who is by nature good” and the virtue of the masses.” (CP
68). This naturally good human being is Rousseau’s anthropology, developed in opposition to the Hobbesian one
that Schmitt is attempting to revive (cf. CP, 65).
17
teaches or “discloses,” but this can only be accomplished by psychologizing, by disclosing that
the possibility of a “friend-enemy” grouping lies underneath “every political idea” (CP, 35).
These “psychic motives” ensure that the sovereign political entity “is by its very nature the
decisive entity” (CP, 43-4). The friend-enemy opposition that ceaseth only in the death of
either one’s friends or enemies is caused by rather than resulting from Schmitt’s concept of the
political. The sphere of the political is “in the final analysis” the concrete possibility of enmity;
because of this, says Schmitt, “political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an
anthropological optimism” (CP, 64). The Schmittean political psychology is thus the
consequence of his political conception. The friend-enemy opposition that justifies sovereign
decisionism constructs the pessimistic anthropology and psychological structure as its own
roots. A “problematic” conception of humanity can precede Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty
because he has made this very political psychology the structural consequence of his politics.
With this psychological structure of enmity in place it is only natural that political decisions
reflect the supposed friend-enemy grouping: the law becomes “a means of compulsory
psychological motivation” (LST, 68).
War discloses for Schmitt the fundamentals of political psychology. Rousseau in what
is perhaps the starkest contrast between these two authors focuses instead on what peace
discloses:
[Peace] conveys to the soul a fullness of sentiment that makes us
love at once our own and other people’s existence, it represents
the bond among the beings that unites them in the universal
system, it has its full breadth only in the mind of God whom
nothing that is can harm and who wants the preservation of all
the beings he has created. (SW, ¶41)

Rousseau’s concepts of sovereignty and security are as aware of political theology as Schmitt’s.
For Rousseau sovereignty is the law's basis and genesis. For Schmitt sovereignty exists at the
law's limit and as an exception. For Rousseau, the being of sovereignty is the writing of laws,
or autonomy. For Schmitt, sovereignty begins where the law ends and is revealed in the
oblivion of law. For Rousseau our affective communion is the presupposition of sovereignty;
for Schmitt, sovereignty’s structure places an affective opposition at the heart of politics, and
with this heart in place builds the body politic. Rousseau compels us to assert that the political
community is the greatest of all affects, or an affective state, perhaps narrowing the gap

18
between pursuing knowledge about oneself and the pursuit of the just and good regime.
Schmitt might not necessarily disagree. It is doubtless easy to concentrate on the question of
what sovereignty is for Rousseau and Schmitt, abstracting from its operation. The present
remarks were intended to address the operation or the how of sovereignty.

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