Providence and contingency in Corsica: Rousseau on freedom without politics

Abstract

Rousseau’s embrace of popular sovereignty – a sovereignty that is unmediated and unrepresented – is often understood as entailing a kind of democratic absolutism. However, Richard Tuck has argued that Rousseau recognises the impossibility of large-scale democratic participation under early-modern conditions, and so confines popular sovereignty to one-off exercises in constitutional or ‘constituent’ lawmaking. This suggests that Rousseau’s thought actually provides cover for a kind of retreat from politics for early-modern citizens, and that being ‘sovereign’ somehow gives these citizens a way of realising political freedom without engaging in political action in its classical or humanist senses. I argue, through a reading of Constitutional Plan for Corsica, that Rousseau crafts a vision of freedom that is realised in the harmony and order of pastoral life, and that this vision not only rejects, but is juxtaposed with and opposed to the life of political action. While this vision of ordered harmony emulates or substitutes the ‘divine providence’ of nature, it aims at dissolving the conditions of contingency and disorder that other republicans understand as being the very circumstance or prerequisite of republican freedom.