Ritual and Symbolic Power in Rousseau’s Constitutional Thought

Abstract

Rousseau’s constitutional writings place a seemingly eccentric emphasis on public ceremony, festival and pageantry as integral aspects of statecraft. The obvious function of such republican rituals is to promote the participative civic dispositions which provide stability for a deliberative politics based on common goods. In some accounts, therefore, Rousseau’s ritualistic constitutionalism has parallels in the mild ceremonial practices of contemporary liberal states. I argue, however, that Rousseau envisages a much broader purpose for republican ritual: not merely to supplement, but to substitute the complex symbolic rituals of liberal society and thus to supplant the need for private sources of aesthetic and symbolic distinction. Accordingly I argue that his politics of “transparency” is informed by an understanding of social practice which, in some respects, closely resembles Pierre Bourdieu’s account of habitus and symbolic power.