Introduction
The critique of urban, cosmopolitan elites on behalf of the virtues and values of the rural was a staple of the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment and is exemplified in the rural political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Martin Heidegger. Both advocate for the political-spiritual benefits of agricultural life out of a polemical opposition to the decadence of the modern commercial city, which maps onto what Cas Mudde calls the “classic populist distinction between the corrupt, metropolitan, urban elite and the pure, indigenous, rural people.”Footnote 1 Their disagreements, however, point to two distinct but overlapping visions of rural renewal: the republican populism of RousseauFootnote 2 and the völkisch politics of Heidegger. Whereas Rousseau provides an immanent critique of liberal democracy that emphasizes the necessity of rustic republican virtues and values as instrumental means toward upholding the Enlightenment goods of liberty and equality, Heidegger provides a total critique, seeking to radically overcome post-Enlightenment politics by reconnecting the Volk with the autochthonous depths of the Vaterland as the soil for a new illiberal political-spiritual world.
Despite the influence of RousseauFootnote 3 and HeideggerFootnote 4 on competing contemporary anti-establishment, populist movements, there are few sustained comparisons between the two thinkers. Richard L. VelkleyFootnote 5 and Waller R. NewellFootnote 6 have written on Rousseau’s influence on German political thought up to and including Heidegger. While these studies also highlight Rousseau and Heidegger’s shared critique of urban-bourgeois modernity, their turn to antiquity, and their search for a pre-rational origin as a ground (or Abgrund) for their respective philosophies, neither sets out to provide sustained direct comparisons of the two thinkers, and they do not focus on, or reconstruct, their competing outlines of specifically rural political institutions and practices.Footnote 7 Comparing their agrarian prescriptions (a) clarifies the continuities and discontinuities between Rousseauian and Heideggerian political thought, (b) illuminates the plurality of political projects that can arise from Romantic appeals to rural authenticity against the alleged inauthenticity of modern urban life, and (c) helps identify Rousseauian resources that can assist liberal democracies in responding to the challenge of far-right Heideggerianism. In doing so, this article builds on and brings into conversation realist interpretations of Rousseau’s constitutional projects in Corsica and PolandFootnote 8 and critical readings of the illiberal politics of autochthony in Heidegger,Footnote 9 while also contributing to our understanding of Heidegger’s reception of the political theory canon.Footnote 10
The article begins by comparing Rousseau and Heidegger’s critiques of the modern commercial city. The second and third parts reconstruct their respective prescriptions for political-spiritual renewal through the promotion of the rural. The fourth part argues that the political differences identified therein should be understood not just in light of competing valuations of Enlightenment understandings of freedom and equality, but more fundamentally from their foundational philosophic disagreements over the essence of nature, history, and Being. It provides an original account of Heidegger’s political and philosophic confrontations with Rousseau from 1933–1943 and constructs a novel Rousseauian “response” to Heidegger, showing how Rousseau’s greater appreciation of the limits of the rooted agricultural life provides a valuable corrective to Heidegger, lending itself to a more malleable and politically salutary vision of rural political renewal.
Critiques of the Modern Commercial City
Rousseau and Heidegger’s championing of rural life must be understood in light of their critiques of the modern commercial city. Yet this should not be mistaken for an opposition to “the city” as such. Rousseau found much to admire in city-states such as Sparta, republican Rome, and contemporary Geneva,Footnote 11 and models the Social Contral accordingly. Heidegger, meanwhile, goes beyond even Nietzsche in his praise of the tragic culture of ancient Athens as the heretofore high-water mark of Western civilization, and writes favorably about medieval cities such as Bamberg whose impressive cathedrals serve, like the rural temples of Greek antiquity, as great world-disclosing works of art.Footnote 12
According to Rousseau, cities are salutary insofar as they promote freedom and political virtue, while for Heidegger, an authentic city (polis) is the open space for the mysterious revelation of Being to a people, as the “pole” around which this revelation is gathered.Footnote 13 The tension between their conceptualizations of the healthy city is exemplified by their competing evaluations of Athens and Rome. Heidegger praises Athens’s tragic festivals as exemplars of the Greeks’ mysterious and primordial relationship to Being, while Rousseau sides with Sparta over Athens in response to the latter’s commercialism and decadent dedication to the arts and sciences.Footnote 14 Conversely, Rousseau praises republican Rome for its austere civic culture while Heidegger criticizes it for its superficial appropriation of Greek philosophy and culture. They agree, however, that the modern commercial city is fundamentally corrosive of the highest political goods: freedom and virtue for Rousseau, and the autochthonous existential-philosophic depth of an authentic historical world for Heidegger. Moreover, they concur that the incompatibility of the modern commercial city with authentic modes of existence emerges out of its production of the bourgeois as an inauthentic, egoistic individual uprooted from the soil of the homeland, which provides a decisive impetus for their political thought. Allan BloomFootnote 15 and Arthur M. MelzerFootnote 16 underscore the significance of Rousseau’s critique of the bourgeois, contributing to what Bernard Yack describes as the “longing for a total revolution” against “the ‘dehumanizing’ spirit of modern society” that would typify post-Rousseauian German thought.Footnote 17 Since Rousseau’s critique of the bourgeois emerges from his critical observations of “cosmopolitan life in a great capital city,” Charles E. Ellison rightly argues that Rousseau’s political theory “is significantly related to and perhaps even shaped by his theory of the modern city.”Footnote 18
Rousseau delineates the ancient city from its modern counterpart by distinguishing the citizen from the bourgeois.Footnote 19 He claims that “the true meaning” of the word city “has been almost entirely lost among modern men,” causing them to “mistake a town [ville] for a City [Cité], and a bourgeois from a citizen. They do not know that houses make the town, but that citizens make the City.”Footnote 20 A true city, in the ancient sense of the polis, is not simply any large concentration of buildings or inhabitants, but a collection of active, civic-minded citizens who are “participants in the sovereign authority.”Footnote 21 True citizens are those who have been “denatured” by the political community to find “the I” not in the “absolute existence” of the originary wholeness of the natural pre-political individual, but in the “relative existence” of “the common unity,” where they believe themselves “no longer one but a part of the unity.”Footnote 22 As Judith ShklarFootnote 23 and MelzerFootnote 24 argue, while the artificial wholeness of the citizen as a wholly dependent member of the community is limited in comparison to the natural wholeness of the independent and wholly self-referential individual of the state of nature, it is nevertheless perhaps the best approximation of natural wholeness, liberty, and equality that the majority of individuals can hope to experience amidst the fallenness of civilization.
The bourgeois, in contrast is not a citizen of the city or polis, but is a town (i.e., borough) dweller. The modern town or city might be larger than the ancient polis, but for Rousseau, the difference between the two is qualitative rather than quantitative. Lacking a republican city or patrie, the bourgeois is caught in a no-man’s land between the state of nature and the civil state. The bourgeois lacks both the natural wholeness that the pre-social individual finds in oneself, and the artificial wholeness that the “citizen” finds in the city.
He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiment of nature does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one these men of our days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing.Footnote 25
If the bourgeois is the typical fruit of the modern commercial state—of France and England, and their metropoles of Paris and London—then from a Rousseauian standpoint, the modern approach to politics, which centers the city as commercial borough rather than a rustic polis, is inherently defective.
As opposed to the civic-minded austerity of ancient republics, the modern state expands outward from large metropoles whose power stems from commerce rather than manpower, and whose appeal lies in its promises of doux commerce: luxury, abundance, and the arts and sciences. In comparison to “ancient politicians [who] incessantly talked about morals and virtues, those of our time talk only of business and money.”Footnote 26 Accordingly, the bourgeois is primarily occupied by the pursuit of private commercial ends, which contribute toward the collective ends of state wealth, power, and prosperity. Rousseau, however, famously countered that the egoistical and acquisitive spirit of commerce is ultimately a corrosive political and moral force. Commercialism replaces attachment to the patrie with an attachment to money; entraps us as mutually dependent individuals within a zero-sum competition, encouraging dissembling actors and cunning knaves who find ingenious ways to excel at the expense of other; proliferates the desires, making us increasingly dependent on obtaining a growing number of unnecessary luxuries; its development of the “useless” arts soften and enfeeble us, enervating the “vigour of the soul” from which virtues spring; exacerbates natural inequalities of strength and cunning while enshrining them as inheritable inequalities of wealth, and so on. Hence Rousseau’s polemical judgments that, as the centers of commerce, the arts, and luxury, “Cities are the abyss of the human species,”Footnote 27 and “a capital is a pit into which almost the entire nation goes to lose its morals, its laws, its courage, and its freedom.”Footnote 28
We can find echoes of Rousseau’s critique of the urban bourgeois in Heidegger’s description of “inauthentic” Dasein in Being and Time. For Heidegger, authenticity and inauthenticity are intimately bound with time and historicity. Whereas the authentic individual reconciles the three “ecstases” of time (past, present, and future) by directing present actions in accordance with future projects, that are in turn informed by the possibilities opened up by the past, the inauthentic individual lacks futural aims and is alienated from their heritage, thus lost to the present moment and the whims, opinions, and “idle chatter” of “the they” (das Man).Footnote 29 Whereas Rousseau blames “foresight” (including that of death) and memory for civilized man’s inability to enjoy the sweetness of the sentiment of existence,Footnote 30 Heidegger embraces being-towards-death as the mode of existence that shakes us from an immersion in the present and redirects us toward future oriented goals and projects that give existence unity and purpose. Insofar as the modern urban world privileges the busy-ness and stability of the present at the expense of futural civilizational goals rooted in the primordial depths and destiny of one’s collective heritage, I join critical Heidegger scholars in identifying an intimate (although not strictly determinative) connection between the text’s discussion of authentic and inauthentic historicity and Heidegger’s explicitly political writings from the 1930s.Footnote 31
For Heidegger, the inauthenticity of so much of modern existence is bound up with the inauthentic historicity of the modern urban “world.” Since being-in-the-world is one of the fundamental structures of Dasein, whether one is embedded in an “authentically” or “inauthentically” historical world plays an important role in whether one is capable of living authentically. In a dramatically urbanizing “world,” however, individuals increasingly do not experience the rooted simplicity of the “countryside”Footnote 32 with its historical “battlefields and cultic sites,”Footnote 33 but instead belong to the urban world of “everyday trade and traffic, as the soil from which they have grown and the stage where they are displayed.”Footnote 34 Amidst the frantic busy-ness of the city with its distractions, demands, and entertainments, modern Dasein is “uprooted,”Footnote 35 “free-floating,”Footnote 36 and inconstant.Footnote 37
In contrast to the inauthentic urbanite, authentically historical (geschichtlich) Dasein is assigned (geschicht) a “fateful destiny” (schicksalhafte Geschick) by the way that Being has revealed itself to a particular “generation” grounded in a historical world.Footnote 38 Heidegger develops this theme in the early 1930s whereby collective participation in this shared fate is the basis of a Volksgemeinschaft as the authentic expression of political life, with the Volk serving, as Blitz observes, “as the authentic analogue” to the inauthentic “public” “as the home for Dasein.”Footnote 39 Uprooted from the soil and heritage of the fatherland, the modern, urban, cosmopolitan Bürger does not participate in the primordial depths of the Volksgemeinschaft and the historic destiny assigned to it by Being (exemplified by the camaraderie experienced by soldiers in their “nearness to death” in World War I), but is instead a mere member of Gesellschaft (society) as an arbitrary collection of individuals coming together to pursue what are ultimately private ends.Footnote 40 The modern commercial city is therefore not an authentically historical world conducive to authentic existence, but an un-Welt; an emblem of the “moribund pseudocivilization” (die abgelebte Scheinkultur) of the modern post-Enlightenment West that is collapsing “into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.”Footnote 41
Thus, both Rousseau and Heidegger critique modern cities for generating the bourgeoisie—individuals who are egoistic yet inauthentic, lack manly vigor or resoluteness, and are ill-fitted participants of a genuine political community. Rousseau’s bourgeois is not fitted to be a citizen of a republic, jealously guarding its freedoms, whereas for Heidegger, the bourgeois is uprooted from the existential depths of participating in “the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk,”Footnote 42 and therefore from Being. The shared identification of the modern commercial city with the inauthentic bourgeois lead both Rousseau and Heidegger to seek collective alternatives to the urban liberalism of Enlightenment civilization, which are colored by their respective republican/völkisch diagnoses of the political-spiritual maladies of modernity.
“[A]t the end of a few generations” Rousseau observes, cities cause “the races [to] perish or degenerate. They must be renewed, and it is always the country which provides for this renewal.”Footnote 43 Heidegger concurs, responding to the devastation of the countryside and uprooting of human beings from the earth with the proclamation that “everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.”Footnote 44 In response to the purported decadence of the modern city, Rousseau and Heidegger both look to the countryside as a source for political-spiritual regeneration.
Rousseau’s Rustic Republicanism
Rousseau’s constitutional plans for Corsica and Poland emphasize the importance of favoring an agricultural rather than commercial economy as the foundation of the state. In contrast to Shklar’s assessment that the alleged “pseudo-realism” of his constitutional plans are “the most visionary, pejoratively utopian, of his works,”Footnote 45 I join Ethan Putterman,Footnote 46 Denise Schaeffer,Footnote 47 Jeffrey A. Smith,Footnote 48 and Mark J. HillFootnote 49 in interpreting these texts as offering fraught but realist or prudential policy prescriptions, which seek to take “men as they are,”Footnote 50 activating the springs of the passionsFootnote 51 with significant adaptions to time and place,Footnote 52 while nevertheless recognizing the political tensions and fragility of Rousseau’s agrarian reforms.Footnote 53 I build on this literature by centering the ways in which these reforms not only seek to redress the ills of commerce, but of urbanism.
By “agriculture” Rousseau means a “constitution that leads a people to spread itself out over the whole surface of its territory, to settle there, to cultivate all its places, to love the country life, the labors that relate to it, to find the necessities and embellishments of life so well in them that it does not at all desire to leave it.”Footnote 54 Agriculture is politically advantageous because it increases state power, and therefore independence, more readily than finance or commercialism. Hence Rousseau’s maxim that “commerce produces wealth but agriculture assures freedom.”Footnote 55 Agrarianism helps generate a larger and more robust civilian base, which is a “more real” source of power than the accumulation of wealth.Footnote 56
The taste for agriculture is advantageous to the population not only by multiplying men’s means of existence, but also by giving the body of the nation a temperament and morals that cause them to be born in greater number. In every country the inhabitants of the countryside multiply more than those of the cities, either from the simplicity of the rustic life which forms better constituted bodies, or by the constant attention to labor which forestalls disorder and vices.Footnote 57
Whereas commercial cities primarily cultivate money, which ultimately begets more ephemeral money—in turn necessitating international trade and therefore dependence on other nations—the countryside produces citizens, who in filling the agrarian station of peasant-soldiers secure material self-sufficiency and military independence. The agrarian relationship to the land means that the peasant is “much more attached to their soil than city dwellers are to their towns” and therefore imbued with a “love of the fatherland [la patrie] which attaches him to its constitution.”Footnote 58 Hence, the physically and morally robust peasant, with deep attachment to the soil and rootedness in the customs and character of the nation,Footnote 59 is a better and more willing soldier than the “rebellious and soft” bourgeois who puts their own interests ahead of the state’s: “the genuine education of the soldier is to be a plowman.”Footnote 60
Agriculture also tends toward freedom insofar as it is the economic order most compatible with republicanism, and in particular, democracy. This is in part because democracy is a less costly form of government (its administration passes “through fewer ranks and requires the fewest different orders”Footnote 61), making it particularly suitable to a rustic and egalitarian way of life. Likewise, the relative decentralization of democratic administration is well suited to Rousseau’s ambition of a population that is “evenly dispersed over the territory”Footnote 62 (“the fundamental maxim of our foundation”Footnote 63), with power redistributed away from concentrated urban centers, thus “keep[ing] the country independent of the cities.”Footnote 64
A policy of agrarian revival and the corresponding repopulation of the country, however, requires addressing the root causes of urbanization: the commercialization of agriculture and the corresponding need to satisfy vanity (amour propre) through the unequal accumulation of the luxurious fruits of commerce. Rousseau establishes the “definite maxim that everywhere money is of the utmost necessity the nation detaches itself from agriculture in order to throw itself into more lucrative professions; the station of plowman is then either an object of commerce and a sort of manufacture for the big farmers, or the last resource of poverty for the crowd of peasants.”Footnote 65 While large commercial farms exacerbate inequality, turning plowmen into paupers, a commercial economy requires small-scale family farms to sell an excess yield in market towns in order to pay monetary taxes, which in turn exposes them to the temptations of the city’s lax morality and material abundance. “Brought up in brokering,” the farmer’s “children become debauched, attach themselves to the towns, lose the taste for their station and make themselves into sailors or soldiers rather than take on their father’s station. Soon the countryside is depopulated and the town swarms with vagabonds,” introducing “all the vices that finally cause the ruin of the nation.”Footnote 66
Rousseau must therefore find a way to lower if not eliminate the tax burden on farmers while restoring public virtue to make agricultural life self-sustaining. First, as Hill notes, he reduces rather than eliminates commercialism.Footnote 67 Rousseau proposes banning financers and limiting the need of money to the greatest extent possible by favoring a system of non-monetary exchange of produce overseen by the state’s administrative apparatus, and by substituting taxes with labor service and a paid standing army with a militia.Footnote 68 Secondly, he tries to reduce the corruption of public morals and virtue by limiting the non-useful arts and sciences,Footnote 69 and by minimizing the temptations of the city by making “the seat of the supreme Government … less a capital than an administrative centre.”Footnote 70 After all, “a cultivating people must not look covetously at residence in cities and envy the fate of the sluggards who live there.”Footnote 71
As Putterman,Footnote 72 Smith,Footnote 73 and SchaefferFootnote 74 agree, Rousseau ultimately recognizes that it will be easier to limit commercialism and revitalize agriculture by redirecting vanity than by fighting it. He would prefer money to be held in contempt rather than forbidden,Footnote 75 and to make the agricultural life the path toward recognition, esteem, and political privileges.Footnote 76 “It is a question of making the people adopt [agricultural] practices, of making it love the occupation we want to give it, of fixing its pleasures, its desires, its tastes there, in general of making it into the happiness of life, and of limiting plans of ambition to it.”Footnote 77
Banning money and forcing habitually idle citizens to labor on the fields is doomed to fail, because while fear of government force may stop individuals from doing evil, it does not sufficiently motivate them to do good.Footnote 78 Humans are, however, positively motivated by hope, and in particular the hope that they can achieve pleasure. With the development of vanity, the socialized individual takes more pleasure from public than private pleasures, from esteem and status rather than sensualism alone. Since esteem, as an inter-subjective good, is ultimately dependent on popular opinion, “the arbiters of a people’s opinion are the arbiters of its actions. [Vanity] seeks things in proportion to the value [opinion] gives them; to show [vanity] what it ought to esteem is to tell it what it ought to do.”Footnote 79 Rousseau’s task, then, is to make sure that agricultural life is held in sufficient public esteem for citizens to be drawn to and remain content within it.
He proposes to reinvigorate agricultural life by “attaching men to the land, so to speak by drawing their distinctions and their rights from it” and “strengthening this bond by that of the family by making the land necessary to the station of fathers.”Footnote 80 He divides the Corsican nation into “aspirants,” “patriots,” and “citizens,” allowing individuals to climb these ranks in accordance with their cultivation of land and establishment of families, incentivizing men to become patriarchs and farmers:
Not seeing anything above them, those who carry it on will make it their glory, and opening up for themselves a path to greater employments they will fill this station like the first Romans. Not being able to leave this station, one will want to distinguish oneself in it, one will want to fill it better than others do, to make larger harvests, to furnish a stronger contingent to the state, to deserve the people’s votes in elections. Large families well nourished and well clothed will bring honor to leaders; and since real abundance will be the sole object of luxury, each will want to distinguish himself by that sort of luxury.Footnote 81
Rousseau therefore redirects vanity so that one finds esteem, privilege, and pleasure not in the individualistic hedonism of the city, but in fulfilling one’s duty to the farm, family, and state. The farmer reaps the benefits of both the natural freedom of the relative independence and self-sufficiency of the family farm, as well as the civic freedom of the citizen of a well-ordered republic, which secures his liberty, equality, and property.
Heidegger also thought that spiritual-political renewal was intimately connected to a revitalization of the people’s relationship to the soil. Yet, his political ambitions demand a complete break with Enlightenment normativity, including, as Newell observes, Rousseau’s acceptance of the modern premise that humans are primarily individuals motivated by self-love, and that a well-ordered republic requires formal constitutional guardrails that protect the rights of citizens and reflect the pre-political freedom and equality of the individual.Footnote 82 Whereas Rousseau thought that the raw, lawless vigor of the Corsicans and the Poles presented a rare opportunity for modern European peoples to receive ambitious legislation that would instrumentalize agrarianism in service of the goods of freedom and equality, Heidegger sought to harness what he saw as the promising spiritual-political energies of the German Volk during the 1933 National Socialist revolution in service of the existential-ontological principle of völkisch primordial rootedness itself.
Heidegger’s Radical Retrieval of Rootedness-in-the-Soil
Heidegger claims that, amidst the wasteland of liberal modernity, the German Volk has been tasked with creating “a truly spiritual world,”Footnote 83 which consists neither in culture or “useful knowledge and values,”Footnote 84 but rather “the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.”Footnote 85 As rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger tried to make this total revolution of German Dasein a reality by embedding students in the rural soil, in spatial-spiritual proximity to the peasantry.
Heidegger outlines a politics of space, soil, and rootedness that rejects modern understandings of the state. Just as Heidegger critiques the Cartesian-Newtonian idea of space as a series of empty coordinates abstracted from historical meaning, he denies that we can take “the space of the people … as a bounded geometrical surface that we can measure precisely in terms of square kilometers—that is, as a measurable extended area” contained within clearly demarcated borders.Footnote 86 The state cannot be understood formally as “an intellectual construct, or a sum of legal principles, or a constitution.”Footnote 87 Rather, it “is essentially related to space and formed by space,”Footnote 88 “people and space mutually belong together.”Footnote 89 Because the state is the state of Being of the Volk, and the Being of the Volk is rooted in its primordial relation to the land as a historical Vaterland, rootedness-in-the-soil is an ontological and political necessity for an authentic Volk/state. The question of who belongs to the Volk, meanwhile, cannot be determined by an abstract, formal consideration of residence within the state’s administrative borders. “For a Slavic people, the nature of our German space would definitely be revealed differently from the way it is revealed to us; to Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed at all.”Footnote 90 Membership as part of a Volk entails having an ethnically-historically derived relation to the land (and thereby Being) “that cannot be taught; at most, it can be awaked from its slumber.”Footnote 91
As Charles BambachFootnote 92 and Richard WolinFootnote 93 demonstrate, Heidegger’s philosophy sets itself the task of reawakening German Bodenständigkeit. His first strategy is to rebalance political power between the urban and rural. As with Rousseau’s constitutional projects, this involves repopulating the countryside and limiting the appeal of the city. In order to cultivate “a fully valid existence as a Volksgenosse [comrade of the folk-people] in the German Volksgemeinshaft” one must “know to what point urbanization has brought the Germans, how they would be returned to the soil and the country through resettlement.”Footnote 94 This would be part of a larger effort by various instruments of the state and civil society, including the university and newspapers, of promoting “public state-mindedness in the village and, in the city … a political existence that remains bound to the rural areas.”Footnote 95
Heidegger, however, provides a warning of how not to rebalance the relationship between the country and the city. “The world of the city runs the risk of falling into a destructive error” by passing a “very loud and very active and very fashionable obtrusiveness” as “concern for the world of and existence of the peasant.”Footnote 96 For all the “literati’s dishonest chatter about ‘folk character’ and ‘rootedness in the soil’,” they disturb the peasant from what “he needs and wants,” namely, “quiet reserve with regard to his own way of being and its independence.”Footnote 97 Instead of the urbanite’s exploitation of the rural world as a site of recreation and novelty, or the presumptuous attempt to educate the country-dweller about indigenous folkways, the task before the Germans is “learn[ing] to take seriously that simple, rough existence up there. Only then will it speak to us once more.”Footnote 98
How, then, can the urbanized population be fruitfully reintegrated into the rural world of the peasants? As Rector, Heidegger answers with an ambitious attempt to reorganize the German University in accordance with a tripartite division of labor service (Arbeitsdienst), military service (Wehrdienst), and knowledge service (Wissensdienst), each of which is to be reoriented toward and benefit from exposure to the land. Having students participate in labor camps will serve as “a new and decisive force for education” that provides a “direct revelation of the Volksgemeinshaft” through working in solidarity with members of different classes in proximity to the land.Footnote 99 “[L]abor reconquers for the peoples its rootedness,”Footnote 100 providing “the basic experiences of hardness” and “closeness to the soil,”Footnote 101 while clarifying and reinforcing “one’s sense of social origin [der ständischen Herkunft] and of the responsibility that derives for the individual from the fact that all belong together in an ethnic-cultural [volkhaft] unity.”Footnote 102
While Heidegger follows Rousseau insofar as he admits that self-interest and “employment prospects” will be what drive many of the “lame, comfortable, and effete” into the Arbeitsdienst, he breaks with Rousseau in locating the origins of the citizen’s pride not in the flattery of one’s vanity, but in a spirited attunement to the destiny of the Volk. “Those who are strong and unbroken are proud that extreme demands are being made of them: for that is the moment when they rise up to the hardest tasks, those for which there is neither pay nor praise, but only the ‘reward’ of sacrifice and service in the area of the innermost necessities of German Being.”Footnote 103
Next, Heidegger advocates that students participate in military service. The Volk’s “relatedness to space” consists of both “mastering space and becoming marked by space.”Footnote 104 Relatedness to land is not just a matter of agrarian labor:
it is not right to see the sole ideal for a people in rootedness in the soil, in attachment, in settledness, which find their cultivation and realization in farming and which gives the people a special endurance in its propagation, in its growth, in its health. It is no less necessary to rule over the soil and space, to work outwards towards a wider expanse, to interact with the outside world.Footnote 105
The work of the peasant is therefore only one side of a Bodenständingkeit, which must be complemented by military-political rule over the land, and even “the will to expansion, or generally speaking, interaction,” whereby the state “finds its borders by working out into the wider expanse.”Footnote 106 Peoples who forget this “are in constant danger of losing their peoplehood and perishing.”Footnote 107 While Sonia SikkaFootnote 108 reads Heidegger’s invocations of international interactionFootnote 109 as intimating cosmopolitan dialogue, the contextual equation of the need for expansion/interaction with “the great problem of those Germans who live outside the borders of the Reich” who “do have a German homeland but … do not belong to the state of the Germans, the Reich” and are thereby “deprived of their authentic way of Being,”Footnote 110 lends itself more readily to Wolin’s identification of this discourse with the militaristic politics of the Großdeutsches Reich. Footnote 111 In contrast, Rousseau advises Poland to willingly lose territory so that it can better protect the land it does own, while disbanding its paid standing army in favor of a defensive militia that can guard the country and its constitution.Footnote 112
Nevertheless, Rousseau and Heidegger do agree that exposure and attachment to the land makes citizens better soldiers. Heidegger’s memorial address for the proto-Nazi martyr Leo SchlageterFootnote 113 impresses upon his student audience that the “clarity of heart” that allowed Schlageter to “place before his soul an image of the future awakening of the Volk to honor and greatness so that he could die believing in this future”Footnote 114 (i.e., “the greatest thing of which man is capable”Footnote 115), came from his rootedness in the Black Forest. As Schlageter “stood defenseless facing the rifles, the hero’s inner gaze soared above the muzzles to the daylight and mountains of his home that he might die for the German people and its Reich with the Alemannic countryside before his eyes.”Footnote 116 He therefore urges his students, when on their “hikes and outings … in the mountains, forests, and valleys, of the Black Forest, the home of this hero,” to “experience … and know” Schlageter’s relation to the land;Footnote 117 the hardness of the “primitive” granite stone of the mountains should “harden[] the will,” while the autumn sun that “bathes the mountain ranges and forest in the most glorious clear light” should nourish the same “clarity of heart” that enabled Schlageter’s heroism.Footnote 118
Heidegger rejects the dominance of abstract, universal knowledge, arguing that genuine Wissensdienst is not occupied with the accumulation of indifferent knowledge, but with clarifying and awakening the historical mission of the Volk, and emerges out of the same provenance as, and in proximity to, the life of the peasant.Footnote 119 He sees his work as being opened up by Todtnauberg valley.
On a deep winter’s night when a wild, pounding snowstorm rages around the cabin and veils and covers everything, that is the perfect time for philosophy. Then its questions must become simple and essential. Working through each thought can only be tough and rigorous. The struggle to mold something into language is like the resistance of the towering firs against the storm.Footnote 120
The drama of the valley neatly encapsulates Heidegger’s understanding of Being and the task of the philosopher: to gather the Heraclitean polemos of Being as logos. “[T]rue Wissenschaft does not differ at all from the knowledge of the farmer, woodcutter, the miner, the artisan” as each consists of knowing and comporting oneself to the communal “world,” fulfilling “the task assigned us, whether this task be to till the soil or to fell a tree or to dig a ditch or to inquire into the laws of Nature or to illuminate the fate-like force of History,” so as to allow the Germans to “master” their world-historical situation,Footnote 121 thus following the “unprecedented will” of “our Führer Adolf Hitler.”Footnote 122
Heidegger’s famous musings on “the history of Being,” which unfolded throughout the 1930s, were his attempt to clarify the world-historical “situation” to the Germans so that they could embrace their historical political-spiritual destiny of overcoming modern nihilism. The history of the West is one in which the original Greek raising of the question of “Being,” out of a rootedness in and receptivity to the revelations of the mysterious, chthonic world of pre-Socratic Greece was gradually concealed by the post-Platonic metaphysical tradition’s focus on eternal and otherworldly “beings” uprooted and abstracted from a people’s particular, historical understanding of Being. This culminates in the free-floating, urban-industrial, cosmopolitan, worldlessness of technological modernity, which the Germans are tasked with overcoming through the initiation of “another beginning” of history, by way of a renewed encounter with the ancient Greek inception of history in the form of a new experience of Being rooted in the primordial ground of the German’s relation to their language and soil.Footnote 123 Heidegger promotes Hölderlin as the prophet of Germany’s historical mission of inaugurating the “other beginning” through a new German revelation of Being via a renewed poetic relation to the German landscape and language, sowing the seeds for the “return” of the immanent gods of the homeland, as emissaries of the Volk’s relation to Being, and with them a new trans-modern political-spiritual world. While Jeff MalpasFootnote 124 and Fred DallmayrFootnote 125 appeal to Heidegger’s turn to the Hölderlinian poetics of “place” beginning in 1934–35 as a rejection of his earlier embrace of Nazism, I emphasize along with Bambach,Footnote 126 Catherine H. Zuckert,Footnote 127 and Alexander S. DuffFootnote 128 its continuities with Heidegger’s “private” understanding of National Socialism.Footnote 129 As Bambach remarks,
Heidegger’s pastoral language of fields paths, native soil, pathmarks, fertile ground, and folkish rootedness … betrays a fundamental unity with the language and axiomatics of his “other” paramilitary discourse about heroism, sacrifice, courage, will, struggle, hardness, violence, and self-assertion that marks his political works of the ‘30s and beyond. Far from being a pastoral roundelay about the rural landscape, Heidegger’s song of the earth in praise of rootedness and autochthony (Bodenständigkeit) is part of a martial-political ideology of the chthonic.Footnote 130
Whereas Rousseau’s material-psychological diagnosis of the decline of agriculture could theoretically be redressed through economic-institutional reform, Heidegger’s ontological-metaphysical diagnosis calls for a complete transformation of Western Dasein, demanding the end of the modern epoch and the leap into a radically new beginning of history, with new modes of thinking, poetry, and politics, rooted in the primordial ground of the soil and the abysses of Being.
Competing Conceptions of History and Being
While Rousseau and Heidegger’s contrasting historical milieus play an important role in their different political approaches to rural renewal,Footnote 131 I focus on how their political differences point to core philosophic disagreements regarding the essence of and relation between Being, history, and nature. Heidegger raises his disagreements in two rare critiques of Rousseau from seminars from 1933–35, both of which are introduced within the context of broader critiques of modern/post-French Revolutionary political-intellectual dispositions. First, he uses a politically charged reading of Hölderlin to critique the Rousseauian-Romantic view of Nature as a state of harmony and wholeness. The tenth strophe of Hölderlin’s “The Rhine,” at first appears to approvingly name Rousseau among the “demigods”—beings who, in striving toward Being raise themselves above mortals while necessarily falling short of the gods, become eschatological figures who signal the destiny of the German Volk. Footnote 132 Heidegger argues instead that Hölderlin is critiquing Rousseau, or those inspired by him, for falling short of this station because of an inadequate relation to Being. Hölderlin’s description of Rousseau as “foolishly divine” and lawless “out of holy fullness” must be read in the context of the stanza’s broader evocation of “primordial beyng, uninterrupted in its naturalness, [which] suggests the thought of Rousseau and his teaching” of “nature” as a “constant, uninterrupted harmony with the gods and with beyng in general.”Footnote 133 Here, Rousseau bifurcates “nature” and “history.” Nature is the complete pre-linguistic/rational immersion in the pure be-ing of the present, while history represents an alienation from Being understood as the wholeness of nature.
Heidegger counters Rousseau’s harmonious conception of nature with a Heraclitean understanding of physis (later translated to the Latin natura) as polemos, that is, struggle, war, or confrontation (Kampf, Aufeinandersetzung). For Heidegger, genuinely struggling with physis (Being understood as the immanent unconcealment and concealment of truth) and gathering it in the logos of poetry and thought is the ground of history and the highest distinction of human existence/civilization. The natural wholeness of the Rousseauian savage in his or her simple/pure immersion in Being as “nature” falls below the pre-Socratic’s genuine historical encounter with Being as “physis” (i.e., the encounter of historical peoples with Being and its gods). Thus, the Rousseauian understanding of Being as “simply” remaining at “the origin” (as Hölderlin puts it), is according to Heidegger “not something that has properly sprung forth—that is, escaped from this beyng of the gods and even rebelled against them.”Footnote 134 The Rousseauian is therefore “not a proper demigod, not a between whose essence is counter-turning,” but a being who longs to remain in the womb of the sweetness of the sentiment of existence rather than wrest a people’s historical experience of Being from concealment into unconcealment.Footnote 135 For Heidegger, then, Rousseau stands as another figure in the history of metaphysics who, in trying to rehabilitate “nature,” contributes to the concealment of Being as a historical event.
Rousseau’s belief in the harmonious goodness of nature as a regulative standard leads to a radically different conception of politics than Heidegger’s understanding of nature as physis and polemos, which Gregory Fried locates at the center of Heideggerian politics.Footnote 136 The natural freedom and equality of the pre-historical and undifferentiated Rousseauian savage serve as normative guides for republican, egalitarian politics, whereas Heraclitean polemos distinguishes individuals and peoples in the arena of historical confrontation, giving birth to inegalitarian politics where some are revealed as masters and others as slaves. This extends to Heidegger’s hierarchical ranking of peoples based on their proximity to Being. Some, like the Germans and Greeks, by virtue of the resources embedded within their respective languages, are elect peoples who enter into the most authentically historical relation with Being, while others, like the Africans, allegedly remain immersed in Rousseauian nature and thus never enter history understood as a genuine confrontation with Being.Footnote 137 Hence, in another brief but telling reference to Rousseau, Heidegger claims that “thought in a Greek way … ‘nature’ in Rousseau” is a form of “barbarianism.”Footnote 138 Other peoples, meanwhile, like the Americans, Western Europeans, or the Bolshevik Russians, have fallen out of history, as reflected by their ahistorical and egalitarian (i.e. technological) politics.
Heidegger identifies Rousseau’s political thought with the latter grouping. For Heidegger, the proto-liberal idea of a pre-historical state of isolated individuals living in freedom and equality is a philosophical-political fiction that severs us from Being and cannot serve as a normative guide for politics.
Rousseau, for instance, believed that the state was a contrat social that was based on each individual striving for his own welfare. The state would no longer be the state in the sense of the political as the fundamental character of Western man, who exists on the basis of philosophy; it would be a subordinate means to an end, in service to the development of the personality in the liberal sense, one domain among many.Footnote 139
Thus, for Heidegger, Rousseau’s republicanism remains fatally “liberal” insofar as it takes its bearings from the ideal of the individual, abstracted from historical-communal ties, who forms the state as an instrument in service of pre-political ends. This is opposed to the concept of the state as the state of Being of the Volk, born out of the Führer’s “awakening the same will” in the people, from which “arises a community” of “sacrifice” and “service.”Footnote 140
While Rousseau’s constitutional projects put strong emphasis on cultivating national character along with communal virtues,Footnote 141 these are instruments in service of approximating the freedom and equality of the pre-historical state of nature where humans are fundamentally self-interested individuals. While Rousseau also insists that the free political community of citizens must be a closed society, and that national characteristics flourish better in the country than in the commercial city, he differs from Heidegger insofar as he maintains—as recognized by Leo StraussFootnote 142 and Helena RosenblattFootnote 143—that the philosopher can and should transcend the civic prejudices of the closed society in order to participate in the universal or cosmopolitan.Footnote 144
At the bottom of Heidegger’s hierarchy are “nomadic” peoples who leave “wastelands behind them where they found fruitful and cultivated land.”Footnote 145 If only a rooted Volk is capable of being authentically historical, and authentic historicity is the measure of human Dasein, then there is little stopping fascistic politics whereby the rooted/authentic Volk is entitled if not obligated to wage war against uprooting or deracinating forces, whether internally or externally. Hence he encourages the Germans to find an internal enemy who has “attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people”Footnote 146 and to ready themselves for an attack against this enemy with “the goal of total annihilation.”Footnote 147 Heidegger justifies this through his Heraclitean reading of physis as polemos. Footnote 148
Rousseau, on the other hand, provides a valuable corrective to (or at the very least, limits) these Heideggerian dangers through his more nuanced and ambivalent evaluation of rootedness and agriculture. Despite Rousseau’s preference for agrarianism over commercialism in his constitutional projects, he pinpoints the development of agriculture and metallurgy as the fateful historical turning points toward the division of labor, establishment of private property, and enshrinement of gross inequality, whereby “vast forests were changed into smiling fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops … [F]or the poet it is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is iron and wheat which have civilized man and ruined the human race.”Footnote 149 That agriculture is unnatural is confirmed by the fact that it requires foresight,Footnote 150 and thereby temporality, which natural man lacks. In comparison, he holds up the nomadic “savage” as a natural ideal and praises the “golden mean” achieved by pre- or proto-agrarian semi-nomadic tribal societies as “the happiest and most durable epoch.”Footnote 151 When Rousseau does appeal to agrarianism it is to find ways to harness its power against the very evils it unleashed.
While both HillFootnote 152 and Istvan HontFootnote 153 place greater emphasis on the development of metallurgy than agriculture in Rousseau’s narrative of historical decline (there were, after all, more salutary forms of primitive agriculture prior to the arrival of metallurgy), it is important not to go too far in absolving agrarianism. In addition to critiquing primitive agriculture as the germ of private property and the division of labor in the Second Discourse, Rousseau further qualifies his assessment of the independence of the rooted, agricultural life in Emile. He praises “man’s first trade” (agriculture) as “the most decent, the most useful, and consequently the most noble he can practice,” but warns that the farmer is “dependent on his field, whose harvest is at another’s discretion”—whether a “prince, a powerful neighbour, or a lawsuit.”Footnote 154 While the well-ordered martial agrarian-republic might reduce domestic or foreign threats to one’s land, rootedness itself nevertheless implies dependence. As Emile concludes,
In our travels I have sought to find some piece of land where I could be absolutely on my own … I have found that my very wish was contradictory; for, were I dependent on nothing else, I would at least depend on the land where I had settled. My life would be attached to this land like that of the dryads was to their trees. I have found that dominion and liberty are two incompatible words; therefore, I could be master of a cottage only in ceasing to be master of myself.Footnote 155
Emile’s tutor teaches him a trade in addition to agriculture since the artisan who “depends only on his work … is as free as the farmer is slave … Wherever [enemies] want to vex the artisan, his baggage is soon packed.”Footnote 156 Yet even the artisan remains dependent: “to practice a single art they are subjected to countless others. A city is needed for every worker.”Footnote 157 Rousseau’s autobiographical writings thus explore the solitary nomadic artist or “man” living on the fringes of society as an attractive modern alternative to both the citizen-farmer and the bourgeois.Footnote 158
Rousseau’s greater acceptance of the limits of politics, and therefore of historical malleability, makes him more skeptical of the prospects for radical rural-political regeneration. He is doubtful that his schemes for agrarianism or republicanism can work in the large states that typify modernity—the window for agrarianism in Europe is rapidly closing, and corruption is difficult if not impossible to reverse once it has set in.Footnote 159 His agrarian constitutions are not possible among the large commercial states that typify modernity. “The best economic system for Corsica and for a Republic is assuredly not the best for a monarchy and for a large state. The one that I am proposing would not succeed either in France or in England, and could not even be established there.”Footnote 160 The physical size of these larger states renders commerce and money necessary for administration and makes genuine republican self-governance unlikely. Even if these nations had a more advantageous size and population, they are already too corrupt to receive agrarian legislation. It therefore seems quite unlikely that Rousseau would think that any contemporary Western state remains capable of receiving such legislation, whereas Heidegger continues to hold onto eschatological hopes that even the corrupted post-war Germans (or perhaps the Russians or Chinese) will eventually inaugurate “an other” inception to the history of Being—a revolution beyond liberal modernity.Footnote 161 Despite Rousseau’s influence on the French Revolution, even critics as unsympathetic as Bertrand RussellFootnote 162 admit that, as Hill phrases it, “Although radical in thought, Rousseau was not a revolutionary.”Footnote 163 Accordingly, Rousseau puts himself at a greater ironic distance from his own plans for the rustic renewal of the political community than Heidegger.
Conclusion
While Rousseau and Heidegger overlap both in critiquing the modern, commercial city and in turning to the countryside for a political renewal that would take the community beyond the bounds of liberalism, they provide different political visions that anticipate two competing varieties of contemporary rural protest—republican populism and the völkisch New Right.Footnote 164 The failure to distinguish these visions risks the all-too-hasty support or condemnation of these movements as a unified whole (depending on whether we interpret protesters through the lens of rustic republicanism or the politics of far-right autochthony) rather than a nuanced exploration of how competing factions might pose challenges or offer opportunities for increasingly urbanized liberal democracies. This is not to downplay the similarities between these two admittedly ideal types. Both are critical of contemporary liberalism’s embrace of urbanization, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, favoring the rustic to the urbane, the rooted member of a small community to the cosmopolitan, and the domestic to the foreign. Rousseau embraces policy demands common to both, including the reduction or elimination of taxes on farmers, sharp limits on immigration, the formation of rural militias, and the championing of pro-natalist policies. Yet Rousseau’s rural vision remains more amenable to compromise with liberalism, insofar as he turns to the rustic virtues of the country to better secure the broadly democratic-egalitarian Enlightenment principles that underlie contemporary liberal democracies. In contrast, Heidegger and his far-right epigones seek to overcome the post-Enlightenment political world as such for the rebirth of authentic, illiberal, and trans-modern autochthonous peoples, as bearers of new collective revelations of Being.
Rousseau’s rural republicanism highlights genuine structural difficulties that farmers are confronted with in commercial societies and may even offer resources to help embattled liberal democracies come to their own defense against far-right challengers. Yet, as he is aware, the nativist passions that he courts remain a highly combustible element of his republicanism.Footnote 165 Furthermore, Rousseau appears at times particularly unamenable to compromise between agrarianism and commercialism. He warns the Polish, for example, “above all” not to “attempt to unite these two projects; they are too contradictory, and to want to reach both by a mixed procedure is to want to fail at both of them.”Footnote 166 Yet Rousseau’s acknowledgment of the impossibility of moving from commercialism to agrarianism in large modern states, his compromises with commerce in his constitution for Corsica, his material-psychological rather than metaphysical-existential account of the decline of modern agrarianism, his recognition of the limits of the agricultural way of life, and his corresponding acceptance of the pole of “man” in addition to that of “citizen,” all prove more amenable to pragmatic compromise with liberal polities than Heidegger’s cultivation of total revolution. Such an uneven compromise—in which the agrarian would be subordinated but subsidized within a commercial and largely urbanized state—would likely only be able to alleviate some of the economic pressures and cultural-political insecurities that rural workers and communities face in a globalized economy. If, however, the only modern alternative to this compromise is the collapse of rural life, its expedience for unfettered commercialism would have to be weighed against the costs to civic cohesion and the longer term price to be paid for the loss of a vision of the good life that we, as heirs to both the Enlightenment and Romantic Counter-Enlightenment, recognize as an important spiritual—and perhaps also political—counterweight to the potential one-sidedness of life in the modern commercial city.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by Government of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Postdoctoral Fellowship 756-2023-0488. Open Access was funded by the Colgate University Research Council. The author would like to give special thanks to Robert Sparling and the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, and to Ruth Abbey, two anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team at The Review of Politics for their feedback and support, as well as to Simon Kow and Christopher Kelly for their generous comments as discussants of early versions of the manuscript at the annual 2024 conferences for CPSA and APSA in Montreal and Philadelphia, respectively.
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