This chapter describes the reactions of Andrew Marvell to the English Revolution. From the famous 'Horatian Ode upon Cromwel's Return from Ireland', whose message continues to be debated by literary scholars and historians alike, and the almost contemporaneous 'Tom May's Death', where the matter in dispute is whether Marvell really wrote it, through to the Restoration satires which often hark back to the Commonwealth and Protectorate era, his writings (and their history of publication) suggest one simple, and to many, unpalatable truth: that Marvell, after initial reluctance, committed himself absolutely to the Revolution, in so far as it could be identified with the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. Another unpalatable truth will emerge in the course of the argument: that for Marvell, one of the chief values of the Revolution and its extraordinary leader was the re-emergence of England, after the pacific Caroline period, as a power in international relations, power being expressed primarily through military force and reputation. If we face the facts, as expressed by all of Marvell’s writings, before, during and after the Cromwellian period, the urbane treasures of his pastoral poems (a contradiction I intend) are eccentric rather than self-defining; though he could not have been so intelligent a celebrator of Cromwell without some internal conflicts and ironies.

Traditions in historiography

The early modern period, it has been claimed, saw a 'historical revolution'. Just how far that term is appropriate, both for the writing of history and for the events of the mid-century themselves, has been much disputed. What is clear is that the political upheavals of our period provoked a wave of remarkable and original writing, stimulated by the authors' sense that they had helped to shape the events they were describing.

>From the start of the Renaissance in Europe, humanist scholars with an impassioned commitment to reviving Classical learning had paid particular attention to history-writing. In the Greek writers Polybius and Thucydides, the Romans Livy and Sallust, they found an intellectual coherence and stylistic vividness that they felt to be lacking in the medieval year-by-year chronicles of secular or religious history. They wanted to go beyond the bare facts to the human passions and motivations that had informed them and the underlying causes. Humanist histories like Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III (1543) and George Buchanan’s History of Scotland (1582) might go well beyond their sources to imagine how the leading agents might have spoken and acted, blurring the boundaries between history and fiction: what counted was the general insight into human behaviour that a particular story could convey. This more ‘literary’ approach was complemented by an emerging school of antiquarian historians such as John Leland (c. 1503–52) and Sir William Dugdale (1605–86) who devoted themselves to broadening the evidential base of history by compiling manuscript and printed evidence. The great Tudor compilations of chronicles by Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1577) eclectically brought together passages from humanists like More and Buchanan and a huge range of texts and documents, providing a great diversity of approaches to history to a growing reading public.

An assiduous reader of everything published in England or in English in the 1630s would find little evidence of a polity crumbling into civil war. The modern editors of the exhaustive catalogue of all such publications list around 750 titles a year for the decade, and it was pretty tame stuff compared with the publications of the final quarter of the sixteenth century when a virulent Catholic campaign was waged against the heretic-bastard-tyrannical Elizabeth, a campaign which called for her to be deposed in favour of the Queen of Scots (before that queen's execution in 1587) or a string of less plausible Catholic candidates thereafter. Furthermore, the Puritan polemic against bishops and against the 'innovations' of Archbishop William Laud and his henchmen - the restoration of stone altars against the East walls of churches, the insistence on the faithful kneeling at an altar rail to receive holy communion, the clamp-down on preaching by unbeneficed clergymen and so on - was turgid and uninspired in comparison to the vitriolic and effective polemic of the Martin Marprelate Tracts of the 1580s.

There are two commonly accepted, seldom scrutinized, claims about Rousseau. The first is that he opposed representation in politics and was an advocate of direct democracy,- the second is that he was opposed to the theater on the grounds that is distanced citizens from moral understanding.

THE OL D MISANTHROPE AND THE NEW

At the end of his Lettres philosophiques (1734), Voltaire attempted to refute Pascal, the thinker all the philosophes regarded as their archnemesis. It was profoundly disturbing to Voltaire, the author two years later of the world-affirming poem “Le mondain,” that Pascal did not start with the philosophy of Port Royal and then work outward, as expected, to his condemnation of the social world. For such a conventional Christian maneuver the philosophes were, of course, well prepared. Rather, Pascal did something far more threatening: He spoke as a worldling and a skeptic who had eventually retreated to the shelter of Port Royal. Pascal, who might have been a forerunner of the philosophes, chose instead to reject in advance the dreams of Voltaire, Diderot, and company.

All through the eighteenth century Pascal continued to haunt the French Enlightenment. Holbach, as late as the 1770s, still found it necessary to quarrel with the author of the Pensées-, Condorcet, when editing Pascal's works, renewed the old debate; Voltaire throughout his life, and even in his last year, launched sally after sally at the writer who frightened him every time he - a hypochondriac - felt ill.

Almost from Émile's first appearance, Rousseau's treatment of the ideal education of women has provoked charges that it is both unjust and inconsistent with his own underlying principles. Mary Wollstonecraft dismissed his views on female education as “the reveries of fancy” and a “refined licentiousness” by which woman is falsely made “the slave of love.” “According to the tenour of [Rousseau's] reasoning, by which women are to be kept from the tree of knowledge, the important years of youth, the usefulness of old age, and the rational hopes of futurity, are,” she claims, “all to be sacrificed, to render women an object of desire for a short time. ”

INTRODUCTION

By nature men are free, but left to their own devices they will inevitably enslave each other. Of all the “bipolarities” in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau none is more striking than this tension between natural freedom and the spontaneous march to inequality and oppression in which all men participate. None aroused more conflicting reactions in his own mind. If men are the sole authors of their ills and not the mere victims of some external force, be it original sin, a malevolent nature, or a hostile environment, then there is always hope for self-improvement. On the other hand, if men were alone responsible for inventing and maintaining their own social misery, they could scarcely be expected to overcome conditions they had themselves chosen to create. One could hardly hope that those who had devised and imposed their own chains would either wish or know how to liberate themselves. If there was no need for cosmic fatalism, there was every reason to despair of mankind's own social powers. And indeed it was perfectly clear to Rousseau that every man left free to follow his own inclinations and every society allowed to pursue its inherent tendencies would repeat all the familiar errors of the past. It was this conflict between possibility and probability that inspired all of Rousseau's works. All of them are attempts to show some way out of the horrors of history. And if all are marked by a deep note of hopelessness, each one is also an act of rebellion against the weight of the actual. The suggestions, the paths he traced and held out, were numerous and various. Among them, the hope of salvation through the personal authority of great men was one of the most important.

There is no need to recommend the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the greatest of all critics of inequality, the purest social contract theorist of the eighteenth century (and simultaneously the deepest critic of contractarianism after Hume), the greatest writer on civic education after Plato, the most perceptive understander of mastery and slavery after Aristotle and before Hegel, the finest critic of Hobbes, the most important predecessor of Kant, the most accomplished didactic novelist between Richardson and Tolstoy, the greatest confessor since Augustine, the author of paradoxes (“the general will is always right” but “not enlightened”) that continue to fascinate or infuriate.

Rousseau's extensive range and intensive depth have been best brought out by Judith Shklar, in the Postscript to her celebrated Men and Citizens:

Kant held that Newton and Rousseau had revealed the ways of Providence: “After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified, and Pope's thesis is henceforth true”

Rousseau discussed Providence and Pope's thesis, that “Whatever is, is right,” most fully in a long letter that he wrote to Voltaire in 1756, approximately a year after the publication of the Discourse on Inequality (1755), at a time when he is likely also to have done work on the Essay on the Origin of Languages. These three writings, the Discourse,- together with Rousseau's replies to the criticisms of it by the Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet, writing under the pseudonym Philopolis, and by the Master of the King's Hunt, Charles-George Le Roy, writing under the name Buffon - the Essay, and the Letter to Voltaire, form a unit: They consider the natural order and man's place in it more specifically than do any of his other writings. The Discourse is the only one of these publications that Rousseau himself initiated. The Letter to Voltaire differs from the other writings in this group by discussing man’s place in the natural world in theological terms. Indeed, it is the only record we have of a theological discussion that Rousseau freely initiated with a near equal: "a friend of the truth speaking to a Philosopher" [2].

It is well established that the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were significantly shaped by his critical engagement with themes and arguments from the Stoic and the Augustinian traditions. Although Alasdair Maclntyre could write in 1983 that a “general blindness to the importance of the continuing influence of Augustinianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” had meant that “books of the highest importance about Rousseau tend with few exceptions to ignore the importance of any reference to Augustine,” the situation is considerably changed today. Maclntyre's words served to introduce Ann Hartle's study of Rousseau's Confessions, in which she systematically compared the autobiographical techniques Rousseau used with those in Augustine's work of the same name; Patrick Riley's volume, The General Will before Rousseau, showed how the most important concept in Rousseau's political theory had first been elaborated for use in the theological arguments of the previous century by French Augustinian writers - including the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld (who may have coined the term), the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche, and the Calvinist Pierre Bayle - as they sought to elucidate the Pauline claim that “God wills all men to be saved.”

The Confessions has almost certainly been Rousseau's most consistently popular work. Julie, or the New Heloise, which became the literary sensation of the eighteenth century immediately on publication, fell out of popularity in the next century. On the Social Contract is Rousseau's most famous work and maintains its status as one of the crucial texts in the history of political philosophy, but has never really been a popular favorite. Interest in the Confessions, however, is sustained by the persisting interest in autobiography that it did much to inspire. It is Rousseau's most accessible work and the one most closely tied to an enduring popular taste.

This is not to say that all readers have found it to be a likeable work. For every reader who reacts to it with enthusiasm, there is one who is repulsed by it. These diametrically opposed responses are inspired from the very beginning of Book I with Rousseau's insistence on his goal of showing “a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself,” a declaration directly followed by his claim that he will appear at the last judgment with this book in hand. As part of his general denunciation of Rousseau, Edmund Burke referred to this opening, saying, “It was this abuse and perversion, which vanity makes even of hypocrisy, which has driven Rousseau to record a life not so much as chequered, or spotted here and there, with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action. It is such a life he chooses to offer to the attention of mankind. It is such a life, that, with a wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator, who he acknowledges only to brave.”

Unless it was Immanuel Kant, who declined to believe it, practically no one who lived in the age of enlightenment ever took note of that fact.1 The term The Enlightenment made its inaugural appearance in only the late nineteenth century, The Scottish Enlightenment was first ushered into print in the early twentieth century, and the Enlightenment Project, about which virtually every contemporary social philosopher now speaks with authority, is an expression invented more than thirty-five years after the demise of the Manhattan Project, whose adherents, by contrast, at least knew its name. Throughout its relatively brief history, The Enlightenment has largely assumed the identity assigned to it by its inventors determined to denigrate its achievement. The Oxford English Dictionary still defines The Enlightenment as an age of “ superficial intellectualism,” marked by “insufficient respect for authority and tradition” adding, for good measure, that a philosophe is “one who philosophizes erroneously” In the French language, matters are, if anything, worse still, as no Frenchman has ever managed to coin a term for The Enlightenment at all. At least God, even if He never existed either, somehow managed to get Himself invented, as Voltaire famously remarked, but not, alas, The Enlightenment. Frances Hutcheson in Glasgow observed that he was called New Light there, but no sparkling luminary in Paris, so far as I know, ever noticed that he was one of les lumières.

In the history of the philosophy of education, Rousseau is renowned as one of the founders of what is often both admired and vilified as “progressive” education. Yet Rousseau remains the most vehement critic of the idea of progress that he so rapidly identified as having become the new received wisdom of the forces of modernity that had set themselves to overturn the authority of tradition. That he should readily and persuasively be interpreted both as a voice of liberation and of conservatism is one reason for the perennial fascination with an author whose very paradoxes have a quality of consistency throughout his apparently varied output. Within education his fame rests on his contribution to the development of “child-centred” education with its attendant emphasis on the freedom of the child to develop at its own appropriate pace and on learning by discovery rather than by forms of imposition. His belief that in education the guiding principle should be to do the opposite to what was the prevailing method of schooling has often seemed to be the inspiration of many of the radical experiments in the rearing of children over the succeeding period. Yet any examination of Rousseau's writings on education will demonstrate that this advocate of child liberation was as deeply concerned with discipline, albeit in a different manner, as the most conservative of writers.

Understanding the unity or, if one prefers, the abiding obsessions of Rousseau's works has often been compromised by the drawing of borders that have little to do with Rousseau or the contexts in which he wrote. One such border is a creation of the modern university. Working in distinct academic disciplines, even Rousseau's most astute critics have collaborated in producing the mirage of two separate and often incommensurable Rousseaus: one for political scientists and historians of philosophy, another for students of literature and psychology. As inevitable as that border may appear, it has led to a fragmentation that can compromise our understanding of his work as a whole. The real challenge in reading Rousseau is to appreciate how his political vision depends on his literary and autobiographical writings while at the same time recognizing the extent to which his literary representations of subjectivity flow from a dialectic of self and other at the core of his political writings. Our study of Rousseau must not foreclose the possibility of grasping in his work the complex paradoxes that balance the literary with the political, the psychological with the anthropological.

THE UNREDEEMED FUTURE AND THE POLEMIC AGAINST KNOWLEDGE

In tracing the genesis of the modern historical consciousness, Rousseau must be understood both as a point of departure and as a deliberate foil. He is neither an idealist - insofar as we can ascribe any consistent philosophical position to him - nor a metaphysician of the historical process. Yet it is with him that this discussion must begin. Because our focus is on political theory, only Rousseau can clarify our procedures; Leibniz or Hume might serve if our attention were elsewhere. There is no pretense, however, of making a full critical survey of Rousseau's unique and complex contributions to moral and political thought in this brief treatment.

For Rousseau, nature is a wise guide, man is an open question, and history is a tale of horror. These three elements form, at the outset, a chemistry of ambiguous potential. As man is free because he commands his own will, exclusive of his intelligence or station in life and because each child born into the world or each act must be regarded as a perpetual beginning, the possibility of salvation – in the act, in the individual, or in the community - cannot be cosmically foreclosed. If history is woeful, it is not authoritative. "Man," exhorts the Savoyard vicar, "look no further for the author of evil; that author is you. No evil exists but that which you make or suffer; both are your works."

TRUE CAUSES

In a lengthy note to the Letter to d'Alembert (1758), Rousseau declares that he has taken as his motto Vitam. impendere vero. The announcement is solemnly accompanied by an address to the reader and by an invocation to truth:

These are the words of an oath. Rousseau takes comfort in an allegiance to truth alone at the time of his break with Diderot and at which he becomes convinced that he must live without friends. At this time, Rousseau wants to serve that truth that contributes to the “public good,” that is to say, to all individuals. After the publication of Emile and the Social Contract, in 1762, and without Rousseau's renouncing the goal of usefulness animating his “system,” his profession of truth will increasingly take the self as its object. His insistence at the beginning of the Confessions is well known: “Here is the only portrait of man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth [...] I want to show my peers a man in the full truth of nature; and that man shall be myself.”