INTRODUCTION

This chapter reassesses the ambiguous figure of the ‘legislator’ – or ‘lawgiver’ – in relation to problems of revolution and political founding. In short, the role of the lawgiver has been understood primarily as that of bestowing a constitution and thus, a political identity upon a people that – owing to never having constituted itself as a political unity – had no capacity to grant this to itself. Thus, the role of the lawgiver is to heroically and providentially break a cycle of seeming impossibility in political time: the apparent impossibility, that is, of a people successfully forming itself as a political identity or political unity. It is a rather awkward and discomfiting role, but a seemingly essential one that accounts for the temporal and conceptual paradoxes of political founding. In this chapter, however, I reassess, specifically, the peculiar quality of the people's incapacity or unsuitability, for which the lawgiver is understood as a response. The lawgiver's role has typically been understood as compensating for the people's apparent incapacity for political reason, or perhaps even for political action, before it has yet formed political consciousness. I argue instead that the lawgiver, at least in Rousseau's thought, responds not to a specifically epistemic deficit, but rather, to the moral perils of popular action – and specifically the moral perils of a heroic role, a peril from which the people is relieved by the lawgiver's providential intervention. Unlike other republican thinkers – and especially his acolyte Robespierre – Rousseau rejects the image of political freedom as being realised in the life of political action, because he sees this as inconsistent with wellordered harmony as a normative standard given by ‘nature’. Political heroism, ultimately, is a potentially potent source of moral corruption and amour-propre.

Therefore, the seemingly heroic and miraculous role of the lawgiver is not to compensate the people's epistemic incapacities, but rather, to relieve the people of the moral burdens of political action and political heroism. Accordingly, these insights invite a reappraisal of the limits of the people's role as a revolutionary agent.