Henry

For Rousseau the whole idea of compromising liberty, of saying ‘Well now, we cannot have total liberty, because that will lead to anarchy and chaos; we cannot have complete authority, because that will lead to the total crushing of individuals, despotism and tyranny; therefore we must draw the line somewhere between, arrange a compromise’ – this kind of thinking is totally unacceptable. Liberty for him is an absolute value. He looks on liberty as if it were a kind of religious concept. For him, liberty is identical with the human individual himself. To say that a man is a man, and to say that he is free, are almost the same.

Rousseau hates intellectuals, hates persons who detach themselves from life, hates specialists, hates people who lock themselves up into some kind of special coterie, because he feels that hearts ought to be opened, so that men may achieve emotional contact; that the simple peasant sitting under the ancestral oak has a deeper vision of what life is like, and what nature is like, and what conduct ought to be, than the buttoned-up, priggish, fastidious, sophisticated, highbrow person who lives in the city. Because he feels all that, he founds a tradition distinct from that of the romantic rebel, which then spreads all over Europe, and then to the United States, and is the foundation of that celebrated concept called the American way of life, in accordance with which the simple people of a society possess a deeper sense of reality, a deeper virtue and a deeper understanding of moral values than professors in their universities, than the politicians of the cities, than other people who have somehow become de-natured, who have somehow cut themselves off from the inner stream which is at once the true life and the true morality and wisdom of men and societies.

The evil that Rousseau did consists in launching the mythology of the real self, in the name of which I am permitted to coerce people. No doubt all inquisitors, and all the great religious establishments, sought to justify their acts of coercion, which subsequently may have appeared, to some people at any rate, cruel and unjust; but at least they invoked supernatural sanctions for them. At least they invoked sanctions which reason was not allowed to question.