Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age

"This book came out in 1990 in the US, right at the end of the Cold War. It’s a study of Rousseau’s contribution to the theory of international relations. It’s a book that hasn’t got the attention it deserves. One of the most remarkable things about it is that Grace Roosevelt—in working on this topic and looking at the texts that were extant—realised that one of the most important fragments that we had was really a mess. There’s a text by Rousseau that’s somehow intermediate between the Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract . Rousseau finished The Social Contract by saying he meant to go on and write about international relations. So the text is called The State of War: Principles of the Right of War . As it existed before Grace Roosevelt got to work, it didn’t make any sense, it seemed to jump all over the place. There was a very simple reason for that: previous editors had got the pages in the wrong order. “It seemed to jump all over the place. There was a very simple reason: previous editors had got the pages in the wrong order.” Grace Roosevelt went to the museums in Switzerland that housed some of Rousseau’s manuscript writing and noticed a very simple thing. At the end of each page, there was a word, and that word indexed to the word that ought to follow on on the next page. For some reason, previous editors hadn’t noticed this. What had initially alerted her to the fact the text was in the wrong order was the fact that Rousseau is very good at opening lines. ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,’ is an example of this from The Social Contract , or the line I’ve already quoted from the Reveries of a Solitary Walker ‘Here am I alone upon the Earth…’. In The State of War , the ringing declaration in the then published edition came on page two or three. She thought, ‘This can’t be right, surely this is how the text is meant to start?’ and she reconstructed it. It’s been reconstructed again, since, by a team of scholars in France led by Bruno Bernardi. They produced a new edition that included some further material, and they re-ordered it slightly. But really, the credit for that rediscovery of a Rousseau text in the 20th century, goes to Grace Roosevelt. It was a tremendous discovery that she made. She was concerned to see whether Rousseau’s writings on peace and war, and his engagement with the Abbé de Saint Pierre’s writings on perpetual peace, had relevance for the predicament we found ourselves in during the Cold War, the stand off between East and West and whether it would be possible to have human society, as a whole, ruled by peaceful institutions. Her project was to see whether Rousseau could make a contribution to contemporary understandings of war and peace."