The lack of attention to slavery as a concept, institution, and lived experience is an unfortunate reality throughout much of the discursive terrain within contemporary political theory and the wider field of political science. Notions of slavery—whether silenced or disavowed in the study of the science of politics—often become a leitmotif in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. The significance of slavery also extends to the physical sciences. The irony, however, is that slavery has been central to understandings of the human ever since the emergence of homo sapiens. Slavery continues to exist in late modernity, be it human trafficking, forced sexual work, or modes of unfree activity in carceral states. As prison abolitionists such as Angela Y. Davis note, the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides juridical support for the punitive treatment as slaves of persons “duly convicted” of a crime.
Discourse on the eighteenth-century Genevan thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau epitomizes the aforementioned irony. This is all the more troubling given the integral role of slavery and slaves in Rousseau’s conceptualizations of freedom, especially freedom’s moral, psychological, and political valences. To be clear, in the case of Rousseau, there has been notable scholarship engaging his writings on slavery. They are, though, few and overwhelmingly dismissive. The work of Laurent Estève, Carole Pateman, Sue Peabody, Louis Sala-Molins, and Susan Buck-Morss exemplify this intellectual camp and the grounds for their critique, aspects of which are valid, have to do with Rousseau’s elision of racial slavery throughout his oeuvre. The camp nevertheless reduces Rousseau’s commentary on slavery to a particular modern form.
Another camp’s works are not purely dismissive, yet they contain at best occasional references to Rousseau on slavery and slaves. Think, for instance, of Patrick Riley’s The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (2001). Furthermore, Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann’s co-edited Rousseau and Freedom (2010) is emblematic of the ongoing trend of volumes devoted to Rousseau that do not have a single chapter connecting his theorizations on freedom to slavery and slave agency. Works of theory and intellectual history littered with silences and disavowals become merely historical fiction posing as factual self-evident truths.
This must cease. We can no longer remain in the Matrix if our aim is to describe accurately Rousseau’s thought.
Thankfully, with the recent publication of works by Madeleine Dobie, David Lay Williams, Jane Anna Gordon, scholars advancing the “creolizing Rousseau” project initiated by Gordon and myself, and now Jimmy Casas Klausen, there is a growing body of literature exploring the relevance of Rousseau for interpreting various types of enslavement inclusive of, albeit not limited to, transatlantic racial slavery. The challenge of attribution still remains: that is, amidst these burgeoning conversations, analysts must decipher which claims Rousseau deserves credit for and what assertions result from stretching Rousseau’s insights beyond his written record.
Fugitive Rousseau is an important book that foregrounds slavery; examines closely in distinct ways more familiar Rousseau texts (especially the Discourse on Inequality, or Second Discourse, Émile, and Of the Social Contract); inquires into select works by Rousseau, less mined in the current moment (such as the unfinished, posthumous Émile and Sophie); meditates on the meaning of Rousseau’s choice of book titles, pages, and a frontispiece; turns surprisingly toward exegesis of the two Hellenistic traditions, usually considered in tension with one another—Stoicism and Epicureanism—to trace their influences on Rousseau’s thought, rather than conventional scholarship situating Rousseau solely within the social contract tradition; introduces a fugitive conception of freedom that the author contends distills Rousseau’s uniqueness; and outlines the implications of the latter idea for questions of civilization, empire, anarchism, and radical politics. The fifth chapter’s articulation of “fugitive freedom,” a patently political and collective notion according to Klausen, serves as the book’s crescendo (pp. 204–63). An account of histories of the act of “flight,” encapsulated in the French word marronage (marronnage, maroonage, maronage), is invoked to justify this reading. The dialect of slavery and freedom buttresses the entire work. It is noteworthy that Klausen excludes from consideration Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and the period Rousseau himself was a fugitive (p. 28).
Klausen defends a heretical interpretation of Rousseau by emphasizing three areas: 1) language, 2) primitivist and counterprimitivist discourses, and 3) models of exit. With regards to language, Klausen argues, against the critics mentioned earlier, that Rousseau was crucially concerned with racial slavery and the plight of modern chattel slaves. Audience here matters. “Rousseau makes chattel slavery salient to an audience of people who have never themselves been subject to it” (p. 34). Klausen posits that Rousseau uses two literary devices—metonymy and metaphor—to displace and condense different forms of slavery. Rousseau deploys hyperbolic and symbolic language in order to evoke a response of indignation from a European audience whose governments were empire-building, had colonies, and cultivated, at home and abroad, slavery, the quintessential unfreedom. While Klausen’s prose is an exercise in linguistic ventriloquism, demanding the utmost patience of the reader, the point here is an important one worth thinking through.
Klausen also claims Rousseau desires to catalogue the overlapping effects of the “senses” of slavery: chattel (institutionalized private property), moral (dependence), and political (despotic subjugation). These types of enslavement are to be recognized as forms of domination both individual and collective enslaved agents experience (pp. 82–87). Klausen’s emphasis on domination is reminiscent neo-republican formulations of freedom as a mode of domination from the arbitrary interference by another.
Most striking is Klausen’s meticulous, and at times brilliant, exegesis of the title page and frontispiece of the Second Discourse, a treatise published by Marc Michel Rey, containing an epigraph by Aristotle, and featuring a famous image with a caption underneath (“He returns to his Equals”) hitherto receiving different previous appreciations. Reproductions of the visual works, along with Social Contract title page, accompany the analysis (pp. 79, 81, 216). By delving into the words and aesthetics of this seemingly familiar text, Klausen opens up a fresh conversation on the political language of freedom that Rousseau specialists and non-specialists alike will find inviting.
Klausen, however, views a negotiation occurring in Rousseau between two conceptions of political freedom: a cultural “primitivism” privileging nature, purity, and a politics of reservation, exemplified in the Second Discourse; and a “counterprimitivism” focused on a the fugitive actions of non-civilized, non-domesticated agents who seeks to flee the unfreedom of enslavement (pp. 3–4, 210). Klausen’s inquiries into Émile and Émile and Sophie complicate the relationship between these notions, for the travels of the character Émile, tutored through the negative education project of Jean-Jacques, in the completed novel and the subsequent capture of Émile by Barbary pirates and tale of Émile’s enslavement in Algiers in the latter work point to Rousseau’s nativism and weariness of cosmopolitanism (pp. 115–58, 159–203). So how can the enslaved become free?
Exit from flawed social and political orders is central. Albert Hirschman’s exit model, while notable, remains insufficient (pp. 4, 65). Klausen turns to the model of fugitive slaves, beings who on the one hand do not believe the malignant orders they are fleeing can be overturned at the time of their flight, and on the other hand enact of mode of resistance that can have the effect of catalyzing transforming the social and political worlds they exit from. Fugitives have their own body politics (p. 227). Fugitives, in Klausen’s vision, embark on a collective “ceaseless exodus” and physical marronage: a flight from domination whose pluralistic search for a Promised Land out of slavery requires rejecting ideals of purity and teleological redemption narratives (pp. 250–52, 262–63). This is fugitive freedom. While becoming a fugitive stops short of revolution, it is radical.
Klausen formulates a provocative vision. The explication of fugitive freedom also underscores the first of my concerns, posed in the spirit of critical dialogue: the unacknowledged distinction between the stated position of “Rousseau” and a “Rousseauian” argument. For all of the deft analysis of Rousseau’s primary texts in Fugitive Rousseau, the core assertions about fugitive freedom are admittedly speculative, or Rousseauian. Klausen writes, “In contrasting fugitive political freedom against the other two models—Émilean countercosmopolitanism and autarkic small or marginal states—I am not performing a straightforward exegesis of Rousseau’s written record” (p. 25). With the exception of the interesting foray into Rousseau on the ancient Israelites and flight (pp. 249–63), the fugitive freedom thesis bases itself on extrapolation. Many Rousseau scholars would find this objectionable. This leads me to wonder if Klausen and the critics of Rousseau’s written record on racial slavery are actually not disagreeing, for they each contend revisionist “Rousseauian” work building on Rousseau’s oversights might have useful intellectual and political results.
Next is a phenomenological query: what of the experience of slavery? The book describes metaphor and metonymy in Rousseau, yet we do not read about experience. My intuition is that this is not Klausen’s fault, but rather a representation of the texts examined. I wonder how an interrogation of the lived experience of bondage would push Klausen not only in a rereading of Rousseau, but also a reconsideration of fugitive body politics and what marronage means beyond its conventional historical and anthropological usages. Such terrain could include models of exit and mass revolution.
The decision to reduce political fugitivity to the collective while bracketing individual flight explains the exclusion of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and works composed while Rousseau was a fugitive. The effect, however, is a limitation to the radicalism of Klausen’s argument. And this connects to the experience of slavery question. Exploring Rousseau’s 1764 Letters Written from the Mountain, for example, penned when Rousseau was a fugitive from French authorities, would be suggestive. Rousseau was residing in the mountainous Swiss community of Môtiers and had already read libel targeted at him by the Catholic Archbishop of Paris. Then the Procurator-General of Geneva publically criticized him. In engrossing prose, Rousseau responds with Letters, bringing out additional dimensions of his fugitive thinking on slavery and freedom. He would be on the run again to the Île Saint-Pierre months after Letters’s publication. Confessions offers reflective context for that period. Ascertaining how a fugitive struggles for individuality is as valuable as assessing struggles for collective flight.
Finally, the paradigmatic status attributed to Josephine Baker in the last pages of the afterword with the following statement is puzzling: “perhaps fugitive Rousseau’s best and most emblematic follower playacted being unable to read him. I speak of Josephine Baker—diasporic Baker of the banana skirt, of the electrifying ‘Danse sauvage,’ in short, of metropolitan French imperial fantasy” (p. 279, orig. emphasis). The quandary has less to do with Baker and more the trajectory of Klausen’s book. There is no framing of black Atlantic philosophy up until this concluding juncture. Baker is presented as counterprimtivist despite the description of her “cultural marronage” appearing classically primitivist (pp. 279–83). Perhaps it the “hidden transcripts” of the damnés that James Scott defines, Robin Kelley explicates with respect to Afro-modern actors, and Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter before both theorized in relation to the slave’s process of marronage (physical, psychological, and social-structural): surreptitious fugitive actions whose double meanings are the grounds for an authentic upheaval out of slavery and the materialize of freedom. I would have enjoyed reading more background to Baker’s heretical fugitivity.
Fugitive Rousseau is an excellent study that refashions the terms of debate on Rousseau’s political theory. Its signal achievement is re-centering slavery as the foundation upon which future theorizations of Rousseau on freedom must rest. For that, we should all should be grateful.
