Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Rousseau; Kritik der Moderne: Tugend (Stadt, Rom. Cato) - Natur

Kurzinhalt: Rousseau attacked modernity in the name of two classical ideas: the city and virtue, on the one hand, and nature, on the other.

Textausschnitt: 252a The first crisis of modernity occurred in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was not the first to feel that the modern venture was a radical error and to seek the remedy in a return to classical thought. It suffices to mention the name of Swift. But Rousseau was not a "reactionary." He abandoned himself to modernity. One is tempted to say that only through thus accepting the fate of modern man was he led back to antiquity. At any rate, his return to antiquity was, at the same time, an advance of modernity. While appealing from Hobbes, Locke, or the Encyclopedists to Plato, Aristotle, or Plutarch, he jettisoned important elements of classical thought which his modern predecessors had still preserved. In Hobbes, reason, using her authority, had emancipated passion; passion acquired the status of a freed woman; reason continued to rule, if only by remote control. In Rousseau, passion itself took the initiative and rebelled; usurping the place of reason and indignantly denying her libertine past, passion began to pass judgment, in the severe accents of Catonic virtue, on reason's turpitudes. The fiery rocks with which the Rousseauan eruption had covered the Western world were used, after they had cooled and after they had been hewn, for the imposing structures which the great thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries erected. His disciples clarified his views indeed, but one may wonder whether they preserved the breadth of his vision. His passionate and forceful attack on modernity in the name of what was at the same time classical antiquity and a more advanced modernity was repeated, with no less passion and force, by Nietzsche, who thus ushered in the second crisis of modernity--the crisis of our time. (Fs)

253a Rousseau attacked modernity in the name of two classical ideas: the city and virtue, on the one hand, and nature, on the other.1 "The ancient politicians spoke unceasingly of manners and virtue; ours speak of nothing but trade and money." Trade, money, enlightenment, the emancipation of acquisitiveness, luxury, and the belief in the omnipotence of legislation are characteristic of the modern state, be it the absolute monarchy or the representative republic. Manners and virtue are at home in the city. Geneva is a city, indeed, but it is less a city than the cities of classical antiquity, especially Rome: in his very eulogy of Geneva, Rousseau calls, not the Genevans, but the Romans, the model of all free peoples and the most respectable of all free peoples. The Romans are the most respectable of all peoples because they were the most virtuous, the most powerful, and the freest people that ever were. The Genevans are not Romans or Spartans or even Athenians, because they lack the public spirit or the patriotism of the ancients. They are more concerned with their private or domestic affairs than with the fatherland. They lack the greatness of soul of the ancients. They are bourgeois rather than citizens. The sacred unity of the city has been destroyed in postclassical times by the dualism of power temporal and power spiritual, and ultimately by the dualism of the earthly and the heavenly fatherland.2 (Fs)

254a The modern state presented itself as an artificial body which comes into being through convention and which remedies the deficiencies of the state of nature. For the critic of the modern state, therefore, a question arose as to whether the state of nature is not preferable to civil society. Rousseau suggested the return to the state of nature, the return to nature, from a world of artificiality and conventionality. Throughout his entire career, he never was content merely to appeal from the modern state to the classical city. He appealed almost in the same breath from the classical city itself to "the man of nature," the prepolitical savage.3 (Fs)