Rousseau's great legislator: 
an empty form of authority? 
Eva D. Bahovec 
Rousseau is supposed to be the father of the modern theory of the state. The third book of his Social Contract is a teatise on different forms of 
government - on democracy, aristocracy, monarchy - but also on government 
in general and »its tendency to degenerate.« How could this tendency to 
degenerate be explained in relation to the concept of the legislator as an 
instancy of pure, impersonal law, an empty form of government, introduced in 
the second book? 
Besides the idea of Rousseau's »invention« of the modern state, he is suffering 
from a much wider range of »paternity complex,« and he is regarded as the 
father of many other things: modern educational theory, anthropology, literary 
theory, theory of music, theory of theatre, etc. But the problem of paternity in 
Rousseau could be approached from quite a different point of view, claiming 
that the very instancy of the father, in all its multiple forms and images, was 
invented by Rousseau himself. 
The central issue of Rousseau's work is, so to speak, civilization and its 
discontents. Examining the paternal figures and the images of authority, we 
have to start with his famous sentence, according to which »Emile is an 
orphan.« Schérer understands it as the abolition of the paternal function, and 
Châteaux as if the tutor has to take the place of the father.1 But speaking of 
the modernity of Rousseau's project, the problem should be brought together 
with the whole range of paternal functions, as reinvented in Freud, making 
government, together with education and psychoanalysis, one of the three 
impossible professions.2 What is to be questioned, is the very nature of this 
impossibility. 
If we look at Rousseau's images of authority, the multiple images (some of 
them partly overlapping, the others distinguished from a common 
counterpoint, some of them clearly different, the others slowly sliding into 
each other), all these multiple images become suddenly intelligible in the 
horizon of Rousseau's prevalent endeavour. First, one has to cope with the 
1 . Cf. R. Schérer, Emile perverti ou des rapports entre l'éducation et la séxualite, Laffont, Paris 
1974, and J. Château, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et sa philosophie de l'éducation, Vrin, Paris 
1962. 
2 . Cf. S. Freud, »Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse« (1937d), Studienausgabe, 
Ergänzungsband, Fischer, Frankfurt/M 1975, p. 389. 
150 Eva D. Bahovec 
actual authority, the »biological« father in the sphere of the political, the royal 
authority. His role is to maintain the false, destructive social order, and his 
interest lies precisely in exploiting his subjects. But this is not just the problem 
of heredity, for even elective kings become tyrants. Thus, the difficulty seems 
to be a deeper one, concerning the very essence of the government.3 
Then there are, in opposition to the actual authority of the monarch, several 
other paternal figures: the legislative authority from Contrat social, acting as 
»merely a mechanical device;« the therapeutic authority, as examplified in 
Wolmar from Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse; the palliative authority, (again in 
Wolmar, but in the image of the legislator as well); and finally the domestic or 
preventive authority from Emile ou de l'éducation 
The royal authority is analyzed in tension with the ideal authority of the pure, 
impersonal rule of law. Yet, the pure legislative authority with no personal 
influence on people is again of no real value, since law is not self-perpetuating; 
so the legislator has to reconstruct every man of the community, being 
responsible for the spirit of laws, and thus for continuing education. It has to 
be a creative authority, as Judith Shklar puts, proceeding by force of 
personality. Nonetheless, here again Rousseau remains ambiguous, since he 
finally doubts, once again, whether it was possible at all. 
Then we have the therapeutic authority of Wolmar, his self-sufficiency, justice 
and love of order. Like the legislator, he is made according to the image of 
God, having the palliative force of his invisible omnipresence, needing to do 
very little - he just simply must be there. Wolmar is the most perfect image of 
a man of authority, although very little is said about his outlook. His look, »fin 
et froid,« reaches everyone's heart directly, and he knows all about them. 
And here again, this rule of abstinence could be perhaps even better pursued 
analyzing the tutor's first and principle rule of negative education - pure 
prevention of perversion and deviation from nature, because of which Emile 
has to be under total, omnipresent surveillance of his tutor. Emile is not 
supposed to make a step on his own, not previously previewed or intended by 
the tutor. He is never to be left alone, neither during the day, nor at night; the 
tutor's control is not to relax even for a moment. And like Wolmar, he does 
not hesitate to employ deceits. Even when Emile is grown up and is about to 
3. Cf. J.-J. Rousseau, Contrat social, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. Ill, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris 
1964, Book III, Chapter 10, and passim. I am also referring to A. Grosrichard's unpublished 
lecture at University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, February 1988. 
4. I am referring to J. Shklar, Men and Citizens. A study of Rousseau's social theory, Cambridge 
University Press, Cambridge 1969, and her paper »Rousseau's images of authority,« in M. 
Cranston (ed.), Hobbes and Rousseau. A collection of critical essays, Anchor Books, New 
York 1972, p. 333-365. However, Shklar is speaking about four distinctive images of 
authority, but from the paternal instancy point of view there is no essential difference 
between the last two. 
Rousseau's great legislator: an empty form of authority? 151 
marry, the tutor says: »1 must be very careful, that he chooses his beloved 
according to his, that is, according to my choice.«5 
The three Freudian images of authority and of impossible professions meet 
here another, yet related, question, namely, how to explain the greatness of 
the paternal figure on which authority is based. This is the problem Rousseau 
has to cope with all the time, as soon as he discovers that the magical force by 
which they operate has to be personal, that one has to have the law plus the 
magnetic personality. This is also why Shklar is so puzzled by the fact that of 
all Rousseau's images of authority, the legislator is the least well drawn and 
the least convincing figure. They have to have an example, so impressive that 
it inspires the wish to imitate - the guiding hand, of course, has to remain 
hidden. The real legislative authority is supposed to prevent perversion, like 
Emile's tutor, and he has to be a Godlike creature as well, like Wolmar, a 
subject who is supposed to know,6 creating a kind of psychic dependency that 
is the condition of possibility, the necessary condition for freedom and order. 
Instead of speaking about the tension between the actual and the ideal, 
doubtfully possible - or impossible at all - we have more likely to do with the 
instancy of the law, the name of the father, on the one hand, and the 
characteristic of greatness itself, the greatness of the great man, which, 
according to Freud's analysis in Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische 
Religion (1939a),7 is not to be measured by their work, the products of their 
activity, but by the way they influence the others, by their broad impact and 
fascination. 
Namely, when Rousseau mentions the concrete examples of the great 
legislators, he says: Licurgus, Numa and Moses, or Numa, Solon, and Moses, 
and this puzzles Rousseau's interpreters very much.8 The Spartan and the 
Roman are brave heroes, of course, since the myth of antiquity was so 
important for the Enlightenment, but why Moses, why this figure from Jewish, 
not Christian, religion? 
Here again we have the two images of Moses, the image of the great legislator 
and that of faiseur des miracles, a miraculous personality, and it has nothing to 
do with, or should at least be taken apart from, the légation divine. But it has 
to do with Rousseau's invention of the paternal instancy, reinvented by Freud, 
5. Cf. J. Château, op. cit, p. 189. On »negative education« cf. J.-J. Rousseau, Emile ou de 
l'éducation, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. IV, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris 1969, p. 323 ff. 
6. Cf. J. Lacan, Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Le Séminaire XI, Seuil, 
Paris 1973. 
7 . Cf. S. Freud, Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion (1939a), Studienausgabe, Bd. 
IX, Fischer, Frankturt/M 1975, p. 455; cf. also S. Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse 
(1921c), ibid; p. 61. 
8 . Cf. B. Baczko, »Moïse, législateur...«, in S. Harvey, H. Hobson, D. Kelley & S. S. B. Taylor 
(eds.), Reappraisals of Rousseau. Studies in honour of R. A. Leigh, Manchester University 
Press, Manchester 1980, p. 111-130. 
152 Eva D. Bahovec 
where Moses is put into relation to Oedipus and to its beyond, to the basic 
impossibility of its resolution. 
Whereas Lycurgus, Numa and Solon are the embodiment of an ideal, the pure 
negative of the present-day tyranic kings and governors, Moses represents the 
other side of the coin. His magnetic personality, as Rousseau puts it, his secret, 
hypnotic power derives from what Freud calls the uncanny, das Unheimliche: 
»something archaic and very well known,« which has been subjected to 
repression. The hypnotism of the archaic places thus Moses, beyond the series 
of the great legislators, into a quite different line of succession. Together with 
the primal father, Urvater, he represents a horrifying image of the big Other, a 
tribute to be paid to enter into civilization and the reason of its discontents. It 
is the side of the paternal instancy which opens the dimension of the real, of 
the impossible - an irreductible remnant and a residue of the symbolic. It is 
the other, darker side of the legislator, of this symbolic instancy of impersonal 
law, decribed by Lacan as an instancy of wholeness, of horrifying, unavoidable 
presence. 
One of the main difficulties in interpreting Rousseau's work lies in its 
ambiguous, even contradictory nature. The theoretical tensions and conflicts 
seem to be so powerful that many interpretations, compared to each other, 
ended in the extreme opposites: Rousseau was proclaimed to be either 
totalitarian or liberal, promoting the civil society or the state, pure 
individuality or strict collectivity, not to speak about the discussions about his 
influence on the French revolution. This duality and contradictions should not 
be understood only as useful contradictions, showing us where a new concept 
has been produced and thus where to proceed, but as indicative of the basic 
position of his philosophy. 
The latter could be grasped through the break in Rousseau's interpretations, 
brought about by Ernst Cassirer.9 Here the famous unity of Rousseau's work, 
no less famous than his contradictions, is put into relation to Rousseau's place 
in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Rousseau's claim for universality, for 
an all-round picture of humanity, is but the counterpart, the other side of the 
coin of Rousseau's, as Cassirer puts it, »passionate fight with his time,« and his 
being »the most dangerous enemy« of the Enlightenment. If Rousseau could 
be regarded as the central figure of the Enlightenment philosophy, it is 
precisely because he managed to displace its central point, not from reason to 
sensibility, from rational to irrational or from philosophical deduction to the 
nostalgic daydreaming, but to displace it »from the inside,« to point out its 
irreductably contradictory and deconstructive nature. He did so, not by turning 
away from it, but quite to the contrary, by deepening the project of modernity 
beyond its very limits. 
9 . CL E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Yale University Press, New Haven 
and London 1989, and his Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Beacon Press, Boston 1959. 
Rousseau's great legislator: an empty form of authority? 153 
For Rousseau the only possible solution is the very perverted, alienated 
civilization that he attacks as thoroughly as nobody else. The corrupted society 
becomes the foundation, even a new beginning, beyond any political 
revolution. But this one as well, of course, is marked by a constitutive 
impossibility, not only of the negative, say, natural and non-perverted 
education, but also of the government, for we have to live in monarchy, since 
nothing better is or could be available. The doing away of the monarchy, as 
unsatisfactory as it might seem to Rousseau and his contemporaries, could lead 
us only to an even worse solution, to despotism. On the other hand, we have 
the counterpart of the third of Freud's impossible professions, of analysis, in 
the paternal function, exemplified in Rousseau's therapeutic and palliative 
image of authority, in Wolmar. Here again, there is no way back, just as it is 
not possible to return to the state of nature, and in a certain sense also no way 
out, no future. As divine and as irreproachable Wolmar's procedure might be, 
the impossibility itself, the real in Lacanian sense of the word, turns out to be 
the ultimate reality: Julie cannot do anything else but commit suicide. 
In its own way, the very solution to the perverted universe, the education of 
Emile, seems to be perverted as well, since we need a whole life, full time 
equivalent job of a tutor, one tutor for one child. And if that condition could 
somehow be fulfilled, the aim of education would perish anyway, as soon as 
the tutor would not be under the constant surveillance of his tutor, not only in 
his childhood, but all the time. In that very moment, the marriage with Sophie, 
which is supposed to engender the new human race, would become, like in 
Emile, a total disaster. Although the education is thus, at least for Rousseau, 
asymmetrical as regards to the other two professions, so to say, slightly more 
possible as they are, it at the end turns out to be an illusion, a necessary 
illusion as the only way out, and at the same time, the very source of the 
civilizational discontents he wanted so passionately to do away with. 
But Rousseau, who was the first to point out the inner crack of the 
Enlightenment, did not identify himself either with the tutor or Wolmar, nor 
with any other images of authority. He identified himself with Saint Preux, 
with someone who has to submit to authority and to total dependency, with 
someone who is not able to find the way out of the perishing world. And the 
more he inclined to the self-sufficiency of the life outside society, the more he 
was aware that authority, forcing the man to live in freedom, as Rousseau says 
in Social Contract, is not just irreductible. The paternal authority, the father as 
a symptom, the instancy of otherness, of the outside, is for the father of the 
modern - or should one say postmodern? - theory of the state the very 
constitutive moment of the human condition. Rousseau's attitude towards the 
instancy of authority was as ambiguous as his work is with regards to all the 
other crucial points of his philosophy, but he never really believed that the 
total liberation, the disappearance of authority could, in principle, be possible. 
154 Eva D. Bahovec 
If Sparta and Rome perished, what can endure? Speaking about the great 
legislator and paternal images of authority, Lacan's answer to this Rousseau's 
question would be: the archaic, the real, the impossible.