Notes on the next republic

Re-reading Rousseau's "The Social Contract."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract.”

You’ll pry the written word from my dead hands. My most soul-nourishing decision recently was a new London Review of Books subscription. The print edition is a little big, bound a little cheaply; stowing one in my tote too long rips the pages from their staples. And I love it. Reading Patricia Lockwood feels like I’m levitating.

Similarly, my used 1968 Penguin Classics paperback of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” is melting from too many owners’ attention over the decades. Its softened yellowed pages, almost velvety to the touch, are separating from the glue binding. Only a bit of masking tape holds Rousseau’s republican project together. I’ll resist the metaphor.

Yet the old words are as alive as ever.

This is the joy and the revolutionary vitality of the humanities reader. Turning a book or a magazine’s cover opens a portal, a literary bridge of spacetime, traversable alike by enlightened farm kids and Nelson Mandela, who signed his name next his favorite passage from “Julius Caesar” in the contraband copy of Shakespeare inside Robben Island prison. (“Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant only taste of death but once.”)

Pick the right words, and serifs will cut like knives centuries later. “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains,” Rousseau roars at the top of Book I, adding of rule by tyranny: “There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?”

It’s nice when political philosophers write like they have something to say.

The social-contract theory that emerged in the European Enlightenment, from Locke through his inheritors, made real by the American Revolution, precipitated a rage among liberals the world over for constitutionalization: for writers straight-jacketing absolutists with words (and sometimes cannons).

The Declaration of Independence — drafted out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” — said we’re doing a nice little rebellion here against the King, but one based on the contractarian theory of a “consent of the governed.” While republics had been around for millennia, here was a season of republican revolution.

The Declaration’s enumerated complaints practically parody the Trump administration now:

• The oppressive sovereign has been ignoring the legislature’s edicts and in a DOGE-like manner “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people.”

• “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

• He’s “transporting us beyond Seas” for trial on shoddy pretenses.

• He’s “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”

Constitutions, like words, are not necessarily freeing or democratic, and sometimes have no more legal meaning than a novel.

After the revolutionary gales of 1848, Austrians caught the constitution bug, and their imperial lawyers set to fruitlessly drafting version after unworkable version. “Where then will the new Austria be made?, one asks,” the liberal author Franz Schuselka joked. “And the answer goes: It will be printed in the k.k. Court and State Publishing House! And in fact the occupation of our ministry is predominantly a literary one.” The effort was doomed.

“In this unfamiliar new constitutional era, state making began to seem like a search for the right words,” Natasha Wheatley says of the Austrian episode in her “The Life and Death of States.” “The growing mass of legal descriptions of the empire put ever greater pressure on the relationship between words and things, between legal text and the state it ostensibly codified. The drafts revealed an unnerving truth: there was little to no agreement about what sort of thing the empire was.”

Within 70 years, the indescribable, multinational, multilingual empire would lose the Great War and promptly cease to exist. The era of nationalism, of governments more legible by blood and soil than by their literary output, took Austria-Hungary’s place. “Every democracy requires complete homogeneity of its people,” the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt concluded. “Only such a unity can assume political responsibility.” And yet the insane Nazi state had a shorter life than the democratic Weimar Republic that fascism’s finest minds had deemed too incoherent for survival.

Liberal democracy, a heavily armed literary phenomenon, helped defeat these gangsters to win the 20th century. In its faltering 21st century, much government is still drained of authoritarian prerogative just by being competently written down. That seems worth preserving. When those of us in the literary life refer to belonging to a republic of letters, maybe it’s simpler to just say that we’re republicans: people who, losing one republic, could draft another.