Quaderni Materialisti

In recent radical political thought, Rousseau has played a rather marginal role. This is hardly surprising, given the fate that befell his thought in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. As Marxism became the dominant current within the European revolutionary tradition, Rousseau was dismissed as a mere forerunner, if not as a ‘bourgeois’ thinker. In the twentieth century, however, Rousseau has been positively reappraised as a thinker of popular sovereignty by the likes of della Volpe, Colletti, and Badiou, as well as by anti-colonial movements. This ambivalence can be interpreted as a symptom, within Marxist thought, of a void concerning crucial issues – like political power, democracy, sovereignty, and institutions – which lie at the core of Rousseau’s thought. These questions have become all the more urgent in the current moment of structural de-democratisation, disintermediation of political life, and general absence of constituent political programmes. In this context, Rousseau may invite a rethinking of popular sovereignty against its framing in nationalist and authoritarian terms. Can Rousseau’s thought breathe new life into the revolutionary tradition and contribute to imagining novel forms of radical democracy?