Basically if you run Rousseau's theories but take away even a little bit of his genuine concern for the common good, you get Nazis

You can cut him some slack because during his lifetime he has very little direct experience with secular tyrants chose by the people to embody the general will.

If we're contrasting with Schmitt, I think it's quite notable that Rosseau never contemplates particular executives embodying the general will, but something that wavers between a massive legislative body, a town meeting from hell, and a supernatural vibe detector. No individualist dictators there.

Yeah he would hate that modification of Schmitt's with a passion. He hates the whole device of representation, and Schmitt takes it to the extreme (making him an unholy fusion of Rousseau with Hobbes)

Yes, that was part of Schmitt's critique basically. As ever, he asked the right questions and then chose the worst answers.

I've never read Schmitt on Rosseau + should, my experience w him is limited to basics like Crisis of Parl. Democracy. He's a disconcerting person to read. Moreso because I studied w a guy personally interviewed him a bunch of times in the 1970s and early 80s, explained a lot re Schmitt's humanity.

It's in Dictatorship (1921). I recently sat down with The Concept of the Political for the first time in a dozen years and... it sure does hit different now. As in it's physically nauseating to spend time with him, how intelligent and persuasive he can be in the service of pure distilled evil.

I've never actually read any of his stuff because I basically can't stand to. Same reason I haven't read Mein Kampf!

This will shock you, but you know who’s an absolutely terrible writer of prose? Hitler.

He didn't even "write" it so much as he just dictated out loud his interminable stream of consciousness monologues while a flunkie transcribed them. His speeches tended to be extemporaneous, too, and he never wrote memos and such himself. So really he never did any substantial writing at length.

The prose indeed reads exactly like a rambling, lightly redacted monologue from a repetitive sociopath would sound. This, too, will shock you, but it turns out fascist flunkies lack a strong editorial hand.

Ha. Funny story about that: my middle school had a copy and I checked it out and read it as I did everything WWII (you're not missing much, it's just ranting slop). The guidance counselor pulled me aside, did a gut check on why I was reading it, and advised me to be more discreet carrying it around.

I got scolded in grad school for not having read him lol

Lmaooooooo

In retrospect I wondered if that was a deliberate thing and why they still had it in the library, specifically so they could flag any kid who checked it out and stage an early intervention. Probably not, but I'd like to think that's what it was.

I read portions of it in college because of debate when people were making ironic arguments quoting MK especially the parts where he talks approvingly of how the US treated native American and he wanted to do the same with the slavs

You almost invented the "shaking my head to show I disagree" meme

I read a biography of him in high school for a history class and made the mistake of bringing it on an overnight trip with my youth group. Several people walked away thinking I was reading a book by him

One thing it convinced me of is if you can find his conclusions persuasive and beneficent rather than viscerally repulsive, that's probably not an intellectual failing so much as a deeper, pre-ideological failure of moral sentiments. Which is why it so chillingly cuts to the heart of the matter.

For the most part I think his heart was genuinely in the right place!

Yes that's my point. He was trying to do something better but not understanding how things would ... get out of hand because it had never been tried. As opposed to Schmitt.

Give JJR a history of the 19th and 20th Century and he makes changes to his theories. Schmitt had those histories and still ended up a nazi

There's an alternate timeline where he lives another 20 or 25 years and the revolution never gets any bloodier than Lafayette becoming prime minister in a moderate-liberal constitutional monarchy.

His greatest work in that timeline is the Trial of Napoleon - after a failed coup.

For sure. He wasn't evil and he wasn't wrong about everything. But he was wrong in some very consequential ways.

There is a big difference between being wrong because he didn't know how some of his theories would manifest in real life vs Schmitt who was wrong after seeing what his theories did to the world.

And then there are the people right now who know how Schmitt's theories turned out and still say yes please I'd like some of that.

Right. He didn't have the racialism and eugenics and social Darwinism etc., but those aren't the hot molten core of it, which is why they don't show up much in Schmitt, either. He very pointedly pretended to not even care who in particular ended up on which side of the friend/enemy distinction.

Yeah. Rousseau is pretty explicit that his system only works in a small and homogeneous community!

The ever-popular spherical cow of political philosophy.

Turns out if you wish away the central problem of political life, politics gets easier! (In your mind, anyway)

Rosseau did also have an unnerving faith that, if only we could clear out the cobwebs of "reasons people disagree with me," which to him were all because of superstition, covetousness, and pride, that perhaps the uniform community was not so distant after all.

The new Soviet man, so to speak.

To be fair, he was ultimately a big influence on all three of democracy, fascism, and communism. Which is... I mean, that's a legacy I guess.

In the American system, it's fair to say anti-federalists like Centinel and his inheritors have a strongly Rosseauian sense of community consensus and the value of the mean, of the input from all governing all, in some sense.

So to go off your post, he not only has an influence on modern parliamentary democratic theory, communist theory, and fascist theory but also on pluralist and constitutionalist democratic debate.

Oh for sure. Jefferson is quite Rousseauvian I think. And really the entire civic republicanism tradition owes a lot to him? You can do well by taking the good bits out of Rousseau, just, you don't have to spin it very hard the other way to turn into a Nazi

If only we didn't have to do complex things