ABSTRACT
The ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have been seminal for Western political and cultural radicalism. They were a decisive influence behind the most uncompromising attack on Western civilization in the eighteenth century. Since then Rousseau has contributed mightily to a transformation of the Western mind, imagination, and moral sensibility. Understanding Rousseau is also essential to grasping the full import of the distinction between constitutional and majoritarian popular rule. It helps bring into relief the incompatibility between constitutionalism of the American type and a Jacobin-style faith in "the people". If traditional American constitutional government answers to the idea of constitutional popular rule, the idea of plebiscitary democracy is advocated in its purest form by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The majoritarian democracy that Rousseau envisioned is based on equality. Democratism as a doctrine of political morality thus receives its clearest and most uncompromising form in Rousseau.
