ABSTRACT
W. E. B. Du Bois offers an insightful response to a problem of political legitimacy raised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In both the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and the Social Contract, Rousseau asked: Can politics and political institutions do more than rationalize the exploitation of existing natural, social, and economic inequalities? Is it possible for there to be political right? Can there be political legitimacy? Rousseau’s tentative answer, that legitimate governance was republican governance, people living under laws of their own making-that political right could emerge out of the displacement of the absurd social convention of the “right” of the strongest by political bodies seeking their general will-was embedded in a larger philosophical anthropology. People could will the conditions for their ongoing shared life and, in so doing, become autonomous and self-governing. But they face an indispensable problem: They have to be able to grasp or be inspired to embrace the requirements for their own enlightenment without yet being enlightened. They would have to see with the kind of eyes that would be the fruit of their transformation. Crucially, their doing this would have to go on within and itself constitute a unit that was “general.” Rousseau’s efforts to bring the notion of the general will, an idea from French theology, into secular political thought, has fundamentally shaped the terrain of participatory democratic thought. Yet for all of the insight it continues to offer, its interpretation has borne the mark of its origins. Discussion of it has been locked in a theodician grammar that an engagement with double consciousness will help us to shed.
