Pastoral Populism: Rousseau and Heidegger's Rural Political Visions

• In Event: Rousseau and Democracy: The People and the Nation

Abstract

Rousseau and Heidegger’s politically charged critiques of the modern commercial city, as well as their valorization of rural life, speak to the urban-rural political divide that is increasingly animating contemporary illiberal populist movements. Nevertheless, their writings give way to sharply diverging political visions. Whereas Rousseau advances rustic virtues in service of a robust egalitarian republicanism, Heidegger’s fascistic promotion of agricultural life attempts to radically “overcome” the “uprootedness” of modern post-Enlightenment civilization by reconnecting the Volk to its primordial rootedness-in-the-soil (Bodenständigkeit) of the homeland.

This paper will argue that we can understand the different trajectories of Rousseau and Heidegger’s agrarian politics in light of Rousseau’s more ambivalent evaluation of agricultural civilization, which emerges in turn from their competing conceptualizations of “nature” and “history.” Whereas Heidegger unambiguously celebrates a people’s rootedness in the soil as the necessary ground of authentic völkisch “historicity” (as against the alleged inauthenticity of “rootless nomads”), Rousseau contends that the agricultural revolution inaugurated a historical trajectory of inequality, political servitude, and psychological dependence. Thus, even when Rousseau turns to agrarianism to remedy modern psychological and political ills, he does so with the tragic understanding that such ways of life cannot restore the natural wholeness that he longs for. Accordingly, Rousseau’s more nuanced appreciation of both the limits and possibilities of rural life can help liberals better understand the claims being raised by rural populists, while also serving as a response to Heidegger and his influential contemporary epigones among the European and Eurasian New Right.

Author

• Timothy Berk, University of Ottawa