Language and politics: Rousseau, Charles Duclos' reader

Abstract

From the reading of the Essay on the origin of languages and of the fragment entitled Pronunciation, one can make the case that, under a Rousseauian perspective, the gradual improvement of writing and its consequent prominence over full voice are, perhaps, the most distinguished effects of the process of historic degradation of languages. Nevertheless, writing only presents itself as a linguistic harm insofar as it reflects the corruption of the political realm. In fact, in substituting the expressive power of accentuated voice for clarity and exactitude, writing modifies language’s character, rendering it less sonorous and eloquent. Thus, writing deprives language of its rhetorical genius, of its capacity to move an audience and bring it to action, something that can only take place in a political juncture in which force imposes itself over persuasion in the conduction of public matters. That is, in a scenario in which the subjects have lost their freedom, in which they are denied any form of political participation. The goal of this work will be not only to retrace the démarche that leads Rousseau to these conclusions, but also to show at what degree the main lines of this argumentation are already laid out in Charles Duclos’ Remarques sur la Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée (1754) – one of the chief sources of the Essay, especially regarding the issue of writing and the relations between language and politics. Among other questions, one will try to demonstrate the influence of the French historian and writer on Rousseau concerning the association between the primacy of writing and the loss of political freedom, as well as the opposition between the language of the ancients – strong, prosodic and, hence, suited for civic life – and the modern European languages – monotonous, deaf, appropriate but for private conversations