How Arendt and Rousseau Critiqued Modern Society

Hello, everyone. I’m Zhongshu. First, I’m very grateful to Suzhou Huamao Center for the invitation, which has given me the opportunity to discuss the Arendt books I recently translated and published from the highest vantage point overlooking Suzhou’s ancient city.

I’m going to begin by demonstrating a traditional Zhejiang skill: praising Jiangsu as better than Zhejiang.

People in Suzhou use the word ling to describe everything wonderful. If a piece of clothing looks good, it is ling; if a dish is authentically prepared, it is ling; if a courtyard makes you feel relaxed and refreshed, it is also ling. The word suggests something vibrant and radiant, the way something looks when it is alive. A place can be ling. A flower is ling because it is blooming. A person is ling because there is light in their eyes. A passage of words is ling because it suddenly illuminates something in your heart, as if something has been set alight.

Suzhou Huamao Center is therefore a particularly fitting place to discuss the voices of our predecessors that penetrate through the ages. In a certain sense, standing here beside the old center of Suzhou, we are also participating in an effort to bring things back to life: allowing the [unclear], which disappeared four hundred years ago, to breathe again; allowing contemporary art at the [unclear] Art Museum to become part of everyday life; allowing a thousand-year cultural lineage and contemporary life to appear in the same neighborhood and at the same moment. The past is not sealed away. It is invited to live again in a new way.

And so today, a person from Zhejiang and a person from Shanghai have come to Suzhou, a place that feels familiar and dear to both of us, to praise Suzhou together. When Zhao Yufei and I were young, we would wander around, and whenever we had nowhere else to go, we would run over to Suzhou, spend the day eating and drinking, and then go home. For someone from Shanghai, you can make the round trip in a single day.

Suzhou has a special significance for Shanghai. A great deal of Shanghai’s culture, including some of its folk customs, its dialect, and even its ways of life, comes from Suzhou. In many respects, the two places are linked by blood. You could say they belong to exactly the same cultural region.

On the high-speed train here, I was still asking Zhao Yufei, “Why are people from Ningbo so famous in Shanghai? It feels as if they have such an enormous cultural presence.”

“Because Suzhou is Shanghai’s underlying foundation,” Zhao Yufei said. “The people from Zhejiang only came along to add a few decorative touches.”

But in any case, we came here to discuss Arendt.

Translating Arendt as a way of life

Last year, while I was translating Arendt’s books, including The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, which we are discussing today, I was constantly pestering Zhao Yufei. Every day, I would start telling him how Arendt viewed this issue or that issue.

Throughout that year, I really was continually reading and translating Arendt. I completed translations of six of her books. Besides The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, which could be described as the two major tomes at the heart of Arendt’s thought, there was Men in Dark Times, a collection of essays, and a collection of Arendt’s poetry. Two more books have not yet been published. One is a collection that does not even have an English translation yet, entitled The Hidden Tradition. The other is the first book Arendt wrote after completing her doctorate, Rahel Varnhagen, a biography of a Jewish woman. Those two books should also reach readers within the coming year.

“Zhongshu becomes extremely, extremely immersed when translating,” Zhao Yufei said. “Generally speaking, he might translate ten thousand Chinese characters or more in a day. At around nine o’clock every evening, he would suddenly video-call me and say, ‘I translated ten thousand characters today. Let me share with you the important points Arendt made in the passages I translated.’ At that point, I would roll my eyes and say, ‘Then let me tell you about Rousseau,’ because I was translating Rousseau at the time.”

He would explain that Rousseau also had views on the issue I had raised.

This brings us to two other identities Zhao Yufei and I share: we are both translators of philosophical works. In doing this work, I discovered how different people’s methods can be. Zhao Yufei and I have two completely different approaches to translation.

Once I begin translating, I push my body all the way to total exhaustion. As soon as I decide to start, I wake up, open my eyes, and may spend thirteen or fourteen hours translating continuously, until my body simply cannot take it anymore. Zhao Yufei knows that I often “drop dead” on the sofa at home. At the end of the day, I collapse onto it.

I have always been amazed by his way of working, because he is capable of exercising extraordinary restraint in his translation. He does only one thousand Chinese characters a day.

“That’s because my daily routine is very healthy,” he said. “After getting up in the morning, I first prepare some posts for WeChat. Then I have a fixed period in which I translate exactly one thousand characters—only one thousand. I do that work every day, eat at normal times, and go to sleep at a normal time. Then I look at the way this workaholic operates and think, ‘How can this person be so unhealthy? He translates for thirteen hours and then sleeps for twenty.’”

I do not think, however, that we represent healthy and unhealthy approaches. We represent two attitudes toward work: moderation and immoderation. I am not very moderate when it comes to work. Zhao Yufei is extremely immoderate in other areas, such as eating.

“When I saw Zhongshu translating for thirteen hours,” he said, “I would ask, ‘Zhongshu, shall we go and have a huge meal together so you can make up for it?’ Though in fact I may simply have wanted a big meal myself.”

Zhao Yufei is the kind of person who can remain extremely restrained in his daily work. He is also remarkably persistent. He works like this every day, come rain or shine, 365 days a year without a day off. Every morning after getting up, he prepares posts. He single-handedly operates the largest WeChat public account in our field, Political Philosophy Research, publishing more than a thousand articles a year, unfailingly, all by himself. There is no team working on the account besides him. Every morning, without fail, he recommends new books in political philosophy, then translates, then writes papers, and then eats at a fixed time.

“I recently started a Xiaohongshu account called Flying Right on the Mealtime,” he said. “The name describes me: I have to do a particular thing at a particular fixed time.”

At the very least, Zhao Yufei made me realize something. I often feel that my own attitude toward work is the best, because once I start translating or doing some other kind of academic work, I genuinely feel as though my entire being has been drained out of me. When I do something, I devote myself to it one hundred percent and immerse myself in it completely.

Last year, for example, when I was writing an introduction to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, I wrote more than ten thousand Chinese characters. For that entire week, I did nothing else. Every day, the moment I opened my eyes, I began reading Dostoevsky, and I carried on until the article had been produced. The entire process felt like giving birth. Once you have finished, you let out a huge breath and feel that a burden has left your body. Then the product—the article, the introduction—may become something I regard almost as a child. When it was gestating in my mind, the process was excruciating. The entire rhythm of my life changed because of it.

Then I looked at Zhao Yufei. Like me, he is an extremely efficient worker, but what I saw in him was someone who is extraordinarily restrained, at least when working, and who can plan each day’s tasks in a highly modular way.

He pointed out, however, that translating Arendt had required a tremendous amount of effort from me. That effort was not merely intellectual; it was also physical labor. I had told him that I ordered a 1,600-page critical scholarly edition of Arendt’s works from Germany and then had the entire thing scanned into electronic form.

This offers a different perspective for readers. In a certain sense, Zhao Yufei and I stand behind books. We take a book from what may be its original philosophical starting point and transform it into a Chinese-language volume presented to all of you. That work is usually imagined as intellectual labor. But for us, translation also includes a considerable element of physical work.

Translation as research and manual craft

At least in Western academia, it is already widely accepted that translation is part of research. One respect in which I think the Chinese-language context still lags behind Western academia is that many people continue to imagine translation as a form of language work.

In the Western context in which we work, the translator of Plato’s Republic, for example, will be one of the finest scholars of Plato, while the translator of Rousseau’s Émile will be one of the finest scholars of Rousseau. Translation itself is part of research.

It is also physical labor. We usually imagine translation as follows: here is a text, and I use my linguistic abilities to translate it into another language. But once you conceive of translation as research, choosing the text itself becomes part of the research.

Take The Human Condition. Its text is not one single thing, such as a six-hundred-page English book. Arendt also had a typescript. She had a first draft and a manuscript submitted to her first editor. She may have had three different manuscript versions. A first layer of academic work must therefore be completed before the translation can begin.

Even I could not do all that work. Beginning in 2016, a group of scholars at the Free University of Berlin started systematically organizing Arendt’s manuscripts. They eventually discovered, for example, three manuscript versions of The Life of the Mind. They brought all three together and produced a complete critical edition. That edition is now being published volume by volume in Germany. It contains both English and German versions, because Arendt sometimes wrote in German and sometimes in English.

This is completely beyond what ordinary readers could be expected to do. It is the work of scholars. For Zhao Yufei and me, however, treating translation as research means first investigating how many versions of the original manuscript exist. We may then have to collect those manuscripts ourselves and judge which is most appropriate to use as the base text. If you look at a genuinely good scholarly translation, the translator’s introduction should explain which edition was used and why it was chosen. That is an extremely important part of scholarly translation.

Translation is not simply a matter of taking a predetermined original text and rendering it into another language. At the outset, much of the necessary work is manual craft—physical labor.

“But you actually handed a lot of that physical labor over to child laborers,” Zhao Yufei said.

He wanted to expose my shortcomings. He had personally done this sort of physical labor, so he disapproved of me.

When I was working on The Life of the Mind, the Germans had just released the Arendt critical edition, a very thick book of more than 1,600 pages. I did not want to scan it myself, so I paid twenty US dollars. It was very expensive. Do not say I hired child labor: I paid far more than Chinese students could dream of earning. I paid the Boston hourly rate, twenty US dollars an hour.

“The Boston minimum wage,” Zhao Yufei added.

Actually, Boston’s minimum wage should have been thirteen dollars. It was also during the Lunar New Year. I was a benevolent capitalist.

On Lunar New Year’s Eve, I was having dinner at the home of the ten-year-old younger sister of [unclear], who played the opening music for A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. I hired her and said, “Scan these 1,600 pages for your big sister.”

“You said, ‘You absolutely have to finish scanning all 1,600 pages tonight and give them to me tomorrow,’” Zhao Yufei recalled.

The rest of us ate, drank, and amused ourselves while his younger sister, in order to earn some spending money, labored away scanning the pages for me. She grumbled and cursed as she scanned.

I did not mention this in my introduction to The Life of the Mind: I really had employed child labor, hiring a ten-year-old to help scan the critical edition the Germans had just published into a PDF so that I could consult it more easily.

But consider the collection of Rousseau’s letters that Zhao Yufei and I were translating together at the time. That book is about to be published, and it involved genuine physical labor.

When readers see the collection today, they will see a book of perhaps a little over four hundred pages. But Rousseau actually wrote eight or nine thousand letters. A French editor spent more than thirty years gathering all of them into a complete edition consisting of fifty-two volumes.

Who would buy such a thing?

The American teacher under whom Zhao Yufei and I studied was the chief editor of the American edition of Rousseau’s complete works. He bought all fifty-two volumes. He was also very shrewd. When he retired, he sold the books to Zhao Yufei.

“At first he told me, ‘Yufei, I can sell them to you cheaply: twenty dollars per volume,’” Zhao Yufei said. “I said, ‘Fine, I’ll buy five volumes to start with.’ But then it turned out that there were no buyers at all.”

Nobody wanted the books. Apart from Zhao Yufei, who was willing to be fleeced, no one was prepared to take them off the teacher’s hands. So the teacher kept lowering the price of the Rousseau letters, first to ten dollars and then to five.

“Finally, I said, ‘If you sell them for two dollars each, I’ll buy all of them.’”

The teacher was selling his books after retirement because he had to move out of his large house and into a smaller apartment for older people. His wife was forcing him to sell all those miscellaneous books. Besides the collection of Rousseau’s letters, he sold us many of the primary philosophical texts he had collected at bargain-basement prices.

Later, the teacher encouraged Zhao Yufei and me to produce a Chinese collection of Rousseau’s letters.

“I’ve just published a collection of Rousseau’s correspondence,” he told us. “There still isn’t a relatively comprehensive collection in Chinese, so you could produce one. I have already read all nine thousand letters, and there are more than three hundred that I find interesting and useful for understanding Rousseau’s thought.”

Zhao Yufei read those three hundred or so letters, and from among them we selected roughly sixty or seventy. That is the form in which the book will ultimately be published.

The physical-labor part was that we had to scan all fifty-two volumes into electronic form before we could translate them with relative ease and convenience. So we began laboriously scanning them.

For quite a long period, while I was spending my days forgetting food and sleep as I translated Arendt, Zhao Yufei invited himself over to our home every day and asked me to do manual labor with him. The two of us were supposed to labor away scanning those books. In fact, I scanned only four volumes in total, and even then I dragged my feet.

“I’m doing extremely important work,” I told him. “I’m engaged in serious work. Don’t bother me with scanning primary texts.”

Of the fifty-two volumes, I ultimately scanned only four or five. Zhao Yufei scanned all the others himself. For me, a substantial and tedious part of the translation process consists of deciding which original texts to consult, as well as undertaking all this physical labor.

“But because Zhongshu acts like a diva,” Zhao Yufei said, “he gives all the physical work to men and children.”

Not at all. Within the bounds of what I am capable of, I do everything possible to avoid this crude work.

Our mention of Rousseau brings us to a comparative perspective that emerged from our conversations. While I spent the past year intensively translating Arendt, Zhao Yufei was doing a great deal of Rousseau-related work. When we discuss Arendt, we generally know that she was German. She was born and educated in Germany, and her teachers were Heidegger and Jaspers. We usually place her within the German tradition of political philosophy: Heidegger’s phenomenology, her political experience of Nazi totalitarianism, the body of political thought about ancient Greece that she learned from Heidegger, and the broader German philosophical tradition.

But my friendship with Zhao Yufei and his recent work on Rousseau gave me a new way of looking at Arendt. In talking with him, I discovered that Arendt and Rousseau offered remarkably similar criticisms of modern society.

Of course, to a certain extent, this discovery was made possible by Zhao Yufei’s habit of trying every few days to drag every topic back to Rousseau.

The weakening of public life

Arendt and Rousseau both had many criticisms of modern society. One of the most important was that publicness, or public space, had been significantly weakened. At the same time, they proposed different solutions.

In The Human Condition, Arendt strongly encourages people to return to a public space and engage in action and speech. Rousseau’s proposed solution in The Social Contract was that people should participate in the general will and use legislation to shape civic virtue, among other things.

The translation work Zhao Yufei and I have been doing over the past year raised a question that I also tried to pose in my introduction to The Life of the Mind: can we understand Arendt as a twentieth-century thinker who revived Rousseau’s questions about modern politics?

Rousseau’s question during the Enlightenment was: why is it becoming increasingly difficult for modern people to become citizens?

Two hundred years later, in the twentieth century, Arendt continued that inquiry. Why is it becoming increasingly difficult for modern people to maintain a common world? Why is it not only difficult to become a citizen, but perhaps increasingly difficult even to become a person capable of thinking and judging? Why is it increasingly difficult to act?

The predicaments they faced in modern society were similar. Technology became increasingly advanced, while modern art and modern science carried society as a whole in a new direction. Yet as society developed, Arendt and Rousseau both seemed to discover, at least on this point, that people had not thereby become happier. Citizens had not thereby become better. The more organized society became, the more public politics might actually decline.

Human beings need to act in public space, yet we may instead be losing more and more of our freedom in the public realm. We are increasingly unable to appear in public. For both thinkers, freedom on this level requires a public dimension in order to be sustained. In other words, for both of them, there is no such thing as completely private freedom.

This is one of the questions we are trying to discuss: in what sense did Arendt and Rousseau make roughly the same complaints about modern society?

I also compared them in the extremely long introduction I wrote for The Human Condition. Here I must insert another story. If you have read any of my translations, you may have noticed that every one of my translator’s introductions is both ugly and long. That is entirely Zhao Yufei’s fault.

When I was writing my first translator’s introduction, for my translation of Plutarch, I read an introduction Zhao Yufei had written. I asked him, “How are you supposed to write a translator’s introduction?”

Most translator’s introductions are quite short. I am sure readers today hate the kind in which the translator is extraordinarily self-conscious, writes at length about their own trivial affairs, and sings the praises of how excellent their own translation is. Then I saw Zhao Yufei writing a translator’s introduction to an unknown, third-rate thinker.

“This is important,” Zhao Yufei objected. “He was a second-rate thinker.”

A two-and-a-half-rate thinker, then. The thinker was Destutt de Tracy. You certainly do not know him, right?

Zhao Yufei wrote an introduction to this two-and-a-half-rate thinker that gave a thoroughly evidence-based account of the person’s entire intellectual system and life. My competitive instincts were immediately aroused. I thought, “Wow, a translator’s introduction can be written like this!”

Instead of becoming an exercise in the translator praising themselves and displaying excessive self-consciousness, it could make a genuine effort to help readers enter the thinker’s work. Readers opening a book will not necessarily understand the background and development of the thinker’s ideas as well as the translator does.

Many translations today have relatively short introductions. Translators generally imagine their task as simply presenting the book to readers. But if translation is treated as research in Western academia, could a translator’s introduction not perform a broader function and genuinely assume responsibility for helping readers enter the book?

That would require the introduction first to give readers an overview of the thinker’s life, then to introduce the book’s background, and finally to offer lines of thought that could help readers understand it. At least, that is what I have continually tried to accomplish in my own translator’s introductions. Writing such an introduction also allows me to acquire a deeper understanding of the thinker and the work.

In my introduction to Arendt’s essay collection Men in Dark Times, for example, there was no need for me to investigate Arendt’s personal relationship with every person she wrote about. She might write in an essay about how she felt about Benjamin, but in my introduction I behaved like a tabloid reporter: I read her biographies and explained everything to readers.

“I did that work for you,” Zhao Yufei said.

By reading the biographies, I found out whether Arendt had a personal friendship with a particular person, the year in which they met, and what their relationship was like. Matters that Arendt herself may not explicitly state in an essay can be covered in the translator’s introduction, giving readers some preliminary assistance.

In this respect, I try to put myself in someone else’s shoes. For a very long time, I myself was, and still am, a reader. Before reading an original text, what information would I want to know? What work would I hope the translator had done for me? That is what I try to do in my translations.

My original motivation was rather base: I wanted to compete with Zhao Yufei. That is why I wrote such a long introduction to Plutarch.

A translator’s introduction also has academic value. It can demonstrate the translator’s scholarly rigor. Zhao Yufei influenced my translations at another, smaller level as well: he forced me to add many footnotes. His reason was extremely simple.

“If you don’t add this footnote,” he told me, “someone will probably give you a one-star review and say you’re incompetent.”

Zhao Yufei has a great deal of experience with this.

I consult different texts because I believe that treating translation as research requires consulting different textual versions. The Life of the Mind, for example, has several different original manuscripts. In the English-speaking world, the standard English text was edited by Arendt’s good friend Mary McCarthy. While editing it, McCarthy may have altered a few lines.

During the translation process, I discussed this with friends. I told Zhao Yufei, “I restored this line that Mary McCarthy altered to the wording in the original manuscript. I’m using Arendt’s own earlier version.”

“You absolutely have to put that in a footnote,” he said. “Otherwise people will say you’re incompetent and made a mistake.”

Readers may have consulted a different original text. Unlike scholars, they may not realize that several versions of the original can exist: an Arendt typescript, a version edited by McCarthy, and a standard German version. A reader may only be able to consult the standard English version and therefore may not realize what scholarly considerations lie behind your decision.

“Isn’t it enough that I believe I’ve made the correct judgment?” I asked.

“No. You have to put it in a footnote. You should explain why you did not follow the standard edition and what considerations informed your decision. Otherwise people online will say you’re incompetent. They’ll end up criticizing you.”

You could immediately tell that he was a battle-hardened old hand who had come up through the Chinese system.

It is extremely necessary work. Under Zhao Yufei’s guidance, I added many explanatory footnotes to The Life of the Mind. For the overwhelming majority of readers, this already constitutes an extremely demanding level of reading. But some of the things one insists upon are intended to serve, or to enter into a common discussion with, the handful of readers who especially love to split hairs. The ability to keep refining a work also depends on the existence of people willing to split hairs.

The forthcoming collection of Rousseau’s letters likewise contains a great many footnotes, several hundred in all, to help readers understand related ideas and provide explanations. Some are editorial notes explaining differences among editions.

This is precisely the significance of treating translation as research. You cannot expect readers to see a name mentioned by Arendt and automatically know who that person was. In letters especially, relationships among people become extraordinarily important.

I will admit something here. Even among scholars, I may be someone who knows Rousseau relatively well, but I genuinely have not cared enough to learn who every single person in Rousseau’s entire social circle was or what status they possessed. The same applies to Arendt. We may know who Benjamin and Brecht were. They are famous twentieth-century thinkers. But when it comes to every person in Arendt’s social network, their academic value, their intellectual contribution, and their relationship with her, you truly cannot expect readers to know all that.

To clear away these cognitive obstacles, the translator often has to do this final work. Many previous translations were not particularly thorough in this respect. A great many terms or personal names may simply have been skipped because the translator did not look them up. Yet explanations provided by the translator are very important for readers’ understanding of the book and of Arendt’s thought. Sometimes, as a reader, you do not know the relationship between Arendt and a particular person, and you may not have time to investigate it. If the translator is also lazy and fails to do the work, the reader may be left completely confused, with no idea what the author is talking about.

This is why both of us agree that scholarly translation should be done by scholars. You first need a certain degree of academic training in order to explain, for example, the background of the ontological terms Arendt discusses, the kind of training she received, and what those terms mean.

Of course, you cannot expect readers to come to a book already possessing that kind of training. If that were your assumption, then all speculative books would have to be taught exclusively in university classrooms.

Thinkers inside and outside the university

The mention of university classrooms brings us into the substantive ideas of The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. Judging from Zhao Yufei’s personal experience as an undergraduate at Peking University, very few people there read Arendt.

“Is that Peking University’s problem, or Arendt’s?” I asked.

“It may be both,” he said. “As an undergraduate, I noticed that teachers in the philosophy department basically never assigned texts by Arendt. The only Arendt book I read during my undergraduate years was her doctoral dissertation, a study of Augustine, who was a Christian philosopher. Teachers would also tell us that Arendt perhaps was not an especially philosophical thinker.”

The book he had read happens to be the one that general readers of Arendt are least likely to read. Arendt’s study of Augustine is the closest of all her books to a conventional academic paper written in conformity with the academic system. It is a specialized monograph.

“Recently, because Zhongshu translated Arendt and then forced me to start reading his translations, my impression of Arendt has improved somewhat,” Zhao Yufei said. “But as Rousseau’s famous spokesperson for the China region, I discovered that many of the insights in Arendt’s thought are actually very similar to Rousseau’s.”

“So the sole reason your opinion improved was that you discovered similarities between Arendt and Rousseau?”

There really are many similarities. Both Arendt and Rousseau discussed the disintegration of publicness in the modern world. Public space is no longer as active, and people are less willing to participate in discussions there. Both thinkers were also deeply concerned with the effects of modernity, or modern science, on human beings.

Modern science promises to give us happiness, comfort, convenience, and so forth. Rousseau and Arendt both believed that it had not actually done so. It had not fulfilled its promise.

In The Human Condition, Arendt describes a transformation between the ancient and modern worlds. Her idea of the ancient world may refer to ancient Athens or ancient Rome, whose citizens participated actively in the public square. They entered public spaces to express their political views and offer opinions and interpretations concerning the entire polis or political community.

In the modern world, Arendt says, everyone has retreated into private life, causing the public realm largely to disappear. She also criticizes modern science. The opening of The Human Condition is famous: the Soviet satellite’s launch into space brought about an enormous transformation in the human condition. Arendt also criticized automation and offered some prescient criticisms of robots.

Then there was the atomic bomb, which could be described as the culmination of modern science and modern physics. As everyone knows, such an invention may not have been a blessing for modern people, but a curse. This was especially true during the Cold War, when Arendt lived. Everyone lived with the anxiety and risk that an atomic bomb might suddenly come from nowhere and destroy their homeland, their entire city.

Rousseau likewise criticized modern science, modernity, and the circumstances of modern life. One of his famous works is the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. He argued that modern people were becoming increasingly calculating, increasingly dependent on other people’s judgments, and increasingly incapable of presenting themselves in public space. They could no longer assume public responsibilities as ancient citizens had. Rousseau also said that the development of modern science had not made people happy.

At this point, I wanted to return to Zhao Yufei’s comment about Peking University not reading Arendt. In the history of modern philosophy, many people we imagine as philosophers were highly rigorous scholars. They were immensely learned, received strict academic training, and wrote deep, massive specialized works within academia: books such as the Critique of Pure Reason and The Phenomenology of Spirit.

In this respect, Rousseau and Arendt were similar.

“Compared with Arendt, Rousseau was even more of a drifter,” Zhao Yufei said. “Someone like Rousseau could never survive in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region. Before he was thirty-seven, he had no proper job. He lay around at home. He made money from odd jobs, such as copying musical scores. Every day he hung around the center of the Enlightenment with fashionable Parisian philosophers, yet he never made it into their inner circle. He just followed Diderot around as a junior sidekick.”

“But didn’t he later become famous overnight?”

Not exactly. When Rousseau was thirty-seven, his “big brother” Diderot went to prison. Diderot had insulted the French government.

Enlightenment philosophers were rather rebellious. In our part of the world, rebellion would certainly not be acceptable either. You cannot be rebellious.

Rousseau went to visit his rebellious good friend in prison. This makes him sound like a hoodlum, going to a prison to visit a rebellious friend. On the way, he was reading a newspaper. He was idling around, and halfway there he no longer felt like walking. So he sat under a tree and read the question printed in the newspaper: “Has the development of modern science and art brought about moral progress?”

Rousseau wrote a rebellious answer: no. Modern society was bad and had not brought about moral progress.

Compare someone like Rousseau with Arendt. You may say that Peking University does not read Arendt, but perhaps that is simply because Arendt has not been dead very long. Give her another two hundred years. After two hundred years, she may be like Rousseau.

Rousseau’s background was even worse than Arendt’s. He received no formal education and was entirely self-taught. In translating his letters, we found written evidence in black and white that he even had to write to friends asking to borrow books. He could not afford them because he was poor. You cannot criticize someone for having to beg others.

Rousseau was an orphan. His parents died very early, and he received no proper education. If he wanted to read some ancient Roman text, he had to write to a friend and say, “I hear that such-and-such a book has been published somewhere. Could you borrow it for me?”

By comparison, Arendt at least received proper academic training and education.

This is a very interesting aspect of Rousseau scholarship. The number of authors he cites is quite limited, probably because of the limited number of books he read in his youth. From this, too, you can see that he truly was a genius. He was entirely self-taught, poor, and constantly on the move. Until the age of thirty-seven, he was essentially a hoodlum drifting around Paris, lingering on the margins of the Encyclopédistes’ Enlightenment circle as Diderot’s junior hanger-on.

Then, after his big brother went to prison, Rousseau became famous overnight and wrote the First and Second Discourses, The Social Contract, and Émile. Although he may not have read many books or received a proper education, he became one of the most important thinkers and philosophers in the history of modern thought. That demonstrates his extraordinary genius.

Zhao Yufei and I also made a podcast episode about Rousseau’s influence on China’s modernization. Chinese thinkers from Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao all the way through the 1980s used Rousseau as an anchor for reflecting on the modernization of Chinese society. In their letters to one another, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao even referred to each other as Rousseau.

I think that was mainly because The Confessions had not yet been translated into Chinese. Zhao Yufei and I are going to translate the book together. In The Confessions, Rousseau recounts all sorts of messy and embarrassing things he did.

Zhao Yufei wanted to continue introducing Rousseau’s writings to the audience, but my point was that Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Arendt were similar in one respect: none was a thinker who was formally studied within an academic ivory tower. Their books share a common feature. They are not especially suitable for being turned into university courses and academically researched.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is suitable for that. The Critique of Pure Reason is suitable. Outside a university classroom, you would not even be bothered to read books like those in everyday life. Zhao Yufei and I took a doctoral course together on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. When we finished, we stared at each other and said, “Wow, thank goodness we read this book in a classroom. If we had been expected to read it at home on our own, we never could have gotten through it.”

With Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Arendt, the facts are precisely the opposite. Their readership outside the classroom is far larger than their readership inside the classroom or the ivory tower.

Some teachers at Peking University thought Arendt was not philosophical enough because they felt her books were too public in character. When I held an event at the Arendt Center in New York in April, its director told me that he had compiled a sales ranking of twentieth-century political thinkers. Arendt had sold more books than any other political thinker of the twentieth century.

Her readers may not be inside academic institutions; they are outside them. Nietzsche is the same. Who teaches Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a philosophy department? It is very difficult to teach that book there. Yet during the First World War, the German government printed it and issued a copy to every soldier. They read the New Testament and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a very strange combination, while being bombarded in the trenches. That may not have been Nietzsche’s real intention in writing the book.

Some thinkers are difficult to study inside research universities, while their appeal allows them to continue living in the minds of readers who do not carry academic prejudices.

Why was Arendt able to sell more books than all other twentieth-century political thinkers? According to the director of the Arendt Center, it was not merely because she sold well during the Trump era. Even while she was alive, Arendt was already extremely popular among the general public.

One simple reason may be that, like Nietzsche and Rousseau, Arendt did not write in specialized jargon. She did not use a great many terms that look at first glance like abstract academic concepts, or jargon that can be understood only after receiving a particular kind of specialized training.

We all know how to write that sort of jargon. Just look at the papers everyone writes in graduate school. When students write papers, they usually try to add jargon.

Some thinkers, however, give people the mistaken impression that they are very easy to read because they write entirely in straightforward, plain language. Arendt’s writing gives many readers that impression. She avoids many philosophical formulations whose logic looks difficult at first glance, the kind of thing especially common in philosophy of language or analytic philosophy. Arendt’s philosophy contains no formulas or abstract concepts. Many of her examples are taken from literature.

A literary example and a mathematical formula may achieve the same effect in logical terms. Bernard Williams, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, once said that analytic philosophers liked to use mathematical formulas as examples only because they had not read enough literature. Every example you need can be found in literature.

I am inclined to agree with him. If we can use Shakespeare to illustrate the philosophical concepts we want to discuss, why must we use X or Y?

Arendt wrote in a way that did not make you think, “Wow, I’ll have to take a special course before I can understand this book.” That may be one reason her works have always had such popular appeal.

Yet when we open The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, and while Zhao Yufei continually tries to bring Arendt closer to his beloved Rousseau, we discover that their questions really can be compared. Both asked: what exactly has gone wrong with modern society? What kind of people does modern society produce?

Rousseau became famous overnight during the Enlightenment because he proposed a counterintuitive idea. Everyone else believed that modern society and modernity were good things, and that modern science and modern art could carry us toward prosperity, development, and progress. Rousseau argued that modern people had lost civic virtue.

Arendt worried that, in addition to civic virtue, we had lost something even more fundamental: the human capacity to act and speak in public space. Civic virtue also needs to be exercised there.

Rousseau worried that modern people would become increasingly selfish and increasingly forget what it meant to be a citizen in public space, until we lost that capacity entirely. Two hundred years later, Arendt may have been concerned with the same tendency: modern society could cause people to lose publicness so completely that we would no longer know how to speak with one another in public space or reveal our personalities there.

Both thinkers believed that modern society did not merely change institutions. Those who defend modern society often think it is good because it possesses the rule of law, equality for all, equality before the law, and institutions intended to make society fairer. Rousseau and Arendt worried that modern society had changed not only institutions, but also people’s desires, capacities, and character.

Modern people are a different kind of people. The people ultimately produced by modern society, the ones best suited to it and best able to function within it, are not people who possess public freedom.

This is another characteristic Arendt and Rousseau share: liberals generally have an ambivalent attitude toward both.

Freedom under the social gaze

The most typical form of liberalism we usually imagine concerns negative liberty. That term means the freedom not to do something.

When we were young, our parents may have demanded that we do certain things: “You have to eat vegetables. Eat this vegetable. Don’t eat that vegetable. Don’t do this or that.” Liberals are not really thinking about the freedom not to eat vegetables. They are thinking about freedom from government interference. No liberal says, “I’m a liberal because I have the freedom to eat whatever I like.”

Suppose your parents insist that you wear a particular piece of clothing. A believer in negative liberty would say that you have the freedom not to wear it. That is what negative liberty means.

The freedom Rousseau and Arendt discuss is very different from the negative liberty commonly associated with liberalism. Rousseau famously says that if people cannot be free, they can be forced to be free. This is one sentence in The Social Contract that may send a chill down your spine.

And what is the first sentence of The Social Contract? “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

If Rousseau and Arendt are to be called liberals, their understanding of freedom is very different from the liberalism we usually imagine. Although Zhao Yufei, because he was controlled by his mother, obviously thinks of freedom in terms of what to eat, what to wear, or what subject to study at university, genuine liberals are concerned with limited government and freedom from oppression and control by law or authority—not parental authority, but real political authority.

Why did Arendt and Rousseau meet with roughly the same fate among liberals? Liberals look at the two of them and think, “What are you really? Which camp do you actually belong to? Are you really one of us?”

That is because both liked to emphasize a freedom with a public character. When you emphasize publicly oriented freedom, it sounds as though you do not believe oppressive power can come only from government. Arendt and Rousseau’s criticism of modern society is that oppressive power may also come from society itself, from the entire environment in which you live.

To use Rousseau as an example, if your surroundings force you to compete, compare yourself with others, and locate yourself outside yourself—if your environment tells you that you must present yourself in a particular way—are you still free?

Rousseau means that society makes people live constantly under the gaze of others. You always feel that other people are examining you and that you have to present a respectable appearance. You have to compete. You have to buy LV, Gucci, and designer bags.

All Zhao Yufei’s examples are very Shanghainese examples.

“The people Rousseau hated most were Parisians,” he said, “because Parisians were very greedy.”

Parisians are Shanghainese. We are all country bumpkins, country bumpkins like Rousseau. Everyone from Suzhou is out in the suburbs.

After becoming famous, Rousseau did something notorious in the circle of Enlightenment philosophers: he refused to go to Paris. He refused to become a Parisian. He refused to buy a home in Shanghai and insisted on buying one in Suzhou.

Rousseau later moved by himself to “the suburbs of Suzhou,” the outskirts of Paris, and wrote letters there. Our collection includes many letters sent from addresses outside Paris. His decision was regarded as a scandal. Parisians thought, “You could have an ID card beginning with 310, but you’re rejecting our ID card? You want to go to Suzhou and become a Suzhou person? Are you even human?”

At the time, this counted as a scandal in France. Diderot had been Rousseau’s good friend, but the two later fell out. Why? Because Diderot could not stand the fact that Rousseau insisted on living outside Paris. He became furious that Rousseau insisted on being a Suzhou person instead of a Shanghainese person.

Returning to the important question: in what sense can Arendt and Rousseau be regarded as liberals, and what exactly does their idea of public freedom mean?

Both believed that the oppression of freedom came not only from government, but also potentially from public opinion, customs, and social habits. If you want to pursue some form of public freedom, or to say, “I am a free person,” you cannot focus all your attention on the government like a vicious hawk, watching only for government encroachments on freedom.

Both thinkers placed greater emphasis on society. Government is certainly part of it, but they paid more attention to the extent to which social opinion restricts your freedom. You may feel that the scrutinizing gaze of the people around you makes it impossible to do certain things.

Consider the most direct example. In Afghanistan under Taliban control, the government may not be the immediate source depriving women of their rights and freedoms. The true source may be the social gaze. If I were a woman who went outside with my hair loose and uncovered, the thing that actually controlled me, making me feel as though needles were pricking me, might not be the government or police. It might be the surrounding people, who believed that a woman must not expose her hair and walk into the street like that.

This is the most extreme example. Rousseau, however, would say that the competition and comparison among the middle classes of modern society on the streets of Paris are also sources that deprive modern people of freedom: whether you own a home, the age at which you bought a car, the age by which you married, or, as is common in modern society, whether your ID card number begins with 310 or you come from northern Jiangsu.

On this level, Arendt is extremely close to Rousseau. Although both are most concerned with the sense in which modern people possess freedom, they focus on how modern society, rather than only modern government, deprives people of the possibility of exercising public freedom.

In Chapter Two of The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes among personal space, private space, and public space. In her view, private space is not subjected to the judgment of the public gaze. In private space, you can do whatever you want. It is the space of the household. Public space is a public location you enter after crossing the threshold and leaving private space.

Modern society, in Arendt’s account, gradually swallows up the distinction between public and private space. One section of The Human Condition is entitled “The Rise of the Social.” The theory is quite complex, but to state it briefly, Arendt believes that modern people are gradually ceasing to distinguish private space from public space. We call all of it “society.”

Those of us living in the age of social media are experiencing this transformation at an ever-accelerating rate. Everyone here may still remember what the world was like before social media. You remember that an entire day of your life could remain unknown to others. When you were a child, your parents might tell you to come home once it grew dark. Between leaving school and nightfall, they had no idea where you were. They could not contact you or find out where you were, and that was entirely okay.

Many parents now come to me anxiously because I studied abroad. They say, “When you went abroad, it was before WeChat. Before WeChat, you could only contact your parents by text message.”

I can hardly remember anymore, but there was certainly nothing like today, when your parents can find you twenty-four hours a day, no matter what you are doing. Many parents ask me in genuine bewilderment, “How could your parents feel at ease when they could not contact you?”

But that was how all of us grew up. You could go out to play, no one could contact you, and it was okay. When you studied away from home, your parents could communicate with you only by certain limited means. I even lived through the period of coin-operated telephones. After school, I would use a pay phone to contact my parents.

Think about all the communication tools developed since then. They have completely erased private space on every level. Before front-facing cameras appeared on the iPhone, you could not see your selfies. Taking a selfie was troublesome. You could not immediately see what you looked like. Vast amounts of space, imagery, and moments in your life could not be exposed to public scrutiny at all.

Children growing up today with front-facing cameras, social media, and instant-messaging apps are completely unable to imagine having a period of private time hidden from public space. Imagine people born in 2000 or 2005. If their first contact with the world involves a children’s smartwatch, then no matter where they are, their parents can find them.

When you were young and playing around your residential compound, your parents could not find you.

Arendt says that the boundary between private and public space is gradually erased in modern society and ultimately swallowed by society altogether. Here “public space” does not necessarily mean performing yourself in front of the masses. It can simply mean the time during which other people judge you.

The result, Arendt says, is that because you lose a private space free from judgment, society turns you into a person who must adapt to the operation of society.

Think about when you were young and played out of sight of your parents. You must all have done some illicit or naughty things. I cannot be the only one who did so many, though of course I cannot confess to everything here. In fact, it was okay to do many things that other people did not permit because nobody was judging you. You could secretly get up to various naughty or illicit things, and it was okay.

Once you completely dissolve the boundary between public and private space, everything you do is placed under public judgment. I did many things as a child that, if posted online today, would definitely get me denounced as a horrible brat. But they were not posted online. Nobody knew what I had done.

“You did say on your podcast that you stole your father’s money,” Zhao Yufei reminded me.

Stealing money was not especially—I only stole five or ten yuan to buy pornographic novels. It was by appreciating vulgar literature that I gradually sublimated myself.

“In this respect, he is especially like Rousseau,” Zhao Yufei said. “At the beginning of The Confessions, Rousseau says that he stole other people’s fruit, ate it, and then framed someone else.”

In my view, that does not constitute exceptionally depraved behavior. I am an adult now, so I can accept being judged by the public gaze. But imagine a child who constantly places themselves under public scrutiny. That child may be unable to grow up healthily and form a complete personality, because society’s judgment continually reshapes you, demanding that you become a person of a particular form.

This is Arendt’s criticism in The Human Condition of how society gradually swallows the distinction between public and private space. We become increasingly unable to say, “This is the part of my life that is completely free from public scrutiny.” When that part is absent, people are increasingly required to become whatever society expects them to be.

Look at the “horrible brats” who are posted online now. Many of the things they have done are probably no worse than what I did when I was young. I can admit without shame that I may have been an equally awful child. But nobody posted me online to expose and shame me. I survived childhood in that way and gradually formed my own personality. Now I can reflect and say that I really was a child who gave my parents quite a headache.

From the loss of civic virtue to the collapse of a world

Rousseau and Arendt lived in profoundly different periods. Rousseau lived during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when modern society could be said to have only just begun. Arendt lived in the twentieth century, after experiencing the ideology and events of Nazi totalitarianism, which inflicted terrible suffering on all humanity.

In what sense, then, did Arendt’s criticism of modern society deepen Rousseau’s?

Rousseau lived at the height of the Enlightenment, when modernity could be said to be flourishing. Arendt lived amid the ruins of everything. Modern Europe, which had once represented the most advanced civilization, had been completely destroyed during the First and Second World Wars. That was the age in which she lived.

When Arendt reconsidered the evils of modern society in the twentieth century, those evils were far more apparent than they had been to Rousseau. The crisis itself had deepened.

Rousseau’s fundamental concern was whether modern society might make us incapable of producing citizens. Both thinkers were concerned with publicness. Rousseau asked whether modern society would cease to produce true citizens and whether people would lose public virtue.

Arendt, confronting totalitarianism after the Nazi regime came to power, asked a more severe question: what happens when an entire public world collapses?

In Rousseau’s day, the world had not collapsed. France was still the most advanced civilization in Europe, the most developed country of its time. In the age Arendt confronted, the entire public world had collapsed.

What we lost was not merely our identity as citizens, or merely civic virtue, but our capacity to be human: the capacity, as human beings, to judge reality.

This is the question Arendt pursued in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. Is it possible for us to lose the capacity to be alone with ourselves and, when confronted by the rise of a terrible, erroneous, and evil regime, to judge what exactly we are doing? Are we participating in evil? Are we allowing evil to occur?

This could be described as the most fundamental capacity that allows a person to be called morally human.

The two thinkers also faced different crises of modernity. One immediate difference was the level of technological development. The era Arendt faced, which from our perspective is actually very close to us, begins on the first page of The Human Condition with humanity sending an object into space. The first artificial satellite had been launched into the sky. People were beginning to think about escaping Earth. It was an age that anticipated people today wanting to live on Mars.

It was also an era in which automated factories and assembly lines replaced human hands in manufacturing everything we use. The clothes we wear were increasingly no longer sewn by hand, but manufactured in factories. Everything in our lives was becoming increasingly automated.

Arendt lived in the age of robots. She discussed the possibility that we might create more and more robots until we forgot what we ourselves were capable of doing. All these issues are closely connected to us.

Rousseau naturally appears much more dated on this point, since he was an eighteenth-century thinker. But Zhao Yufei wanted to refute me. The collection of Rousseau’s letters shows that Rousseau was already confronting the rise of modern science.

“You said that Arendt confronted an age of automation,” Zhao Yufei said, “but Rousseau was already confronting the beginning of automation.”

He wanted to introduce his mechanical duck.

There were no robots, but there was a mechanical duck. A famous eighteenth-century inventor created one. It was rather like the toys we played with as children: you wound it up or put something into it, and it would move and quack by itself.

The inventor held a launch event in France and invited local writers, scholars, and distinguished figures to see the mechanical duck. The duck began quacking and moving, and someone nearby asked, “Has anyone ever seen a machine more automated, more sophisticated, and more advanced than this mechanical duck?”

Rousseau was young at the time, around thirty, and he responded sarcastically.

“I have,” he said. “I have seen automatic machines like that. Not only can they make noises and move by themselves, but they also compete with one another and are vain.”

Was he talking about Shanghainese people?

He was talking about Parisians.

From this, we can see that Rousseau lived at the dawn of automation. His sarcastic comment, or rebuttal, also anticipated a major tendency of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: human beings are becoming increasingly like machines.

Rousseau’s fundamental concern was that modern society made people unwilling to remain citizens. After Arendt witnessed two centuries of modernity’s rise, rise, and further rise, followed by its total collapse in the First and Second World Wars, her concern was that modern society was gradually causing people to lose the basic human capacities that citizens require.

In The Human Condition, these basic human capacities are described as the capacities to appear before other people, to judge the world from different standpoints, to withdraw from society’s judgment and conduct a silent dialogue with oneself, and to say no when everyone else obeys.

Here we should think of Eichmann, whom we have not discussed in detail. When Eichmann received orders from above to kill people, he did not stop to think: “What exactly am I doing? Am I killing people?” He had lost this most fundamental capacity for reflection.

Finally, are we still able to begin something new together with others in public space?

To be honest, this comparison between Rousseau and Arendt probably would not have been made on this level without Zhao Yufei. From Rousseau’s perspective, Arendt truly did continue his attempt to discuss the contradiction between modern society and civic capacities.

From Arendt’s perspective, however, although Rousseau was the first to discover the alienation of modern people in modern society, his solutions were clearly not good ones. We do not have time to explore them fully here.

Rousseau’s solution in The Social Contract was to try to create a unified opinion through such things as the general will, a legislator, and fraternity. In Arendt’s view, that was not a good solution. She revived the predicament of modern politics that Rousseau had raised two hundred years earlier but rejected both of the answers he provided.

One answer was the attempt in The Social Contract to reestablish a civic community through a general will. In Arendt’s view, that was impossible.

Rousseau’s other answer, in the Reveries, was to escape: to flee corrupt society by retreating into the solitary walks of an isolated individual.

Arendt refused to place political hopes in a brilliant legislator. What she hoped for—and we could discuss in the Q&A whether her attempt was as unrealistic as Rousseau’s—was to restore a public space in which plural human beings could speak in the plural, voice their views, act, and engage in practice.

Despite modern society’s continual pressure on human publicness, Arendt hoped we could still preserve such a public space: a space in which people could judge and think, and resist evil through thought.

That is probably where our conversation today should end. Thank you to Suzhou Huamao Center for inviting us and allowing the two of us to discuss voices that penetrate through the ages in such a beautiful place.

I then tried to force Zhao Yufei to show off a few phrases in Suzhounese and Shanghainese before we moved into the Q&A.

“Why don’t you give us one final performance,” I said, “and say, ‘Thank you, everyone, for listening and for participating in this event’?”

“Why are you making me perform Taizhou dialect in front of people from Suzhou?”

“You can speak Wu Chinese. Everyone will understand.”

“No, no,” he said. “Thank you, everyone, for taking part in this event. My Wu Chinese is extremely poor because I left when I was nine years old. I basically can’t speak it.”

Thank you. Thank you for Zhongshu’s presentation. Thank you.