‘No appearance, always reality’: Rousseau, transparency, and the international

This paper develops a new perspective on one of the key concepts of liberal global governance – transparency – by reflecting on its earlier role in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rejecting the view that he desires ‘total transparency’, the paper argues that Rousseau provides an early example of a complex modern discourse in which transparency is closely connected to the emerging contours of the international. Transparency is an image used to describe global systems of power, the experience of encountering them, and the ways in which they might be transformed by an empowered citizenry. Twenty-first century liberal transparency is a particular idiom which has emerged from this more extensive language. Distinguished by the relative demise of the figurative and utopic aspects which shape earlier uses of transparency, it has considerable ideological power while also reflecting a sclerosis of political imagination.