Warm and Cold Speech in Rousseau’s Political Theory

This essay traces Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s attempt to deploy cold (discursive) language in order to evoke warm (musical or gestural) language. Rousseau associates warm speech with the eloquence of the ancients and opposes it to cold speech, the language that predominates in modern societies, especially in intellectual or philosophical discourse. Cold speech cannot be the speech of a flourishing republic, but it can describe the conditions for the creation of a space within which a republican language might emerge. Warm speech is the cultural language of republican citizens. It operates to ensure that public deliberation (the procedural general will) is guided by the common interest (the substantive general will) and that the interests citizens hold in common are privileged over any particular interests they may have independent of, or apart from, their fellow citizens. The general will is not (only) general because, in substance, it corresponds to the common good. It is not (only) general because it is the result of the active will of all citizens. It is general because it speaks the language of generality; it emerges from a special orientation or intentionality born of and communicated through warm speech. This suggests a three-dimensional theory of democratic legitimacy—procedural, substantive, and ethical—that offers significant advantages over formal approaches to democratic legitimacy grounded in public reason.