When I was growing up in central Pennsylvania, my working-class family took vacations to places we could drive to—for example, Pine Creek Gorge upstate, better known to locals as the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, or Delaware, where an aunt and uncle lived on the way to Rehoboth Beach. To this day, neither of my parents have been on an airplane, or west of the Mississippi River. The first time I flew anywhere was the summer after I graduated from college.
I mention those biographical details to explain the relative lateness and force of a realization I had on a trip to Wyoming in my mid-twenties. A friend had moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he was a teacher. As a graduate student, I had my summers off, too, so I’d fly to Sioux Falls, he’d pick me up at the airport, then we’d pack food, gear, and supplies into his car and head west to the mountains and hiking trails that usually took two or three days of driving to get to. I’d never seen country so vast and so empty, and I remember going long stretches without passing a gas station or restaurant, let alone anything resembling a town. Sometimes, I’d notice a solitary house off in the distance and think about why someone might have moved there, or stayed, and just how much they must want to be left alone.
At the time, I was in a doctoral program studying political theory, and I couldn’t help but relate my experience of Wyoming to the texts I was reading, especially the Federalist Papers, and, even more important, a late, somewhat offbeat writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, The Government of Poland. The two were linked in my mind by Willmoore Kendall, who had been William F. Buckley Jr.’s professor at Yale and an early contributor to National Review. He’d also translated Rousseau’s short treatise about Poland and written a provocative introduction to it that, among other things, explicitly compared its arguments to those of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
Rousseau finished The Government of Poland in 1772, after a Count Wielhorski, supposedly on behalf of a convention that gave itself the task of drawing up a new constitution for the country, solicited his advice. Rousseau didn’t know much about Poland, though he claimed to study its history and laws for six months before offering his recommendations, and he may have taken on the project for the money. As such, The Government of Poland has tended to languish in relative obscurity, in part because it fits uneasily among Rousseau’s other political writings. Whereas one might expect the author of The Social Contract to tell the Poles to set about razing that country’s old order, Rousseau does no such thing—if anything, he impresses upon them the danger of change, and directs them to keep the most backward and unworkable features of their existing system.