46 SOCIAL SCIENTIST meant dispensation of souls but it also meant special access to knowledge, through Latin and through a monopoly over schooling, very much as Brahminism in India historically implied the debarring of women and shudras from Sanskrit language, hence Vedic knowledge. While patriarchal power certainly meant serfdom of one sort or another in the realm of agrarian production, it also meant the subjection of women in that realm as well as within the household. What got transformed, in the course of the political upheavals of the 18th century and in the thought of the Enlightenment, was even the linguistic meaning of the word 'Subject*. French Jacobins may be credited with the revolutionary revisions of the meaning of subjecthood, whereby the idea of popular sovereignty is bom, so that the individual comes into being as a citizen and becomes a subject not to the prince or the priest, but of History, exercising the liberty of belief in matters of faith, demanding from the state a system of public and secular education, and instead of obeying the given laws actually making the laws whereby the state itself is to function. As we know, this battle was not won once and for all even in France, and it has had to be fought over and over again, in many corners of the globe. But, even before all that came to pass, Rousseau had been thinking of the doubleness of the idea of Citizen-Subject, in the sense that true citizenship lay for him in the ability of the citizens, in their collectivity, to give laws unto themselves but also, equally, in their collective consent to abide by the laws they had given to themselves. The citizen, thus, was both a subject of and subject to: at once the author of laws and the voluntary object of laws, thereby the maker of history but also made by history. It was on the terrain of this doubleness—of being subjected to the laws that one had made as the subject of law— that the conflicting demands of individuality and community were to be reconciled; the community was to be not the community of local origin or the given caste affiliation, but the community of equal citizenship that was chosen by each citizen freely and to which, then, one surrendered a part of one's self-interest. I believe that this is the moment in Rousseau's thought which is also, in the history of political philosophy, the moment in which the idea of equality, which had started evolving with the issue of secularity within religious society, transforms itself into the idea of democracy. But the truly revolutionary step that Rousseau takes is the second one, in which he asks whether or not citizens who make laws and obey those laws, can in fact be equal subjects of the law, as makers of and as made by the laws, if the distribution of material goods among them is unequal. In other words: is property reconcilable with democracy? Rousseau's thought on this score is both brilliant and faltering, but what I want to suggest through this brief review is that the seeds of democracy are already there in the idea of secularism, because you cannot have popular sovereignty if the state represents a religious