Chris Bertram quotes from Rousseau's Emile about how good social institutions discourage self-centered individualism and encourage republican virtue, and goes on to say that that's not Rousseau's ultimate position:
Junius: "'Good social institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one but a part of the unity and no longer feels except within the whole. A citizen of Rome was neither Caius nor Lucius; he was a Roman.' (Bloom trans, p.40). I don't believe that this is the view that Rousseau ends up advocating, but there's a long and complicated story to be told about that...
And I'm curious. I Am Not a Political Philosopher. But I thought that was the position Rousseau ended up advocating: that now that we have moved from the innocent goodness of the State of Nature to the complicated social patterning of technology-based society, we can no longer achieve Goodness, so we have to settle for something lesser: Virtue--thinking first and foremost of how our actions affect others...
Posted by DeLong at August 22, 2002 07:20 AM | TrackbackI've posted a few lines of clarification.
Posted by: Chris Bertram on August 22, 2002 08:00 AMAnd they are:
I wouldn't dissent from that, but that's a much weaker thesis than the one he appears to advocate at that point in Emile. Whereas the Romans he is talking about there have, according to him, lost any idea that they are private, independent persons, in the Social Contract he writes (Book 2, ch 4, "Of the Limits of Sovereign Power"):
"...in addition to the public person, we must consider the private persons who make it up, and whose life and freedom are naturally independent of it. It is therefore important to distinguish clearly between the respective rights of the Citizens and of the Sovereign, as well as between the duties which the former have to fulfill as subjects, and the right which they must enjoy as men."
I know there are other passages that point the other way, too, but I think the best reading of the Social Contract allows for the pursuit of private ends within a framework set by the law that all have willed, and doesn't require or suppose that all citizens are completely engulfed in their citizen role.
Posted by: Brad DeLong on August 22, 2002 08:40 AMBrad
Agree with your reading....
Posted by: on August 22, 2002 08:46 AMThe reading of Rousseau as destroyer of individualism is basically the fault of Isiaiah Berlin, who as well as having a name that looks like it's misspelt even when it isn't, gave Rousseau some pretty rough treatment in "Two Concepts of Liberty".
Posted by: Daniel Davies on August 22, 2002 10:53 AMMichael Walzer likes to (or used to like to) counterpose Rousseau and Tocqueville, as exponents of what my teacher Jeff Weintraub liked to call the total and partial conceptions of (republican) virtue, and to quote from an early draft of the Contrat Social where Rousseau talked of the need to "mutilate" human nature...
Posted by: Brad DeLong on August 22, 2002 12:14 PM