Amanda, Isabel, and Lydia, who have been patient and generous over the years in sharing their mother’s attention with this mysterious person named Rousseau. I would also like to thank my parents, Ernesto and Darci Schaeffer, for their love and unwavering support. I dedicate this book to the memory of my father, a self-described philosopher of cars and mechanic of people whose distinctive perspective on the world gave me a taste for philosophical thinking before I knew what it was.
ABREVIATIONS OF ROUSSEAU’S WORKS
Parenthetical references to the following works are followed by references to volume and page number of the Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95).
| CC | Plan for a Constitution for Corsica, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, 13 vols. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990–2009), 11:121–65. |
| E | Emile, or On Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). |
| ES | Emile and Sophie, or The Solitaries, trans. Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, 13 vols. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990–2009), 13:685–721. |
| GP | The Government of Poland, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1985). |
| PE | Discourse on Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terrence Marshall, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, 13 vols. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990–2009), 3:140–70. |
| SC | On the Social Contract, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, 13 vols. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990–2009), 4:127–224. |
| SD | The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964). |
The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects as they are, or sometimes as they should appear to be. . . . From this arises the necessity for a legislator. (SC, 154; 3:380)
The idea of democracy presupposes that human beings are capable of exercising judgment, since it requires citizens who are capable of making judgments about a shared public world. The question of how to foster this capacity in individuals is thus a fundamental question for political philosophy. Yet the process by which the ability to exercise good judgment is acquired and nurtured remains somewhat mysterious, despite a rich intellectual history of the subject.1 This indeterminacy has to do with the very nature of judgment. As Ronald Beiner states in his landmark book Political Judgment, “Judgment is a form of mental activity that is not bound to rules, is not subject to explicit specification of its mode of operation (unlike methodical rationality), and comes into play beyond the confines of rule-governed intelligence.”2 Because the operation of judgment is detached from the realm of universal reason and absolute standards, yet is at the same time distinguishable from the realm of merely subjective opinion, judgment seems to rest upon “an elusive and ineffable faculty of sense,” as Peter J. Steinberger puts it.3
In seeking to understand judgment, scholars rarely look to Rousseau,4 at least not when the inquiry is bound together with the question of democratic politics.5 In fact, Rousseau is often presented as suspicious of the very idea that citizens are capable of exercising good judgment,6 and is often depicted as willing to sacrifice judgment (and therewith genuine democratic freedom) for the sake of social cohesion and republican virtue.
Rousseau certainly leaves himself open to this charge insofar as his defense of popular sovereignty in On the Social Contract entails the following qualification: the general will, though always legitimate, is unenlightened and tends to lack good judgment (SC, 154; 3:380). This deficiency in judgment is precisely what creates the need for a godlike legislator, who mythologizes the origins of the city and its laws, creates ennobling spectacles, and appeals to divine sanction—all in order to foster the underlying psychology that is necessary to facilitate the proper expression of the general will. Rousseau seems less interested in creating citizens who are capable of exercising independent judgment than in producing citizens who are conditioned to be unreflectively patriotic: “by inclination, passionately, of necessity” (GP, 19; 3:966). To the degree that Rousseau seeks to guarantee good judgment in this way, he seems to undermine democratic judgment insofar as the general will becomes an effect of external manipulations rather than an autonomous expression of popular will.7 In short, it can appear that Rousseau is perfectly willing to substitute deep, nonrational conditioning for the genuine and independent exercise of judgment—except perhaps for the exceptional, solitary philosopher (an unlikely model for democratic politics).
On the level of the individual, similar concerns can be raised with regard to Rousseau’s model of an allegedly free individual: the imaginary pupil whose education toward freedom Rousseau depicts in Emile. Many have raised questions about Emile’s alleged autonomy in light of the veiled manipulations of his tutor.8 Even those who evaluate the figure of Emile positively on the question of his capacity for autonomy recognize limitations when it comes to the issue of judgment specifically.9 On this view, Rousseau’s educational project, like his political project, seems to consist in the substitution of new (healthy, salutary) prejudices for existing, corrupt prejudices. To be sure, these salutary prejudices may produce better judgments than those based on corrupt ones. But a nagging question nevertheless remains: if those judgments are conditioned reflexes, and if one never learns to reflect critically on those (new) prejudices, however salutary they may be, what are the implications for human freedom? Are we left with an unbridgeable gap between the few who are wise and the rest who remain the product of their indispensable prejudices? If so, then Rousseau’s idealized models of political freedom (e.g., the general will) and individual freedom (e.g., Emile) are little more than seductive but illusory chimeras that mask the deepest operations of power.
What this leads us to see is that the question of Rousseau’s position on the possibility of genuine self-rule is inseparable from the question of his view of the proper orientation of individuals and communities toward the illusions or “chimeras” that operate in identity formation and political life—including those that he himself generates. If these chimeras, in performing their necessary function in promoting civic cohesion, substitute for the faculty of judgment, then self-rule in any meaningful sense becomes compromised, if not impossible, as charged by those who see citizenship for Rousseau as fundamentally passive and devoid of critical reflection.10 In other words, if citizenship is to be more than a deeply conditioned, unconscious reflex, we must be able to distinguish between conditioning and education in Rousseau’s political philosophy.
What, then, does “education” mean for Rousseau? At first glance, he appears to offer two mutually exclusive models. On one side, there is the civic education depicted in overtly political works such as the Discourse on Political Economy and Considerations on the Government of Poland, in which the individual is apparently subsumed by the common unity. Then there is Emile, which is ostensibly the education of a natural man who is a whole unto himself (albeit one who eventually inhabits a social environment). What Rousseau’s civic and private models of education have in common is, at a minimum, that they are designed to overcome the contradictions that plague human beings in the modern world. The individual living in civil society, Rousseau argues, exists in a sorry state of in-betweenness. “Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. . . . He will be nothing” (E, 40; 4:249–50).
