we learn something about how he thinks judgment might be reformed. Rousseau, who complained that his readers did not understand him, does his part to educate them to do so.28
I am not the first to draw attention to the importance of this dimension of Rousseau’s work. What is the character of the education he imparts to his reader? In many readings of Rousseau’s rhetorical strategy, a parallel is drawn between the tutor’s cultivation of necessary prejudices in Emile and Rousseau’s cultivation of necessary prejudices in the reader. One such salutary prejudice would be an idealized view of the goodness of nature, which allows the reader, like Emile, to be “shielded” from “the dangers that even measured progress and a limited social life entail.” While Emile may offer a more complex view of nature than the idealization we find in the first part of the Second Discourse, “downplaying or concealing this view is part of Rousseau’s rhetorical strategy,” employed for the political purpose of preserving a salutary prejudice in favor of the goodness of nature.29 The primary goal of Rousseau’s political/philosophical project is thus understood to be the production of certain beneficial psychological or social dynamics at the expense of revealing the truth about them. For example, we might understand Rousseau’s goal as the cultivation of a salutary but unreflective love of virtue by means of identification with Emile’s example.30 On this view, Rousseau manipulates the reader (for his or her own good), just as the tutor manipulates Emile.
My analysis seeks to extend this insight by subjecting it to the persistent question with which I began: if one never learns to reflect critically on those (new) prejudices, however salutary they may be, what are the implications for self-rule? Are we left with an unbridgeable gap between the enlightened few and the rest, who remain dependent upon prejudice? Does Rousseau ultimately follow Plato in suggesting the necessity of a noble lie deployed by an enlightened elite in order to produce a certain disposition in the many, and thereby a unified whole?31 But of course Rousseau is indisputably modern, which means that the tension between his desire for wisdom to rule and his egalitarianism (reflected in his claim that each individual has an infallible guide within, namely, conscience) is not so easily resolved. Just as there is a middle ground between the poles of radical asociality and seamless community, there is also a middle ground between mere prejudice, on the one hand, and either godlike wisdom or transparent truth, on the other. If we reconsider Rousseau’s rhetorical strategy in light of this middle ground, a new picture emerges, for example, of the rhetoric of the Social Contract. While Rousseau clearly offers a great deal of ideological ammunition for the people to use in passionate defense of their sovereign rights, as Arthur Melzer has argued,32 we must not overlook the fact that it also draws attention to the secret machinations of the legislator and thus requires that the reader transcend the perspective of the people for at least a few chapters. Rousseau does not of course spell out all of the legislator’s techniques—he leaves that in part to the Political Economy (which is for Melzer the partisan education of the legislator)—but he does highlight what is probably the most important technique: the necessity of an appeal to divine sanction in order successfully to direct the general will. Rousseau thus makes explicit the instrumental and Machiavellian character of appeals to divine sanction.33
The Social Contract is not simply an education toward a particular illusion but is also simultaneously an education about illusions and the role that they play in creating and maintaining a political community. The claims of the legislator then would be checked not simply by the unreflective partisan zeal of the people but by their appreciation of the nature of his position in relation to their own.34 I would add that while the Social Contract is not simply a defense of a manipulative legislator, neither is it simply an unmasking. The matter is rather more complicated, even paradoxical. The challenge for Rousseau is to encourage critical reflection while at the same time preserving a passionate attachment to the political whole. He may hope that citizens appreciate the necessity of an appeal to divine sanction, which requires some critical detachment, but at the same time he needs the appeal to work. Explicit demystification is therefore not the goal, nor is the goal the checking of one single-minded perspective with another, but rather a double vision that both incorporates and transcends the necessary illusion.
Thus, while I agree with commentators that Rousseau seeks not simply to explain but to produce the political effects he theorizes, I argue that Emile represents Rousseau’s attempt to cultivate the capacity for independent judgment, and not simply to foster the salutary prejudices and illusions that might substitute for it. These prejudices and illusions play an important role, to be sure, but they are only one part of Rousseau’s strategy. Focusing on the twofold character of Rousseau’s project in Emile will enhance our understanding of the psychology that makes possible the political middle ground identified in the existing scholarship that focuses on Rousseau’s concern for complex middle states over simple, unified wholes. Emile is certainly about combining independence and interdependence, but it is also exemplifies another (related) middle ground. That is, as a philosophical novel it occupies a middle ground between Rousseau’s treatises and his literary works, such as La nouvelle Heloise. Emile does not simply tell the story of an idealized education; it includes commentary and critical reflection on that poetic representation throughout. Both substantively and structurally, it is a crucial text for exploring Rousseau’s take on the proper perspective toward idealized images.
For a book that is often considered to be primarily about achieving wholeness and psychic unity, Emile is strikingly riddled with divisions that resist assimilation to a stable whole. A crucial bifurcation occurs between book III and book IV, which heralds a “second birth” for Emile. This major fault line in Emile’s education separates the physical and the moral dimensions of that education, or, put another way, separates Emile’s education in independence from his education in interdependence.35
Within this fundamental cleavage, however, others unfurl. Just as it is significant that Emile is “born” twice, it is important to note that the other characters in the book have a double or foil as well. For example, there is the awkward distinction between the tutor and Jean-Jacques (Rousseau’s persona as author). The voice of Jean-Jacques interprets, reflects, and comments upon the drama of Emile’s education by the tutor. This creates the illusion of a closed circuit between the tutor and Emile, with Jean-Jacques observing from above or beyond. However, Jean-Jacques also occasionally intervenes by means of a subtle narrative slippage, the implications of which are never explicitly acknowledged. The tutor seems never to make a mistake, but Jean-Jacques is an experimenter who must sometimes retrace his steps or explore alternative scenarios that involve other (often wayward) pupils who present challenges that do not arise with Emile. These challenges and mistakes are in one sense extrinsic to Emile’s education, but are in another sense an important part of it, as they provide the justification for many of its features. Moreover, they form part of the educational project of Emile as a whole, which is not reducible to the education of Emile in particular. Emile depicts several educations: the education of Emile (which is itself divided into two parts), and that of Jean-Jacques himself, which is itself two discrete educations in the following sense. We see the education that he receives about education, as it were, as he experiments with alternative scenarios for Emile and recalls experiments with other children, but we also witness certain moments in his own (earlier) education as a young man. For example, two important lessons in Emile—on taste and religion—are explicitly based on an account of Jean-Jacques’s own education rather than Emile’s. In his dual role as both educator and (at times) the one who is educated, Jean-Jacques serves as a foil not only for the tutor but for Emile as well.
Furthermore, there is the education of Sophie—yet another of Emile’s multiple educations. Since Sophie is destined to marry Emile, her education is part of Emile’s story, but it also stands on its own insofar as book V is not simply a chapter like other chapters but rather a “book” unto itself, with its own subtitle (“Sophie, or The Woman”). Sophie’s education is partly designed to complement Emile’s, but it also, I shall argue, explores alternative human possibilities, and therefore offers a model
