Rousseau has been among the most influential modern philosophers, and among the most misunderstood. In the United States, his political thought was poorly received, in part because Edmund Burke blamed him for much of what was worst in the French Revolution. Today, political conservatives continue to shun him, seeing his work as a contributor to various pernicious alternatives to the healthy teachings of John Locke and the American founders. Although Rousseau has admirers, especially perhaps among those repulsed by our commercial society, his writings are seldom taken seriously as a source of enduring political wisdom. Alexis de Tocqueville , however, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest analysts of American institutions, reported that Rousseau was one of three men with whom he lived a little every day.1
This book seeks to reintroduce Rousseau to an American audience. His understanding of politics rests on deep and frequently prescient reflections on the nature of the human soul and the relationship between our animal origins and the achievements of civilization. The implications that Rousseau drew from those reflections continue to deserve serious attention today. With his assistance, we can deepen our own understanding of many political issues that remain alive, including feminism and the family, the role of religion in a secular society, and the proper conduct of constitutional government.
This book sprang from my effort to read Rousseau as Rousseau read Plato, an approach that does not involve novelty for novelty’s sake. Two conclusions, frequently found in the existing literature, leap out from the surface of Rousseau’s writings. First, he had a special attraction to Plato. Second, he sought to deploy ancient political thought against what we call the Enlightenment. The precise way in which Rousseau drew on Plato has proved to be a more difficult question, and one that has provoked significant controversy.
Leo Strauss , one of the most influential political philosophers of our own time, maintains that Rousseau did not seek to recover political philosophy as Plato practiced it: “[Rousseau’s] return to antiquity was, at the same time, an advance of modernity. While appealing from Hobbes, Locke, or the Encyclopedists to Plato, Aristotle, or Plutarch , he jettisoned important elements of classical thought which his modern predecessors had still preserved” (Natural Right and History, 252). Similarly, Allan Bloom contends that Rousseau’s greatest work, the Emile, is meant “to rival or supersede” Plato’s Republic by seriously undertaking a project outlined only ironically in the Republic (translator’s Introduction to Emile or On Education, 3–4).
It is true that Rousseau can appear, especially in retrospect, to have broken with both classical and Enlightenment thought, thus ushering in “[t]he first crisis of modernity” (Strauss , Natural Right and History, 252). It is also true that the Emile is meant to rival the Republic in the scope of its ambition. But in claiming that Rousseau’s own political philosophy broke radically with Plato’s, or that he sought to “supersede” Plato, these commentators lead the reader astray. At the very least, Rousseau was far more indebted and sympathetic to Plato than they acknowledge. If there are fundamental substantive disagreements between Rousseau and Plato, they are much more difficult to identify than Strauss and Bloom would have us believe.
At the opposite pole, David Lay Williams maintains in Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment that Rousseau was a Platonist. In order to make this case, Williams begins with a very brief summary of Plato’s putative positions on several difficult issues, ranging from metaphysics to epistemology to politics.2 He then finds numerous statements in Rousseau that appear to agree with the doctrines that he attributes to Plato. In my view, this approach is seriously misguided because it assumes away abundant evidence of irony and indirection in both Plato and Rousseau. Just to take two of the most obvious examples, Plato never purports to present his own views in any of the dialogues, and Rousseau frequently puts important arguments in the mouths of fictional characters. Williams makes dogmatists of them both, which distorts their philosophy and their way of writing.
In the following chapters, I offer readings of Rousseau’s texts that refrain from presupposing the conclusions reached either by Strauss and Bloom or by Williams . Rousseau had little formal education, but he became impressively erudite through a self-guided program of study. In the course of this self-education he invented his own method of reading, which he describes in the Confessions . First, “I made myself a law: to adopt and follow all [the author’s] ideas without dragging in my own or those of another, and without ever disputing with him” (bk. 6, O.C., 1:237). After several years of following this discipline with many writers, Rousseau acquired a stock of ideas that he only then began to scrutinize by “reviewing and comparing what I had read, by weighing each thing on the balance of reason, and sometimes by judging my masters” (ibid., 237–38). This two-step process is not a recipe or formula, and it is far easier to describe than to follow. I have no doubt that this is how Rousseau read Plato, and I am confident that he hoped his own works would be treated in the same spirit.
Plato’s decision to refrain from speaking in his own voice served his two principal goals as a writer. First, he seeks to provoke potential philosophers to engage in philosophy. Because they are dominated by an ironic and frequently paradoxical Socrates, the dialogues discourage attentive readers from hastily attributing substantive conclusions to Plato that the reader can then hastily accept or reject. Philosophy not only requires that one think for oneself, but it means thinking completely for oneself. Through their form as much as through their content, the dialogues constantly remind the reader that he can never be altogether certain what Plato or his Socrates finally concluded, and that a serious student should care more about finding the truth than about what anyone else believes.
Second, Plato’s total silence about his own views contributed to the political goal of cautioning philosophers against threatening the existing political order, and thereby inviting the persecution of philosophy. When Socrates went beyond the study of nature by subjecting ethics and politics to philosophic analysis, philosophy’s uncompromising pursuit of the truth became a more vivid threat to the shared opinions on which political stability depends. By presenting a certain kind of fictional Socrates as the model philosopher, Plato’s dialogues encourage the friends of political stability, or of established political opinions, to see the suppression of philosophy as a mistake. Plato’s Socrates stayed resolutely out of politics, and was condemned to death by excited people who could not understand what they were doing or why they could not accomplish what they thought they were doing. Whatever Plato’s political opinions may have been, the manner in which the dialogues present philosophy has made it virtually impossible for anyone to enlist Plato as an advocate for a destructive political agenda.
Rousseau’s goals as a writer are in certain fundamental respects the same as Plato’s. Although he usually speaks in his own name, Rousseau’s presentation of his thought is deliberately paradoxical, frequently outlandish on its face, and packed with subtleties that invite careful thought. In these respects, the writings of Rousseau resemble the speech of Plato’s Socrates. Like Plato, Rousseau seeks to promote philosophy by discouraging serious readers from substituting the discovery of the author’s doctrines for the uncompromising pursuit of the truth.
The political situation in which Rousseau found himself, however, was far different from Plato’s. Modern writers had gone far toward the goal of making philosophy and philosophers politically respectable and politically powerful. In Rousseau’s view, this development was a threat to healthy political life. Natural philosophy had made genuine progress, but it now threatened human welfare in a way that pre-Socratic philosophy had never done. The problem arose from a perversion of political philosophy. The Enlightenment diminished and popularized philosophy by promoting dogmatic atheism, materialism, and consumerism. These doctrines, along with an abundance of material benefits made possible by the progress in natural philosophy, corrupt men’s souls by fostering a narrow egoism and the frantic pursuit of luxuries that cannot bring happiness. The Enlightenment pointed the way to the soft despotism that Tocqueville later diagnosed, and ultimately to the “last men” described by Nietzsche .
Rousseau sought to rejuvenate political philosophy by pursuing the same goals at which Plato aimed. In the new circumstances created by the Enlightenment, this required a public stance or philosophic rhetoric that was very different from Plato’s. At a time when natural philosophy was politically suspect, Plato went out of his way to avoid endorsing studies that were thought to promote atheism. At a time when philosophic materialism was becoming popular and respectable, Rousseau presented himself as a skeptic about the value of philosophy and a defender of humanity against its corrupting influence. For all their apparent differences, Plato and Rousseau both treat political philosophy as a means of protecting political life and the life of philosophy from threats that each poses to the other.
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Because this book is an introduction to Rousseau’s thought, not a synopsis, it does not address all of his major works or his claim that they reflect a unified and coherent system. His later autobiographical writings in particular look to me like the final steps in an educational journey that he invites us to take with him. My own book will at most suggest reasons to prepare for taking those steps. Even with respect to the works I discuss, I have chosen to focus on a few of their themes, chosen as entryways to further reflection.
Because this book is not meant to address Rousseau’s place in the history of political philosophy, I will say almost nothing about the major thinkers who were influenced by him. In my view, a great deal of misunderstanding arises from the practice of looking at Rousseau through handy lenses provided by his many influential successors.
Finally, the book is designed to be useful both to experts in the field and to non-specialists. It presents a coherent and unified exposition, and the chapters are best read in the order I have presented them. I have, however, made each chapter independently intelligible, and readers who are particularly interested in certain topics can begin with the relevant chapters. In order to avoid unhelpful distractions, I have referred very sparingly to the immense secondary literature on Rousseau. Interpretations that differ from mine, and from one another, will be easy for anyone to find.
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Chapters 2 and 3 deal with Rousseau’s account of the evolution of humanity, which is central to his thinking about politics. Since his time, scientists have made fascinating new discoveries—about primitive peoples, physical evolution, and the behavior of our fellow primates—that support the principal elements of his account. This is important for at least two reasons. First, if Rousseau were refuted by newly discovered evidence, it would raise serious questions about the validity of the implications that he drew from his scientific inquiries, including the political analysis that rests on those implications. Second, Rousseau’s treatment of human origins illustrates his approach to science or natural philosophy itself, an endeavor to which he gave considerable attention. His prescience suggests that he had a deeper understanding of the possibilities and limitations of modern science than many of us have today.
Chapters 4 and 5 consider some of Rousseau’s efforts to bring his philosophic insight to bear on problems presented in the modern world. These include the place of women in society, the viability of traditional family structures, and the role of religion and religious freedom in nations that are becoming ever more secular. In considering these issues, I give special attention to examples that illustrate how Rousseau used what he found in Plato. Seeing how he used Plato can help us see how we, in turn, might use Rousseau.
Chapter 6 complements the treatment of natural science in Chapters 2 and 3. The American Constitution is the most successful application of the Enlightenment’s new political science, and Rousseau was deeply skeptical about the promises made by that science. Nevertheless, when read in the manner suggested by the previous chapters of this book, the Social Contract and Considerations on the Government of Poland offer considerable support for important features of America’s constitutional arrangements. At the same time, Rousseau’s analysis points to the merits of certain dissident or subdominant strains in American political thought. That in turn suggests that American students of politics should reconsider the widely held view that Rousseau is a useless or dangerous guide for us. Like Plato, Rousseau illuminates the obstacles facing those who aspire to replace political philosophy with political science.
Footnotes
1
Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay (12 Nov. 1836), Œuvres, Papiers et Correspondances, 13:418. The others were Pascal and Montesquieu .
2
Williams ’ understanding of Plato and Pla...