Professor Steven Smith:
Good morning.
My name is Borat.
Anyone see the movie yet?
Yeah, I saw it over the weekend.
Had to cheer myself up a little
bit after Saturday afternoon but
there's still another week to
go.
Still time.
Good morning.
I want to talk today about my
favorite part of the Second
Discourse,
a book that never grows old,
that never fails to produce.
Last time, in talking about
Rousseau's account of the
origins of inequality,
I focused on a famous passage
in which Rousseau claims it was
the establishment of private
property that was the true
formation of civil society and
the beginnings of inequality and
all of the subsequent miseries
of the human race that he wants
to describe.
But in fact,
that's not really true.
Rousseau himself knows it's not
quite true.
If Rousseau were only
interested in issues of class
and economic inequality,
there would be very little
difference between him and
materialist theorists of society
like Karl Marx although Marx was
in fact a very appreciative
reader of Rousseau and got most
of his best lines against
capitalist society from him.
Nevertheless,
Rousseau understands that even
for institutions like property
and civil society to be possible
there must be huge and important
developments that go on or take
place even prior to this,
moral and psychological
transformations of human beings.
And it is for Rousseau far more
what we might call "the moral
and psychological injuries of
inequality" than the material
aspects of the phenomenon that
is of concern to him.
Rousseau very much takes the
side of the poor and the
dispossessed but it isn't
property,
or it isn't poverty rather,
that really rouses Rousseau's
anger as it is the attitudes and
beliefs shaped by inequalities
and of wealth and power.
It is Rousseau the moral
psychologist where his voice
truly comes out.
In many ways,
Rousseau like Plato finds his
voice when discussing the
various complexities of the
human soul.
So what is the chief villain in
Rousseau's Second
Discourse and his account of
the beginnings in development of
inequality?
Real inequality begins in a
faculty or a disposition that is
in fact in most editions of the
book rendered simply by the
French term because it is really
untranslatable into English.
It is amour-propre,
the first term I put on the
board, which is the first and
most durable cause of inequality
for Rousseau.
Amour-propre,
again, is an untranslatable
word but in many ways is related
to a range of psychological
characteristics such as pride,
vanity, conceit.
In the translation that you
have, I believe,
the translator refers to it as
egocentrism,
a kind of ugly modern
psychologistic term I think but
better and more accurately,
evocatively translated by terms
like vanity and conceit or
pride.
Amour-propre for
Rousseau only arises in society
and is the true cause,
he believes,
for our discontents.
And in a lengthy footnote that
I hope you checked--in a lengthy
footnote, he distinguishes
amour-propre from another
disposition that he calls
amour de soi-meme,
a sort of self-love.
How are these distinguished?
He says in that note:
"We must not confuse
amour-propre with love of
oneself.
These are two passions very
different by virtue of their
nature and their effects."
Love of oneself,
amour de soi-meme, "Love
of oneself is a natural
sentiment,"
he writes, "which moves every
animal to be vigilant in its own
preservation and which directed
in many by reason and modified
by pity produces humanity and
virtue."
So there is a kind of
self-love, he says,
that is at the root of our
desire to preserve ourself,
to be strong in our
self-preservation,
and to resist the invasion or
encroachment by others.
But then, he goes on to say
amour-propre is an
entirely different kind of
passion or sentiment.
"Amour-propre is merely
a sentiment that is relative,"
he says, "artificial and born in
society which moves each
individual to value himself more
than anyone else,
which inspired in men all the
evils they cause one another and
which is the true source of
honor."
Listen to that last expression.
"Amour-propre," he says,
"is what moves every individual
to value" him--or herself--"more
than any other,
which inspires all of the evils
in society and," he says,
"is the true source of honor,
both evil and honor,
the desire to be recognized and
esteemed by others."
How can this passion of
amour-propre be
responsible for these two very
different sort of competing
effects?
How did this sentiment arise
first of all?
How did it come about and I
suppose fundamentally and more
importantly, what can or should
be done about it?
For Hobbes, recall,
and this idea of pride,
vanity, what Hobbes called
vainglory,
you remember,
a very important part of
Hobbes' political and moral
psychology in Leviathan,
pride is seen as something
natural to us,
Hobbes writes,
you remember,
it is part of our
natural--pride is part of our
natural desire to dominate over
others,
but for Rousseau by contrast
amour-propre is something
that could only come about after
the state of nature,
a state that Hobbes,
you remember,
had called solitary,
poor, nasty,
brutish,
and short, after the state of
nature had already begun to give
way to society.
Hobbes' account for Rousseau is
incoherent.
If the natural state is truly
solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish,
and short, what would it mean
in such a state to feel pride or
vanity that requires human
sociability and requires the
esteem of others and somehow the
gaze or the look of others?
How could pride have arisen in
a state of nature which on
Hobbes' own account is solitary?
Rousseau uses Hobbes in a way
to prove his own point,
that amour-propre,
vanity, is not a natural
sentiment but,
as he says in that passage I
just read,
a sentiment that is relative
and artificial,
could only have come into being
once we enter society in some
ways.
But how did that happen?
Rousseau speculates about this
and, again, this is part of his
hypothetical or conjectural
history.
He speculates that
amour-propre began to
arise and develop as soon as
people began to gather around a
hut or a tree and to look at one
another,
as soon as we became conscious
of the gaze of another,
and it is from that gaze,
from the look or gaze of
another, that the passion of
vanity was born.
Listen to the way in which he
speculates how this arose.
"Each one," he says,
"began to look at the others
and to want to be looked at
himself and public esteem had a
value.
The one who sang or danced the
best, the handsomest,
the strongest,
the most adroit or the most
eloquent became the most highly
regarded and this was the first
step toward inequality and at
the same time toward vice.
From these first preferences
were born vanity and contempt on
the one hand and shame and envy
on the other and the
fermentation caused by this new
leavens eventually produced
compounds fatal to happiness and
innocence."
So the rise of this passion to
be seen, to be seen to be best
at something,
produced in many--for many
people again,
as he puts it,
pride and vanity from some
shame and envy on the part of
others and from this fatal
compound grew tendencies that
were,
as he says, fatal to our
happiness and innocence,
and Rousseau,
I think is very much onto
something here.
Amour-propre is
presented in the passage I just
read and throughout much of the
Second Discourse in
largely negative terms but it is
also related to something
positive,
in many ways,
for the development of humanity
in society, the desire felt by
all people once we enter
society,
to be accorded some kind of
recognition or respect by those
around us.
That too is a part of
amour-propre,
the desire to be seen and
recognized and respected.
The desire for recognition,
he says, is at the root of our
sense of justice and underlying
this,
I think, is the intuition
powerful and in many ways I
think deeply true,
that our feelings,
beliefs, opinions and attitudes
be acknowledged and respected by
others around us,
that we matter in some way.
When we feel that our opinions
are slighted,
when others do not recognize
our worth,
we feel angry about this and
this need for recognition,
which is part of this passion
of amour-propre,
is for Rousseau also a
cornerstone of justice but it is
also, as he says,
at the same time the demand for
recognition can easily become
cruel and violent as we demand
this from others.
Consider again just the
following.
I want to read one other
passage from the same part of
the text.
He writes: "As soon as men had
begun mutually to value one
another and the idea of esteem
was formed in their minds,
each one claimed to have a
right to it, each one claimed to
have a right to esteem or
recognition,
and it no longer possible," he
writes, "for anyone to be
lacking it with impunity.
From this came the first duties
of civility even among savages
and from this every voluntary
wrong became an outrage.
Every time someone was harmed
or injured, it became an outrage
because along with the harm that
resulted from the injury,"
he says, "the offended party
saw in it contempt for his
person, which often was more
insufferable than the harm
itself."
Think about the psychology,
the moral psychology that
Rousseau is invoking here in his
talk about harm and injury.
It's not the physical aspect of
the harm that bothers him.
It is the sort of contempt that
is implied or entailed in the
act of injury.
Hence, he goes on to say,
"each man punished the contempt
shown him in a matter
proportionate to the esteem in
which he held himself.
Acts of revenge became terrible
and men became bloodthirsty and
cruel."
That is to say,
amour-propre and society
gave rise to the state of war.
Does this sound familiar?
I think it should.
I was trying to think of some
example that might fit this and
one I came up with when I was
thinking about this
earlier--consider a story that
was much in the news.
I forget if it was last spring
or last summer sometime.
The Danish cartoon controversy.
Do you remember that,
about the cartoons of the
prophet Muhammad and the outrage
and the protests,
often violent,
that occurred about that?
To some degree,
Rousseau might argue,
the protests were about
disrespectful cartoons of the
prophet but he would argue,
I suspect, that the deeper
cause seemed to be that the
protesters believed was
disrespect being shown to them,
to their beliefs,
to what it is they held sacred
in some sense.
It is their beliefs that were
being disrespected and were the
cause of the protests.
Amour-propre,
as Rousseau I think himself
recognizes, is this very
volatile passion.
It contains the desire to be
respected again and acknowledged
that is at the root of justice
and virtue and yet at the same
time this passion,
as we know, is easily
manipulable by those who wish to
convince others that their basic
entitlements or views are not
being respected.
To some degree,
I think, Rousseau would believe
the protesters over those
cartoons had a point.
Their views were not being
respected and to which you might
say a Lockean or a liberal
formulation of the problem or
response would be,
"Well, so what?"
The task of government,
according to Locke or the
liberal view,
is to ensure the security of
person and property,
to protect you from harm and of
course to provide you the
freedom to practice what
religion you like,
consistent with the freedom of
others to do so too.
It is not the business of
government to ensure that your
beliefs are being respected.
This was clearly the view,
for example,
of the Danish newspaper editors
that published the cartoon as
well as the Danish prime
minister who refused to
apologize for this on the ground
again that the government's job
is not to impose a gag order on
what can and cannot be said on
the grounds that some people
might find it offensive.
This is a respectable,
sort of liberal line of thought
going from Locke to John Stuart
Mill,
and yet, while I am inclined to
agree very much with that point
of view, there is something
powerful and true about what
Rousseau has to say about it,
about this kind of issue.
Lockean liberal thought was
addressed in many ways to people
who had experienced the crucible
of civil war,
a century of religious conflict
and were looking for a way to
settle their religious and
political differences.
Toleration in many ways is a
liberal virtue because it
requires us to distinguish
between beliefs that we may take
with the utmost seriousness in
private life and yet
nevertheless bracket them in
some way once we enter the
public world.
This, in many ways,
is the peculiar liberal virtue
of self-restraint or
self-denial,
that we refuse to allow our own
moral point of view to,
in many ways,
dominate in the public space.
But it is one thing,
you might say,
to tolerate other views and
another thing to accord them
respect and esteem.
That seems to be something very
different from what Locke talked
about.
To tolerate simply means not to
persecute, to leave alone,
while respect for something
requires that we esteem it.
You might ask yourself,
"Must we esteem and respect
values and points of view that
we do not share?"
This seems very different,
again, from the sort of liberal
understanding of toleration that
means only extending acceptance
to views again that are very
different from our own.
It doesn't require us to,
as it were, censor,
self-censor,
our own views on the ground
that they may be--our views may
be in some ways disrespectful or
hurtful to others.
This is a vast topic.
I've sort of used the
opportunity to sort of move away
from Rousseau a little bit but
his point is I think that
amour-propre,
the desire to be esteemed,
recognized, and to have your
values and points of view
esteemed by those around you is
in fact a violent and
uncontrollable passion.
It is the passion very much
like Plato's thumos,
spiritedness,
back in the Republic.
It is a passion that makes us
burn with anger over perceived
slights and makes us also risk
our lives and endanger the lives
of others to rectify what we
believe to be acts of injustice.
Like Plato, in many ways,
Rousseau wants to know whether
amour-propre is purely a
negative passion or disposition
or whether,
like thumos,
whether it can be redirected,
in some way,
to achieve social goods and
social benefits.
All of this is entailed in that
short discussion of
amour-propre in the
Second Discourse.
So much of Rousseau's
subsequent account of
civilization and its discontents
grows out of this peculiar
psychological disposition and
passion.
So let's talk a little bit more
about civilization and its
discontents.
In Woody Allen's movie,
Annie Hall,
you might recall a scene in
which he says there are two
kinds of people.
They're the horrible and the
miserable.
The horrible are those who have
suffered some kind of personal
tragedy, a disfigurement of some
kind, who are facing a terminal
illness.
The miserable is everybody else.
Rousseau wants us to be
miserable.
He wants us to feel just how
bad things are,
how bad we are,
how bad off we are.
The only exception to this
general human misery is,
as he tells us at one point,
kind of early primitive
society.
These societies described by
him, not quite the state of
nature to be sure,
maintained a kind of middling
position between the pure state
of nature and the development of
modern conditions.
He says these were the happiest
and most durable societies and
the best for man.
It was primitive man,
not the pure savage of the
state of nature,
where Rousseau finds a happy
equilibrium between our powers
and our needs that he says is
the recipe for happiness,
bringing our powers and our
needs into equilibrium,
but the end of that happy state
came with two inventions,
two discoveries:
agriculture and metallurgy.
With agriculture came,
here we see the division of
land, the division of property,
and the subsequent inequalities
that came with it.
With metallurgy came the art of
war and conquest.
With these two developments,
he tells us,
humanity entered a new stage,
one where laws and political
institutions became necessary to
adjudicate conflicts over
rights,
and the establishment of
governments that this entailed
rather than bringing peace,
as it would for Hobbes or
Locke, the establishment of
governments had the effect
simply of sanctioning the
existing inequalities that had
begun to develop.
For Rousseau,
there is something deeply
shocking and deeply troubling
about the assertion that men who
were once free and equal are so
easily,
as it were, led to consent to
the inequalities of property and
to rule by the stronger,
which government brings into
being.
The social contract,
as he presents it in the
Second Discourse,
is really a kind of swindle.
The establishment of government
is a kind of swindle that the
rich and the powerful use to
control the poor and the
dispossessed.
Again, rather than instituting
justice, this compact merely
legitimizes past usurpations.
Government is a con game that
the rich play upon the poor.
Political power simply helps to
legitimize economic
inequalities.
Governments,
he tells us,
may operate by consent but the
consent they are granted is
based on falsehoods and lies.
How else can one explain why
the rich live lives that are so
much freer, so much easier,
so much more open to enjoyment,
than the poor?
That is Rousseau's real
critique and real question.
And it is the establishment of
government that is the last link
in the chain of Rousseau's
conjectural history,
the last and most painful,
in many ways,
legitimation of the
inequalities that have been
created after our emergence from
the natural condition.
But what, again,
is most painful to Rousseau is
the emergence of a new kind of
human being that this stage of
civilization has been brought
into--that this state of
civilization has brought into
being.
And Rousseau is the first,
I think, to use that term so
powerfully, which became used
very much in the next two
centuries, the
bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie is
Rousseau's invention and most
striking about this human type
for him is the necessity to
appear to be one thing where
actually being something else.
Go back again to think of the
way in which Plato or Socrates
uses that distinction between
seeming and being when he talks
about the just man in Book II of
the Republic,
someone who seems to be and
someone who is just.
It is this tension between the
two that is so central to
Rousseau's account of what he
calls the bourgeoisie.
"Being something and appearing
to be something," he says,
"become two different things
and from this distinction there
arose grand ostentation,
deceptive cunning,
and all the vices that follow
in their wake."
And in the penultimate
paragraph of the Second
Discourse Rousseau describes
the dilemma of the
bourgeoisie in the
following way.
He says, "The savage lives
within himself.
The man accustomed to the ways
of society, the bourgeoisie,
is always outside of himself
and knows only how to live in
the opinions of others and it
is,
as it were, from their judgment
alone that he draws the
sentiment of his own existence."
Think of that sentence.
It comes from the next to the
last paragraph of the book,
that in society we only live
through the opinions of others,
through the gaze of others,
through what others think of
us.
We are constantly our own
sentiment of existence,
he says.
Our own sentiment of self and
existent comes entirely from the
judgment, as he puts it,
of those around us.
The bourgeoisie,
in other words,
is someone who lives in and
through the opinions,
the good opinions,
of others, who thinks only of
himself when he is with other
people and only of other people
when he is by himself.
Such a person is duplicitous,
hypocritical,
and false.
This is why this is the true,
you might say,
discontent of civilization.
This is what our perpetual
restlessness and reflectiveness
have made of us.
Goaded on perpetually by
amour-propre,
this is the particular misery
that civilization has bequeathed
us.
So the question at the end of
the book is what to do about
this and here,
in many ways,
one has to say the Second
Discourse falls short.
The book ends on a note of
utmost despair.
It offers no positive answer to
cure the problem of civilization
but only hints at best at two
possible solutions.
One is suggested,
you will recall,
by the letter to the City of
Geneva which,
in a sense, prefaces the book.
Perhaps the closest
approximation to the early state
of primitive society lauded by
Rousseau are the small,
isolated rural republics like
Geneva in its own way where a
kind of simple patriotism and
love of country have not been
completely overwhelmed by the
agitations of
amour-propre.
Only, he says,
in a well-tempered democracy
like Geneva is it possible for
citizens still to enjoy some of
the equality of the natural man.
Democracy for him,
this kind of simple rural
democracy like that of Geneva,
is the social condition that
most closely approximates the
equality of the state of nature
and that of course is a theme
that Rousseau will take up
powerfully in his book the
Social Contract.
But Rousseau offers another
hint to the solution of the
problem of civilization,
what to do about it.
How can we restore happiness in
the midst of society?
The Second Discourse
leaves us to believe that all
society is a state of bondage
and alienation from nature,
from our true being.
We have lost our true humanity
that he describes in the state
of nature, our state of--our
capacities for pity and
compassion and the like,
and the answer to the problem
of society is,
in many ways,
to return to the root of
society and this root of society
is not just the need for
self-preservation but a kind of
primordial,
as he calls it in that passage
I read a minute ago,
sentiment of existence,
the sentiment of our own
existence.
By giving oneself over to this
feeling of existence without a
thought for the future,
without care or fear,
the individual somehow
psychologically returns to the
natural state.
Only a very few people,
Rousseau writes,
he being one of them of
course--only a very few people
are capable of finding their way
back to nature.
The type of human being who can
find their way back to the sort
of pure sentiment of existence
is not going to be a
philosopher,
is not going to be a person of
high order reflection like
Socrates, but will more likely
be an artist or a poet.
He is one of those rare
aristocrats of nature,
you might say.
His claim to superiority is not
based on a higher understanding
but a superior sensitivity,
less on wisdom than on
compassion.
Rousseau believed himself to be
one of these people.
Maybe you also are one of them.
Yes?
But it requires you,
in some way,
to distance yourself severely
and psychologically from all of
the possibilities of society,
to return inward,
and it was that inward journey
that Rousseau took and that he
writes about so powerfully in
his Confessions and his
final book,
The Reveries,
where you find the Rousseau,
founder of the romantic
disposition that you get again
in writers in America like
Thoreau and others who look
inward and return to nature in
some way,
their natural self as opposed
to society.
But the Second Discourse
leaves us, to be sure,
with a paradox.
The progress of civilization is
responsible for all of our
miseries.
Yes, it is society's fault.
It's not your fault.
It's society's,
he wants to tell us,
and yet he also leaves us with
no real apparent way out.
He denies that we can,
as a practical solution,
return to simpler,
more natural forms of political
association but how then do we
resolve the problem that he
leaves us with?
And his answer to it,
his political answer to it,
his most famous political
answer to it is contained in his
book,
yes, called the Social
Contract,
Du Contrat Social,
published in 1762,
seven years after the Second
Discourse.
Here he attempts to give one
such answer, and I mentioned one
such answer because it is not
his only or final answer,
but one such answer to the
problems of inequality and,
again, the injuries of
amour-propre.
The Social Contract
begins with one of the most
famous sentences in all of the
history of political philosophy,
"man is born free and is
everywhere in chains."
Always begin your essays with a
good, strong sentence like that.
Rousseau knew this.
He knew something about how to
write.
The phrase seems to be
perfectly in keeping with the
Second Discourse.
In the state of nature,
we are born free,
equal and independent.
Only in society do we become
weak, dependent,
and enslaved.
It is what follows after that
sentence in a way that is the
shocker.
How did this take--how did this
change take place,
Rousseau asks.
I do not know.
What can render it legitimate?
I believe I can answer this
question.
What can render it legitimate
and by the "it" I take it he
means the chains as in--that
states man is born free and is
everywhere in chains.
In the Second Discourse,
he had attempted to completely
delegitimize the bonds of
society,
saying how the Social
Contract and the creation of
government was nothing but,
in many ways,
a sophisticated swindle.
Now in the Social
Contract,
he asks the question,
"What can give these chains or
bonds moral legitimacy?"
He says I believe I can answer
that.
Has Rousseau simply undergone a
massive change of heart in the
seven years between these two
books?
I don't think so but I think
these are--this is part of
his--one of his answers to this
fundamental question.
But before going into the
details of this,
let's consider some of the
differences between these two
very powerful books.
Right?
The Second Discourse,
the discourse on inequality,
presents itself as a
hypothetical or conjectural
history of human development
from the state of nature to the
civil condition.
It is written in a vivid
language, which is why it is
always- it is often considered
one of Rousseau's most powerful
pieces of writing,
a vivid language drawing on in
many ways the biological
sciences of his day and newly
discovered knowledge of animal
species like orangutans and
other kinds of anthropological
investigations of the Caribs and
North American peoples,
a very vivid work.
The Social Contract,
by contrast,
is written in a dry,
even a kind of bloodless
language of a lawyer.
It is very much written in the
genre of a legal document.
Its subtitle is The
Principles of Political
Right.
It is a work of considerable
philosophical abstraction whose
leading concepts are
abstractions like the social
contract,
the general will,
and so on.
The book, he tells us in short
preface, was originally part of
a longer investigation of
politics which has since
been--which he says has since
been lost.
Also, the Social
Contract presents itself in
many ways as a utopia,
an ideal city,
in some respects an answer to
the Calipolis of Plato's
Republic and yet this is
also--this seems to be not quite
true.
The work begins,
even before the famous sentence
about man being born free,
the work is prefaced with a
statement that could have come
directly out of Machiavelli's
Prince.
"Taking men as they are and
laws as they might be," Rousseau
says, "I will try in this
inquiry to bring together what
right permits with what interest
prescribes."
Taking men as they are… You
remember the fifteenth chapter
of The Prince.
Let us look at the effectual
truth of things,
not what is imagined to be but
the way people actually are.
Let us take men as they are,
Rousseau says,
following Machiavelli.
He will not begin,
he tells us,
by making any heroic
assumptions about human nature,
no metaphysical flights of
fancy, but rather stay on the
low but solid ground of
recognized fact.
What does he mean by this and
what are these facts of human
nature, men as they are,
he says, that Rousseau claims
to describe in the Social
Contract?
And here we get to the basic
premise of the book.
The basic premise,
I think, from which the entire
Social Contract unfolds
is the claim that man is born
free.
All subsequent relations of
hierarchy, obligation and
authority are the result not of
nature but of agreement or
convention.
Society and the moral ties that
constitute it are conventional,
you might say,
by agreement,
all the way down.
There is nothing natural about
any of the social contract.
And from this basis of man as a
free agent, that we are born
free, Rousseau attempts to work
out a system of justice.
The Principles of Political
Right, again is the
subtitle, suggests that are
appropriate to human beings
conceived as free agents
responsible to themselves alone.
But how do you do that?
How can you do that?
Rousseau's political philosophy
begins, at least he believes I
think, with the realistic or
even empirical assumption that
each individual has a deep
rooted interest in securing the
conditions of their own liberty.
The state of nature and the
social contract presuppose
individuals who are in
competition with others and each
attempting,
as it were, to secure the
conditions for their own
liberty.
He does not presuppose altruism
on the part of any human being
or any other kind of self-other
regarding characteristics,
what I called a moment ago
heroic assumptions.
He doesn't make the assumption
that we act for the interests of
others.
We are selfishly concerned with
our own freedom and the best
means of preserving it and
protecting it.
Each of us has a desire to
preserve his or her own freedom
and that social order will be
rational or just,
that allows us to preserve that
freedom.
The problem,
of course, is that in the state
of nature the desire to preserve
my freedom comes into conflict
with the selfish desire of
everybody else to preserve their
freedom.
The state of nature quickly
becomes a state of war based on
conflicting desires and
conflicting again means of
liberty preservation.
So how do we preserve our
liberty without lapsing into
anarchy, that is the state of
war?
This is the question that the
Social Contract sets out
to answer and to which his
formulation,
his famous formulation of what
he calls the general will,
is the solution.
I'm going to end on that note
today and Wednesday I want to
talk about the general will and
how Rousseau sees it as a sort
of collective answer to the
problem of the securing of
individual liberty.
So meditate on that if you like
for the next day.
 
