Professor Steven Smith:
I hope that everybody followed
Rousseau's advice and yesterday
exercised your rights as
citizens of a free state.
We hope so.
I begin today with an apology
and that is for the particular
edition that you're using for
this section of the class on
Rousseau.
This is the only edition that
I've assigned in the course that
I don't like.
Why did I assign it?
Because I want us to read the
Second Discourse,
the Discourse on
Inequality and the Social
Contract and this is the
only edition that I could find
where they are both in the same
volume and I don't have to
assign two separate books.
So, in order to keep your costs
down, I bit the bullet and
assigned a translation in an
edition I don't particularly
care for.
A far superior edition is found
in this.
This is one of the two volumes,
the Cambridge Bluebook series
as it's called,
edited and translated by
Gourevitch.
If anybody wants to do more
advanced work in Rousseau,
you will no doubt get this
edition,
better translations,
better notes and so on,
of the Second Discourse
and The Social Contract
and for anybody who's
interested,
I've decided because Rousseau
has become so important to me,
that next year I will be
offering an undergraduate
seminar entirely devoted to
Rousseau.
He's one of the handful of
writers, of political
philosophers,
to whom one could,
in all justice,
devote an entire semester to
his writings and that's what I
want to do next year.
So if any of you should get the
bug, the Rousseau bug,
next year we'll do Rousseau in
many more texts,
in detail.
So with that having been said,
I'm going to talk today about a
remarkable, remarkable human
being and writer.
It's a very common way of
entering the thought of Rousseau
to see him as a critic of
liberalism,
of the kind of property owning,
rights-based society given
expression by John Locke and I
will talk about that a little
bit later.
But to see Rousseau as a critic
of Lockean liberalism would be I
think very shortsighted and very
unfair.
Rousseau was a product not of
liberal society but rather of
the ancien régime,
the old regime in France.
Rousseau was born in 1712.
It was two years before the
death of the famous Sun King,
Louis XIV, a man who symbolized
the age of absolutism,
and he died in 1778
approximately a decade before
the outbreak of the French
Revolution.
His life, in other words,
was lived entirely within the
waning decades,
the waning years of the age of
absolutism in France and in
continental Europe.
Rousseau was deeply aware that
he lived in an age of transition
but what precisely would come
after he was by no means clear.
He wrote, as you will see,
with the passion and the
intensity of someone who fully
expected to be instrumental in
the coming of a new historical
and political epoch and indeed
he was.
Rousseau was Swiss.
He was not French.
He was a Swiss.
He signed many of his most
important words simply
citoyen de Gèneve,
a citizen of Geneva,
after the city where he was
born.
He was the son of an artisan
who abandoned his family after a
falling out with the local
authorities and the young
Rousseau was apprenticed to an
engraver but he left Geneva;
he fled Geneva for good at the
age of 16.
For the following 16 years,
Rousseau lived a kind of
vagabond varied life doing many
different things,
working as a music instructor
and a transcriber.
He was the secretary to the
French Ambassador in the city of
Venice and he was also the lover
of a wealthy woman many years
his senior.
After moving to Paris in 1744,
Rousseau spent several years
eking out a living,
sort of on the margins of the
Parisian literary scene until
1750 when he published his
first,
although quite brief major
essay, a work called The
Discourse on the Arts and the
Sciences,
which catapulted him to
literary fame.
That work made his name so it
was--it came to be called the
First Discourse.
That work was followed five
years later in 1755 by the work
we will be reading starting
today,
The Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality,
often simply called the
Second Discourse,
and that work was followed
later on in 1762 with the
Social Contract and also
the same year that Rousseau
published his major massive work
on political education called
Émile or On
Education,
both in 1762.
During this period,
Rousseau fathered five
children.
He abandoned all of them to an
orphanage.
He did so with a common-law
wife with whom he lived and
during this times the writings
I've mentioned are only a small
portion although a very
important portion of the
writings which he lived.
He was also the author of a
very large novel,
Heloise,
The New Heloise,
La Nouvelle Heloise,
which was a bestseller in his
time and it was a kind of
philosophical novel that helped-
that explored many of his ideas.
He was the composer of an
opera, Le Devin du
Village, that was performed
at the court of Louis XV.
He also wrote several very
important and interesting
volumes of autobiography,
the most--the best known of
which is simply called
Confessions after the
work of Saint Augustine of the
title--a book of the same name
and he also wrote another volume
of autobiography in a dialog
form called Rousseau Juge de
Jean Jacques in which he
divides himself up into two
different people,
Rousseau and Jean Jacques,
in a kind of internal
interrogation of himself.
Rousseau wrote in many and
varied genres and his work spans
the entire gamut of
philosophical,
literary and political themes.
He was also the writer of
different constitutional
projects.
He was consulted by heads of
state in his period and wrote
constitutions for Poland and for
the small island country of
Corsica which he said in the
Social Contract was the
only place in Europe that one
might expect great things and of
course he was right as anybody
knows,
a generation or two later the
famous Corsican,
yes, who put an end…Who am I
talking about?
Napoleon, of course.
You might say he was right.
He helped to substitute the
general's will for the general
will but that was Rousseau.
People have been very baffled
by exactly the nature of
Rousseau's contributions.
What did he believe?
What did he stand for?
What do his writings represent?
Was he a revolutionary whose
work helped to inspire the
radical phases of the French
Revolution?
Just remember,
for example,
you've probably all heard the
famous opening sentence of the
Social Contract,
"man is born free but is
everywhere in chains," his
appeal to the severe political
ethics of ancient Sparta and
Rome as well as his belief that
the people,
in their collective capacity,
are the only legitimate source
of sovereignty.
All of these seemed to pave the
way for the revolutionary
politics of the late eighteenth
century and up into our own
time.
So is Rousseau a kind of
incendiary and revolutionary or
did his writings seek to release
us altogether from the bonds of
society as he appears to do in
the Second Discourse,
in the Discourse on
Inequality?
In this work,
Rousseau seems to lay the basis
for the kind of romantic
individualism that would be
associated with people like
Wordsworth in England or Henry
David Thoreau in America.
Rousseau's direct appeals to
Nature as well as his
celebration of the simplicity of
peasant life and rural life
seemed to open the door later on
to writers like Tolstoy as well
as to various kinds of social
experiments in rural communal
utopianism such as,
for example,
the Israeli kibbutz movement,
which is in its own way a
direct descendant of Rousseau.
So my suggestion is Rousseau's
writings are varied and his
influence has been manifold,
to say the least.
He both helps to bring to
fruition and completion the
political and intellectual
movement that we know as the
Enlightenment.
He brings this to its highest
phase of perfection,
in many ways,
and at the same time he was a
severe critic of the
Enlightenment.
He was a close friend and
associate of men like Diderot,
who was the general editor of
the Encyclopedia,
the great French contribution
to the age of the Enlightenment,
and yet he excoriated the
progress of the arts and the
sciences and worried about their
effect on the moral life of
communities.
He was a writer who wore
different hats.
He defended what he called the
savage, sauvage,
against the civilized man.
He took the side of the poor
and the dispossessed against the
elites and he adopted the
posture of the loyal son and
citizen of Geneva against the
sophisticated Parisian
intellectuals of his time.
So who was Rousseau and what
did he stand for?
That's what I want us to begin
to try to find out a little
about today.
The Second Discourse,
the Discourse on
Inequality,
is in the eyes of many readers
Rousseau's greatest work.
I'm not sure if that's true but
many people believe it is.
It is what writers in the
eighteenth century called a
conjectural history.
It is, that is to say,
a kind of philosophical
history, really that is to say a
philosophical reconstruction of
history,
but not of what actually
happened in the past.
It's not a history of facts and
dates but it is a history
Rousseau believes of what had to
have happened for,
in a way, human beings to
evolve to their current
condition.
Rousseau begins the work by
comparing the effects of history
on us to the statue of Glaucus
that he says the winds and
storms had so disfigured that it
scarcely looked like a human
being at all.
This is what history and time
has done to us.
It has so affected and
transformed human nature that if
we want to understand what human
nature really is,
he argues, it is necessary to
reconstruct it through a kind of
thought experiment.
Rousseau compares the
Second--Oh,
God.
Oh, dear.
All right.
Rousseau--Bad to laugh at your
own jokes.
He compares the Second
Discourse to an experiment
like those undertaken by
physicists and cosmologists in
his own day who speculate about
the origins of the universe in
the same way that he is
speculating about the original
condition of human nature.
That is to say,
there is no empirical or
physical evidence to draw on to
understand how the world was
actually framed.
We can only make,
he says, intelligent guesses,
certain inferences or
conjectures based on the
evidence that we find around us.
And so Rousseau remarks,
in one of the most arresting
passages from his book,
and Rousseau was a man known
for writing arresting
paradoxical and ingenious
sentences,
he writes, "let us therefore
begin by putting aside all the
facts, let us put all the facts
aside for they have no bearing
on the case.
The investigation that may be
undertaken concerning this
subject should not be taken for
historical truths,"
he says, "but only for
hypothetical and conditional
reasonings."
In other words,
what he's saying is that the
history that he intends to
unfold is an experiment much
like,
again, that undertaken by
geologists who try to infer the
development of plant or animal
life from the existence of
certain fossil remains or
skeletal remains.
And yet, at the same time,
while Rousseau speaks of his
work as tentative,
experimental,
conjectural,
he has only hazarded some
guesses, he writes,
you cannot help but be struck
by the certain tone of
confidence with which he
presents his findings.
In particular,
he discusses and rejects quite
emphatically the investigations
of his predecessors both ancient
and modern.
"The philosophers," he writes,
"who have examined the
foundations of society have all
felt the necessity of returning
to the state of nature but none
of them has reached it,"
Rousseau says.
He believes that he alone has
finally, as it were,
struck gold.
"Oh, man," he exclaims,
"oh, man, whatever country you
may be from, whatever your
opinions may be,
listen.
Here is your history as I have
thought to read it,
not in the books of your fellow
men who are liars but in nature
who never lies."
That's a remarkable sentence.
For the first time,
Rousseau says,
human nature will be revealed
and the history of civil society
explained to us.
Listen.
Here is your history,
as I have read it,
not through other books but
through nature,
he says, that seems to speak
directly to me or to which I
have an insight.
So what is the state of nature,
a term that we've been looking
at in Hobbes and Locke?
What is it that Rousseau thinks
he has found that that eluded
his predecessors?
In many ways we have already
seen, I've already suggested.
Rousseau follows in the
footsteps of his great
predecessors,
particularly Hobbes and Locke,
in attempting to understand the
original condition by referring
to this hypothetical or
conjectural state of nature.
In many ways,
he praises and follows Hobbes
and Locke in doing this but
suggests that they never really
took the problem of nature
seriously enough.
What does it mean,
Rousseau seems to ask us,
to take nature,
human nature,
the state of nature,
what does it mean to take
nature seriously?
Again to understand it,
to understand human nature,
what it originally is,
is to conduct a sort of thought
experiment where we peel away
almost like the layers of an
onion,
everything that we have
acquired through the influence
of time, of history,
of custom and tradition,
in order to discover what is
naturally there.
So when Hobbes tells us or when
he attributes to natural man
certain warlike propensities,
Rousseau figures that this
cannot be right.
War and the passions that give
rise to war can only come into
being once we are in society.
The state of war is really
simply the state of society.
This cannot be told for natural
man because the natural
conditions had no social
relationships of this sort and
you might say his statement was
ditto for John Locke.
When Locke attributes to us in
the state of nature certain
qualities of rationality,
of industry,
of acquisitiveness.
These too, Rousseau complains,
are only qualities that we can
acquire in the light of society.
Property entails social
relations between persons,
relations of justice and
injustice, and man in a state of
nature is not a social animal.
So it is clear for Rousseau
that human nature is something
infinitely more remote and
strange than any of his
predecessors had ever imagined.
What was the condition of
natural man?
Rousseau's captivated readers,
in his time and since,
by showing that the original
condition of human nature was
far more like an animal than
anything identifiably or
recognizably human.
Rousseau takes great delight in
animalizing human nature,
animalizing us.
When Aristotle said that man is
the rational being because we
possess speech or logos
Rousseau says "wrong again."
Language is dependent upon
society and could only have
developed over literally
thousands of generations and
cannot be a property of natural
man.
Human nature is little
different from animal nature
and, in many ways,
Rousseau delights in…you can
see this in his footnotes in
particular…in investigating
stories about orangutans and
other species that he believes,
in many ways,
are our distant ancestors.
You might say,
a century before Darwin,
Rousseau could just have easily
entitled his second discourse
On the Origins of the
Species.
In many ways,
the whole science of
evolutionary biology is already,
in many ways,
implicit here and yet for all
of our features,
our common features with other
species,
Rousseau specifies two
qualities that set us apart.
The first is the quality of
freedom or what he calls free
agency although he understands
this in a very specific way.
Let me read a relevant or
crucial passage.
"In any animal," Rousseau
writes, "in any animal I see
nothing but an ingenious machine
to which nature has given senses
in order for it to renew its
strength and to protect itself
to a certain point from all that
tends to disturb it.
I am aware of precisely the
same thing in the human
machine."
In other words,
he says animals are just simply
little machines that operate by
mechanical or physical impulses
and needs and desires and the
same is true,
he says, in the human machine
with this difference,
"that nature alone does
everything in the operations of
an animal whereas man
contributes as a free agent to
his own operations."
What does he mean there in
saying that man is a free agent?
This idea of free agency in
many ways sounds similar,
and indeed it is similar,
to Hobbes and Locke,
both of whom who said freedom
of will, some kind of freedom is
a characteristic of natural man
or natural pre social man.
But Rousseau seems to add to
this something different.
Freedom for Hobbes or Locke
simply means the freedom to
choose to do this or that,
the freedom to exercise the
will and not to be interfered
with by others around us.
Rousseau also believes that but
in many ways he adds something
else to it.
He connects freedom,
in this same passage,
to what he calls the phenomenon
or the quality,
the faculty of perfectibility,
perfectibilité.
What does he mean in connecting
freedom with what he calls
perfectibility?
Perfectibility,
for Rousseau,
suggests an openness,
a sort of virtually unlimited
openness to change.
We are the species who not only
have the freedom to do this or
that but we are the species who
have the freedom,
as it were, to become this or
that.
And it is our very openness to
change that accounts for our
mutability over time.
As a species,
in other words,
we are you might say,
uniquely undetermined,
meaning that our nature is not
confined in advance to what it
may become;
rather, our nature,
for Rousseau,
is uniquely suited to alter and
transform itself as
circumstances change and as we
adapt and adopt to new and
unforeseen situations.
Perfectibility for Rousseau is
not so much a feature of the
individual as it is of the
species.
And again, whereas Hobbes or
Locke assumed that human nature
itself remained more or less
constant in the transition from
what they called the state of
nature to the civil state,
Rousseau believed that human
nature has undergone manifold
revolutions as he called it over
the source of time.
What we are at any one phase of
human history or human evolution
will be very,
very different from what we are
at any other particular phase.
And it is this what he calls
distinctive and unlimited
faculty that he says is also the
source of all of our
misfortunes.
So when he says that we are
characterized by freedom and
associates freedom with
perfectibility,
he doesn't necessarily mean by
"perfectibility" that which
perfects us.
He also says it is that which
is at the source of our miseries
and our discontents.
In many ways,
if you wanted to give this book
another title I've already
suggested one for it,
The Origin of the
Species.
It could just as well have been
called more than a century
before Freud,
Civilization and its
Discontents,
which is many ways Freud's
attempt to rewrite Rousseau's
account of the evolution of the
human species.
But Rousseau notes,
in this same part,
that freedom or perfectibility
is not our sole natural
characteristic although it is
responsible,
in some way,
for almost everything that we
have become.
Everything that we have become
is due to this openness to
change.
In addition to perfectibility
and freedom is the quality that
Rousseau calls pitié,
or pity, compassion,
and here is,
in a sense, Rousseau at his
most characteristic.
You could say,
here is Rousseau,
the founder of Romanticism.
Man is not the rational animal,
the thinking being,
the being with logos,
but we are the sensitive
creature.
Rousseau finds all kinds of
evidence for assuming that
compassion is part of our
original nature.
He notes, in other species,
a reluctance to witness the
pain or suffering of another of
its own kind,
how an animal will not wish to
walk near a dead member of its
own species.
That seems to indicate to
Rousseau, even in the other
species, a kind of natural core
of compassion or pity.
The fact that we cry at the
misfortunes of others who have
nothing to do with us is
evidence of our original
sensitivity.
Do we not enjoy crying in
movies?
Has someone in here ever cried
in a movie?
Yeah, I thought we all have.
Even at people or objects that
don't exist.
Did we not feel pity for King
Kong when we saw that movie?
Did we not feel pity for a
fictional creature that could
not exist but yet whose fate
somehow affected us in some way?
And Rousseau completely
understands this.
In giving man tears,
Rousseau writes,
nature bears witness that she
gave the human race the softest
of hearts.
Man is a sensitive creature,
so much so that Rousseau finds
evidence in this for what he
believes is our natural
goodness.
The natural goodness of man in
the state of nature is to some
degree borne out by this quality
of pity or compassion that we
even share with other species.
Why does Rousseau emphasize
this quality?
Because it is deeply important
to him.
You might say long before Dr.
Phil and thousands of other
self-help gurus and self-help
manuals, Rousseau taught us to
get in touch with our feelings.
While natural man may be
compassionate and kind,
however, that sentiment,
he tells us,
is easily overpowered by more
powerful passions once we enter
society, once we become
civilized or socialized.
We cease, once we are in
society, to care about others
and we become calculating and
mercenary in other motives.
Selfishness and egoism are in
fact reinforced for him by the
development of reason.
Reason, he writes,
is what engenders egoism and
reflection strengthens it.
The development of rationality,
he thinks, simply hastens our
corruption by the assisting in
the development of different
vices and the task of the
Second Discourse,
at least its rhetorical task,
is in many ways to recover our
natural selves,
compassionate,
gentle, kind,
from the artificial,
corrupt and calculating selves
we have all become in civil
society.
And who can't read that in
Rousseau without realizing that
there is a significant germ of
truth in what he says?
Did Rousseau believe it
possible then or desirable to
return to the state of nature,
to return to some kind of
prelapsarian condition before
the beginnings of civil society?
He is frequently read as saying
this.
When Voltaire wrote--read,
rather, the Second
Discourse, he said,
"never has so much intelligence
been expended in the attempt to
turn us back into brutes" and
that is clever but it's not
really right.
Voltaire surely knew that 150
years before Rousseau,
there was a French writer by
the name of Montaigne,
Michel de Montaigne,
who had written an important
essay called On Cannibals
in which he described Indian
tribes off the coast of Brazil
whom he praised against the true
savagery and barbarism of their
European conquers.
When he calls that essay,
that famous essay,
Michel called--Montaigne calls
it Of Cannibals,
it is an open question of who
the cannibals are.
Are they the natives of the
Brazilian coast or are they
again the European conquerors?
And Montaigne,
like Rousseau but a century or
more before, praised,
in many ways,
the qualities and the
capacities of these
sauvage that he
discovered and contrasted them
to the bloodthirsty cruelty of
the Europeans of his own day.
Rousseau was deeply influenced
by this particular essay and
it's a short essay and I would
suggest at some point when you
have a chance you read it.
But in any case,
Rousseau makes it plain that a
return to the state of nature or
some kind of pre-social or
pre-civil state is no longer an
option for civilized beings.
In one of the footnotes,
and I encourage you to read the
footnote, very important
footnotes in his book,
Rousseau writes,
"What then?
Must we destroy societies,
annihilate thine and mine and
return to live in the forests
with the bears?
A conclusion," he writes,
"in the style of my
adversaries, which I prefer to
anticipate rather than to leave
to them the shame of drawing."
And, he says,
in other words no,
we can't do that.
A return to the state of nature
is impossible for us for the
same reason it would be like
returning a domestic animal back
to the wild.
They and we have simply lost
our instinct for
self-preservation.
It has been dulled by continual
association and dependence on
others.
We would not last a single day.
So if a return to nature is
impossible, the only alternative
in some way is to remain in
society.
But before we can learn how to
live in society,
Rousseau wants to tell the
story of how it is man became
civilized so to speak,
how the transition from nature
to culture or from nature to
society in fact occurred.
In one sense,
Rousseau's account of this
story can be given in a single
word: Property.
The first sentence of Part II
of the Discourse reads as
follows: "The first person who
having enclosed a piece of land,
took it into his head to say
this is mine and found people
simple enough to believe him was
the true founder of civil
society."
Locke would certainly agree,
in some respects,
but Rousseau continues as
follows.
"What crimes,
wars, murders,
what miseries and horrors would
the human race have been spared
had someone pulled up the stakes
or filled in the ditch and cried
out to his fellow men do not
listen to this impostor.
You are lost if you forget that
the fruits of the earth belong
to all and the earth to no one."
There you see,
in a germ, in many ways,
his repudiation of Locke.
Rousseau was not a communist
although this sounds very much
in some respects like Karl Marx.
He was not a communist.
He did not feel it was either
again possible or desirable to
do away with private property or
to collectivize property in the
manner of a Plato or a Marx but
there is no one of whom I am
aware who is a more acute
observer of the ills of class
and the effects of private
property than Rousseau.
He believed that there was
something deeply wrong with the
conception of government as the
protector of private property
that intervenes as little as
necessary with the affairs of
individuals leaving them simply
free to pursue life,
liberty and estate as they
would see fit.
Rousseau, in many ways,
points back to an older,
you might say classical
conception of government of the
ancient polis and ancient
republic,
one for which politics had the
task, among other things,
of supervising the pursuit and
acquisition of property,
mitigating the harshest effects
of economic inequalities.
And a single sentence from
Rousseau's first discourse,
The Discourse on the Arts
and Sciences,
in many ways,
says it all.
"Ancient politicians," he
wrote, "spoke only about morals
and virtues.
Ours speak only of commerce and
money."
That was Rousseau's complaint,
no talk any longer of civic
virtue and citizenship.
Locke's view,
recall from just a couple of
days ago, is that the
emancipation of acquisition
makes everyone better.
In Locke's famous formula,
a day laborer in England is
housed, clothed and fed better
than a king of the Americas.
And Rousseau believed that from
a strictly, you might say,
economic point of view there is
certainly a lot of truth to
this.
But he also realized that from
the economic point of view or
that the economic point of view
barely began to scratch the
surface of things.
Rousseau is far more impressed,
you might say,
by the proud dignity and
independence of the native
American king than with all the
luxuries and conveniences that
have made European kings and
even some European day laborers
soft and dependent,
in his word.
Rousseau was deeply impressed,
and again you see this in his
footnotes, with the kind of
inassimilable character of
native peoples,
Icelanders, Greenlanders,
Hottentots, he writes,
all of their refusal to
assimilate in many ways to
European religion and custom.
They prefer their "personal
independence," he writes,
"to the comforts and luxuries
of modern civilization."
Consider the following passage,
which is one of the passages I
love in this book that comes
from his footnotes.
He says, "savages have often
been brought to Paris,
London and other cities.
People have been eager to
display our luxury,
our wealth and all our most
useful and curious arts to them.
None of this has ever excited
in them anything but a stupid
admiration without the least
stirring of covetousness.
I recall, among others,
the story of a chief of some
North Americans who was brought
to the court of England about 30
years ago," he writes.
"A thousand things were made to
pass before his eyes in an
attempt to give him some present
that could please him but
nothing was found about which he
seemed to care.
Our weapons seemed heavy and
cumbersome to him.
Our shoes hurt his feet.
Our clothes restricted him.
He rejected everything.
Finally, it was noticed that
having taken a wool blanket,
he seemed to take some pleasure
in wrapping it around his
shoulders.
‘You will agree at least,'
someone immediately said to him,
‘on the usefulness of this
furnishing.'
‘Yes,' he replies,
‘this seems to be nearly as
good as an animal skin.'
However," Rousseau says,
"he would not have said that
had he worn both of them in the
rain."
And there's kind of Rousseau's
sense of the virtue,
again.
The proud independence,
of the native of the
sauvage, as he calls him,
to the decadence,
the corruptness,
the softness of the modern
European.
Rousseau's assertion that
market economies and the
governments that protect them do
in a sense make all people
better off and yet despite this
fact he realized that market
economies also introduced vast
inequalities between human
beings and this is a trade off
that Rousseau seemed unwilling
to make or wished to make even
though I would have to say most
Americans seem fairly happy with
this trade off perhaps because
we have--we either are or have
become kind of natural Lockeans
but that,
again, is a bargain or a
tradeoff that Rousseau was at
least unwilling to accept.
He was not only impressed with
what was gained by the progress
of civilization but more
impressed, so to speak,
by what was lost.
Its inequalities increase,
we are forced to become greedy,
calculating,
acquisitive,
again our natural pity or
compassion is easily overcome by
these more powerful passions.
What becomes of our original
goodness and natural decency?
Natural man,
for Rousseau,
thought of himself but only of
himself whereas civilized man is
forced to think of others but we
do only in a calculating and
mercenary way,
thinking of them as means to
our own ends.
Even the social bond itself,
even the social contract,
is simply an agreement among
business partners,
so to speak,
the most bourgeois of
institutions,
the contract.
The fact is Rousseau believes
under modern conditions natural
man is transformed into a
bourgeois.
Rousseau is one of the first to
use that term in quite that way.
Locke's rational and
industrious man was,
for Rousseau,
simply the calculating
bourgeois and unlike the natural
man,
who thinks only of himself,
or of the classical citizen of
Rome or Sparta,
who thinks only of the common
good and his public duties,
the bourgeois inhabits a kind
of halfway house,
neither capable of original or
spontaneous goodness nor of
political heroism or
self-sacrifice.
In short, our modern people
have become kind of nullities,
nowhere men,
nowhere man,
you might say,
in the title of the Beatles'
song.
How did that happen?
How did we become put in this
situation?
I have suggested one answer or
Rousseau suggests one answer,
the development of property.
But that's only part of the
story and what I want to do for
next week is tell another very
important,
in some respects even more
important, part of that story of
how we have become the way we
are.
So anyway, have a good weekend.
Go to the football game and
we're going to win against
Princeton.
 
