Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or, on Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
1. Travel rightly understood
As Rousseau has insisted throughout, “Too much reading only serves to produce presumptuous ignoramuses” (V.450). Parisians being among the most widely-read persons in the world, they stare at foreigners uncomprehendingly for the simple reason that they have only read about them. “One has to have seen the bourgeoisie of this great city close up and to have lived with them to believe that people with so much cleverness can be so stupid”; “a Parisian believes he knows men, and he knows only the French” (V.451). Parisians prove that books “are good for learning to babble about what one does not know” (V.451). For his part, Rousseau writes, “I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does not know men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived” (V.451).
Travel alone does not educate, however. The aristocratic and bourgeois practice of sending their young men on a ‘grand tour’ of Europe is another instance of stupidity. “There are many persons who are informed still less by travel than by books, because they are ignorant of the art of thinking,” incapable of “see[ing] anything on their own” (V.452). “It is necessary to know how to travel” (V.452). “The instruction that one extracts from travel is related to the aim that causes travel to be undertaken” (V.454). He who travels to confirm “a system of philosophy” will “never see anything but what he wants to see”; he who seeks profit learns only how to cut deals (V.454). Serious travel “is suitable for only very few people,” those “sure enough about themselves to hear the lessons of error without letting themselves be seduced and to see the example of vice without letting themselves be carried away” (V.455). If, as a wise man of antiquity said of ruling authority, it “shows the man,” “travel pushes a man toward his natural bent and completes the job of making him good or bad” (V.455). Power corrupts the already corrupt and ennobles the good because it releases him from many conventions, gives him freedom to act; travel does that, too, getting men away from the laws and customs of their own country, unmooring them. Inasmuch as most young men have been badly educated, “more men come back” from their travels “wicked than good, because more leave inclined to evil than to good,” “contract[ing] all the vices of the peoples they frequent and none of the virtues with which these vices are mixed” (V.455). But those, like Emile, “whose good nature has been well cultivated, and who travel with the true intention of informing themselves, return better and wiser than they left” (V.455). It is easy to imagine Chateaubriand and Tocqueville reading this passage.
Intelligent travel, then. But it isn’t enough to decide to gather information. “Everything that is done by reason ought to have its rules” (V.455). As a child, Emile learned about “his physical relations with other beings” and the limits those other natural beings impose upon him; in youth he learned “his moral relations with men,” the limits imposed by natural and conventional right (V.455). In young manhood he must “consider himself in his civil relations with his fellow citizens,” beginning “by studying the nature of government in general, the diverse forms of government, and finally the particular government under which he was born, so that he may find out whether it suits him to live there” (V.455). He is now a young adult, and so has the right to reaffirm or to renounce his citizenship. He has attained the age of self-government. Emile plans to establish a household. “This plan is laudable; it is one of man’s duties,” the governor tells him (V.456). “But, before marrying, you must know what kind of man you want to be, what you want to spend your life doing, and what measures you want to take to assure yourself and your family of bread. Although one ought not to make such a care his principal business, one must nonetheless think about it once.” (V.456).
Emile thinks, briefly, and avers that he only wants Sophie and a field to till. If he were alive today, he would say he wants only Sophie, a cellphone, and a laptop to tap on. The problem is exactly the same, however. Where will you till or tap? “In what corner of the earth will you be able to say, ‘Here I am master of myself and of the land which belongs to me?'” (V.457). Where can you go to find a place “where one can be independent and free” without needing to harm others or fearing harm? (V.457). Farming (or working at home with a cellphone and a laptop) brings more independence than most forms of employment. “But where is the state where a man can say to himself, ‘The land I tread is mine?'” (V.457). “Be careful that a violent government, a persecuting religion, or perverse morals do not come to disturb you there,” to say nothing of “boundless taxes that would devour the fruit of your efforts” and “endless litigation that would consume your estate” (V.457). Where, “above all,” can you go to “shelter yourself from vexation by the noble and the rich”? (V.457). You cannot maintain your property without political influence, and vice-versa. Political life is indispensable. In your travels you had better learn about politics, not from books so much as from citizens and subjects.
2. Knowledge of political right
“The science of political right is yet to be born, and it is to be presumed that it never will be born,” Rousseau writes, in a book published in the year The Social Contract was published, and as he prepares a condensed version of the argument he makes there for his pupil. “The only modern in a position to create this great and useless science was the illustrious Montesquieu. But he was careful not to discuss the principles of political right,” “content to discuss the positive right of established governments,” which is hardly the same thing (V.458). But to “judge soundly” what has been established, one must know “what ought to be” (V.458). The governor will interest Emile in this inquiry by guiding their travel with two questions: “What importance does it have for me?”—the familiar question of ‘what good is it?’—and “What can I do about it?”—the question of capability and limitation, again familiar to Emile from his childhood, on (V.458).
To this matter of judgment Rousseau adds a “second difficulty,” one that derives from “the prejudices of childhood, from the maxims on which one has been raised, and above all from the partiality of authors who always speak of the truth” while only thinking of “their interest” (V.458). This will not be so great a problem for Emile as it is for most. “He hardly knows what government is. The only thing important to him is to find the best one,” and his nearly book-free, opinion-free education has prepared him for that (V.458).
The third difficulty, “more specious than solid,” is that many will say that judging political conventions well is difficult, a hard task even for philosophers. Rousseau disagrees. “I am certain that in researches of this kind great talents are less necessary than a sincere love of justice and a true respect for the truth” (V.458).
How, then, to establish the standard of judgment, the principles of political right? This task requires not travel but thought. It is preliminary to travel. “By first going back to the state of nature, we shall examine whether men are born enslaved or free, associated with one another or independent” (V.459). Do they “join together voluntarily or by force”? (V.459). If by force, can this force “form a permanent right by which this prior force remains obligatory, even when it is surmounted by another,” or indeed whether it forms any right at all (V.459). Is force providential, therefore right because God ordains it? If force is indeed providential, and God ordains that we are ruled by a bad regime, have we the right to overthrow it. (Or as Rousseau puts it, “We shall examine whether one cannot say that every illness comes from God, and whether it follows from this that it is a crime to call the doctor.”) (V.459). Or does conscience oblige me to give my purse “to a bandit who demands it on the highway, even if one could hide it from him”? (V.459). “After all, the pistol he holds is also a power” (V.459). Indeed, can ‘power’ not be subdivided into ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ power, and consequently be made “subject to the laws from which it gets its being”? (V.459).
Rejecting “this right of force” for “the right of nature,” Rousseau identifies the right of nature with “paternal authority” (V.459). He suggests paternal authority has no greater extent than “the utility of the child, his weakness, and the natural love the father has for him” (V.459). At maturity the child becomes “the sole natural judge of what is suitable for his preservation” and therefore “his own master,” “independent of every other man, even of his father,” given the fact that “the son loves himself” even more than his father loves him (V.459). This rules out the kind of absolute patriarchal authority in families and in civil societies praised by Robert Filmer, among others.
Such independent individuals could form civil societies rightly “by choice,” only, their amour de soi directing them to form a “free and voluntary association” (V.459). No one can justly consent to a condition of unconditional slavery, which would be to “renounce his person, his life, his reason, his I, and all morality in his actions—in a word, [to] cease to exist before his death in spite of nature, which gives him immediate responsibility for his own preservation, and in spite of his conscience and his reason, which prescribe to him what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from doing” (V.460). And if a slave “cannot alienate himself without reserve to his master, how can a people alienate itself without reserve to its chief?” (V.460). As with individuals, so with groups of individuals: they remain judges of the freely consented-to social contract they have entered.
A people, then, consists not of an ethnic or linguistic community but a group of individuals who have formed either an explicit or a tacit contract with one another. “The social contract is the basis of every society,” whatever its regime may be (V.460). “The tenor of this contract” is simply stated: “Each of us puts his goods, his person, his life, and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and we as a body accept each member as a part indivisible from the whole” (V.460). This collective body is a moral entity, its powers limited by the natural rights it should be designed to protect. “This public person, understood generally, takes the name body politic; its members call it state when it is passive, sovereign when it is active, and power when it is compared to other bodies politic. Speaking of the members collectively they take the name people; individually they are called both citizens, as members of the city or participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects, as subject to the same authority.” (V.460). This implies “a reciprocal commitment of the public and the individuals”—ruling and being ruled (V.460). There being “no common superior who can judge their differences,” the individual and the body politic remain the only ones entitled to break the contract (V.461)—by self-exile in the case of the individual, by expulsion of the individual by the body politic. Since “the individuals have subjected themselves only to the sovereign, and the sovereign authority is nothing other than the general will…each man who obeys the sovereign obeys only himself,” making himself “more free under the social pact than in the state of nature,” where he needed to guard himself against other individuals who also respected no ruling authority (V.461).
The general will must indeed be general, not particular. For example, the sovereign authority “has no right to touch the possessions of one or more individuals” but it “can legitimately seize the possessions of all, as was done at Sparta in the time of Lycurgus” (V.462). Debt forgiveness, which aims at a particular group, is outside the legitimate power of the sovereign authority. That is, all laws must be truly general, applicable to all citizen-subjects. “The sovereign never has the power to make any statute applying to a particular object,” although of course in enforcing its laws the sovereign acts on individuals and groups (V.462). The executive should be elected by the sovereign people. This will put some constraint on the dangerous power to act on individuals, inasmuch as “the particular will” of the individual who wields that power “will often be contrary to the general will,” as “private interest always tends to preferences, and the public interest always tends to equality” (V.462-463). Another constraint on executive power is the law, enacted by the general will.
Rousseau doubts not only that a people can have a rightful master but also whether it can have a rightful set of representatives. Even representative government involves particular wills too much in the formation of the laws by which those individuals, along with everyone else in the body politic, should be governed. Only small bodies politic can govern themselves without masters or representatives, and so it is hard “for a large populace to be its own legislator” (V.463). Rousseau proposes that the body politic, in its capacity as sovereign, must have no more power than the “power of the citizens, who are on the one hand subjects and on the other sovereigns” (V.463). This is because “the more the state expands, the more liberty diminishes,” and the citizens must have the power to resist encroachments on their rights, including liberty (V.463).
There is also the opposite danger: The sovereign people might become corrupt. “The less the particular wills correspond to the general will—that is, the less morals correspond to laws—the more the repressing force ought to increase” (V.464). Such an increase in force doesn’t entail an increase in the number of government officials, however, as a bloated sovereign will only get in its own way. “The more the state expands, the more the government ought to contract, so that the number of chiefs decreases in proportion to the increase in the size of the people” (V.465). As a reader of Fénelon’s Telemachus, Rousseau admires the way Mentor advises King Idomeneus to single-handedly reform the morals of the people of Salente, which the king had allowed to become lax.
“From this we can draw the conclusion that there is not a single and absolute constitution of government, but that there ought to be as many governments differing in nature as there are states differing in size,” and in citizen virtue (V.464), although roughly speaking there are three main regime types: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. “The combinations of these three forms can give rise to a multitude of mixed forms, each of which is multipliable by all the simple forms” (V.466). Generally speaking, the larger the state the more it will require a small but powerful sovereign authority; an empire, for example, will likely require a monarch or “prince.” A medium-sized state should be an aristocracy. A small state can be a democracy, wherein “the particular and individual will ought to be almost nonexistent,” since all citizens participate in the formation of the laws in accordance to a general will that is readily determined by voting, with no need for representatives. Rousseau is no ‘idealist’; he recognizes that “according to the natural order” the particular will is always “preferred over all the others” (V.464). Under democracy, possible only in a small body politic, these self-loving particular wills coalesce into the general will by the act of voting directly on the laws that will govern them.
“By following the thread of these researches, we shall come to know what the duties and the rights of citizens are, and whether the former can be separated from the latter” (V.466). Emile will also know what a true “fatherland” is, a body politic that really does serve the utility with its citizens insofar as they are subjects, a body politic that doesn’t take advantage of the weakness of the individual citizen and that respects his amour de soi.
3. Guarding natural right in a world of sovereign “powers”
Given the diversity of size and moral character seen in the many peoples of the world, “we shall compare them in order to observe their diverse relations” (V.466). Travel is the best way to undertake what is now called ‘comparative political science’. Such study gives an intelligent purpose to travel. “Tyranny and war” are “the greatest plagues of humanity,” and even if the formation of bodies politic may lift men out of the perils of the state of nature the dangers such bodies pose to one another will make Emile wonder “whether it would be better to have no civil society in the world than to have many” (V.466). After all, in the state of nature an individual may hold himself in relative isolation from others, whereas in civil society he is subject to the depredations of foreign peoples, often organized for plunder or conquest. Moreover, if small bodies politic are the only ones amenable to the regime of democracy, the regime which best aligns particular wills with the general will, how will such small and therefore relatively weak entities defend themselves against the larger and often less just aristocracies and monarchies?
Typically, small bodies politic defend themselves by entering into leagues and confederations for mutual defense. “We shall investigate how a good federative association can be established, what can make it durable, and how far the right of confederacy can be extended without jeopardizing that of sovereignty,” a perennial problem in Europe seen in the proposal of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who “proposed an association of all the states of Europe in order to maintain perpetual peace among them” (V.466). Even if such an association could be established, would it last? Given the likelihood of war, “we shall lay down the true principles of the right of war,” which the main authority on the subject, Hugo Grotius, has failed to propound (V.467).
The governor now reveals the real reason why he has had Emile take Sophie’s copy of the Telemachus on this journey. In that novel, Fénelon has his hero visit a variety of cities, variously governed; he has him fight wars according to strict standards of natural right (no deception of the enemy, no countenancing of individuals from the enemy side who offer to betray their own country to you); he has his hero’s guide frame a just regime, a standard by which other regimes may be judged. However, “since Emile is not a king” like young Telemachus “and I am not a god” like Telemachus’ governor, Mentor, who is Minerva in human form, “we do not fret about not being able to imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good that they did for men. No one knows better than we do how to keep in our place, and no one has less desire to leave it” (V.467). Emile and the governor travel to learn but never intervene in the affairs of the peoples amongst whom they travel. Not only are they not kings, they do not aspire to be kings, even the best of whom “do countless real evils without knowing it for the sake of an apparent good” they believe they are doing (V.467).
Traveling to learn and not to rule or to teach, they will avoid the capital cities. “All capitals resemble one another. All peoples are mixed together in them, and all morals are confounded. It is not to capitals that one must go to study nations. Paris and London are but the same city in my eyes.” (V.468). Instead, we shall “go to the remote provinces, where there is less movement and commerce, where foreigners travel less, where the inhabitants move around less and change fortune and status less—in order to study the genius and the morals of a nation” (V.468).
For the ideal, Fénelon’s Telemachus. For the real, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. “One can do no better than have recourse to this work” to study “the necessary relations between morals and government” (V.468). For Emile, Rousseau again boils things down, offering “two easy and simple rules for judging the relative goodness of government” (V.468): population growth (or at least stability) and the even distribution of the population throughout the territory of the country. With respect to population growth, Rousseau stipulates that it be natural, not immigrant-based; a naturally growing population indicates general prosperity. With respect to population distribution, an even distribution indicates a predominantly agrarian population; “it is big cities which exhaust a state and cause its weakness”; indeed, “France would be much more powerful if Paris were annihilated” (V.469).
If you want to understand a people, get out of the cities. “You gain nothing by seeing the apparent form of a government disguised by the machinery of administration and the jargon of administrators if you do not also study its nature by the effects it produces on the people and throughout all the levels of administration” (V.469). Outside the cities you will see the land—quite literally, the country—and the people who live on it, “who constitute the nation” (V.469). What is more, “the closer they are to nature, the more [the people’s] character is dominated by goodness,” as Rousseau has made evident by his description of Emile’s education at every stage, his education in self-government by means of constant attention to things, to facts, to the limits imposed upon human passions and imaginings by nature, which is the true ‘governor’ or ‘tutor’ (V.469).
His travels completed, and “with a heart no less tender than it was before his departure, Emile brings back to [Sophie] a more enlightened mind, and he brings back to his country the advantage of having known governments by all their vices and peoples by all their virtues” (V.471). Having been introduced to “some man of merit” in each country he has visited, Emile will correspond with them regularly, a “useful and agreeable” practice which serves as “an excellent precaution against the empire of national prejudices which attack us through life and sooner or later get some hold on us” (V.471) by “giv[ing] us the means to pit one set of prejudices unceasingly against the other and thus to guarantee ourselves from them all” (V.471). And so Emile will be armed with another way to combat the sway of opinion, with its insistent appeals to amour-propre.
4. Combatting the apolitical
If anything, Emile returns from his travels more the ‘idealist’ than the ‘cynic,’ very far indeed from having been corrupted by foreign ways. He determines not to depend upon his inheritance. “Rich or poor, I shall be free. I shall not be free in this or that land, in this or that region; I shall be free everywhere on earth. All the chains of necessity are broken for me; I know only those of necessity.” (V.472). Death itself is no punishment but yet another “law of nature” (V.472). “Come, give me Sophie, and I am free.” (V.472).
The governor kindly brings another natural necessity to his pupil’s attention. “This extravagant disinterestedness does not displease me at your age. It will decrease when you have children.” (V.473). Yes, it is true that human laws and other conventions usually disguise “only individual interest and men’s passions” (V.473). And it is true that “the eternal laws of nature and order to exist,” taking the place of “positive law” for “the wise man” (V.473). They are indeed “written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason: It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free” (V.473). These truths notwithstanding, however, “where is the good man who owes nothing to his country?” (V.473). In the state of nature, a man would live “happier and freer”; he would be good but not, as the governor has emphasized before, lacking in virtue (V.473). “The public good, which serves others only as a pretext, is a real motive for him alone. He learns to struggle with himself, to conquer himself, to sacrifice his interest to the common interest.” (V.473). It is the laws which “have taught him to reign over himself,” although they have surely not made him free (V.473).
Therefore, Emile’s generous cosmopolitanism, his proto-Kantianism, will not suffice. You were born in civil society and you thereby contracted duties to it. “Your compatriots protected you as a child; you ought to love them as a man,” living among them, making yourself useful to them by living “where they know where to get you if they ever have need of you” (V.473-474).
Rousseau thus teaches aristocrats to prefer natural to conventional right while never abandoning civil society and their duties within it. He would have them abandon the great city, Paris, the palace at Versailles where absolute monarchs have drawn them in order to corrupt and rule them. Live, then, in the countryside with Sophie, but “do not let so sweet a life make you regard painful duties with disgust, if such duties are ever imposed on you,” as Roman Cincinnatus consented to be called from his plow to save the republic. And, of course, modern France being no ancient Rome under the republic, “if this function is onerous to you there is a decent and sure means to free yourself from it,” namely, “to fulfill it with enough integrity so that it will not be left to you for long” (V.474-475). “As long as there are men who belong to the present age, you are not the man who will be sought out to serve the state” (V.475). With the impending regime change Rousseau has predicted, however, who knows?
5. The married couple
Trusted, the governor advises Emile and Sophie on the right conditions of intimacy. To Emile he urges respect. “Obtain everything from love without demanding anything from duty, and always regard Sophie’s least favors not as your right but as acts of grace,” the grace of nature (V.477). “The lover who has delicacy and true love” will discern “his beloved’s secret will”; be guided by it (V.477). “Even in marriage pleasure is legitimate only when desire is shared” (V.477).
The next day, alone with Sophie, he explains why he said these things. It is true that “in becoming your husband, Emile has become the head of the house. It is for you to obey, just as nature wanted it”—it being recalled that men are physically stronger than women (V.478). “However, when the woman resembles Sophie, it is good that the man be guided by her. This is yet another law of nature.” (V.478). As I said yesterday, you will be “the arbiter of his pleasures”; this will “give you as much authority over his heart as his sex gives him over your person” (V.478). Accordingly, so long as “you reign over yourself” you will “reign over him” by means “of love”—if “you make your favors rare and precious,” never severe but modest, never cold but chaste (V.478-479).
This is how he will come to “give you his confidence, listen to your opinions, consult you about his business, and decide nothing without deliberating with you about it,” enabling you to “bring him back to wisdom”—very much in accordance with the meaning of her name—when “he goes astray,” leading him “by gentle persuasion” and “mak[ing] yourself lovable in order to make yourself useful” (V.479). The governor calls this “us[ing] coquetry in the interests of virtue and love to the benefit of reason” (V.479).
This is how a marriage can be made to endure. “Enjoyment wears out pleasures, and love is worn out before all others,” but if you can make it last for a while, “a sweet habit fills the void it leaves behind, and the attraction of mutual confidence succeeds the transports of passion” (V.479). “When you stop being Emile’s beloved, you will be his wife and his friend,” the mother of his children, “his other half to such an extent that he can no longer do without you” (V.479). The link the governor has forged between eros and agape (reconceived as natural), love and compassion, finds its embodiment in an (again natural) version of the Christian conception of the marital bond as ‘one flesh.’
Then, in front of them both, the governor announces, “Here my long task ends, and another’s begins,” Sophie’s task as Emile’s new “governor” (V.479). But when Sophie becomes pregnant with their first child, Emile invites the governor to remain, to “advise and govern us” both (V.480).
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