The Game of Justice: A Theory of Individual Self-Government

6. Rousseau on Self-Government: The Late Individualist Model of the Promeneur Solitaire

The End Is the Beginning At the end of his life, isolated, ill, and paranoid, Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined in the Tenth Walk of Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire what may have been the central obsession in an amply obsessed life, the task of “unraveling what there is of my own in my own conduct” (Butterworth 1982:141; emphasis added).1 Rousseau had initiated this existentially important inquiry in his early years with Mme. de Warens, but seems not to have faced it fully until the Rêveries , using the broad perspective that only old age can bring because then, and only then, the individual has a reasonably full set of data to work with, data to analyze with the paradoxical question in mind: What is there of my self, in myself ? That the question was still an open one for the aged Rousseau is astonishing , given the amount of time and literary effort he expended on himself, from the Confessions through the Dialogues. But it emphasizes Shklar’s interpretation of Rousseau, that his source of primary interest for us is not his political theory of the state: “for Rousseau politics was but a part of that study of the human heart that he had made his province,” and it is this study of the individual that is the “chief reason for his enduring relevance” (Shklar 1969:186–187).2 This suggests that republicanism and civic virtue may not be Rousseau’s major contribution to political philosophy, and that an individualist model is his ultimate solution to the paradoxes of political life. It is customary, among those students of Rousseau who allude at all to Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire to pass it over lightly (e.g., Wokler 1995), as the mutterings of a brilliant but old and neurotic man,3 and not therefore directly relevant to the larger republican argument of Rousseau’s oeuvre. Yet Rousseau Chapter Six Rousseau on Self-Government The Late Individualist Model of the Promeneur Solitaire 123 professes in this work, as does the disillusioned Emile in Les Solitaires, that he has achieved in this his final solitude the height of human happiness, and the Rêveries seem to refute,4 by their sharp contrast, such central precepts of the earlier model as that expressed in the Lettre d’Alembert, where “the only joy is public joy.” For the late Rousseau, joy is private and achieved through a radical selfknowledge that makes individual self-government possible. What Rousseau discovered in the Rêveries, as he admits not to have done in the Confessions (Butterworth 1982:43),5 was that self-knowledge is a more difficult thing than he had earlier recognized. Knowing what one has done, even in a life as eventful as Rousseau’s, does not explain why one has done it. Without understanding the underlying principles of action, Rousseau argues that one is living, in effect, with a stranger who is beyond one’s reach and potentially disruptive of one’s stability. To us this may recall Freud, but Rousseau’s approach is civic rather than clinical.6 Self-knowledge as Rousseau defines it in the Rêveries is open-ended, empirical (Reisert 2003:14), and self-conducted.7 The basic analytic strategy by which this result is achieved is, according to Rousseau’s demonstration, the disentangling of one’s self, as a social creation, from one’s own instinctive personal predilections. Only this analytic strategy of the self makes individual self-government possible. To focus on the political individual in Rousseau’s work cuts in a direction contrary to the more orthodox interpretations, which emphasize social unity and loss of the self in that perfect contractual sovereignty underlying the General Will. Yet Rousseau’s individualist model is equally a response to the question , which guides all of Rousseau’s inquiries, of how to achieve freedom and justice in a corrupt world, a question that goes back to the First and Second Discourses (Masters 1964). If one solution to Rousseau’s problem is to create a noncorrupt political system in which men as citizens may lose themselves in transparent total community, a second solution,8 also proposed by Rousseau, is the creation of a human individual who is able to live, alone, an uncorrupted life despite the corruption of the community, through the creation of an internal government.9 Particularly in the Rêveries, Rousseau suggests that such selfgovernment is a function of a radical method of self...