Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment

Notes

Introduction 1. For a comprehensive overview of the intellectual history of the concept of judgment, see Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 1. 2. Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2. 3. Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 148. 4. One exception is Ryan Patrick Hanley, who gives sustained attention to Rousseau’s understanding of the workings of judgment in “Rousseau’s Virtue Epistemology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (April 2012): 239–63. Tracy B. Strong also emphasizes the centrality of judgment in the context of Rousseau’s critique of the theater in “Music, the Passions, and Political Freedom in Rousseau,” in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 92–110, esp. 104. 5. The notable exception is Benjamin Barber, who emphasizes Rousseau as an important resource for reinvigorating democratic politics in general and democratic political judgment in particular; see his Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). However, Barber’s account of Rousseau’s general will as a manifestation of democratic deliberation makes no mention of the problematic figure of the legislator, which many argue undermines his commitment to democratic freedom, as I discuss below. 6. For example, in his incisive defense of rhetoric and judgment, Bryan Garsten presents Rousseau as part of a modern project to disarm judgment in order to eliminate the inherent risk that judgment may be co-opted by the rhetorical wiles of demagogues or other dangerous political actors. Rousseau thus seeks to protect against the dangers of rhetoric by cultivating a nonrational patriotic fervor that internalizes an authoritative perspective in order to circumvent judgment while preserving a purely subjective sense of freedom. Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 7. Steven Johnston, for example, has argued that because Rousseau seeks to “choreograph ” the rhythms and motions of politics in advance, “force of habit . . . is the true foundation of Rousseau’s republic.” Johnston, Encountering Tragedy: Rousseau and the Project of Democratic Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 118–19. 8. Emile strikes some readers as no more autonomous than a puppet because he is so deeply manipulated by the tutor (and eventually by his beloved Sophie). With regard to Emile’s coming of age, Daniel E. Cullen, for example, states, “Emile has been properly ‘constituted’; his choice notes 198 L Notes to Pages 2–4 now is to remain what he ought to be. His act of volition is indistinguishable from one of submission . . . a wholly predictable compliance with authority.” Freedom in Rousseau’s Political Philosophy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 131. Similarly, David Gauthier remarks that “captivity of the will is at the core of Rousseau’s account of education,” which ultimately produces a freedom that is not genuine but rather “feigned.” Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36, 41. See also Lester Crocker, “Rousseau’s Emile: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” in Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century: Essays in Memory of R. A. Leigh, ed. Marian Hobson, J. T. A. Leigh, and Robert Wokler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101–15. 9. Jonathan Marks, for example, argues that while Emile does exercise a certain degree of autonomy, he does so only within the confines of a set of necessary prejudices, with which he is equipped to protect himself from corruption. Marks concludes from this that Rousseau is an “antiromantic ” who recognizes “that human health depends not upon our liberation from constraints and prejudices but, at least in most cases, on the imposition of new constraints and prejudices.” Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 129. 10. “For it cannot be denied that, as Rousseau presents it, the work of political education (which is the transformation of the self) occurs not in the continuing process of democratic deliberation but in the founding activity of the Legislator, which is later routinized in the permanent influence of moeurs. Rousseauian democratic politics is not an exercise in self-transformation because it depends upon a prior transformation of the self that occurs outside the legitimate boundaries of the political.” Cullen, Freedom in Rousseau’s Political Philosophy, 132. Similarly, Ruth W. Grant states that “in Rousseau’s view self-consciousness is simply not a necessary requirement for freedom...