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Chapter Four Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Republic of Virtue Introduction Given his deeply pessimistic social assumptions, Rousseau argues that sentiments must be fostered artificially by means of institutions and beliefs that systematically reshape the individual’s antisocial passions in a way that promotes the formation and strengthening of social bonds that do not arise spontaneously. “Good institutions,” he writes in Emile, “are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one but part of the unity and no longer feels except within the whole” (E, 40 [OC IV, 249]). By not only denying the naturalness of society but asserting the presence of powerful antisocial forces, Rousseau provided a pretext for the state’s active involvement in social life, as an agency for manufacturing sociability. The philosophes, by contrast, took sociability more or less for granted. They saw themselves as liberators of individuals from the fetters of tradition, social customs and religious intolerance , the crushing weight of which prevents us from using our natural powers to improve our condition and attain happiness in this life. To the extent that they relied on the state, it was to bring this condition of “enlightenment” about, and not directly to cultivate sociability, which they thought natural. Rousseau rejected the optimistic Enlightenment belief that the delicate equilibrium of society can be sustained primarily on the basis of natural sociability, reason, and the spontaneous harmony of diverse and competing interests. He viewed social life as, at best, an extremely precarious and unstable balance of forces. The philosophes, he held, are not only blind to this, but actually exacerbate it, whereas the institutions he prescribed would mitigate the powerful centrifugal tenden55 cies that constantly threaten social life with disintegration. That is why he regarded a harsh Spartan politics that sanctifies social life and promotes intense patriotic sentiments as the only effective means of artificially adapting naturally selfish individuals to society. Extending amour-propre Rousseau insisted that any solution (or partial solution) to the social predicament humans find themselves in must be based on an acceptance of the fact that individuals in society are necessarily dominated by amourpropre , the social form of amour de soi. However, he believed that it is possible to mitigate the social divisiveness of amour-propre by refocusing it, away from individuals and towards national communities. The “wellordered society” is one that maintains institutions, practices and beliefs that “lead us out of ourselves,” diffusing our individual selfishness throughout society and minimizing the distance between our particular interests and the common interests we share. By uniting individual wills and interests with the social will and the common interest in this way, amour-propre becomes an extended form of social, rather than individual, selfishness; love of oneself becomes love of ourselves. “Let us extend amour-propre to other beings,” Rousseau writes in Emile. “We shall transform it into a virtue” (E, 252 [OC IV, 547]). This extension of amour-propre is not meant to negate the interests of the individual, or to subordinate those interests to the community. Rather, Rousseau wished to redefine the individual good in terms of the public good, to turn individuals into citizens through an extension of individual amour-propre. This involves an enlargement of the each person’s affections and a reshaping of his or her interests and identity. For Rousseau, the most virtuous citizens, as found in ancient Sparta for example, are those for whom the distinction between the individual and the community cannot effectively be made. However, Rousseau warns that a global diffusion of amour-propre would be unable to generate a sufficiently strong bond of attachment between individuals to preserve social unity. “[T]he feeling of humanity evaporates and weakens as it is extended over the whole world,” he writes in his Encyclopédie article on “Political Economy” (1755). “Interest and commiseration must in some way be confined and compressed to be activated ” (DPE, 151 [OC III, 254–255]). According to this article, the optimal extension of amour-propre, one that mitigates the divisive effects of individual selfishness without completely dissipating it through overextension , focuses on the small patrie. Rousseau maintains that a strong sense of patriotic identity is crucial to counteract the strength of divergent wills by redirecting them, rather than actually repressing them, towards a 56 Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Republic of Virtue...

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