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Conclusion Questions about consistency have always dogged Rousseau’s writings, and not unreasonably. The Social Contract and Emile were written and published more or less contemporaneously,1 yet the former prescribes a severe “republic of virtue” stressing collective discipline, the subordination of the individual to the group, and the active promotion of “sentiments of sociability,” whereas the latter prescribes a form of life and education intended to cultivate the highest possible degree of individual integrity, authenticity, and independence. If Rousseau intended these two prescriptions to be in some way reconcilable, then he nowhere makes it clear exactly how.2 We have already seen that, in his Discourse on Political Economy, he praises both Socrates, the solitary gadfly in a corrupt city, and Cato, the model citizen of a virtuous republic. Both of these ideals, the Socratic and the Catonic, won Rousseau’s admiration. Such apparent inconsistencies abound in his works. It is little wonder, therefore, that many of his interpreters have concluded that, “[o]n the score of consistency ,” as C. E. Vaughan put it, “he is hardly to be acquitted.”3 Rousseau consistently prescribed both ideals because he believed that they apply to utterly different situations. He offered no single prescription for all circumstances. “If you are a Philosopher, live like Socrates,” he advised. “If you are only a Statesman, live like Cato” (“Comparison of Socrates and Cato,” in SC, 15).4 He admired Montesquieu’s pragmatism and took from him the lesson that prescriptions must take into account the varied contexts to which they apply. In ancient Athens Socrates had no fatherland since his native city was by then “already lost.” The same is true of modern Europe, where a few rare individuals on the fringes of society might follow the Socratic path of personal integrity to preserve their virtue and authenticity in the vast ocean of vice that surrounds them. That is the best that can be hoped for under such disastrous conditions. Rousseau imagined himself to be in such a position, and interpreted his 117 persecution at the hands of both the philosophes and their orthodox opponents in such terms.5 Yet in his essay on The Government of Poland—published a decade after Emile—Rousseau holds up the Catonic ideal to the Poles, as he had done to the Genevans and the Corsicans, since he judged that virtue had some hope of success on a national scale on those fringes of Europe not yet wholly corrupted by “civilized” values. But they were rare exceptions. We know that Rousseau was profoundly and increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for virtue on such a scale. That is why the Socratic ideal of personal integrity and individual virtue are central to his last works—the Confessions, the Dialogues and the Reveries. They are best read as applying to uncorrupted individuals who live in conditions of generalized vice, like Socrates among the Athenians. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau’s favorite novel and the model for the young Emile, eventually became his own personal model in the last years of his life, as his pessimisism and social estrangement became as complete as the corruption he perceived around him. He later looked back on the rustic isolation of the Isle de Saint-Pierre, where he lived in 1765, as among the happiest days of his life, confirmation of his claim in Emile that a “truly happy being is a solitary being” (E, 22 [OC IV, 503]).6 The tragic sequel to Emile that Rousseau began in 1762 was subtitled “Les Solitaires,”7 and his last work, begun two years before his death, was Reveries of a Solitary Walker, in which he recounts the pain of his social life and the pleasures and solace of solitude. Both the Socratic and Catonic ideals that Rousseau prescribed were incompatible with the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is quite clear in the Catonic works such as The Social Contract, the Letter to d’Alembert, the Discourse on Political Economy, The Government of Poland, and the Constitutional Project for Corsica. One thing that makes Rousseau distinctive within the classical republican tradition is the intensity of his opposition to the Enlightenment.8 These days, we are used to republicanism being contrasted with liberalism, not “enlightenment,” and the most common criticisms of the latter have very rarely come from a republican direction. Of course there are many forms of republicanism, ranging from the solidaristic anti-pluralism of classical republicanism to the rational-discursive liberal republicanism favored by many contemporary...

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