Rousseau (Arguments of the Philosophers)

241 Pages·1999·1.61 MB·English

by  Timothy O'Hagan

ROUSSEAU
The Arguments of the Philosophers
EDITOR: TED HONDERICH
Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College
London
The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of
philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher or
school of major influence and significance.
Already published in the series:
*Augustine Christopher Kirwan
*J.L.Austin Geoffrey Warnock
Ayer John Foster
*Bentham Ross Harrison
*Bergson A.R.Lacey
*Berkeley George Pitcher
Butler Terence Penelhum
*Descartes Margaret Dauler Wilson
*Dewey J.E.Tiles
Gottlob Frege Hans Sluga
Hegel M.J.Inwood
*Hobbes Tom Sorell
*Hume Barry Stroud
*Husserl David Bell
William James Graham Bird
*Kant Ralph C.S.Walker
*Kierkegaard Alastair Hannay
Locke Michael Ayers
*John Stuart Mill John Skorupski
*G.E.Moore Tom Baldwin
*Nietzsche Richard Schacht
*Peirce Christopher Hookway
*Plato Justin Gosling
iii
*Plotinus Lloyd P.Gerson
*Karl Popper Anthony O’Hear
*The Presocratic Philosophers Jonathan Barnes
*Thomas Reid Keith Lehrer
*Russell R.M.Sainsbury
Santayana T.L.S.Sprigge
*Sartre Peter Caws
*Schopenhauer D.W.Hamlyn
*The Sceptics R.J.Hankinson
*Socrates Gerasimos Xenophon Santas
Spinoza R.J.Delahunty
*Wittgenstein (2nd edition) Robert J.Fogelin
*available in paperback
ROUSSEAU
Timothy O’Hagan
London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1999 Timothy O’Hagan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
O’Hagan, Timothy.
Rousseau/Timothy O’Hagan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
(hbk.: alk. paper)
1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. I. Title.
B2137.037 1999
194–dc21 98–13945
CIP
ISBN 0-203-03932-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-34463-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-04443-X (Print Edition)
FOR MY MOTHER BETTY O’HAGAN
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction. Rousseau: the life and the work 1
(A) Geneva: an eccentric upbringing (1712–28) 1
(B) Savoy and France: discovery and loss of love (1728–42) 1
(C) Paris, with Venetian interlude: formation of a writer, subverting the Enlightenment 2
‘from within’ (1742–55)
(D) Montmorency, Montlouis: the maturing of a genius (1756–62) 3
(E) Switzerland, England, France: years of exile (1762–70) 4
(F) Return to Paris: a life withdrawn (1770–8) 5
(G) Sickness and solitude 6
(H) The three axes of Rousseau’s thought 6
(I) Hume’s generous judgment 7
I Rousseau’s divided thought: the morality of the senses and the morality of duty 8
(A) Two themes in tension 8
(B) ‘Man is a naturally good creature’ 10
(C) ‘That great maxim of morality’ 11
(D) Contradiction 12
(E) Imagination and amour-propre 12
(F) Three strategies of identification 13
(G) Julie’s ‘Elysium’: dialectic of nature and art 15
(H) The perils of manipulation and bad faith 16
(I) ‘Virtue is a state of war’ 18
(J) The fate of the morality of the senses 20
(K) Romanticism and reason: two perspectives on the morality of the senses 20
viii
II The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men 23
(A) Time and ‘the sciences of man’ 23
(B) ‘Nascent man’ in the ‘pure state of nature’ 27
(C) Emergence from nature via the ‘combination of several extraneous causes’ 34
(D) Civil society, the specious contract and despotism 37
(E) Finale 39
III The Emile 41
(A) Introduction. Rousseau’s judgment on the Emile 41
(B) The form of the treatiselnovel 42
(C) Natural and social 43
(D) Negative education and the art of timing 45
(E) Reason and reasoning 47
(F) Reason: the method and the goal. Drawing and geometry 51
(G) Reason: the method and the goal. Physics 52
(H) Physics and morality: tricks with the conjuror 53
(I) Stoicism: reining in the imagination, closing the gap between desires and reality 54
(J) An education for autonomy. Stages of autonomy and authority 55
(K) Freedom, judgment, knowledge 57
IV The Social Contract: principles of right 60
(A) Introduction: the Social Contract, an uncompleted fragment 60
(B) Right and fact 62
(C) Nature and convention 63
(D) Errors of the predecessors 64
(E) The legitimate contract: free-riders and the ‘remarkable change in man’ 66
(F) Interests and rationality 69
(G) Legitimacy and property 70
V The empire of the laws: the general will and totalitarianism 75
(A) The empire of the laws 75
(B) Total alienation: the contractual basis of absolutism 76
(C) Conditions of emergence of the general will: no major inequalities, no factions 78
ix
(D) No factions: Rousseau’s anxiety concerning pluralism 81
(E) Voting procedures to guarantee the emergence of the general will 83
(F) Legal voluntarism 84
Appendix I Internal and external sanctions: the voice of conscience and the free-rider 86
Appendix II Interests, free-riders and the general will 89
Appendix III ‘Conventions’ and ‘contracts’ 89
VI The Social Contract: maxims of politics 92
(A) The people 92
(B) ‘Institutional systems’ 94
(C) ‘The form of government’ 94
(D) Maxims drawn from history: the inference from the existent to the possible 105
(E) Moeurs: laws ‘engraved in the hearts of the citizens’ 107
(F) Cosmopolitanism and ‘the little platoon’ 109
VII Amour-propre 112
(A) The genesis of amour-propre 112
(B) Amour-propre as the key to socialization: the Emile 115
(C) Amour-propre: positive pole 118
(D) Amour-propre: negative pole 119
(E) From positive to negative: the mechanism of degeneration 121
(F) Amour-propre, self-esteem, pride and vanity 123
(G) Towards an anarchic egalitarianism? 123
VIII Men and women 125
(A) An anthropology of identity: the Second Discourse 126
(B) A politics of difference: the Third Discourse 129
(C) A culture of difference: the Letter to d’Alembert 130
(D) A psychology of difference: the Emile 132
(E) An education for difference: ‘Sophie, ou de la femme’ 134
(F) The natural and the social 139
IX Language 140
(A) The search for origins in history and psychology 140