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Rousseau and the Fall of Social Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Anthony Skillen
Anthony Skillen
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Extract

As ideas and feelings succeeded one another, and heart and head were brought into play, men continued to lay aside their natural wildness; their private connections became ever more intimate as their limits extended. They accustomed themselves to assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of men and women thus assembled together with nothing else to do. Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice. From these first distinctions arose on the one side vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these heavens ended by producing combinations fatal to innocence and happiness.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 231 , January 1985 , pp. 105 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

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References

1 J., J. Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1913 (1935)), 213. ‘Distinctions’ in the last sentence is Cole's translation of ‘préférences’. Whatever the origin of the inequality of recognition accorded the Second Discourse and the Social Contract, the fact is that the Everyman edition has now gone out of print, while Penguin now has The Social Contract without its subversive accompaniment. Maurice Cranston's new translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) will fill the gap.Google Scholar

2 Op. cit. 214.

3 E., Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau, Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1960), 81.Google Scholar

4 Rousseau, op. cit. 233.

5 G., della Volpe, Rousseau and Marx (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978).Google Scholar

6 M., Einaudi, The Early Rousseau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 118.Google Scholar

7 J., Plamenatz, Man and Society (London: Longmans, 1963), Vol. 1, 377 (footnote).Google Scholar

8 Rousseau, op. cit. 197 (footnote).

9 R., D. Masters, Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 139-140.Google Scholar

10 R., Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 37.Google Scholar

11 K., F. Roche, Rousseau, Stoic and Romantic (London: Methuen, 1974), 35.Google Scholar

12 Rousseau, op. cit. 234.

13 Op. cit. 232.

14 J., Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 1974), 26.Google Scholar

15 Op. cit. 30.

16 C. Cherry, ‘How Differences Make a Difference’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XLI (1980-81), 64-92, 78.

17 Op. cit. 81.

18 Rousseau, op. cit. 197.

19 Op. cit. 212.

20 E., Rapaport, ‘On the Future of Love: Rousseau and the Radical Feminists’, in Women and Philosophy, C. Gould and M. Wartofsky (eds) (New York: Capricorn, 1976).Google Scholar

21 Rousseau, op. cit. 201.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Philip Robinson has pointed out to me that Rousseau's language in this whole paragraph had to his French readers the direct sexual sense that the context should anyway have led readers of the ambiguous English translation to grasp. ‘Objects’ quite simply meant female ‘love objects’ or ‘objects of sexual desire’ while ‘transient commerce’ ‘among young people of opposite sexes’ should not be thought of as occasional barter but as sexual intercourse, euphemistically but clearly signified. Rousseau, in other words, is straightforwardly placing sexual love at the ‘origin’ and this is where ‘singing and dancing’ get their impulse. See Philip Robinson, ‘Rousseau's Second Discours: Preciosity, Politics and Translation’, French Studies Bulletin (1984).

26 Rousseau, , Emile, trans. Foxley (London: Everyman, 1911 (1974)), 175.Google Scholar

27 E., Goffman, ‘Role Distance’, in Encounters (Aylesbury: Penguin, 1972), 94.Google Scholar

28 I would invite comparative reflection on the following paragraph in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, for it expresses the flowering of Romantic Humanism and is forced to acknowledge a tragic consequence: Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically-cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune (Moscow, 1961, p. 14). This, not surprisingly, is the last paragraph of the section on Money, and marks an awareness, never allowed to develop, of problems of ‘non-economic’ ‘poverty’.

29 Rousseau, Discourse, 218.

30 Ibid.

31 Op. cit. 237.

32 Emile, 191.

33 Cherry, op. cit. 81.

34 Op. cit. 86.

35 Given what Rousseau says in his Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre the erotic connection, even for those still sceptical of the intention of the Discourse, is hard to resist. Rousseau proposed to d'Alembert a Civic Ball in which young unmarried men and women can ‘show themselves off with the charms and faults which they might possess, to the people whose interest it is to know them well before being obliged to love them’ (Politics and the Arts, trans. Allen Bloom (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1960), 128). Rousseau is forgetful enough of his anxieties about such events to propose a Queen of the Ball.

36 R., Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 243. Hobbes and Mandeville had earlier stressed self-esteem's power over self-interest, a dimension of bourgeois philosophy too often ignored by vulgar critics. I criticize Nozick's claim in Ruling Illusions (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1977), 48-53.Google Scholar

37 Discourse, 210.

38 Emile, 10.

40 Op. cit. 332-333.

40 Op. cit. 331.

41 Op. cit. 328.

42 G. Lloyd, ‘Rousseau on Reason, Nature and Women’, Metaphilosophy (July/October 1983) 308-326. This article focuses on the significance of Rousseau's sexual philosophy for his conception of reason and feeling.

43 Rousseau, op. cit. 442-443.

44 Chris Cherry, John Charvet, Genevieve Lloyd, Anthony Manser and Benjamin Gibbs made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.