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The Critical Function of Genealogy in the Thought of J.-J. Rousseau1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Frederick Neuhouser
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Abstract

This paper examines the kind of genealogical project Rousseau undertakes in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. It explains what it is for Rousseau to discover the “origins” of inequality and examines the normative implications of such an account, especially the relation his genealogical claims have to his critique of society. After arguing that the Discourse singles out l'amour propre as the psychological source of inequality, the paper reconstructs Rousseau's account of the origin of inequality and its criteria for judging the legitimacy of inequalities. It also highlights similarities among Rousseau's use of genealogy and later genealogical projects, such as Nietzsche's.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Summer 2012 , pp. 371 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Random House, 1967), preface, §6Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., preface, §3.

4 Ibid., II, §12.

5 Parenthetical references are by page number to the Pléiade edition of the Second Discourse, in Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Œuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin, Bernard and Raymond, Marcel, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95)Google Scholar. The translation is from Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 111–222Google Scholar, which incorporates the Pléiade pagination. I have amended this and other translations used in what follows slightly.

6 It is significant that in his examples of moral inequalities Rousseau fails to mention inequalities between men and women. These inequalities play a huge role in all of Rousseau's major works, yet they do not count among the inequalities he criticizes in the Second Discourse. Rousseau's views on gender inequalities are notoriously vexed and contradictory (as well as repugnant). Most glaringly, he fails to explain how or why the natural equality between the sexes in the original state of nature is transformed into large inequalities—presumably moral rather than natural—between them in the civilized state. Not surprisingly, he also fails to criticize them or regard them as illegitimate, even though by his own standards he ought to have.

7 Rousseau never uses exactly these words. But the idea is implicit in the original title page's citation of Aristotle—“it is not in corrupted beings but in those who live in accordance with nature [qui se comportent conformément à la nature; quae bene secundum naturam se habent] that one must seek what is natural”—as well as in the claims that the study of man is the “study of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duties” (OC, 3:126) and that “savage man … sensed only his true needs” (OC, 3:160).

8 This raises the question whether the normative account of human nature depends in some way on the descriptive account. I argue in detail that it does in “Die normative Bedeutung von ‘Natur’ im moralischen und politischen Denken Rousseaus,” in Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, ed. Forst, Rainer et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009)Google Scholar.

9 The dependence at issue here is not merely, perhaps not even primarily, economic. The presence of amour-propre means that there is also psychological dependence that threatens human freedom. This dependence stems from the second sense in which amour-propre is relative (see note 11 below): that humans depend on the opinions of others for the satisfaction of their need for recognition. Thus, Rousseau differs from Marx in holding that economic reforms alone cannot solve the evils depicted in the Second Discourse.

10 Despite what Rousseau suggests here, the aims of amour de soi are not restricted to self-preservation. The good that amour de soi inclines one to seek varies with one's self-conception; to the extent that one thinks of oneself as more than a physical being, the good one seeks will extend beyond the mere necessities of life. (See Dent, N. J. H., Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social, and Political Theory [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988], 98–103Google Scholar.) A more precise way of distinguishing amour de soi from amour-propre would be to describe the former's good as nonrelative (in precisely the two senses in which the latter is relative).

11 The other sense in which amour-propre is relative to other subjects is that the good it seeks depends on—consists in—the judgments of others. This plays an important role in Rousseau's larger theory of amour-propre but is less relevant to my concerns here. For more detail, see my Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 1Google Scholar.

12 “As soon as amour-propre has developed, the relative I is constantly in play, and the young man never observes others without returning to himself and comparing himself with them. The issue is to know what rank among his fellows he will put himself after having examined them” (Rousseau, J.-J., Emile, or On Education, trans. Bloom, Allan [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 243Google Scholar; OC, 4:534).

13 This thesis, together with the thesis about amour-propre's great malleability, comes from Cohen, Joshua, “The Natural Goodness of Humanity,” in Reclaiming the History of Ethics, ed. Reath, A., Herman, B., and Korsgaard, C. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108–11Google Scholar. These two theses play a large role in my argument.

14 It is important that, when it develops in the prepolitical state, the desire for equal standing does not replace but coexists with various forms of the desire for superior standing. The point here is merely that amour-propre is by its nature highly malleable and capable of assuming a large variety of forms. Rousseau clearly does not subscribe to the Hegelian claim that there is an inner dialectic to the drive for recognition that of its own accord, apart from “artificial” intervention, necessarily results in satisfying patterns of recognition in which individuals conceive of themselves first and foremost as beings of equal moral worth. The demand for equal consideration as reflected in the “duties of civility” never replaces the desire to be recognized (in other respects) as superior to others, and the former's presence in the prepolitical state does not eliminate the pathologies of recognition so vividly described in the Second Discourse.

15 I argue for this claim at length in Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy.

16 Rousseau, J.-J., The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), II.11.iiGoogle Scholar.

17 Ibid.

18 The basis for Rousseau's critique of the vices described in the Second Discourse is much more complicated than these brief remarks imply. The fact that vices, when possessed by many, make universal happiness and freedom impossible is sufficient to show that the moral inequalities that generate them are illegitimate; it does not imply that Rousseau has no independent moral grounds for condemning hypocrisy, greed, the lust to dominate, etc.

19 Rousseau uses “inflamed” and its variations only once to modify amour-propre (Emile, 247; OC, 4:537), but, following Dent, Rousseau, it has become standard practice to use the term, as I do here, to refer to amour-propre in any of its pernicious manifestations.

20 See Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy, chap. 4.

21 J.-J. Rousseau, Letter to Voltaire, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 234; OC, 3:1062.