By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Scott, John T. Rousseau’s Reader: Strategies of Persuasion and Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020; 328 pages.
John T. Scott is a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. He has previously edited or translated the major political writings of Rousseau. The present volume is not a straightforward narrative of Rousseau’s thought, but is instead an almost line-by-line textual study of the major works, or should I say influential works, of Rousseau. Scott is mainly interested in the rhetorical and literary strategies Rousseau employs to present his thought.
Assessment of that thought varies. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, was willing to call Rousseau a philosophe in the eighteenth-century French sense but, says Russell, he was not what we would call a philosopher.
Judith Shklar, the distinguished Harvard University professor of philosophy, would agree. In her Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory, she writes: “Jean Jacques Rousseau was not a professional philosopher. He never pretended he was. His claim was that he alone [among his contemporaries] had been the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart.”
Jacques Maritain in his Three Reformers presents him as a spiritual writer in the mold of Luther and Calvin.
Call Rousseau what you will, his influence was great and lasting, leading immediately to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Rousseau’s Reader, apart from an introduction and a conclusion, consists of seven chapters. Four are devoted to Emile, the others are entitled, “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,” “Discourse on Inequality,” and “Reading The Social Contract.”
A pervading theme in Rousseau’s many writings is: Man is naturally good; it is our institutions — our social systems — that have made him wicked. The goodness of nature is self-evident from the order one finds in the natural world. “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of the world, everything degenerates in the hands of man. But the alleged goodness of human nature is not self-evident, given that civic education has denatured man by transforming him into a being who is consequentially defined only by his citizenship.”
“Political rights,” Rousseau will say in The Social Contract, derive not from nature but are founded on conventions. The nature of those conventions is determined by their purpose. Whereas Aristotle held that man is by nature a political animal, and furthermore that the polis is a natural condition for human fulfillment, Rousseau emphatically denies both claims and declares to the contrary:
“The political community is the result of an act of the will, a conventional body created for certain purposes. When men in a state of nature encounter obstacles to their self-preservation, they must form an association productive of a moral order.”
As Scott points out, “The social contract is not an act in the sense of an action that actually took place . . . but is instead what I might call a principle related to the political as such.” The general will when declared is an act of sovereignty and constitutes law. If it is merely a political will, an act of magistracy, it is at most a decree. Thus Rousseau distinguishes the general will from the will of all which is the sum of the political wills of the members generally.
Laws enacted by the sovereign people are necessarily general in form and application. The will of all is just a collection of private wills. The general will reflects the common good and what is best for all. The general will presupposes the existence of a generally accepted political and social ideal.
As Scott points out, it is most often associated with socialist traditions in modern politics.
Rousseau will argue that freedom and authority are not contradictory since legitimate laws are founded on the general will of the citizens. In obeying the law, the individual citizen is thus obeying himself as a member of the political community, exercising his personal freedom. Again, the purpose of Rousseau’s social contract was to dissolve the state. The civilized state, a product of the arts and science is responsible for moral degeneration and alienation of people from the mainstream of society. Why does Brussels come to mind?
Rousseau’s Reader may have been written primarily with a professional audience in mind, yet its relevance to the political world in the year of its publication could not have escaped its author.
John T. Scott is to be thanked for this in-depth study, which can be read with profit by the lay reader as well as by the professional philosopher.
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