Progress?

In 1750, a group of eminent scholars known as the Academy of Dijon announced an essay competition on the following topic: ‘‘Has intellectual and economic progress contributed to the moral improvement of human- ity?’’² It is likely that Adam Smith would have answered “Yes.” The Swiss- born Jean Jacques Rousseau won the prize for an essay explaining his resounding “No!” He developed his argument in a number of essays and books, including The Discourse on Inequality written in 1754 and in The Social Contract and Emile, both published in 1762 and banned by authorities in France and Switzerland.

Rousseau gained sufficient celebrity from his work to circulate with the best known philosophers of Paris, including Voltaire and Diderot. He was invited to write the essay on Political Economy for the first major compendium of French knowledge, the Encyclopedia. Lacking social skills, he broke off from most of his friends, spending the last years of his life in solitary obscurity. He never married, and although many of his later writings elaborated at length on the correct methods of raising children, he never welcomed parenthood. His lifetime companion, Therese Levasseur, bore him several children whom he deposited shortly after their births at a Paris orphanage.

Rousseau was no libertarian. He embraced ideals of benevolence.³ He insisted, more vehemently than Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Diderot, that political and economic institutions should be designed to meet the basic needs of all citizens. When it came to political ideals, he, like other Enlight­enment philosophers, wanted the law of nature on his side. His blazing rhetoric in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality made him a favorite of revolutionaries for centuries to come: ‘‘It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature... that a handful of men should gorge themselves with superfluities while the starving multitude goes in want of necessities.’’⁴

But Rousseau was convinced that the growth of commerce, the develop­ment of so-called civilized society, would undermine natural benevolence.

This was no Hobbesian warrior, wielding a broad axe. Rousseau envis­aged natural man as a peaceable fellow who seldom came into prolonged contact with his fellows. Nature was bountiful, so he had little reason to fight. Natural man was not oblivious to his own self-interest, but had an inborn propensity for pity and sociability.⁶ A nomenclatural distinction clarified his argument:

One must not confuse vanity (amour-propre) and self-love (amour de soi- meme), two very different passions in their nature and in their effects. Self-love is a natural sentiment that prompts every animal to watch over its own preservation and that, guided in many by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Vanity is only a relative, artificial sentiment born in society, a sentiment that prompts each individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, that triggers all the evil they do to themselves and others.⁷

Other eighteenth-century Frenchmen used the term amour-propre to mean self-love. But the distinction Rousseau made echoed the English contrast between selfishness (what he termed vanity) and self-interest (amour de soi- meme). The State of Nature may be primitive and rude: but the State of Society feeds the vanities, making men ‘‘greedy, ambitious, and wicked”.⁸

Other Enlightenment philosophers might sympathize with these argu­ments, to a point. But they were fairly confident that the state and the church, working in concert, could defend civic virtue.

Hobbes had described the Leviathan as an aggregation; Rousseau offered the more organic picture of a body politic in which laws and custom were the brain, and economic wisdom fulfilled the functions of the heart.¹⁰ Having established his metaphor, however, he went on to undermine it, observing that every political society is composed of smaller societies, each with its own interests. Feelings of humanity stretch only so far. Rousseau observed that Europeans did not feel as much pain at news of a disaster in Tartary or Japan as on their own continent.¹¹ As the body grew larger, and more complex, it began to lose its ability to function as a whole.

Rousseau’s fear that individuals would not subordinate themselves to the General Will was expressed in elitist terms. Ordinary men might know how to define the Common Good but it would be difficult to persuade them to pursue it. Rousseau rejected the ‘‘social sentiments’’ solution. He summar­ized his argument in an early draft of Book I of The Social Contract, which included an appendix entitled ‘‘The General Society of the Human Race’’, asking whether a General Society is possible:

It is false to say that, in a condition of independence, reason leads us to contribute to the common good through consideration for our own interests. Private interest and the general welfare, far from being combined, exclude each other in the natural order of things, and social laws are a tie which each man will gladly impose on others, but by which he will not be bound himself. 12

The kind of religion that could solve this problem, he continued, was beyond the grasp of ‘‘the multitude’’.

Lacking confidence in both paternity and fraternity, Rousseau embraced maternity—on the condition that it remain firmly under male control. Mothers, sisters, and daughters could be held responsible for the future of civilization. In popular novels such as Emile and La Nouvelle Heloise he shifted attention away from men to women’s virtue, romanticizing the role of those who devoted themselves to the next generation. But because society remained so dependent on this virtue, the ‘‘disorder of women’’ posed a dire threat. 1³ If only his lover Therese had not seized his affections and borne him children that he did not want—how much more orderly his life could have been.

Women had to be limited to the sphere of family life because this was the only uncorrupted, redemptive sphere of human experience, the only sphere that could be successfully defended from selfish preoccupations. Rousseau rejected the optimism of individualism.¹⁴ Men might not be able to impose the Common Good directly upon themselves, but by imposing it upon women, they might protect future generations. One wonders what became of his own abandoned children.