Rousseau on Citizenship and Education

Abstract

This chapter examines the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the relationship between citizenship and education. The section “Citizenship in Rousseau’s Thought” offers a sketch of Rousseau’s political ideas and his understanding of the nature, requirements, and duties of citizenship. Section “Amour-propre and the Challenges to Citizenship” explains why education is required to form citizens. The chief reason for this turns on Rousseau’s view of the passion of amour-propre, which, once inflamed, impedes the development of civic virtue and the performance of citizen duty. In Rousseau’s thought, education has among its principal aims the prevention of amour-propre’s development into its inflamed variant. Section “Rousseau’s Educational Project(s): Domestic and Civic” outlines Rousseau’s educational project and scholarly disagreements about how we are to understand it. One influential interpretation holds that Rousseau offers us two distinct models of education – domestic and civic – which are opposed to one another. A second, more recent interpretation holds that the two models can be read as parts of a single scheme. The section examines arguments for both interpretations before proceeding to discuss the details of Rousseau’s educational project under the second interpretation.