Abstract
In many ways, the whole of Emile has been building up to Rousseau’s political philosophy and his particular version of the social contract.1 Ever since the incident with Robert, the gardener, in which little Emile beginss to learn about property, rights, and agreements, his education prepares him for this moment. Already in the course of the novel several things have appeared that could be considered protocontracts for Emile. With the emergence of his sexuality and his entry into moral relationships, Emile makes an agreement with his tutor. He begs of his teacher, “Make me free … force me to be my own master” (Emile, 325; Pl. 4:652), a statement meant to make the reader think of the famous line from the Social Contract in which, when someone is constrained to obey the general will, “he will be forced to be free” (CW 4:141; Pl. 4:364).
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Notes
The title of this chapter is an obvious play on the tide “The General Will and the Scandal of Politics” in Tracy B. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 67–103. Strong sees the scandal there as being created for Rousseau by Hume’s writing on politics. Humans’ lack of knowledge of the other undermines any trust one might have in another. Strong sees “Rousseau’s political thought … as a solution—or an attempt at a solution—to a stance that was, one might say, ‘destructive of political philosophy’” (73).
Steven G. Affeldt, “The Force of Freedom: Rousseau on Forcing to Be Free,” Political Theory 27, no. 3 (1999): 305.
In Patrick Riley, “Rousseau’s General Will: Freedom of a Particular Kind,” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 1–28, Riley says that he will discuss how Rousseau generalizes the will, but he never adverts to the forming of common interests or to the footnote in which he describes the process. Rather, he sees it as a process of “doing away with will’s particularity and selfishness and ‘willfulness,’” while not destroying it (8).
Patrick Riley’s other outstanding study, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic, Studies in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) is essential reading on the topic of the general will. He shows himself to be quite sensitive to the theological background of the concept. He fails to see that Rousseau’s desacralizing of this concept is still a move within Christianity and not a move outside ot it.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1963), 76–78.
Ibid. This parallel was brought to my attention by Wolfgang Palaver in his article “Mimesis and Scapegoating in the Works of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant,” Contagion 10 (Spring 2003): 126–48.
For a different interpretation of this phrase, see John Hope Mason, “‘Forced to Be Free,’” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
These fragments have been printed in Heinrich Meier’s bilingual edition: Diskurs über die Ungleichheit/Discours sur l’inégalité, 3rd ed. (Padernborn: Schöningh, 1993), 386–401.
See Felicity Baker, “Eternal Vigilance: Rousseau’s Death Penalty,” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Cf. Madeleine B. Ellis, Rousseau’s Socratic Aemilian Myths: A Literary Collation of Emile and the Social Contract (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977), 372, 382n67.
Cf. Laurence Mall, Emile ou les figures de la fiction, SVEC, 2002:04 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), 9–44, for a very intelligent and enlightening look at the question of the genre of Emile.
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© 2007 Jeremiah Alberg
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Alberg, J. (2007). The Politics of Scandal. In: A Reinterpretation of Rousseau. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607132_6
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