Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social and Political Theory

"I’ve chosen N.J.H. Dent’s book Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social and Political Theory (1989). The reason that I’ve selected this book is that, when it came out, it offered a reconstruction of Rousseau’s moral psychology that has been tremendously influential, including on people like John Rawls and on other political philosophers like Joshua Cohen. I think it’s true to say that most political philosophers in the Anglophone world have basically taken Nick Dent’s ideas on amour propre , amour de soi , and pitié , these basic Rousseauian concepts, and run with them. It was Nick Dent who revolutionised the way that we think about Rousseau’s moral psychology today. There were writers in the Francophone world who had, to some extent, covered similar ground – Jean Starobinski, for instance, in France, had written about Rousseau’s moral psychology. The orthodoxy, however, in the Anglophone world, had been that Rousseau saw amour propre , this social sense of self-love, as a purely negative and toxic idea. A lot of writers were drawn to a primitivist sense of Rousseau, that, for him, the ideal would have been some kind of regression to a primitive state of humankind. A lot of people over the years have read Rousseau like that. Dent thought they had got Rousseau wrong. While amour propre , it’s true, is usually something toxic, and negative, and destructive, it also can have a positive side to it, and it can correspond to a demand, an instinct, an impulse to seek respect and recognition from other people. It is very closely connected to ideas about justice and equality. It can be connected with civic virtue, yes. Rousseau sees us as having two ways in which we can realise and satisfy our demand for social self-love. One of those is via personal relationships: if we’re lucky enough to find a loving relationship with someone who loves us back for ourselves, then that can satisfy this craving for recognition. The other way is a social and political way, so that if we can live together with other people in a just society in relations of equality, then we can enjoy a life where we are valued for our own sake by our fellow citizens, and where we accord to them the same kind of respect that we want them to accord to us. Those relations of equality and reciprocity are essential to the non-toxic version of amour propre . Yes, there’s been a revival of interest in 18th century moral theory. You can find many parallels to Rousseau’s work in, for instance, Adam Smith ’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and in his idea of the impartial spectator. He’s got a whole story to tell, which is different from Rousseau’s in interesting ways, about how people come to have a mature moral psychology. But you also find ideas about moral psychology in Kant : a lot of the Rousseauian ideas about equality and respect are there in Kantian philosophy, though they are officially de-psychologised because Kantian philosophy is all about ‘reason’ as opposed to affect and sentiment. But some of the same notions are there and have a Rousseauian genealogy."