Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, General, Literary Criticism, European, French, philosophy, History & Surveys, Movements, Humanism, political science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780199542673
Google: cVsVDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2008-07-10T00:28:05.779551+00:00

Institutional sources of respect and esteem

The second major class of Rousseau’s socio-political remedies focuses on devising institutions that make a sufficient range of stable and benign forms of recognition available to all. If one of the conditions that favor the inflammation of amour-propre is the general lack of non-destructive opportunities for acquiring a recognized standing, then it ought to be possible to curb much of the mischief amour-propre is capable of unleashing simply by establishing healthier alternatives to the forms of recognition individuals are led to seek in a society (such as the one depicted in the Second Discourse) that has not yet been reorganized by reason’s principles. Once the problem is viewed in this light, it is easy to see the Social Contract as playing a central role in Rousseau’s strategy for remedying the evils of amour-propre. For one of the main accomplishments of the legitimate state as Rousseau envisages it is to guarantee all its members a substantial form of social recognition: the equal legal respect accorded to citizens of a republic. In other words, this part of Rousseau’s solution makes the political community itself a major source of the recognition individuals seek as a consequence of amour-propre.

In a true republic—in any state ruled by the general will (SC, II.6.ixn)—law is the source of three types of recognition, each of which counts as a form of respect rather than esteem since each prescribes a mode of treating individuals that in its own way proclaims the equal worth of all citizens. The first of these is enshrined in what is usually called equality before the law or, as Rousseau puts it, in the equality of citizens as subjects (SC, I.6.x). This type of recognition derives from the fact that legitimate laws must be universal in the sense of applying equally to everyone: no individual citizen stands outside their reach. A state that upholds the universality of law in this sense confers a kind of equal standing on its members by insisting, as it were, that no individual is ‘above’ the law.

The second type of legal respect a republic affords its members consists in the equality they enjoy as the collective sovereign, or author, of the law: legitimate laws not only ‘apply to all’ but also ‘issue from all’ (SC, II.4.v). The most obvious sense in which the laws of a republic come equally from all is that all citizens are accorded the same rights of political participation: equal say in the assembly, equal right to vote, and equal access to political offices. There is, however, a further respect in which legitimate laws come equally from all citizens. The laws of a republic originate in the wills of its members not only in the sense that all citizens participate in framing them but also in the sense that, insofar as they are grounded in the general will, they are obliged to protect the fundamental interests of each citizen.18 Here legitimate laws recognize the equal worth of citizens by proclaiming, in effect, that every individual’s fundamental interests have the same standing as anyone else’s.

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