This book seeks to explore the meaning and practice of freedom in Rousseau through the broad scope of both Rousseau's texts and his life seen as a quest for the retrieval of an authentic sentiment of existence.  Given this weighty agenda, in addition to competing interpretations of Rousseau's writings and actions, it is perhaps not surprising the author finds in the end that this search is an elusive one, and that the fullest practice of freedom in authenticity ultimately is denied.  Still, Rousseau's writing shows that he felt he had an answer, an answer tied to the experience of love as experienced in his relationship with Madame de Warens.

Gauthier provides a long interpretative detour to undermine the arguments that place greater significance on The Social Contract, Emile and Julie as visions of distinct forms of viable human liberation for Rousseau.  Gauthier suggests that just as the Tutor in the Emile plays the role of overseer and figure of dependence for Emile, so then, by that fact, does the boy remain unable to maintain a fully self-sufficient life.  In similar fashion, the Citizen remains the product of the work of the Legislator and at Clarens the practice of unity is a façade that is not transformative for the main characters and their servants.  In all these cases, Gauthier seeks to show that the demanding conditions of freedom, including a need for full independence, yet unity with others such that one's own sentiment of existence is sustained and strengthened in that unity, cannot be met.  In this way, the fundamental problem of the alienation of human beings, as laid out in The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality as well as in Rousseau's accounts of his own life in such works as The Confessions, cannot be rectified by the standard recourse to Rousseau's social and political writings.  Indeed, Gauthier argues that not only do The Social Contract, Emile and Julie not offer a coherent solution to the fundamental problem of freedom as envisaged by Rousseau, but they also provide an implicit acknowledgement on the part of Rousseau that freedom can not be pursued in these realms and by these means.     

Is Rousseau's quest, then, a failed quest?  For Gauthier, not entirely.  He argues that Rousseau reveals through the course of his life experience and his autobiographical texts that there was one experience in which he felt both entirely at home in himself while united in spirit with another, and that was his experience of love and fulfillment in his life with Madame de Warens.  Gauthier suggests that this is the overriding message and truth about freedom that Rousseau came to believe over the course of his life and work (despite what for Gauthier is its ultimate fallacy).

Gauthier's work can be praised for its close attention to the texts, as well as for the attention the author pays to the broad opus of Rousseau.  While the book is relatively short, it shows evidence of careful reading of a number of Rousseau's writings and provides some insights into both similarities and differences in the basic structure of the various forms of relationship discussed by Rousseau in his work. 

Gauthier claims that his Rousseau still makes political choices (188).  However, there is no doubt that this is a strongly depoliticized Rousseau insofar as it entails a rejection of any possible institutional or organizational approach to improve prospects for human freedom.

In the Second Discourse and at the beginning of The Social Contract Rousseau sets out a problem of social existence that is not meant to be, nor felt to be, merely a personal experience of alienation, or an aggregate of such experiences.  While individuals generally experience alienation in modern society, this is symptomatic of deeper pathologies in social, economic and political organization.  There may not be agreement among the critics as to the relative success or viability of Rousseau's answers to these problems in the various texts, but many would acknowledge Rousseau's need to tackle them at the level of basic forms of social and political organization.  In this light, it is peculiar that Gauthier would have recourse to Rousseau's own experience of love as the positing of a general solution to problems of social alienation.  As a clearly individualized and somewhat idiosyncratic phenomenon, it is puzzling to think, even within the parameters of Rousseau's own thinking, of how such an experience could logically be regarded as the solution to the problem posed at the outset of The Social Contract and in The Second Discourse.  It lacks, in essence, the public and structural dimension that is explicit in Rousseau's statement of the problem.

Related to this is Gauthier's version of Rousseauian freedom as discussed in chapter one of the book.  Gauthier, perhaps rightly, sees the centrality of the notion of the “sentiment of existence” to the Rousseauian quest for freedom.  The stages of human development in Rousseau are sketched out by Gauthier in psychological terms as the man of nature with the sentiment of existence fully in himself, the early stage of society where love of family or a more generalized 'amour de soi' becomes the basis for identity, and finally the modern individual where 'amour propre' involves living through the eyes and opinions of others (21).  Rousseau's quest, then, is conceived by Gauthier as an attempt to find the basis through which individuals can anchor once more this sentiment of existence within themselves, but in the context of a modern social environment.  However, because Gauthier seems to suggest that most forms of relationship or non-reciprocal social interchange (such as that between Emile and his tutor or the Legislator and her people) in Rousseau entail a form of psychological dependency (and hence alienation) there is from the outset little room for any possible public or structural solution to the problem.  In principle, though, there is no reason to suggest for Rousseau that social interchange, even if not reciprocal, necessarily entails a form of psychological violence.  Emile is not raised to live separately from his fellows and The Social Contract seeks a political solution to the problem of alienation.  If Rousseau understood the problematic nature of social interchange in general with regard to the problem of psychological dependency, then it is odd that he would continue to proffer supposed solutions that required this same interchange.  The framing of Rousseau's solutions show that the social nature of human beings was not a problem, but indeed a fact of human existence that needed not to be denied, or fled from in a state of romanticized love, but indeed transformed.       

Still, it is a provocative essay on Rousseau from a noted scholar of Hobbes and one that will be of interest to scholars and students alike.

© 2007 Rebecca Kingston

Rebecca Kingston is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and author of Montesquieu and the parlement of Bordeaux (Geneva:  Libraire Droz, 1996) and editor (with Len Ferry) of Bringing the Passions Back In (Vancouver:  UBC Press, forthcoming) and of Montesquieu and His Legacy (Albany:  SUNY Press, forthcoming).  She is currently completing a monograph on Montesquieu and the passions.

Categories: Philosophical