Rousseau’s Response to Locke’s Education for Freedom

• In Event: Late Modern Critiques of the Bourgeois

Abstract

Among Rousseau’s chief rivals in Emile, or On Education (1762) was John Locke. At the core of both Emile and Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is the question of how to educate individuals for freedom. For both thinkers, this aim depended on a deeper question about the natural character and education of human pride—whether it might serve not in fueling, but in transcending age-old political divisions between those who command those who obey. In a certain counterpart to his political theory, Locke’s theory of education advances what might be termed a series of “checks and balances” within the individual psyche. The domineering inclinations of self-esteeming pride, for instance, were to be checked with the desire to win external esteem for distinctly liberal virtues of character. Rousseau disputes this Lockean vision of education at numerous points in Emile. This critique of Lockean liberalism illustrates Rousseau’s understanding of distinct challenges to the independence and undivided psychological “unity” of the mind in modern commercial society. To check pride and ambition with a countervailing desire for esteem was, for Rousseau, to divide or alienate the mind from itself. Rousseau’s critique of Locke works to define his ambiguous critique of the modern “bourgeois.”

Author

• Sophie Pangle, Princeton University