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The Question of Freedom in Rousseau's Writings
History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 403–405
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
History of European Ideas journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas
Review essay The Question of Freedom in Rousseau’s Writings Rousseau and Freedom, C. McDonald, S. Hoffmann (Eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2010). xiii+312 pp., ISBN: 978-0-521-51582-5 Rousseau and Freedom is said to represent an opportunity to reflect on the issue of freedom. It covers a whole range of Rousseau’s writings, while the contributors to this edited work come from a variety of disciplines. Although Rousseau may have helped shape modern debates concerning the nature of freedom, the question consistently arises as to what type of freedom he is referring to in any given context. This is because Rousseau can be seen to operate with at least three different conceptions of freedom. To begin with, there is natural freedom, which can be equated with the kind of independence enjoyed by primitive man in the state of nature as portrayed in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, otherwise known as the Second Discourse. Then there is civil freedom, which is, roughly speaking, freedom from arbitrary interference on the part of others. Civil freedom, however, depends on what can be referred to as democratic freedom, which consists in the collective power of the members of a political community to determine the laws to which they are all subject. Finally, there is moral freedom, which can be characterized as the obedience to a law or principle of action that one has prescribed to oneself. Then there is the question as to how these forms of freedom might be interrelated. In Rousseau’s theory of the social contract, the civil, democratic and moral forms of freedom all have a role to play. Moral freedom appears to be presupposed by the very act of entering into the social pact by consenting to its terms, because this is an act through which each individual subjects him or herself to conditions that apply equally to all, and, in so doing, makes him or herself dependent on the collective body established by means of the social pact. In this respect, the act of self-legislation on the part of each individual by means of which the collective body of which he or she becomes a member is established must be considered to be the condition of the legitimacy of all subsequent acts of self-legislation performed by this collective body in its legislative function. Moral freedom therefore seems to be a condition not only of democratic freedom but also of civil freedom, with the laws collectively agreed upon determining the extent of this form of freedom. Given its title one might expect Rousseau and Freedom to contain detailed analyses of the various forms of freedom mentioned above, together with some sustained attempts to explain how they are related to each other. The division of the book into three parts announced in the introduction suggests that this is indeed the book’s primary aim, for this division purports to be based on these different forms of freedom, while following a roughly chronological sequence in terms of the main texts dealt
0191-6599/$ – see front matter doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.11.004
with, beginning with the freedom of man in the state of nature (natural freedom) as presented in the Second Discourse, the freedom of man in a perfect society (civil and democratic freedom), and the freedom of an individual endowed with a sense of morality while attempting to live an independent life in a corrupt society (moral freedom). However, some of the articles which clearly deal with the issue of freedom do not appear to fit this schema. For example, Je´roˆme Brillaud’s article ‘If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d’Alembert’ found in part one of the book analyses the work mentioned in the title, which was published only a few years after the Second Discourse, in such a way as to show how it relates to the issues of religious and poetic freedom. It does not, therefore, appear to have anything to do with the question of natural freedom. In part two, Jason Neidelman’s article ‘‘Par le bon usage de ma liberte´’’: freedom and Rousseau’s reconstituted Christianity’ looks at Rousseau’s attempt to render Christianity compatible with personal liberty, especially in the form of freedom of conscience, taking the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in Emile as its starting-point. This form of freedom could be assimilated to civil freedom, but this is not explicitly done. Thus, the chronological sequence, rather than one based on the different conceptions of freedom we find in Rousseau’s works, appears to have primacy. This is also true of Philip Stewart’s article ‘Can woman be free?’, which analyses Emile and Julie, or the Nouvelle Heloise with the intention of determining what kind of freedom Rousseau considered women to be capable of. In the case of Neidelman’s and Stewart’s articles we have discussions of texts that belong to roughly the same period as the Social Contract but which do not, in any obvious sense, deal with the topics of civil and democratic freedom. It is therefore sometimes unclear what the main organizing principle of the book really is. This lack of clarity is made worse by the fact that some of the articles in the book appear to treat the topic of freedom itself as only a secondary matter, a peripheral one even, rather than providing an analysis of the forms of freedom which we find in Rousseau’s works and some explanation of their possible interrelations, even though such analysis and explanation is what one might have expected. A good example of this feature of the book is to be found in the first part in Christopher Brooke’s article ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism’. In this article natural, civil and moral freedom, though not democratic freedom, are mentioned, but only in the second half of the very last paragraph of the article, while the main topic of the article is the alleged Epicurean and Stoic background to the Second Discourse. This is not to say that there might not be a significant relation between this topic and Rousseau’s views on freedom. However, this relation needs to be made more explicit, whereas only some cursory indications as to how Rousseau’s views on freedom might be linked to the Epicurean and Stoic traditions are given. The main topic of the book as a whole and the main topic of
404
Review essay / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 403–405
the article do not, therefore, appear to coincide; indeed, the topic of freedom is mentioned almost as an afterthought. I had, to varying degrees, the same impression with respect to some of the other articles in the book, however good they may be in other respects. For example, in the article entitled ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s: satire, friendship, and freedom’ by Marian Hobson, Rousseau’s gift of a book to Diderot provides the basis of a set of interesting speculative reflections on these two thinker’s difficult, complex relationship. Yet, once again, the topic of freedom appears, as it stands, to be a rather tangential one. Part two begins with the only sustained engagement with the topics of civil and democratic freedom as they are presented in the Social Contract in the shape of Stanley Hoffmann’s article ‘The Social Contract, or the mirage of the general will’. Although this is by far the longest article in the book, it is questionable whether it really has anything new to say about these important topics. The article in fact largely replicates an essay published in 1954. Early on the author claims that, ‘Many of those who have tried to offer a faithful interpretation of the main themes of Rousseau’s treatise have lost sight of what might be ambiguous or dangerous about them, and have too often presented them as the solid elements of a perfectly coherent construction’ (p. 113). Yet since the author makes no reference to any secondary literature dating from after 1955, it is unclear if this criticism is also aimed at more recent accounts of Rousseau’s Social Contract. In the article itself, Hoffmann fails to recognize the existence of a puzzle with which his own account of Rousseau’s views on freedom presents us. He states that moral freedom becomes possible for human beings only within the state, since entering the civil condition allows a human being to give him or herself law and autonomy. Yet the act of entering into the social pact and agreeing to its conditions seems itself to be an act of moral freedom, that is, an act by means of which an individual subjects him or herself to laws of which he or she is in some sense the author. In this respect, moral freedom must be thought to precede, either in temporal or in conceptual terms, civil and democratic freedom, so we may ask how can it first be made possible by one’s entering the civil condition? Rather than considering such issues, Hoffmann offers a general account of the fusion of liberty and authority which he claims, plausibly enough, Rousseau sought to achieve by means of the idea that the general will involves a synthesis of these two terms. While, on the one hand, Hoffmann provides a liberal reading of Rousseau’s position, insofar as he claims that civil society is the means of protecting liberty, he ends by arguing that Rousseau’s attempted synthesis founders on some unrealistic psychological assumptions concerning the citizens’ dispositions uniformly to will the common good, inviting the conclusion that, ‘The ideal of Rousseau appears, in the end, as a collection of illusions, a concatenation of fictions’ (p. 128). The implications of this failed synthesis are then said to be the degeneration of Rousseau’s ideal into the reality of oppressive regimes, such as National Socialism. This type of conclusion is hardly a new one, and it suggests that Rousseau’s account of democratic freedom is an essentially flawed one. Such a conclusion appears at odds with the claim made in the introduction to the book that Rousseau ‘offers a panoply of ideas that continue to enrich us today as we engage with our present-day concerns about individuals within vastly differing societies’ (p. 4). While Rousseau’s accounts of civil freedom and, more especially, democratic freedom are not well-served in the book, a good example of what I consider to be one of the book’s successes is Diane Berrett Brown’s article ‘The constraints of liberty at the scene of instruction’. Focusing on the pedagogical strategies adopted in Emile, Berrett Brown skillfully and with great clarity examines the artificial nature of the form of education proposed in this work and how the tutor manages both the space and the events of this education. She also offers an account of the selective
knowledge made available to the pupil by means of the popular books of the day. In this way, it is shown that although the pupil, Emile, may feel that he is free and is told by his tutor that he is so, his environment, movements and thoughts are, in fact, so carefully controlled and contrived by the tutor that this sense of freedom is an essentially illusory one. Rather, the pupil is at all times completely subject to authority. This raises questions concerning the effectiveness of an educational programme that involves removing someone from the corrupting influences of society with the intention of eventually allowing the person in question to participate in society. Berrett Brown briefly explores this issue in the last section of the article in relation to the unfinished sequel to Emile, Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires. The article has a clear relation to the topic of freedom and it deals with a specific problem concerning the idea of freedom, namely, the question of the relation between independence and authority in the pedagogical sphere. Berrett Brown even manages to locate her article in the debate initiated by Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between ‘negative’ liberty, that is, freedom from arbitrary interference by others, specifically in the form of coercion, and the ‘positive’ liberty of which Rousseau is considered to be one of the main representatives. She does this by relating Rousseau’s pedagogical project to Berlin’s claims concerning the coincidence of liberty and authority in Rousseau’s writings. At the same time, the article furnishes us with new insight into one of Rousseau’s major works and its relation to one of his lesser known works. The article entitled ‘The subject and its body: love of oneself and freedom in the thought of Rousseau’ authored by Mathieu Brunet and Bertrand Guillarme also refers to Berlin’s distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. As the authors point out, loss of negative freedom results in dependence while loss of positive freedom results in alienation, and Rousseau can be credited with recognizing the importance of both forms of freedom and of avoiding alienation as well as dependence. Positive freedom, which involves the idea of self-realization, differs from negative freedom in that it does not consist in the absence of interference by others as expressed in the form of certain rights. Rather, it entails certain prohibitions, imperatives and duties. As such, it has tended to represent something of a beˆte noire for liberals. The authors, however, seek to defend the idea of positive freedom by exploring Rousseau’s vision of this form of freedom in connection with his views on the subject’s relation to its body. They argue against attributing to Rousseau the kind of dualist, proprietarist understanding of this relation associated with Locke, which results in the claim that I own my body and I am therefore able to do what I please with it. They bring out the nondualist character of Rousseau’s own conception of the relation in question with reference to some of the views on suicide and on love expressed in Julie, or the Nouvelle Heloise, together with the kind of absorption in nature and the reverie to which it gives rise described in the Confessions and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It is suggested that for Rousseau a nondualist conception of the subject’s relation to its body and the ability to live in accordance with such a conception are integral to human self-realization. Moreover, the authors end by making the suggestive claim that this view of the matter has implications for Rousseau’s political solution to the problem of dependence, since it implies that the alienation associated with the dualist conception of the subject’s relation to its body must be overcome if individuals are to know and to will the common good. In this way, positive freedom turns out to be a condition of negative freedom. Once again, the issue of freedom is explored from a unique angle, making us aware of how complex the issue of freedom really is in Rousseau’s thought. The third part of the book begins with the introduction of a distinct form of freedom, that of psychological freedom, in the
Review essay / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 403–405
article ‘Paranoia and freedom in Rousseau’s final decade’ by Leo Damrosch. Damrosch associates this form of freedom, his own experience of which Rousseau seeks to describe in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, with an interior consciousness of freedom. This form of freedom therefore has something essentially subjective about it, for one could experience such a sense of freedom without being objectively free, so that it might even be compared with the illusory sense of freedom enjoyed by Emile. Damrosch argues that Rousseau’s paranoia performed an important function when it came to achieving this psychological freedom, by acting as a defence mechanism that allowed him to block out the external world and other people, that is to say, the factors over which he had no real control and in relation to which he was consequently unfree. Such psychological freedom can be contrasted with political freedom, since the latter requires active engagement with others, rather than the kind of passivity that came to characterize Rousseau’s own attitude to the world and to other people. Moreover, it appears to involve what looks like an attempt partially to recapture the natural freedom enjoyed by primitive man in the state of nature, in the sense that what matters is gaining an independence – though this time only subjectively – that ensures one is not made to do what others want one to do, even if it does not allow one always to do as one wants to do. A link between Rousseau’s later writings and the natural freedom described in the first part of the Second Discourse is also implicitly made in Pierre Saint-Amand’s article ‘Freedom and the project of idleness’, which argues that Rousseau’s autobiographical works base a series of practices of freedom on the foundation of idleness. The link here is that Rousseau tends to characterize primitive man as being naturally indolent, while his indolence is made possible by his independence. Saint-Amand stresses the disjunction between Rousseau’s later and earlier views on freedom, by claiming that his project of idleness is radically
405
different from his political writings, in which freedom is defined in relation to work. The project in question, which is aptly described as ‘a logic of subjective freedom’ (p. 245) and is exemplified by the purposivelessness characteristic of the promenade and the reverie, consists in escaping constraint or subjugation by means of disengagement and disinterest, thereby representing a deliberate withdrawal from the sphere of action. Damrosch’s and Saint-Amand’s articles both suggest that Rousseau’s final conception of freedom is a unique one that does not neatly fit into the categories of natural freedom, civil and democratic freedom, and moral freedom mentioned in the introduction to the book. Unlike natural freedom, it is entirely subjective, while, unlike civil and democratic freedom, it has no obvious relation to the civil condition or to politics. For example, given the subjective character of this psychological form of freedom, even a person who lacked civil liberty could, in principle, enjoy it. Finally, unlike moral freedom, it appears to lack any definite law or principle which one imposes on oneself. Rather, the aim is to divest oneself (if only subjectively) of any constraints, including any self-imposed ones, and to think and act in as purposiveless a manner as possible. It seems, then, that Rousseau’s views on freedom are even more complex than the attempt made in the introduction to impose thematic unity on the articles that make up Rousseau and Freedom at first suggests; and we may be grateful that the book ultimately succeeds in revealing this complexity. David James Department of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, WITS 2050, South Africa E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
History of European Ideas journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas
Review essay The Question of Freedom in Rousseau’s Writings Rousseau and Freedom, C. McDonald, S. Hoffmann (Eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2010). xiii+312 pp., ISBN: 978-0-521-51582-5 Rousseau and Freedom is said to represent an opportunity to reflect on the issue of freedom. It covers a whole range of Rousseau’s writings, while the contributors to this edited work come from a variety of disciplines. Although Rousseau may have helped shape modern debates concerning the nature of freedom, the question consistently arises as to what type of freedom he is referring to in any given context. This is because Rousseau can be seen to operate with at least three different conceptions of freedom. To begin with, there is natural freedom, which can be equated with the kind of independence enjoyed by primitive man in the state of nature as portrayed in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, otherwise known as the Second Discourse. Then there is civil freedom, which is, roughly speaking, freedom from arbitrary interference on the part of others. Civil freedom, however, depends on what can be referred to as democratic freedom, which consists in the collective power of the members of a political community to determine the laws to which they are all subject. Finally, there is moral freedom, which can be characterized as the obedience to a law or principle of action that one has prescribed to oneself. Then there is the question as to how these forms of freedom might be interrelated. In Rousseau’s theory of the social contract, the civil, democratic and moral forms of freedom all have a role to play. Moral freedom appears to be presupposed by the very act of entering into the social pact by consenting to its terms, because this is an act through which each individual subjects him or herself to conditions that apply equally to all, and, in so doing, makes him or herself dependent on the collective body established by means of the social pact. In this respect, the act of self-legislation on the part of each individual by means of which the collective body of which he or she becomes a member is established must be considered to be the condition of the legitimacy of all subsequent acts of self-legislation performed by this collective body in its legislative function. Moral freedom therefore seems to be a condition not only of democratic freedom but also of civil freedom, with the laws collectively agreed upon determining the extent of this form of freedom. Given its title one might expect Rousseau and Freedom to contain detailed analyses of the various forms of freedom mentioned above, together with some sustained attempts to explain how they are related to each other. The division of the book into three parts announced in the introduction suggests that this is indeed the book’s primary aim, for this division purports to be based on these different forms of freedom, while following a roughly chronological sequence in terms of the main texts dealt
0191-6599/$ – see front matter doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.11.004
with, beginning with the freedom of man in the state of nature (natural freedom) as presented in the Second Discourse, the freedom of man in a perfect society (civil and democratic freedom), and the freedom of an individual endowed with a sense of morality while attempting to live an independent life in a corrupt society (moral freedom). However, some of the articles which clearly deal with the issue of freedom do not appear to fit this schema. For example, Je´roˆme Brillaud’s article ‘If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d’Alembert’ found in part one of the book analyses the work mentioned in the title, which was published only a few years after the Second Discourse, in such a way as to show how it relates to the issues of religious and poetic freedom. It does not, therefore, appear to have anything to do with the question of natural freedom. In part two, Jason Neidelman’s article ‘‘Par le bon usage de ma liberte´’’: freedom and Rousseau’s reconstituted Christianity’ looks at Rousseau’s attempt to render Christianity compatible with personal liberty, especially in the form of freedom of conscience, taking the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in Emile as its starting-point. This form of freedom could be assimilated to civil freedom, but this is not explicitly done. Thus, the chronological sequence, rather than one based on the different conceptions of freedom we find in Rousseau’s works, appears to have primacy. This is also true of Philip Stewart’s article ‘Can woman be free?’, which analyses Emile and Julie, or the Nouvelle Heloise with the intention of determining what kind of freedom Rousseau considered women to be capable of. In the case of Neidelman’s and Stewart’s articles we have discussions of texts that belong to roughly the same period as the Social Contract but which do not, in any obvious sense, deal with the topics of civil and democratic freedom. It is therefore sometimes unclear what the main organizing principle of the book really is. This lack of clarity is made worse by the fact that some of the articles in the book appear to treat the topic of freedom itself as only a secondary matter, a peripheral one even, rather than providing an analysis of the forms of freedom which we find in Rousseau’s works and some explanation of their possible interrelations, even though such analysis and explanation is what one might have expected. A good example of this feature of the book is to be found in the first part in Christopher Brooke’s article ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism’. In this article natural, civil and moral freedom, though not democratic freedom, are mentioned, but only in the second half of the very last paragraph of the article, while the main topic of the article is the alleged Epicurean and Stoic background to the Second Discourse. This is not to say that there might not be a significant relation between this topic and Rousseau’s views on freedom. However, this relation needs to be made more explicit, whereas only some cursory indications as to how Rousseau’s views on freedom might be linked to the Epicurean and Stoic traditions are given. The main topic of the book as a whole and the main topic of
404
Review essay / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 403–405
the article do not, therefore, appear to coincide; indeed, the topic of freedom is mentioned almost as an afterthought. I had, to varying degrees, the same impression with respect to some of the other articles in the book, however good they may be in other respects. For example, in the article entitled ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s: satire, friendship, and freedom’ by Marian Hobson, Rousseau’s gift of a book to Diderot provides the basis of a set of interesting speculative reflections on these two thinker’s difficult, complex relationship. Yet, once again, the topic of freedom appears, as it stands, to be a rather tangential one. Part two begins with the only sustained engagement with the topics of civil and democratic freedom as they are presented in the Social Contract in the shape of Stanley Hoffmann’s article ‘The Social Contract, or the mirage of the general will’. Although this is by far the longest article in the book, it is questionable whether it really has anything new to say about these important topics. The article in fact largely replicates an essay published in 1954. Early on the author claims that, ‘Many of those who have tried to offer a faithful interpretation of the main themes of Rousseau’s treatise have lost sight of what might be ambiguous or dangerous about them, and have too often presented them as the solid elements of a perfectly coherent construction’ (p. 113). Yet since the author makes no reference to any secondary literature dating from after 1955, it is unclear if this criticism is also aimed at more recent accounts of Rousseau’s Social Contract. In the article itself, Hoffmann fails to recognize the existence of a puzzle with which his own account of Rousseau’s views on freedom presents us. He states that moral freedom becomes possible for human beings only within the state, since entering the civil condition allows a human being to give him or herself law and autonomy. Yet the act of entering into the social pact and agreeing to its conditions seems itself to be an act of moral freedom, that is, an act by means of which an individual subjects him or herself to laws of which he or she is in some sense the author. In this respect, moral freedom must be thought to precede, either in temporal or in conceptual terms, civil and democratic freedom, so we may ask how can it first be made possible by one’s entering the civil condition? Rather than considering such issues, Hoffmann offers a general account of the fusion of liberty and authority which he claims, plausibly enough, Rousseau sought to achieve by means of the idea that the general will involves a synthesis of these two terms. While, on the one hand, Hoffmann provides a liberal reading of Rousseau’s position, insofar as he claims that civil society is the means of protecting liberty, he ends by arguing that Rousseau’s attempted synthesis founders on some unrealistic psychological assumptions concerning the citizens’ dispositions uniformly to will the common good, inviting the conclusion that, ‘The ideal of Rousseau appears, in the end, as a collection of illusions, a concatenation of fictions’ (p. 128). The implications of this failed synthesis are then said to be the degeneration of Rousseau’s ideal into the reality of oppressive regimes, such as National Socialism. This type of conclusion is hardly a new one, and it suggests that Rousseau’s account of democratic freedom is an essentially flawed one. Such a conclusion appears at odds with the claim made in the introduction to the book that Rousseau ‘offers a panoply of ideas that continue to enrich us today as we engage with our present-day concerns about individuals within vastly differing societies’ (p. 4). While Rousseau’s accounts of civil freedom and, more especially, democratic freedom are not well-served in the book, a good example of what I consider to be one of the book’s successes is Diane Berrett Brown’s article ‘The constraints of liberty at the scene of instruction’. Focusing on the pedagogical strategies adopted in Emile, Berrett Brown skillfully and with great clarity examines the artificial nature of the form of education proposed in this work and how the tutor manages both the space and the events of this education. She also offers an account of the selective
knowledge made available to the pupil by means of the popular books of the day. In this way, it is shown that although the pupil, Emile, may feel that he is free and is told by his tutor that he is so, his environment, movements and thoughts are, in fact, so carefully controlled and contrived by the tutor that this sense of freedom is an essentially illusory one. Rather, the pupil is at all times completely subject to authority. This raises questions concerning the effectiveness of an educational programme that involves removing someone from the corrupting influences of society with the intention of eventually allowing the person in question to participate in society. Berrett Brown briefly explores this issue in the last section of the article in relation to the unfinished sequel to Emile, Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires. The article has a clear relation to the topic of freedom and it deals with a specific problem concerning the idea of freedom, namely, the question of the relation between independence and authority in the pedagogical sphere. Berrett Brown even manages to locate her article in the debate initiated by Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between ‘negative’ liberty, that is, freedom from arbitrary interference by others, specifically in the form of coercion, and the ‘positive’ liberty of which Rousseau is considered to be one of the main representatives. She does this by relating Rousseau’s pedagogical project to Berlin’s claims concerning the coincidence of liberty and authority in Rousseau’s writings. At the same time, the article furnishes us with new insight into one of Rousseau’s major works and its relation to one of his lesser known works. The article entitled ‘The subject and its body: love of oneself and freedom in the thought of Rousseau’ authored by Mathieu Brunet and Bertrand Guillarme also refers to Berlin’s distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. As the authors point out, loss of negative freedom results in dependence while loss of positive freedom results in alienation, and Rousseau can be credited with recognizing the importance of both forms of freedom and of avoiding alienation as well as dependence. Positive freedom, which involves the idea of self-realization, differs from negative freedom in that it does not consist in the absence of interference by others as expressed in the form of certain rights. Rather, it entails certain prohibitions, imperatives and duties. As such, it has tended to represent something of a beˆte noire for liberals. The authors, however, seek to defend the idea of positive freedom by exploring Rousseau’s vision of this form of freedom in connection with his views on the subject’s relation to its body. They argue against attributing to Rousseau the kind of dualist, proprietarist understanding of this relation associated with Locke, which results in the claim that I own my body and I am therefore able to do what I please with it. They bring out the nondualist character of Rousseau’s own conception of the relation in question with reference to some of the views on suicide and on love expressed in Julie, or the Nouvelle Heloise, together with the kind of absorption in nature and the reverie to which it gives rise described in the Confessions and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It is suggested that for Rousseau a nondualist conception of the subject’s relation to its body and the ability to live in accordance with such a conception are integral to human self-realization. Moreover, the authors end by making the suggestive claim that this view of the matter has implications for Rousseau’s political solution to the problem of dependence, since it implies that the alienation associated with the dualist conception of the subject’s relation to its body must be overcome if individuals are to know and to will the common good. In this way, positive freedom turns out to be a condition of negative freedom. Once again, the issue of freedom is explored from a unique angle, making us aware of how complex the issue of freedom really is in Rousseau’s thought. The third part of the book begins with the introduction of a distinct form of freedom, that of psychological freedom, in the
Review essay / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 403–405
article ‘Paranoia and freedom in Rousseau’s final decade’ by Leo Damrosch. Damrosch associates this form of freedom, his own experience of which Rousseau seeks to describe in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, with an interior consciousness of freedom. This form of freedom therefore has something essentially subjective about it, for one could experience such a sense of freedom without being objectively free, so that it might even be compared with the illusory sense of freedom enjoyed by Emile. Damrosch argues that Rousseau’s paranoia performed an important function when it came to achieving this psychological freedom, by acting as a defence mechanism that allowed him to block out the external world and other people, that is to say, the factors over which he had no real control and in relation to which he was consequently unfree. Such psychological freedom can be contrasted with political freedom, since the latter requires active engagement with others, rather than the kind of passivity that came to characterize Rousseau’s own attitude to the world and to other people. Moreover, it appears to involve what looks like an attempt partially to recapture the natural freedom enjoyed by primitive man in the state of nature, in the sense that what matters is gaining an independence – though this time only subjectively – that ensures one is not made to do what others want one to do, even if it does not allow one always to do as one wants to do. A link between Rousseau’s later writings and the natural freedom described in the first part of the Second Discourse is also implicitly made in Pierre Saint-Amand’s article ‘Freedom and the project of idleness’, which argues that Rousseau’s autobiographical works base a series of practices of freedom on the foundation of idleness. The link here is that Rousseau tends to characterize primitive man as being naturally indolent, while his indolence is made possible by his independence. Saint-Amand stresses the disjunction between Rousseau’s later and earlier views on freedom, by claiming that his project of idleness is radically
405
different from his political writings, in which freedom is defined in relation to work. The project in question, which is aptly described as ‘a logic of subjective freedom’ (p. 245) and is exemplified by the purposivelessness characteristic of the promenade and the reverie, consists in escaping constraint or subjugation by means of disengagement and disinterest, thereby representing a deliberate withdrawal from the sphere of action. Damrosch’s and Saint-Amand’s articles both suggest that Rousseau’s final conception of freedom is a unique one that does not neatly fit into the categories of natural freedom, civil and democratic freedom, and moral freedom mentioned in the introduction to the book. Unlike natural freedom, it is entirely subjective, while, unlike civil and democratic freedom, it has no obvious relation to the civil condition or to politics. For example, given the subjective character of this psychological form of freedom, even a person who lacked civil liberty could, in principle, enjoy it. Finally, unlike moral freedom, it appears to lack any definite law or principle which one imposes on oneself. Rather, the aim is to divest oneself (if only subjectively) of any constraints, including any self-imposed ones, and to think and act in as purposiveless a manner as possible. It seems, then, that Rousseau’s views on freedom are even more complex than the attempt made in the introduction to impose thematic unity on the articles that make up Rousseau and Freedom at first suggests; and we may be grateful that the book ultimately succeeds in revealing this complexity. David James Department of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, WITS 2050, South Africa E-mail address: [email protected]