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"Rousseau on the Conflict between 'Human' and 'Civic' Education"

My aim in this paper is to give a brief account of the principles underlying the
educational regimen that Rousseau sets out in the most unwieldy and most neglected of his
philosophical texts, Emile. In doing so, I am interested less in issues in the philosophy of
education than in the implications Emile's education has for Rousseau's political philosophy,
and especially for his understanding of how the good of citizenship fits into human flourishing
more generally. The argument I construct develops out of a critique of the widely held view
that Rousseau's two positive philosophical works, Emile and the Social Contract, are informed by
conflicting and irreconcilable conceptions of human flourishing, ideals that (in Emile) are
denoted by the terms homme and citoyen. Implicit in the view I am arguing against is the idea
1that both 'man' and 'citizen' represent genuinely worthy, perhaps even equally worthy, ideals
and that--since the two ideals are fundamentally incompatible--realizing one is possible only at
the expense of the other. On this view, the human condition is such that it is possible to achieve
either the goods of citizenship or those associated with being a man but not both; or, what is
more likely, the human condition is marked by a radical Entzweiung, or bifurcation, in which
individuals are continually torn between two opposing identities--man and citizen--that defy
reconciliation. My principal claim in this paper is that for Rousseau these two ideals are not
inherently incompatible and that demonstrating this is a central concern of the philosophical
project carried out in Emile and the Social Contract. In fact, I shall argue, Rousseau's position is
stronger than this. For a careful reading of these texts reveals that the ideals of man and citizen
are not just compatible but (in a certain sense) mutually dependent: under the conditions of

1 In the various drafts of this paper I have gone back and forth between 'man' and 'human being' as the
translation of homme. Although I have finally opted for the former, I remain conscious of two main
advantages of the latter. First, as we use the terms today, 'human being' comes closer than 'man' to
capturing what Rousseau intends by homme (at least here, when he is distinguishing man from citizen).
Second, the philosophical tension I examine here does not depend--or so I would argue--on homme being
a gendered concept. I'm happy to talk more about this issue in discussion. 2
modern civilization [just dependence?], "men" can exist only if they are also citizens, and,
conversely, citizens (of a legitimate republic) must at the same time be constituted as "men."

Distinguishing men from citizens
First, it is necessary to say a few words about the concepts 'man' and 'citizen' and to
explain why it might seem that they represent irreconcilable ideals. The main piece of evidence
2in support of the interpretation I am arguing against is Rousseau's apparently unambiguous
declaration at the beginning of Emile that educators must choose between "two contrary forms
of instruction:" domestic (or private) education, which forms children into men, and civic (or
3public) education, which makes them into citizens (E, 39-42/OC 4, 248-52). After
distinguishing three possible sources of education--nature, things, and men--Rousseau goes on
to ask:
what is to be done when our [different educations] are opposed? When,
instead of raising a man for himself, one wants to raise him for others?
Then their harmony is impossible. Forced to combat nature or the social
institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one
cannot make both at the same time (E, 39/OC 4, 248; emphasis added).

This passage makes clear that the distinction between domestic and civic education turns on
their having not different sources but different goals. (With respect to their source--to who or
what does the teaching--both count as education by men.) In specifying the goals of these
educations, Rousseau characterizes the ideal of the man in a variety of ways, but the most
important of these--the one I'll focus on here--finds expression in his talk of a man's existing "for

2 The locus classicus of this interpretation is Judith N. Shklar's Men and Citizens (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1969).
3 'E' refers to Emile, or on Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979); 'OC 4' refers to vol.
4 of Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1959-69). Other abbreviations I use are: DI, for Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality
among Men, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 111-222; LWM, for Letters Written from the Mountain, in The Collected
Writings of Rousseau, trans. Judith R. Bush and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of
New England, 2001), vol. 9, 131-306; PE, for Discourse on Political Economy, in The Social Contract and Other
Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3-38;
and SC for The Social Contract, ibid, 39-152 (with 'SC, I.4.vi' referring to book 1, chapter 4, paragraph 6). 3
himself," in contrast to the citizen, who exists "for others." Since it is not immediately obvious
what this distinction amounts to, I cite Rousseau's elaboration of it in full:
Natural man exists entirely for himself. He is a numerical unity, the
absolute whole that exists in relation only to itself . . . . Civil man is
merely a fractional unity dependent on the denominator; his value is
found in his relation to the whole, which is the social body. Good social
institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his
absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and
transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each
individual believes himself no longer one but a part of the unity and no
longer perceptible (sensible) except within the whole (E39-40/OC 4, 249).

This passage is followed by examples of citizens--of ancient Rome and Sparta--whose common
characteristic, according to Rousseau, is that they thought of themselves first as Romans or
Spartans and only secondarily (or maybe not at all) as individuals: "A citizen of Rome was
neither Caius nor Lucius; he was a Roman; he even loved the country exclusive of himself" (E,
40/OC 4, 249).
The difference between man and citizen, on this formulation, comes down to two related
points. First, men and citizens differ with respect to the kind of self-conception they hold:
citizens think of themselves first and foremost as members of their respective states and
therefore conceive of their own good (or their highest interests) as inseparable from the good of
their state. Men, in contrast, think of themselves first as individuals and, like the inhabitants of
Rousseau's state of nature, conceive of their own good (or highest interest) independently of
their membership in a political association. The second dimension along which the two differ
concerns the source of their sense of value as a self. The citizen "believes himself . . . no longer
perceptible (sensible) except within the whole," which is to say that a citizen of Rome "counts," or
has a sense of himself as valuable, only insofar as he is a Roman, only insofar as he is part of a
whole that he (together with his compatriots) regards as valuable and from which his own
value (as well as that of his compatriots) derives.
Both of these points could be summed up by saying that what characterizes the citizen is
a certain kind of dependence on others, whereas the hallmark of the man is self-sufficiency.
Rousseau makes the same claim when he says that the citizen's existence is "relative" (he 4
conceives of himself and senses his own value only in relation to a larger whole), whereas the
man's existence is "absolute." It is striking, and no coincidence, that these are the same terms
Rousseau uses in the Second Discourse when distinguishing the two forms of self-love--amour
propre and amour de soi-même--that motivate humans and account for the greatest part of their
behavior. (The other human motivator is pity, which, in the Second Discourse at least, is said to
operate independently of both forms of self-love (DI, 127/OC 3, 125-6).) As this repetition of
the two terms suggests, it is impossible to grasp Rousseau's distinction between man and citizen
without first defining the "relative" and "absolute" forms of self-love and understanding how
they figure in each of the two ideals. I shall argue that the most important difference between
man and citizen is a difference in how self-love (in the broadest sense) is configured in each and
that the principal distinction between domestic and civic educati