Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Society · Status · Character
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. Largely self-educated and frequently at odds with the intellectual establishment around him, he became one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
While many contemporaries celebrated the advance of reason, science and civilisation, Rousseau asked a more troubling question: whether material and intellectual progress necessarily made human beings morally better.
The Idea
We become different when we begin to measure ourselves against others.
Rousseau believed that social life introduces comparison, status and the desire for recognition. We cease simply to experience ourselves and begin to see ourselves through the imagined judgement of other people.
Reputation begins to matter.
So do rank, possession and appearance.
Society does not merely regulate behaviour. It helps shape the people who behave.
Rousseau and Owain Morgan
Rousseau gives Owain another way of thinking about character:
A person may act not simply because of what he wants, but because of what he needs others to think of him.
This distinction interests Owain enormously.
Pride, embarrassment, reputation and social position can exert considerable pressure upon behaviour. A man may accept a risk he would otherwise avoid because refusing it would make him appear weak. He may defend a decision long after recognising privately that it was mistaken because admitting the mistake would diminish him in the eyes of others.
The audience need not even be present.
Once social expectations have been internalised, a person can carry them within himself.
Rousseau therefore encourages Owain to look closely at comparison. Who does this person measure himself against? A father? A brother? A colleague? A social superior? What standard does he believe he must satisfy, and what would failure mean to him?
This takes Owain beyond the simple question of temperament.
Someone described as proud may have spent a lifetime being told that he must succeed. Someone who appears arrogant may be protecting a more fragile sense of position. A person who seems excessively concerned with reputation may inhabit a world in which reputation determines authority, livelihood or belonging.
Understanding those pressures does not make the resulting conduct harmless.
But it may make it intelligible.
Rousseau therefore leaves Owain with a revealing question:
Who is this person trying to be in the eyes of others?
The Unresolved Question
Rousseau’s account creates a difficulty.
If society shapes us so profoundly, where does social influence end and individual responsibility begin?
Owain cannot simply blame the world surrounding a person for what that person eventually chooses to do.
Nor can he pretend that character develops independently of family, class, education, status and expectation.
Circumstance may explain the pressure. It does not determine the response.
For Owain, the important distinction is between understanding the conditions that shaped an individual and denying that individual’s responsibility for what he does within them.
Further Reading
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755) — Rousseau’s examination of inequality, comparison and the effects of social development upon human beings.
The Social Contract (1762) — his influential exploration of freedom, political authority and the relationship between individual and society.
Émile, or On Education (1762) — an examination of human development and the ways education and society shape the individual.
The Essence
‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’
For Owain, some of Rousseau’s most interesting chains are psychological rather than political: reputation, expectation, comparison and the need to be seen in a particular way.
A person may believe he is acting freely while responding to an audience he has carried within himself for years.