When my children were little, I found myself immersed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Part treatise on education and part novel, Emile calls out the artificiality of social expectations, which can lead to suffering, anxiety, and physical ailments. Rousseau advocates instead for a system of education that can free human beings from the chains of public opinion while fostering virtuous interactions with others. For Rousseau, the arbitrary rules and conventions imposed by society and well-meaning parents only stifle a child’s capacity to learn.
Sometimes, after days tending to my children, I would read passages aloud to my husband and we’d laugh over the impracticality of Rousseau’s suggestions: exposing children to cold weather or setting them loose in the woods so they would get lost and have to find their way home. Rousseau, moreover, wasn’t a model parent. He fathered five children and took them all to a foundling home. We do not conclusively know what happened to them, but given the conditions of foundling homes in 18th-century Europe, Rousseau almost certainly doomed his offspring to a nasty, brutish, and short life. Apparently, like so many of us, he was better at giving advice than doing the work of parenting.
Although my children are grown now, I still find myself thinking about Rousseau’s approach to education. As a social philosopher, I see his project as visionary. Indeed, Emile’s contributions to discussions of human relations, justice, and politics remain relevant. Rousseau understood that people don’t appear fully formed, ready to take their place in society as responsible and contributing citizens. Emile offers his detailed description of raising a child according to nature, for the good of the child and the community.
Rousseau’s wonderfully rich text—beginning before the birth of Emile and concluding when, as a young adult, he meets his perfect mate—teaches that human beings need to learn how to be social. The past few years have punctuated the importance of Rousseau’s lesson. The lockdowns brought about by Covid provided a sort of reset: a long period of isolation followed by a gradual reintroduction to social life. But the modern world is too infected with all the things Rousseau disdained: the curated images of self constantly on display in social media and the celebration of uncivil or cruel behavior—especially on “reality” shows that distort what their name promises. I doubt Rousseau would find our forms of social existence compelling. Contemporary human beings worry too much about the opinions of others and too little about the cultivation of empathy.
In Emile, Rousseau dreamed up a tutor who aims to make Emile into a person suitable for life in society and for participation in politics. The tutor eschews book learning and orchestrates various lessons for his student instead: the naturally curious child will learn by doing and by playing. While out on a walk one day, Emile and his tutor pause to snack on some small cakes. The tutor suggests that it would be fun to award a cake to the winner of a race between two local youths. This footrace proves to be amusing but, at first, nothing more. The youths must race repeatedly for the tutor’s lesson to sink in.
Soon, Emile has the desire to run in the event and earn a cake for himself. After some practice (and no small amount of chicanery on the part of the tutor), he is ready to compete. The student ends up running the race repeatedly, with the tutor altering the course to increase the distance. Emile soon notices that the tutor is manipulating things to ensure a win or loss. Incensed at such behavior, the student becomes expert at estimating distances on the racecourse and overcoming the inequality. Despite knowing what the tutor is up to, Emile still chooses to run, selecting a route with confidence. In the end, the runners enjoy the adulation of the gathered crowd and share the prize. Rather than feeling resentment or distrust, Emile feels the spirit of generosity, which for Rousseau is less about sharing one’s riches and more about working together to accomplish a goal.
The second illustration of Emile’s nascent efforts at becoming a social being comes couched in a lesson on magnetism. A magician at a fair beguiles the young student with a wax duck that floats in a tub of water and is seemingly attracted to a piece of bread in the magician’s hand. Emile and the tutor head home, intent on replicating the trick with a magnet and a needle hidden in their own wax duck. Full of pride at uncovering the secret, Emile and his tutor go back to the fair, where Emile performs the trick himself, winning the accolades of the crowd.
This, however, isn’t the point of the lesson. The next day, the magician invites Emile back to the fair so that the student can show off his new skill again. This time the duck fails to respond. The magician has come up with some other method of controlling the duck, leaving Emile humiliated. The magician then visits Emile and his tutor to complain about the way they behaved. In attempting to replicate the trick, they sought to destroy his only means of subsistence. If he had other skills, he wouldn’t need to rely on a simple magic trick at a small country fair to earn a living. Paradoxically, Rousseau describes the magician as generous, too. Although the magician’s action might today be considered one of “public shaming,” Rousseau suggests that social relations require attentiveness and respect; we must learn to live with people of varying talents and abilities. Anyone in any station of society can exercise generosity. Emile must learn that each person contributes something of value to the social whole; the value lies not in the cleverness, the profitability, the strength, or the power of the contribution. The value—and hence the source of generosity—lies in the meaning of the contribution to the person making it.
Rousseau invites Emile and his teacher not just to walk a mile in the magician’s shoes. Rousseau cajoles them into seeing themselves as the magician sees them, from the perspective of his poverty and his trade. Yes, they are given front-row seats and exhibited to others for a lesson in humility. But the magician’s true sleight of hand is to get them to see how their actions jeopardized another’s livelihood and potentially harmed not only his profession but also his standing in the community. They were put in their place precisely to show that their place is privileged.
I won’t deny that readers who are quick to judge will find Rousseau’s suggested methods often cringeworthy, unscrupulous, and overly optimistic in their intent. Nonetheless, they contain abundant wisdom that can be applied to our current social situation.
Emile and the tutor do not wallow in their self-pity once they’ve been subjected to ridicule. They don’t use their humiliation to center attention on themselves. Rather, they humbly accept the lesson from the magician and come to recognize the value of the magic trick in the magician’s life. Self-absorption or self-aggrandizement, the sort of attention seeking that our culture seems to prize, works against social life for both the individual and the community. Getting caught up in appearances, or what Rousseau might describe as vanity that opposes our natural humanity, encourages a dangerous forgetfulness: we forget that other people also have lives and livelihoods worthy of acknowledgment, celebration, and care.
Learning to be social means learning to inquire about other people. Stepping outside ourselves to ask a stranger about her day or a friend about what troubles him is practicing empathy—a core trait for social life. When we’re too embarrassed to take such simple risks, a vain self-absorption settles in and feeds social division. In a letter to a friend, Rousseau signs off by saying, “I embrace all that you hold dear.” His written embrace bridges the divide, allowing him to share in the joys and heartaches of his friends.
The real risk, Rousseau contends, lies in failing to be attentive, empathetic, humble, understanding, respectful, trustworthy, and generous. As we increasingly find ourselves in a world in which trust and generosity are difficult, we can learn to be social by respecting the talents of those around us and by working to create fairness in a democratic society. Circumstances have thrown us together, for better or for worse. Social goodness, when cultivated in the right way, can allow us to reap the rewards of a generous and trusting society. At least that is what Rousseau wanted us to see.
