Furthermore, by focusing so much on the positive aspects of amour-propre, scholars disregard Rousseau’s powerful critique against his contemporaries. Most seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century thinkers—such as Pierre Nicole, Pierre Bayle, Bernard Mandeville, and others—enthusiastically celebrate amour-propre as a cure for poverty, a catalyst for economic growth, an inspiration for intellectual development, and the emotional glue bonding society together. Rousseau was far more skeptical of amour-propre than his peers, rejecting most of their attempts to extract political, social, and economic value from the passion. When he argues for positive usages of amour-propre, it is mostly to construct healthy moral personalities that transcend the selfishness inherent in it. Amour-propre, in other words, can be transformative. It can create new forms of consciousness. Rousseau rarely argues it should merely be redirected to mimic virtues such as charity or promote economic growth. His utilization of amour-propre for positive ends is much more circumscribed than that of many of the thinkers of his age.
While the desire of the positive amour-propre theorists to correct for the error of earlier scholars who held too dismal a view of Rousseau’s treatment of the passion is welcome, I worry that they overcorrect this problem—especially Dent and Neuhouser in his second book, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality. Rousseau is not Kant. Rather than try to reconcile him with liberalism, we should embrace his far-reaching social and political criticism and interpret amour-propre in the context of this criticism. We will learn more about him, more about amour-propre, and more about modern life.
The four chapters in this book trace the development of amour-propre from its genealogical roots in the Homeric honor culture to Saint Augustine and medieval Christianity to its rebirth among seventeenth-century French neo-Augustinians. It continues through Rousseau’s debate with the philosophes, and finally to Tocqueville’s interpretation of it as a democratic vice, though one that is ultimately harmless and occasionally useful.
In Chapter 1, I argue that Rousseau defines amour-propre in terms of classical notions of aristocracy and draws upon it in his critique of the philosophe project to become a new aristocracy.
Chapter 2 examines the religious origins of amour-propre through Augustine’s concept of amor sui (translated as self-love in English and amour-propre in French) and traces its development through seventeenth-century neo-Augustinians and early Enlightenment thinkers such as Mandeville. Augustine’s treatment of amor sui is varied and wide-ranging. Augustine offers, however, two narratives of the passion that are of supreme importance in modernity. The first is democratic and seeks to identify instances in which amor sui can be manipulated for some societal benefit. The second is aristocratic and identifies a process in which amor sui degenerates into a more destructive passion—libido dominandi, or lust for domination and control. Surprisingly, most neo-Augustinians hold a more modern, utilitarian interpretation of amor sui and downplay Augustine’s own warnings that it tends to become a gateway emotion to the lust for domination. Instead, they emphasize its social utility in the city of humans, or civitas terrena.
In Chapter 3, I contend that Rousseau’s narrative in the Second Discourse closely mirrors Augustine’s treatment of amor sui as a gateway to domination and despotism. Furthermore, I examine his various solutions to amour-propre and conclude they all are designed to eliminate the aristocratic and commercial conditions most responsible for its most dangerous expressions.
Finally, in Chapter 4, I argue that Tocqueville implicitly challenges Rousseau’s thesis that amour-propre results from aristocratic psychology and is dangerously inflamed by commercial capitalism. While he accepts that “inflamed” amour-propre is most common in commercial societies that sustain social-class fluidity, he also believes the passion to be essentially democratic rather than aristocratic. That is, it results from the commitment to equality more than from the rewarding of excellences. Tocqueville is also less pessimistic than Rousseau and rejects his argument that it degenerates into a desire to dominate and tyrannize over one’s neighbors. The most dangerous tyrannies of the modern age, he thinks, are inspired by weakness and mediocrity, not the excellences of the talented.
Chapter 1
Being Aristos and the Politics of Aristocracy
Rousseau undertakes his initial inquiry into amour-propre early in part II of the Second Discourse. His first step is to connect it to aristocracy. In his anthropologic natural history, he describes early humans settling into villages for the first time. These new social living arrangements forever change the consciousness of the species and create a powerful new desire: that of being aristos, or “being best.” Rousseau writes,
It became customary to assemble in front of the Cabins or around a large Tree: song and dance, true children of leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle men and women gathered in a crowd. Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a price. The one who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice: from these first preferences on one side were born vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens at last produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.1
Granted, Rousseau does not explicitly use the term amour-propre in the passage (hereinafter referred to as the “competition for esteem”). Many scholars, however, are comfortable with Victor Goldschmidt’s contention that Rousseau’s village residents are experiencing an emotion, if not the same as amour-propre, at least resembling it and represent a harbinger of things to come.2 Like civil humans, as most scholarship acknowledges, the village inhabitants are both self-conscious and competitive. Self-consciousness, in fact, results from competitiveness. The villagers become aware of themselves as individuals and form an identity through repeated comparisons with their peers. As Jean Starobinksi observes, it is the first time in which there is an “active division between self and other.”3 In the process, the villagers develop a social consciousness in which they learn to view themselves through the perspective of others. That is, they learn to think of themselves in the third person. Surprisingly, however, little attention is paid to the language of being aristos in the “competition of esteem” passage—even though such language is clear and obvious. The members of Rousseau’s little society all want to be the best at something: singing or dancing, intelligence, and so on. Importantly, they do not want merely to be appreciated for their finer qualities or recognized as a person worthy of respect. They do not even want to be better than their neighbors. They want to be aristos, or to “claim first rank as an individual.”4 They desire a level of superiority that is not easily satisfied and leaves little room for the success of others. Most scholars, however, ignore this language and interpret it as either a proxy for the competitive nature of civil society or diminish it to a superlative desire for a higher relative rank. Almost no one takes seriously that Rousseau actually means in the passage “being best.”
The three “positive amour-propre” theorists—Dent, Cooper, and Neuhouser—interpret