The purpose of such games, however, is not Homeric. They are not designed to provide source material for poets. Rather, they are a means to much more important ends: promoting patriotism and ensuring the safety of the state. Patriotism is achieved by increasing the “pride and self-esteem” of the participants, which is redirected to promote love of country and a common Polish identity through reminiscences of past national glories.55 It is common among Rousseau scholars, in fact, to cite this passage as proof that amour-propre and honoring talents can be manipulated for positive purposes, such as the promotion of civic virtue. The latter goal of ensuring state security is attained through the selection and establishment of a manly aristocratic class capable of mounting an effective military defense against invaders. The Homeric games and knights’ tournaments are specifically tailored to address Poland’s geopolitical vulnerabilities. Rousseau worries that Poland is too decentralized and underpopulated to fend off military threats from its more powerful and despotic neighbors, such as Russia. If Poland is to prevent foreign invasion, it needs to become a unified nation guided by powerful military leadership. Thus, unlike Ajax and Achilles, Rousseau seeks to promote the glory of collective identities rather than individual ones and does so in service to amour de soi-même rather than amour-propre. Sensibly, Rousseau views Homer’s martial ethic as an asset for a people facing military dangers. In a world of nation-states, patriotism and a warrior class have their uses and must be cultivated. Homeric practices and attitudes are for him a means to a different end and do not imply an endorsement of aristocratic values.
Sure enough, absent such geopolitical concerns, Rousseau presents a much more mixed picture of classic aristocratic values. In “Discourse on Heroic Virtue,” he provides a modest defense of heroism and heroes. Love of glory, he claims, is responsible “for innumerable goods and evils.”56 The formulation here is more balanced than his earlier descriptions of the utility of amour-propre in the Second Discourse and Emile, which are more skewed toward inevitable evils. But it is hardly a ringing endorsement. Moreover, Rousseau portrays martial glory as a poor substitute for virtue. True heroes are wise men who desire virtue and the happiness of their fellow citizens, not warriors trying to kill their way to eternal glory. And heroes for him are hardly the best of men. Rather, they are “a composite of good and bad qualities that are beneficial or harmful depending on circumstances.”57 While the essay is not all that helpful—Rousseau begins it by conceding “this piece is very bad”58—this last point about circumstance is crucial for understanding his critique of amour-propre and love of glory and why his endorsement of Homer in Considerations on the Government of Poland is not generalizable to other societies.
In the context of Enlightenment Europe, as evident from the first two discourses as well as later writings, Rousseau thinks the concept of the hero or the existence of a superior class of individuals is positively dangerous. In such environments, love of glory serves neither the collective good nor amour de soi-même. It becomes solely a means for self-aggrandizement. People will want to be best for the sake of being best, and hence will develop the worst sorts of amour-propre. In all likelihood, they will cause untold amounts of evil. The great, in other words, become a grave threat to the good. When writing of Paris and Enlightenment Europe, Rousseau dedicates himself to equality and promotes the virtues of the common person. He sees it as his duty to protect the dignity of such people against the superior personalities or heroes in their community.
When Rousseau writes in this vein, few would dispute that he is the “anti-Homer” or, as Judith Shklar once wryly referred to him, “the Homer of the losers.”59 Nietzsche’s characterization of Rousseau as committed to “an ideal born of hatred for aristocratic culture” likewise gets to the core of Rousseau’s motivations.60 Although Nietzsche has been accused of being unfair and simplistic toward his Genevan predecessor,61 a charge that is probably true, his bird’s-eye view of Rousseau nonetheless manages to identify the topical thread that ties together so many of Rousseau’s writings. Nietzsche’s Rousseau views genius and being best as a social problem in need of a solution.
Third, and most important, Rousseau blurs the aristocrat-democrat distinction that structures Sophocles’ Ajax. The modern Europeans whom he so persistently criticizes—the urban ones committed to the Enlightenment and commerce—are a strange amalgam of both the aristocratic and the democratic personalities. They are one part Odysseus and one part Ajax. They are strategic, calculating, and materialistic and yet supremely consumed with honor, the value of their identity, and ability-based superiority. In some cases, they even strive for immortality. If they speak the language of utilitarianism, they are still dedicated to being aristos and, as will be demonstrated, seeking societal dominance to complement their perceived excellences. They do more than work for themselves in the prudent, flexible way that is exemplified by Odysseus. There is a good deal of Ajax in them, even if they lack the vocabulary to account for it.
It requires little effort to reconcile the seemingly disparate democratic and aristocratic values of modern bourgeois Europeans. Their “democratic” commitments to utility and practicality are easily assimilated into the aristocratic value structure. They become yet another criterion for being aristos. Once utility and practicality are established as a dominant set of values, those who best exemplify such traits plausibly can demand membership among the aristoi. This is even true of Odysseus. He wins Achilles’ armor because he successfully argues that his intelligence is more useful to the Greek war effort than Ajax’s brute strength. As Woodruff points out, after nine years of war it was clear to everyone that brute strength was not going to win the war. It took Odysseus’s idea of the Trojan horse to finally secure victory.62 Rousseau essentially argues that the new bourgeois elite echoed Odysseus’s claim to being aristos and called for the establishment of an “Odyssean” aristocracy. The members of the elite argued that their ability to administrate the world, produce wealth, and invent knowledge ought to define new criteria for being best—that the useful and the clever ought to rule.63
Publicly at least, these new bourgeois heroes did not speak like ancient heroes. Their vocabulary consisted of such terms as equality, popular sovereignty, and liberty. Rousseau, however, sees this as little more than hypocrisy and ideology, and he warns his readers not to be fooled. The new upstart men of commerce and administrators (and to a lesser degree intellectuals) supported opening up the political system and other democratic measures only to the extent that the new measures would weaken their perceived enemies and promote their own ambitions.64 If they championed equality, it was only in a form such as equality of opportunity, which would not get in the way of their aristocratic ambitions.65 They knew that if they were to attain their goals of becoming the new aristoi, they had to subvert the old powers. They had to delegitimize, in short, the courtly aristocracy and the church. If democratic language was suitable to this purpose, they were more than willing to use it. Thus, like Odysseus, their values slid around to meet their desires, which paradoxically were aristocratic.
It is therefore sensible to conclude that Rousseau interprets the great social-class battles of the eighteenth century as an ideological scrum between competing aristocratic factions rather than between democrats and aristocrats. The contest between Ajax and Odysseus is not between two separate worldviews so much as between competing claims to the same prize. While the old and new aristocrats fought for dominance, Rousseau worried about the common people. In his view, they were merely pawns in this upper-class competition, to be used, abused, and demeaned for someone else’s ends. Throughout his writings, he tears off the democratic clothing of Europe’s emerging elite and attempts to protect the masses against the elite’s scheming and maneuvering for dominance.
Political Evidence: Elias’s Civilizing Process and Elite Politics in Modern Europe
Rousseau’s intuition about the nature of eighteenth-century politics draws support from important historical scholarship. In particular, Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process perfectly frames Rousseau’s narrative. According to Elias, the medieval era in Europe is at first dominated by a warrior aristocracy of landowning knights who, like the ancient Greek aristocrats, earned their superiority on the battlefield. It was a violent, almost anarchic