The Very Order of Things: Rousseau's Tutorial Republicanism

Abstract

Rousseau's political theory has seemed to many to contemplate the radical transformation of human character through invasive governmental practices. But a classical republican reading of his general concern with moeurs and his developed conception of statecraft shows why he called for regulating or redirecting psychic dispositions, not destroying and then reconstructing them. Intimately related to this theme of moral economy are Rousseau's ideas on liberty and authority, which evince a deep-seated, complex Platonism. Far from displacing the modern categories of natural law, however, Rousseau's classical republicanism was meant to supply critical force for their revision. Thus the more instructive antinomy for students of Rousseau's politics is not Plato and Hobbes but rather Plato and Machiavelli, for the outstanding interpretive dilemma concerns the precise nature of republican authority.