Questions to Ask Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau quarreled with Voltaire, Diderot and Hume and contradicted himself often enough to keep a room arguing, which makes him a good subject for a seminar, an essay, an imagined interview or a seat at a classroom Enlightenment salon. Here are 54 questions to ask Rousseau, for students of philosophy, political theory or history and the teachers who set the task, in the order his own argument runs: what people were like before society, how property and comparison made them unequal, the contract that could make law legitimate, the government that has to carry it out, the child raised in Emile, and last the life that so often contradicted the books. Rest every answer on something he wrote, and where he wrote nothing, mark the invention as yours.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
State of nature
Are people good by nature, and if so, what went wrong?
Why ask it
He called natural goodness the principle behind everything he wrote: people begin with self-love and pity and no wish to harm, and life among others is what bends them. Press on the word good, because his natural man has no idea of right and wrong and is closer to harmless than virtuous.
Did the state of nature ever really exist?
Why ask it
The preface to the Discourse on Inequality calls it a condition that no longer exists, perhaps never did and probably never will. It works as a measuring stick for the present, so an imagined Rousseau who gives it a date or a place on the map is out of character.
Hobbes said life without government would be a war of all against all. What did he get wrong?
Why ask it
His charge is that Hobbes took the greed and pride of people already living in society and read them back into a creature that had neither. Rousseau's natural man lives alone, needs little and has no reputation to defend, which leaves him little to fight over. The follow-up that tests it is what happens the first time food runs short.
What is the difference between loving yourself and needing to be admired?
Why ask it
He has a French term for each: amour de soi, the healthy care for one's own survival, and amour-propre, a self-regard that depends on ranking above someone else. The second can only appear once people live close enough to compare. Nearly every later argument of his leans on the pair, so settle it early in the conversation.
Do you want us to go back to living in the forest?
Why ask it
No, and being read that way annoyed him. A note to the second Discourse asks whether we must abolish society and return to live among the bears, and calls that a conclusion in the style of his opponents. Voltaire's joke that the book made him want to walk on all fours is the reading to steer a class away from.
Is it true you never wrote the words 'noble savage'?
Why ask it
True. The phrase is older than he is, turning up in English in a play by Dryden, and it does not appear in his works. His natural man is neither noble nor wicked, only untouched by comparison, so in an essay call it a label later readers pinned on him.
Why did you make pity natural, and not something we have to be taught?
Why ask it
A creature with no laws and no morals needed something to hold it back, and he found it in a reluctance to see another living thing suffer, which he says animals show too. Then ask what becomes of pity in a city. The Discourse answers that a philosopher need only put his hands over his ears and argue with himself a little.
What separates a human being from the other animals, if not reason?
Why ask it
Two things in his account: freedom to refuse instinct, and perfectibility, the capacity to gain new abilities over a life and across generations. It cuts both ways, since the faculty that gave us farming and writing gave us every vice as well. Whether he counts it a gift is the question to leave him with.
You argued that the sciences and the arts made people worse. Did you ever take it back?
Why ask it
The first Discourse sets rough, virtuous Sparta against clever Athens and ties learning to luxury and insincerity. He held to it, though his replies to critics grant that a people already corrupted gains nothing by closing its academies. The awkward point to raise is that the essay is itself a polished piece of rhetoric that won a literary prize.
Inequality
Who was the first person to say 'this is mine', and why do you blame him for so much?
Why ask it
Part Two of the Discourse on Inequality begins with him: the first man to fence a plot, call it his and find people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. Crimes, wars and miseries would have been spared, Rousseau adds, had someone pulled up the stakes. Point out that half the blame lands on the neighbors who believed it.
Is all inequality unjust, or only some of it?
Why ask it
The Discourse starts by sorting it into two kinds: natural differences of age, health, strength and mind, and political ones such as wealth, rank and power, which rest on agreement. His quarrel is with the second kind, most of all when it has stopped matching the first. A sharper follow-up is whether unequal talent may fairly earn unequal reward.
Locke said mixing your labor with the land makes it yours. Why is that not enough for you?
Why ask it
Labor, he grants, is the only believable start of a claim: whoever works a field has some title to its crop. His doubt is about what came after, when every acre was fenced and latecomers had nothing left to work. For an essay, set this beside the bean garden in Emile, where a child learns ownership by planting in soil that turns out to be the gardener's.
How did the rich persuade the poor to accept laws that protect the rich?
Why ask it
In his telling the wealthy had most to lose from constant disorder, so they proposed rules that would guard everyone's possessions alike. The poor ran to meet their chains, he writes, believing they were securing their liberty. Keep this fraudulent bargain apart from the legitimate contract of the later book, because the two are easy to run together.
Why does living near other people make us compare ourselves with them?
Why ask it
He starts with a harmless scene: people gathering to sing and dance outside their huts, each beginning to notice who is the handsomest, the strongest or the best dancer. Out of that came vanity and contempt on one side, shame and envy on the other. Students tend to bring up social media here, and the parallel is fair provided they present it as their own and not as his.
You wrote that iron and wheat civilized men and ruined the human race. What was so bad about farming?
Why ask it
Metalwork and agriculture, as he tells it, made each person need the labor of others, and dividing the land brought property, masters and hired hands. Before that he pictures a long age of huts and families, which he calls the happiest and most lasting. He blames a fatal accident for its end, and what the accident was is a question he never answers well.
In your story of the deer hunt, why does one hunter leave his post to chase a hare?
Why ask it
A group agrees to bring down a stag, a hare runs within reach of one of them, and he takes the sure small meal while the others lose theirs. The passage is a few lines long and is there to show how fragile early cooperation was. Game theory borrowed it as the stag hunt, so it suits a class that also studies economics.
How rich is too rich, in a state you would approve of?
Why ask it
The Social Contract offers a rule of thumb: no citizen wealthy enough to buy another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself. That is moderation and not equal shares, kept up by law because circumstances always push the other way. On method he is thin, his essay on political economy suggesting little beyond taxes on luxuries, which gives you somewhere to press.
If strength and birth do not give a ruler the right to be obeyed, what does?
Why ask it
Book One crosses out the usual candidates one at a time. A father's authority lasts only while the children need him, and force creates no duty: the robber's pistol is a power too, he notes, and nobody feels bound in conscience to hand over the purse. Agreement is all that remains, which leaves him to explain who agreed, and when.
What does a person give up by joining the social contract, and what do they get back?
Why ask it
He draws up the balance himself in Book One: lost, natural liberty and an unlimited right to whatever one can take; gained, civil liberty and secure ownership of what one has. A third gain is moral liberty, since being driven by appetite is slavery and obeying a law you gave yourself is freedom. Everyone surrenders everything, which he says keeps the terms equal, and that total surrender is the clause to question.
What is the general will, and how is it different from what most people happen to want?
Why ask it
Private wishes added together give only what he calls the will of all. The general will aims at the common interest, what each person would choose when voting as a member of the whole and not as someone with a stake of his own. Make him give an example, because the text supplies few and readers have argued over the idea ever since.
How can anyone be 'forced to be free'?
Why ask it
The phrase is in Book One: whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to by the whole body. He reasons that the citizen helped make the law, and that being held to it protects him from dependence on any one person's will. Twentieth-century critics read the line as a license for tyranny, and an honest interview puts that charge to him directly.
If I vote against a law and lose, in what sense did I consent to it?
Why ask it
Book Four says voters are asked whether a proposal matches the general will, not whether they like it, so the outvoted citizen learns he was mistaken about that will. A condition follows that is easy to miss: this holds only while the majority still has the qualities of the general will. Who is to judge when it has lost them is the natural next question.
Can a person agree to become a slave?
Why ask it
No, and Book One argues it at length: to give up liberty is to give up being human, and a bargain with unlimited authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other is no bargain. The words slavery and right, he writes, contradict each other. It is the passage to quote in any essay about the limits of consent.
A people does not always know what is good for it. Who writes the first laws?
Why ask it
Here he brings in the lawgiver, a figure like Lycurgus who drafts the founding laws, holds no office and may not use force. Rousseau admits the task almost calls for a god, and has the lawgiver credit his wisdom to heaven so that people will accept it. It is the weakest joint in a book about self-rule, since the people's first laws come from an outsider.
Why did you distrust parties and factions?
Why ask it
Each association inside the state grows a will of its own, so a vote ends up counting blocs instead of citizens. He would have none, or failing that a great many kept roughly equal so that no single one prevails. Students who have read Madison on factions can compare the two remedies, and anyone can ask how citizens deliberate if they may not organize.
Government
Why can't elected representatives speak for the people?
Why ask it
Sovereignty cannot be handed over, he argues, any more than a person's will can. His jab is aimed at the English, who think themselves free and are so only while they elect members of parliament, and slaves again once the vote is over. Deputies may draft and carry messages, but a law the people has not ratified in person is, for him, no law at all.
Could your republic work in a country of millions?
Why ask it
He doubted it: his models were Geneva, Sparta and early Rome, where citizens could know one another. Asked to advise Poland, a very large kingdom, he recommended a federation of smaller units and deputies bound by their instructions. That late work shows him bending the theory to a real case, and it is worth citing for exactly that reason.
Is democracy the best form of government?
Why ask it
Mind the vocabulary. The people must always be sovereign and make the laws, but he reserves the word democracy for a government in which the people also carry the laws out, and says only a people of gods could manage that. For the executive he leans toward an elected aristocracy, so an invented Rousseau who simply cheers for democracy has blurred his line between sovereign and government.
Can a country with a king still be a legitimate state?
Why ask it
On paper, yes: any state ruled by laws counts as a republic for him, and a king who only carries out laws the people made is their officer. The chapter on monarchy then takes most of it back, saying kings want to be absolute, courts raise schemers above able men and a hereditary crown can land on a child or a fool. In a classroom salon this is the one to ask when somebody else is playing a defender of absolute monarchy.
What should citizens do when the government starts behaving as if it were the sovereign?
Why ask it
He expects it to happen, as surely as age wears down a body. The safeguard he proposes is a fixed schedule of assemblies that open with two votes: whether to keep the present form of government, and whether to leave it in the same hands. What the people can do if the government refuses to call the meeting is where to push.
Why did you want a civil religion, with banishment for anyone who would not profess it?
Why ask it
The last chapter proposes a short public creed: a powerful and good God, a life to come, the sanctity of the contract and the laws, and no intolerance. Those who reject it may be banished as unsociable, and someone who professes it and then acts as an unbeliever may be put to death. Within months of that chapter appearing his own Emile was condemned for its religion, so ask whether he would still sign it.
Robespierre and the Jacobins claimed you as their own. Would you have claimed them?
Why ask it
He died in 1778, eleven years before the Revolution began, so the texts cannot settle it. The evidence pulls in two directions: his advice to Poland was to reform slowly and with great caution, yet in 1794 the revolutionaries carried his remains to the Pantheon. It makes a good debate motion with half the room on each side.
Is there any country today you would call a legitimate republic?
Why ask it
Nothing he wrote can answer for the present, so arm him with his own tests: do the citizens themselves approve the laws, is the state small enough for them to meet, and is anyone rich enough to buy another? In the Europe of his day he named one place still fit to be given good laws, the island of Corsica, and he later began drafting a constitution for it. Have each student nominate a country and make whoever plays him say why it fails.
Education
What is 'negative education', and why did you think doing less would teach more?
Why ask it
Emile begins from the claim that everything is good as it leaves its maker's hands and degenerates in the hands of man, so early teaching is mainly a matter of keeping vice and error out. His most quoted rule is that the aim before twelve is to lose time, not to gain it. Idle is the wrong picture, though: the body and the senses are worked hard while the lessons wait, and a reply in his voice should say so.
Why did you tell mothers to nurse their own babies and throw away the swaddling bands?
Why ask it
Book One attacks two customs of his day, wrapping infants tightly and sending them out to wet nurses, and argues for free limbs and a mother's own milk. The book is often credited with making both fashionable among well-off families. It is also the hardest setup for the question about his own children, so decide which of the two you ask first.
Why keep books from Emile until he is twelve, and then hand him Robinson Crusoe?
Why ask it
Reading is the plague of childhood, in his words, because it teaches children to talk about things they do not understand. Crusoe is allowed because it shows one man supplying his own needs and judging things by their use and not by opinion. A room of readers will object, and the fair reply is to ask how much they understood of what they read at eight.
How do you correct a child without ever giving an order?
Why ask it
By consequences. The boy in Emile who breaks his window is left to feel the draft at night, and nobody scolds him, the idea being that he should run up against things and never against another person's will. If he breaks it again he is shut in a room with no windows until he offers a bargain himself, which is hard to tell apart from a punishment and a fair thing to say to the author.
Emile has a tutor to himself from infancy to marriage. Who could ever afford that?
Why ask it
Nobody, and the preface expects readers to call the book the visions of a dreamer. He picks a rich orphan as the pupil, on the grounds that the poor are educated by their circumstances, and uses him to show principles the way the state of nature does. The useful version of the question is what a teacher with thirty children should take from it.
Why must a rich man's son learn a trade with his hands?
Why ask it
Emile becomes a carpenter. A fortune can be lost and a craft cannot, and someone who lives by his hands needs no one's favor. Rousseau adds that a crisis and an age of revolutions are coming in which the great may become small, a line that readers after 1789 took as prophecy.
Is the tutor teaching Emile freedom, or managing a child who only feels free?
Why ask it
The book is blunt: let the pupil always believe he is the master while it is really you, since no subjection is so complete as one that keeps the look of freedom. Put that beside 'forced to be free' and ask whether his citizen is being handled the same way. Few passages tie the two books of 1762 together as tightly.
Why did you give Sophie such a different education from Emile's?
Why ask it
Book Five says a woman's education should be planned in relation to men: to please them, be useful to them and make their lives agreeable. Mary Wollstonecraft answered him by name in 1792, turning his own case for reason and independence toward girls. Have someone put her objection to him in her terms, and do not soften what he wrote.
Did you ever manage to teach a real child?
Why ask it
As a young man he tutored the two sons of the Mably family in Lyon and, on the evidence of his own Confessions, did it badly, lurching between sentiment, argument and anger. He left after about a year. An in-character reply admits that Emile was written by someone who knew what failing at the job was like.
What did the Savoyard Vicar say that got Emile burned?
Why ask it
Book Four holds a long profession of faith by a country priest who finds God through conscience and the order of nature and sets revelation, miracles and church authority aside. In 1762 the Parlement of Paris condemned the book and ordered his arrest, Geneva burned it together with the Social Contract, and he fled. Any question about his later distrust of everyone should begin from that summer.
His life
You wrote a book on raising children and left your own five at a foundling hospital. How do you answer for that?
Why ask it
This is the contradiction every interviewer reaches, and he knew it. The Confessions offers reasons (poverty, Thérèse Levasseur's family, a belief the children would be better raised) and also remorse, while Emile declares that a man who cannot fulfill a father's duties has no right to become one. Let him make his defense in full, then read him that sentence.
Why did you walk away from Geneva at fifteen?
Why ask it
He was an unhappy engraver's apprentice who came back from a Sunday walk in 1728 to find the city gates shut for the third time, and chose not to face his master's beating. His mother had died days after his birth and his father had left the city years earlier, so little held him there. It explains some of the longing in the title pages of his major books, which present the author as a citizen of Geneva.
In the Confessions you admit letting a servant girl take the blame for a ribbon you stole. Why tell that story?
Why ask it
As a teenage servant in Turin he took a ribbon and, when it was found on him, accused a young cook named Marion; both were dismissed and he never learned what became of her. He says the memory weighed on him for life and was one reason for writing the book. Watch how the telling moves from guilt toward explanation, a pattern that runs through the whole autobiography.
What happened to you on the road to Vincennes?
Why ask it
Walking to visit Diderot in prison in 1749, he read that the Dijon Academy was asking whether the revival of the sciences and arts had improved morals. He described being overwhelmed under a tree by a rush of ideas, and the essay that came of it won the prize and made his name. Since he told the story more than a decade later, an interviewer may fairly ask how much polish the memory had picked up.
You argued against opening a theater in Geneva, yet you wrote an opera and a bestselling novel. Which Rousseau should we believe?
Why ask it
His opera The Village Soothsayer was performed before Louis XV in 1752, and Julie, or the New Heloise was one of the most widely read novels of its century. The Letter to d'Alembert of 1758 holds that a theater suited to Paris would corrupt a small republic. His defense in the preface to Julie is that great cities need theaters and corrupt peoples need novels, and you can decide how far that gets him.
Why did you turn down a pension from the king?
Why ask it
After the opera's success he was to be presented at court the next day, with a pension expected, and he went home instead. The Confessions puts it down to shyness, poor health and an unwillingness to owe his living to a patron, and he copied music by the page to pay his way. Weigh that against the houses he accepted from wealthy admirers over the years.
What went wrong between you and David Hume?
Why ask it
Hume brought him to England in 1766 as a refugee, found him a house and arranged the offer of a royal pension. Within months Rousseau had decided Hume was part of a plot to ridicule him and sent a long accusing letter, which Hume answered by publishing his own account. Hume comes out of the exchange looking the more reasonable man, though it is fair to ask what four years of being driven from one refuge to the next does to a person's trust.
Did you really write 'let them eat cake'?
Why ask it
Something close to it is in the Confessions, where he recalls a great princess who was told the peasants had no bread and replied that they should eat brioche. He names nobody, and he wrote those pages in the 1760s, when Marie Antoinette was a child in Austria. Pinning the line on her came later, so the better follow-up is who he thought the princess was.
After a lifetime of writing about citizens, why did you end it walking alone?
Why ask it
His last book, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, opens with him alone on the earth, with no brother, neighbor or friend but himself. He spent his final years copying music and collecting plants, and died at Ermenonville in 1778 with the book unfinished. A good last question is whether a citizen of his republic would be allowed that much solitude.
You and Voltaire lie a few steps apart in the Pantheon. What would you say to him now?
Why ask it
They quarreled for some twenty years, over the theater, over Providence after the Lisbon earthquake and over the pamphlet in which Voltaire exposed the abandoned children. Both died in 1778, and their tombs now face each other in the crypt in Paris. The answer has to be invented, which makes this the creative question for an assignment and one to leave out of an essay.
Putting Rousseau in the chair: sources, staging and traps
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Which book answers which question
Four books carry most of the answers
The Discourse on Inequality (1755) covers the State of nature and Inequality groups. The Social Contract and Emile, both published in 1762, cover the two political groups and Education. The Confessions, printed after his death, is the main source for the life. A class short of time can manage with the opening of Part Two of the Discourse, Book One of the Social Contract and the first pages of Emile.
The two Discourses were contest entries
Both were written in reply to essay questions set by the Academy of Dijon, and they argue one side as hard as a prize essay does. Read them as advocacy. When an answer of his sounds extreme, check whether the Social Contract or Emile says the same thing more carefully before you treat it as his settled view.
Words he uses in his own way
Sovereign means the whole people making law, never a king. Government means the body that carries the law out, which can be one person, a few or many. Nature means what a human being would be without society's shaping, and has little to do with scenery. Half the confusion in essays on him comes from reading these three words in their everyday sense.
He kept writing for almost thirty years
The author of the first Discourse was a little-known secretary and musician in Paris. The author of the Social Contract was famous and about to become a fugitive. The author of the Reveries believed a wide conspiracy was working against him. Put a year on any answer you write in his voice, because the tone changes more than the doctrine does.
Staging the imagined interview
Choose the year you visit him
In 1755 he is the talk of Paris and enjoying the argument. In the summer of 1762 he is packing to escape arrest. In 1777 he is an old man who walks, gathers plants and distrusts visitors. Ask about the foundling hospital in 1755 and it is still known only to a few friends. Ask in 1777 and Voltaire has made it public and the Confessions has already argued the defense, so fix the date before you draft a line.
Write him touchy and eloquent
He took offense easily and defended himself at length and with feeling. A calm Rousseau who concedes a point in one sentence sounds wrong. Let him object to the question, explain himself for a paragraph, and only then admit what troubles him, which is roughly the order the Confessions follows.
Give him one paradox per answer
He liked to state a position as a sharp contrast: born free and in chains, forced to be free, losing time in order to gain it. In Emile he says he would sooner be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices. One such turn in an answer catches the voice. Three in a row reads as parody.
In an Enlightenment salon he is the awkward guest
History classes often stage a salon with one student playing each thinker. Rousseau is the guest who fell out with the others: he quarreled with Voltaire, broke with Diderot and accused Hume. Whoever plays him should arrive with the first Discourse's claim that learning and polish made people worse, since nobody else at the table holds it. Locke died eight years before Rousseau was born, so the question about property crosses a gap the salon has to wave through. For a one-on-one interview, cast the questioner as well: a reader of Wollstonecraft fresh from Book Five, or a Geneva magistrate deciding whether the book may be sold.
Exercises for a seminar or a debate
What to assign before each group
State of nature needs Part One of the second Discourse and Inequality needs Part Two, with the short first Discourse for the question on the sciences and arts. Social contract rests on Books One and Two of the book it is named for, plus the chapter on voting in Book Four. Government is mostly Book Three, with the chapter on civil religion near the end of Book Four. Education follows Emile in order: infancy and the broken window in the first two books, Crusoe and the carpenter's bench in Book Three, the Vicar in Book Four, Sophie in Book Five. His life can be run cold, though the first two books of the Confessions, which hold the Geneva gates and the ribbon, are short enough to assign.
Set Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau in three corners
Divide the room into three and give each group one author's account of life before government. Put the questions on Hobbes and on Locke from this list to all three, and have each corner answer as its author would. Students see quickly that the three disagree about what people are like, and that the politics follows from that.
Hold a real vote, then ask his question
Have the class vote on a rule that affects them, such as where phones go during the session. Then ask those who lost whether they were wrong about what is good for the whole group, or simply outnumbered. It turns the hardest page of Book Four into something people have just felt, and the general will stops being a phrase.
Keep the two contracts on separate sides of the board
Write the bargain from the Discourse on Inequality on the left, where the rich propose laws and the poor accept them. Write the terms of the Social Contract on the right, where each person gives himself to the whole and gets back a share in making the law. Ask what would have to change to turn the left column into the right.
Four misreadings worth catching early
The back-to-nature Rousseau
He never proposes returning to the woods, and a note to the Discourse says that people like himself can no longer live on grass and acorns. A paper that has him recommending the simple life has stopped at the first half of his argument. The second half is the Social Contract, which tries to say what a just society would look like for people who cannot go back.
The general will as a head count
The majority can be wrong about the common interest, and he says so. Writing that the general will is whatever most people vote for misses the distinction he draws between the general will and the will of all. Writing that it is whatever a wise ruler decides the people really want misses his insistence that only the assembled people can declare it.
Letting the life settle the argument
What he did with his children is a fair question to put to the author of Emile, and he should be made to answer it. It does not show that the argument about property or consent is false. Mark where a criticism is aimed at the man and where it is aimed at a claim, and keep the excuses he makes for himself at the same distance.
Slogans without the next sentence
The famous lines are openings, and each is qualified by what follows it. Quote the passage on chains with the sentence about legitimacy, and 'forced to be free' with the reason he gives. Two of the best-known tags fail the same test from the other side: 'noble savage' is not his phrase, and the cake story names no queen. Give the book and the chapter for anything you put in quotation marks.