Making virtue reign : citizenship and civic education in the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This dissertation is a study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptions of citizenship and civic education. Its basic conceit is that the former—what it means to be a citizen—can be understood fully only in light of the latter—what it means to become a citizen. It argues that Rousseau’s conception of civic education—a denaturing, psychically transformative process whereby human beings become citizens who virtuously exercise their rights and fulfill their duties under the social contract—poses a critical, yet, in a way, friendly, challenge to us as liberal democrats. For as radically as Rousseauian civic education differs from ours, it is grounded in premises that we, as liberal democrats, affirm, i.e., that human beings are naturally free and equal and therefore that the only authority to which human beings may be legitimately subject is that to which they consent. Hence, our own premises compel us to confront the challenge posed by Rousseau’s writings on citizenship and civic education. Contemporary disillusionment with citizenship across the liberal-democratic West makes doing this only more urgent and potentially illuminating and fruitful. Consisting in careful textual analysis of the various works and passages in which Rousseau treats civic education, the dissertation is organized around a heretofore insufficiently examined distinction between a preliminary stage of civic education and civic education proper. Whereas, in the former, future citizens are persuaded by legislators effectively to enact wise laws by means of ingenious yet disingenuous appeals to divine authority, in the latter, dutifulness to such authority is replaced as the moral basis for civic virtue with patriotism. The thesis of the dissertation is that, in order to understand the limits and possibilities of Rousseauian citizenship, it is necessary to understand this shift that lies at the heart of Rousseauian civic education.