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THINKING ABOUT THE NATURE AND ROLE OF AUTHORITY IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION WITH ROUSSEAUS EMILE
Olivier Michaud
Department of Educational Foundations Montclair State University

Abstract. Educational authority is an issue in contemporary democracies. Surprisingly, little attention has been given to the problem of authority in Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Emile and his work has not been addressed in the contemporary debate on the issue of authority in democratic education. Olivier Michauds goals are, rst, to address both of these oversights by offering an original reading of the problem of authority in Emile and then to rehabilitate the notion of educational authority for democratic educators today. Contrary to progressive readings of Emile, he argues, Rousseaus position on this issue is not reducible to education against authority. What appears at rst glance to be an education against authority is, in a deeper sense, an education toward and even within authority. Michaud contends that we have to embrace these complexities and contradictions that inform Rousseaus work in order to gain insights into the place and role of authority in democratic education. Michaud sheds light on Rousseaus stance on authority through a close study of specic topics addressed in Emile, including negative education, opinion, ones relation to God, friendship and loving relationships, and, nally, the relation Rousseau established with his reader.

The Issue of Authority in Democratic Education

In her classic text, What Is Authority?, Hannah Arendt claimed that we no longer understand the meaning of authority.1 According to her, if authority implies a certain form of obedience, it is by its nature not related to the use or the threat of violence, nor is it coming from argumentation and reasoning. For Arendt, authority is the power that exists outside of violence and argumentation. It takes its force from two sources: on the one hand, individuals must freely recognize it as legitimate; and, on the other hand, it points toward something superior from which it receives its legitimacy (for example, God or tradition). Arendts point is that authority is no longer structuring our social life; it is fundamentally a concept of past societies. Likewise according to Alexis de Tocquevilles framework, authority was an essential element of aristocratic societies.2 During the passage from a society rooted in the principle of inequality to a society rooted in the principle of equality from a heteronomous society to an autonomous society authority came to be at odds with the democratic revolution. For Tocqueville, authority requires a certain form of inequality that establishes who is superior and who is inferior, who knows and who is ignorant, who is wise and who is not. It is therefore natural that a society founded on the principle of equality weakens unequal social relations predicated on authority. Not only does the democratic revolution push people to question authority, but it also has rendered it difcult to situate those
1. Hannah Arendt, What Is Authority? in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1961), 91141. ` 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes [Complete works], 2 volumes (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1951 [18351840]). EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 3 2012 Board of Trustees University of Illinois 2012

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who possess it in the past it was clear to which group authority belonged: aristocratic classes or religious groups. According to Arendt and Marcel Gauchet, it was only a question of time for education to be struck by this reorganization of the place and nature of authority.3 Moreover, they believe that the crisis of authority is one of the major problems in modern education, because authority is at the center of any educational relation. A similar conclusion has also been reached by Judith Pace and Annette Hemmings, who argue that the problems that plague public education will never be resolved until theorists, ideologues, and researchers acknowledge the fact that a good education is simply not possible without classroom authority relations that promote learning.4 The issue of authority in modern education is general, but it appears most clearly in progressive education. John Dewey argued that progressive education is the new pedagogy required by the new democratic society.5 Progressive education is fundamentally child-centered, and, accordingly, it rejects imposition from above and outside of the child. In other words, Dewey was, if not eliminating the concept of authority, at least making it difcult to integrate into the new progressive pedagogy. Indeed, Dewey did not reject the place of authority in education, but it remains unclear what kind of authority he was advocating.6 Paolo Freires work leaves the reader with similar questions regarding authority: he was against the traditional use of authority, but he afrmed the place of some educational authority without clarifying its primary characteristics.7 The crisis of authority is most acute in A.S. Neills Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood, which argues against any form of authority in an education meant to promote student autonomy and freedom.8 Rousseaus Emile can be seen as providing the foundation for these diverse educational movements that refute the idea that the child has to
3. Hannah Arendt, Crisis in Education, in Between Past and Future, 170193; and Marcel Gauchet, ` Troisieme partie: Fin ou metamorphose de lautorite? [Part three: End or transformation of authority?] in Conditions de leducation, ed. Marie-Claude Blais, Marcel Gauchet, and Dominique Ottavi (Paris: Editions Stock, 2008), 134171. 4. Judith Pace and Annette Hemmings, Understanding Authority in Classrooms: A Review of Theory, Ideology, and Research, Review of Educational Research 77, no. 1 (2007): 22. 5. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2004 [1916]). 6. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938). 7. See mainly Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littleeld, 1998). 8. A.S. Neill, Summerhill School: A New Voice of Childhood (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995). OLIVIER MICHAUD is a Doctoral Student in Philosophy and Education at Montclair State University, Educational Foundations, University Hall, Room 2128B, 1 Normal Ave., Montclair, NJ 07043; email <michaudo1@mail.montclair.edu>. His primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education, educational authority, and democratic education.

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be disciplined and shaped from the outside.9 It is my contention that Rousseaus Emile should not only be read as a historical work. Indeed, as I intend to show in this essay, Emile offers us a more insightful, complex, and realistic inquiry into the issue of authority in democratic education than most contemporary progressive strains of educational philosophy.10 On a rst and supercial level, Emile is based on the idea that authority must be avoided in education, that education must start from the child. Thus Emile appears to be the appropriate genealogical point of origin for the progressive distrust of authority. However, on a second level, as my essay will show, Emile also offers an original and complex view of the place and nature of authority in democratic education an issue that has received little attention.11 This essay aims therefore to contribute to the literature on Emile by exploring the issue of authority in it. My ultimate goal is to show how Rousseaus Emile can help us to establish a new conception of authority adapted to democratic education, a new conception that is required for the effective functioning of our classrooms. It is true that Rousseau did not refer to democracy explicitly in Emile. In addition, Rousseau certainly understood democracy in a different way than we understand it in contemporary liberal democratic society;12 furthermore, he presented Emile as an account of the education of the man and not of the citizen. However, Rousseaus thought is too complex and wide-ranging to be subsumed under a simple category. The fundamental idea of this essay is that Emile has something to tell us about the issue of democratic education and more specically about the issue of democratic educational authority. Democratic education is understood in two ways in this text. First, in a particular sense, it means progressive education as an education that aims purposefully to be democratic; second, in a more general sense, it means an education that happens in a democratic society, a society based on the principles of equality and autonomy. Those two senses of
9. For the educational legacy of Rousseaus Emile, see Jason Martin and Nathan Martin, Rousseaus Emile and Educational Legacy, in The SAGE Handbook of Philosophy of Education, ed. Richard Bailey, Robin Barrow, David Carr, and Christine McCarthy (London: SAGE, 2010), 9196. 10. For the French text, I use Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou De leducation (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969 [1762]); the references and translation in the rest of this essay come from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). This work will be cited in the text as EOE for all subsequent references. 11. Some texts treat the issue of authority in Rousseaus work, but they do not examine Emile. Judith Shklar offers a study of the issue of authority in Julie, ou La nouvelle Helose; see Judith N. Shklar Images of Authority, in Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseaus Social Theory (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 127164. Robert McClintock explores the relation of Rousseau to his own authorities in his article Rousseau and the Dilemma of Authority, History of Education Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1974), 309333. However, according to N.J.H. Dent, the issue of authority in Rousseaus political writings has received the most sustained attention of commentors; see N.J.H Dent, A Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 3840. The exception is Michael Bell, Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority From J-J. Rousseau to J.M. Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1752. 12. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social [The social contract] (1762; repr., Paris: GFFlammarion, 2001).

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democratic education are not in contradiction, and Rousseau in Emile addressed both of them. Indeed, Emile is a foundational text of progressive education,13 but it can also be read as an exploration of the democratic mind.14 In the subsequent analysis, I will not distinguish between the two democratic educations that I have just differentiated, because they complement each other and also because I believe that narrowing the sense of the word democratic will conceal Rousseaus fundamental intuitions. My contention is that by exploring the different levels of complexity surrounding authority in Emile we gain essential insights regarding the place and nature of authority in democratic education. For this purpose, in the remainder of this essay I will unveil the issue of authority in Emile and explore how each level of interpretation pushes our understanding of democratic educational authority further. I argue that the book is structured around an ongoing dialectical transition from an education against authority, toward authority. Moreover, I claim that this movement is never stopped, but rather that democratic educational authority is exercised through a process of continual movement and transformation.15

Rousseaus Emile : Toward a Democratic Conception of Educational Authority First Principle: Living the Tension
Authority is one of the central concepts of Emile, and whoever wants to read Emile has to pay attention to its centrality. Supercially, we have only to look at how often Rousseau used the word authority.16 More fundamentally, Emiles education is constructed around authority, but in a very complex and to some extent contradictory way. On one level, authority is presented in Emile as the principal obstacle to a good education. This is why the word authority is mostly used in a negative sense. This rejection of authority appears in the goal that Rousseau gave himself in Emile: conducting a child from the moment of his birth up to the one when, become a grown man, he will no longer have need of any guide other than himself (EOE, 50). Moreover, not only is the goal of Emiles education autonomy, but this autonomy can only be attained by and through autonomy, that
13. See Avi I. Mintz, The Happy and Suffering Student? Rousseaus Emile and the Path Not Taken in Progressive Educational Thought, and Tal Gilead, Rousseau, Happiness and the Economic Approach to Education, both in this issue. For the link between Rousseau and les pedagogies nouvelles in France, see Jean-Paul Resweber, Les pedagogies nouvelles [New pedagogies] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). 14. Tanguy LAminot, La formation de lhomme nouveau [Formation of the new man], Hors-serie du nouvel observateur: Rousseau: Le genie de la modernite (JulyAugust 2010): 7679. 15. Emile is written in ve books that represent the ve stages of the life of a young individual, according to Rousseau. My reading of Emile is, on the one hand, chronological, following how each stage regarding authority develops on the preceding ones; on the other hand, however, I also offer a reading that is nonchronological, where all the stages overlap. How these two readings are intertwined will appear clearly in the following sections. 16. Gilbert Fauconnier, Le vocabulaire pedagogique de J-J. Rousseau [The pedagogical vocabulary of J-J. Rousseau] (Paris: Editions Slatkine, 1993), 3031.

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is, by means of an education where the pupil never faces authorities. There are two approaches to education that rely on authority and each fails for distinct reasons, according to Rousseau. There is rst the authority that achieves the submission of the child. According to Rousseau, this method is inadequate because it cannot teach the child to be autonomous, as it can only accustom a man to submit his judgment to others. Methods and goals in education cannot be disconnected, according to Rousseau: Submitted in everything to an authority which is always teaching, your [child] does nothing unless given the word. . . . About what do you want him to think when you think about everything for him? (EOE, 118).17 Any imposition of adult authority on the child will not only cause submission, but also resistance, as the child will only see this authority as something obstructing his freedom. Perhaps worst of all, a pedagogy of authority will encourage the child to put on a false face for the educator while hiding his real face. In the end, this child will nd ways to escape the governors surveillance and to escape at the rst opportunity. Lets now suppose an authority that is not so overt. The gentle educator may try rst to give reasons to justify his orders; however, whoever enters the realm of reasons enters a realm without boundaries. We always need a reason to justify another reason, and there is no end to the chain of reasons without at some point saying, it is like this because I say it is like this, that is, by imposing our view by force or by authority.18 The gentle educator may furthermore want to negotiate his own authority with the child for example, by promising the child something in return for obedience but such an approach simply undermines the educators authority. An educator following this path believes that he controls the child, when in reality it is the other way around: it is the child who is in power in such a relation, always negotiating his obedience. By rejecting the imposition of obedience by force or by reasoning, Rousseau demonstrated his agreement with Arendts denition of authority.19 The rst part of Emiles life unfolds without the use of explicit authority: Let him not know what obedience is when he acts nor what domination is when one acts for him (EOE, 85). This can only occur if the governor abandons the pretension of having authority over the child: Do not even allow him to imagine that you might pretend to have any authority on him (EOE, 91). Thus at the end
17. Throughout this essay, I use the masculine exclusively in discussing Rousseaus educational theory. In Emile and elsewhere, Rousseau made clear that he believed men and women followed different developmental paths and had different educational needs; therefore, I have continued his practice of using he and man to avoid potential problems associated with generalizing his ideas to cover the experience of girls and women. 18. That is one of Rousseaus main points of contention with Locke: childhood is not the age of reason, according to Rousseau. For the limits of reason, we can refer to the brief dialogue between an adult and a child in book 2 (EOE, 90). 19. By authority, Rousseau meant the rightful, legitimate title to command or require actions and forbearances from others. Correlative with authority is the obligation of obedience. It stands in contrast to mere superior force, which exacts only subjugated compliance (servitude). See Dent, A Rousseau Dictionary, 38.

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of book 2, Rousseau proudly related that his pupil will not understand us if we talk to him about duty, obedience, or command (EOE, 160). The education described in Emile, therefore, appears rst as an education without and even against authority. This aspect may explain why Emile has been read as depicting an education opposed to authority. However, this aspect, as important it is, is incomplete. Emile is obviously not totally free; he is always under the gaze of his governor, who has carefully constructed the environment that constrains his freedom. Emile does not consciously obey his governor, but he is completely under his power. This control is most evident in the following quote: Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do (EOE, 120). Emiles freedom cannot therefore be disconnected from the hidden and absolute domain of his governor: he ought to obey only me. That is my rst or, rather, my sole condition (EOE, 53). Rousseau emphasized the governors power over his pupil until the last lines of the book, where Emile begs his governor not to abandon him. By positing the complete freedom of the child and the complete power of the governor, Rousseau brought to light the fundamental contradiction or at least tension within democratic education regarding authority. Our rst step is to accept simultaneously both the absolute freedom and individuality of the child and the need for an adult to continually intervene in order to permit the development of the childs freedom and individuality. To be a modern educator is to accept living with this tension instead of hoping to resolve it. In discussing the role of the governor, Rousseau specied, In the rst place, you should be well aware that it is rarely up to you to suggest to him what he ought to learn. It is up to him to desire it, to seek it, to nd it. It is up to you to put it within his reach, skillfully to give birth to this desire and to furnish him with the means of satisfying it (EOE, 179). This quote expresses exactly this tension: the absolute freedom of the child and the absolute domain of the governor are interwoven and interdependent. The mistake is to try to subsume one term under the other instead of perpetually dwelling in their complexity. Democratic authority emerges from an innite dialectic between the authority of the adult and the autonomy of the child as they both shape each other.

Second Principle: The Importance of Differentiating an Education Without Authority from an Education With Authority
The reader cannot fail to notice the rupture that separates books 1 through 3 from books 4 and 5. One of the reasons for this rupture is certainly the shift in the role authority plays in Emiles education. The governor states, This is the moment to present my accounts to him, so to speak; to show how his time and mine have been employed; to disclose to him what he is and what I am (EOE, 318). This new educational phase is dened by Emiles recognition and acceptance of the authority of his governor, by the creation of a contract between them. Thus, Emile depicts the passage from an education without authority (shown in the rst three books) to an education with authority (shown in books 4 and 5).

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Are we then confronted with two moments that are completely disconnected, an education without and an education with authority? I propose that within the supposed rupture of those two moments there exists a union that is far more fundamental and of central importance for theorizing democratic authority. Far from being in contradiction, those two moments cannot exist without each other. The moment without authority aims by its nature to be transformed into a moment with authority. On the other hand, the moment of authority cannot exist without the process that precedes it. In that sense, the education without authority is in reality an education toward authority. It has taken fteen years of care to contrive this hold for myself (EOE, 332), says the governor at the moment of disclosing himself. I think that, here, Rousseau revealed something essential about our democratic project. In aristocracies, the moment of autonomy that is, the moment where individuals recognized the legitimacy of those in authority was in some way predetermined by the authoritative structure of the society. The individuals were pushed by the whole social order to accept authority. In democracy, the moment of autonomy becomes more radical: in the abstract, individuals should be able to accept a legitimate authority without referring to something other than themselves. Rousseaus account demonstrates that such a principle is unrealistic, that even in democracy the moment of autonomy the moment where authority unveils itself has to be settled prior to its unveiling. In other words, autonomy has to be shaped in some way to be the autonomy proper for democratic societies, an autonomy that will be able to recognize why a certain level of authority is necessary for the proper functioning of society and its citizens. Our role as educators is to be able to distinguish the proper moment to exert our authority, to avoid confusing the exercise of our authority with the process that constructs it, and to know how to build our own authority before unveiling it.

Third Principle: How to Build Our Own Authority by Restraining It

Rousseau provided wide-ranging advice on how we can construct a democratic form of authority out of an education that appears to be against all manifestations of educator authority. In what follows, I focus on one aspect of what Rousseau himself called his negative method (EOE, 93). I choose this element of Rousseaus pedagogical method because of the importance he attributed to it throughout Emile.20 Rousseaus negative education is an intentional retraction of the governors authority over the pupil. This is achieved by not wanting to impose specic learning onto the child: Dare I expose the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to gain time but to lose it (EOE, 93). The ultimate goal of the rst phase of Emiles education is not to make him learn a particular set of skills, because in the end this does not matter. By abandoning the aim of making his pupil learn specic skills and knowledge, the governor puts
20. While Emile is written in a series of ruptures between the books, it is possible to see that some principles are applied throughout the whole book, and negative education is one of these.

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Emile at the center of his own learning experience. By doing less, the governor makes the pupil do more. If Emile is to learn something, he has to learn it by himself. Even when describing for us how to teach a particular discipline to the pupil (geometry, for example, in book 3), Rousseau emphasized that such learning is not important in reality: Their progress in everything is not important for the present; whereas, those who feel that, no matter what, they just have to teach them this or that always nd it impossible to succeed without constraint, without quarrelling, and without boredom (EOE, 148). A negative education has to be understood from within Rousseaus perspective on pedagogy and authority. It is rst a rule to follow in daily activity with the child; however, the most important aspect of the negative method relates to morality. Morality cannot be used and taught by the governor. In this respect, the governor has to abandon a superior position over the pupil, which amounts to abandoning any pretension to have authority over the pupil. Authority is fundamentally a moral concept: it gives a special position and quality to human beings. All those relations of issuing commands and showing obedience, of superiority and inferiority, are established through a moral order that is shared by the persons involved in an authoritative relation. A nonmoral education is a direct consequence of an education against authority. Rousseaus nonmoral and nonauthoritarian education is realized through the use of the environment. The environment is not itself good or bad; it is of the domain of physical necessity. Human beings have to learn to change the environment when they can or to submit to it when they cannot. This submission is not based on the authority of the environment, but on a force that does not have a moral dimension that is, on necessity. When the educator has to act directly on the child, he should use force. By doing so, the educator also becomes a nonmoral element of the childs environment. Rousseau was certainly not claiming that his education is amoral in the end, Emile is the story of educating a good human being. But it is through this nonmoral phase of education that the moral education can eventually happen. I have already demonstrated the complexity of Rousseaus theory of authority, showing how we pass in Emile from an education without authority and against authority to an education toward authority. Here I want to go further and claim that there is in reality an authority that permeates all of Emiles education. The negative method is ultimately a positive method. It is a positive method not only because it aims to develop specic attitudes in the child, but also because it permits the development of a natural form of authority. It is by constraining his own authority that the governor permits a natural authority to blossom between him and his pupil: The heart receives laws only from itself. By wanting to enchain it, one releases it; one enchains it by leaving it free (EOE, 234). It is by letting the child free that he may acknowledge the importance and goodness of his governor. This appears clearly in the moment of revelation when the governor discloses his role to Emile. To what source of legitimation can Jean-Jacques refer to justify his role and past manipulation of his pupil?

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Rousseaus answer here is quite interesting. Multiple sources are invoked to legitimate the governors authority including nature, real freedom as opposed to the corrupted freedom of our world, and the internal connection of the good man with truth but Rousseau identied these sources only to his readers; JeanJacques never mentions them to his pupil. Instead, when the time of judgment comes and the governor unveils his role, he asks Emile to judge him by one criterion: Can you recognize that everything that I did, I did for your good? In other words, the authority of the governor does not refer to anything other than itself: it proves its legitimacy by what it has done in the past and, therefore, by the subjective judgment of the pupil who assesses it. The moral age of Emile blooms by itself from the nonmoral period of his life:
Up to now you got nothing from him except by force or ruse. Authority and the law of duty were unknown to him. He had to be constrained or deceived to make him obey you. But see how many new chains you have put around his heart. Reason, friendship, gratitude, countless affections speak to him in a tone he cannot fail to recognize. (EOE, 316)

There is certainly a rupture in the unveiling of authority, in the passage from the nonmoral life to the moral life, from a hidden power to an accepted contract. However, I want to emphasize not only that this moment was settled before it happened, but that the governor has already earned the right to govern Emile, as if the governor had amassed a preparatory amount of capital that culminates in conscious authority. Consider the following observation by Rousseau:
The condence he ought to have in his governor is of another kind. It ought to rest on the authority of reason, on superiority of understanding, on advantages that the young man is in a condition to know and whose utility to himself he senses. A long experience has convinced him that he is loved by his guide, that his guide is a wise and enlightened man who, wishing for his happiness, knows what can procure it for him. He ought to know that in his own interest it is proper to listen to his guides advice. (EOE, 246)

Emile knows that he needs the authority of his governor to direct him in life, because Jean-Jacques has already proven that he is good and useful to him. If my reading is correct, Emile has already been living in and with the authority of his governor prior to his governors revelation, but that authority has not yet attained its full meaning because it has not been consciously recognized. There is therefore a thin line that separates real from incomplete authority a thin line drawn by consciousness. To be a modern educator is to be caught in this web of tensions and complexities.

The Fourth Principle: Understanding the Real Threat to Educational Authority in Democracy
Rousseaus whole intellectual career, even its existential project, started with his opposition to the society in which he lived, more specically to the injustices of that society.21 Thus, Rousseaus thought was mainly formed by his worry over
21. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et lobstacle [Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and obstruction] (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

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the birth of the bourgeoisie.22 Emile is the story of how to educate a good man in a corrupted world. Rousseau identied the rise of a new form of power specic to the new society, which he labeled opinion. To understand this concept, we have to make a small detour through another concept fundamental to Rousseaus thought: the amour-propre. Rousseau identied two fundamental passions in men: self-love (amour de soi) and amour-propre. Self-love, according to Rousseau, is the natural passion: it is the desire to please and to perpetuate oneself.23 Amour-propre is a deformation of self-love; it develops in social relations when one asks that others prefer oneself to themselves. Modern man, in whom the amour-propre is the dominant passion, is whole in his mask. . . . What he is, is nothing; what he appears is everything for him (EOE, 230). Amour-propre creates a constant competition among everyone as we all search for social recognition that will establish our superiority over others. Amour-propre is fundamentally about having authority over other people or being subjected to their external authority. For Rousseau, the liberal society the society that claims far and wide to be the society of freedom of the highest order is in reality the society of a hidden slavery. Our lives in such a society pass in an eternal quest to gain authority over others, yet this cannot be achieved without putting ourselves under their authority. Rousseau foresaw in liberal freedom a new form of slavery and misery. We believe that we are free, but in reality everyone is subjugated to all. We are happy for a moment, but our lives are miserable. The rst level of amour-propre is the one between two individuals. Yet, with the development of civilization, this primal form of amour-propre has transformed into another form: opinion.24 Public opinion is the natural consequence and realization of amour-propre in the modern world: From the bosom of so diverse passions I see opinion raising from an unshakable throne, and stupid mortals, subjected to its empire, basing their own existence on the judgment of others (EOE, 215). Tocqueville, one of the most careful readers of Rousseaus work,25 also saw in the circulation of opinion the specic power of modern society.26 We do not know how opinion is formed in the chaotic movements so characteristic of our society, but its expression cannot be missed: opinion gives an imaginary value
22. Allan Bloom, Introduction, in Rousseau, Emile, 328. 23. It is natural in two senses: it is the rst passion that men experience (see Emile), and it is the only passion of pre-civilized man (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Second Discourse: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, and The First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002). 24. Rousseau traced the genealogy of how the progress of civilization has led to a more wicked society in the Second Discourse. 25. John C. Koritansky, Alexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics: An Interpretation of Democracy in America (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1986). 26. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Ameriques [Democracy in America], in volume 2 of ` uvres completes, ed. Andre Jardin (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), book 2, part 1, chapter 2.

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to everything with such a force that everyone has to submit to it. Rousseau and Tocqueville both offered the same diagnosis of public opinion in liberal democratic society: the development of democratic society, they contended, will create the conditions for the rise of a new kind of slavery, maybe the worst kind in the history of humanity. The rst reason for this judgment is that we are unaware of the power of opinion in ourselves. How can we resist a power that is not recognized as such, that is so diffuse and has almost no denite place? The second reason is that we are the opinion. Even if only in a minuscule way, we are partially the creators of public opinion. Thus, opinion is this strange power that we create and submit to. It is external to us, yet has its roots in our hearts. If opinion is the main problem of the modern liberal democratic world, then authority logically becomes the principal issue of education. Indeed, opinion is the peculiar and dominant authority of the democratic age. The role of education for Rousseau, therefore, is to block the rise of such authority and to promote the development of a sane authority. It is due to neither temperament nor the senses that the wildness of youth begins; it is due to opinion (EOE, 330). Rousseau rejected all traditional forms of authoritative education because they all lead ultimately to the creation of slaves of opinion (EOE, 337), that is, human beings that are all made virtually in the same mold. Liberal autonomy, the idea that individuals can be free from all authority, just leads to a submission to another and more perverse authority. Thus, Rousseau believed that autonomy requires the existence of particular forms of authority.

Fifth Principle: How Do We Actually Establish Principles in a Democratic Age?

Up to this point, I have focused on the rst level of legitimacy of democratic authority the legitimacy of the relation that develops between the student and the educator, between a child and an adult. However, as I noted at the outset of this essay, an authority is never self-sufcient since it always refers to something else from which it receives its legitimacy.27 We cannot say that this second level is absent from Rousseaus presentation in the rst three books, but discussion of it is always addressed to the reader and not to the student. Moreover, Rousseau did not develop his principles fully but presented them to the reader through dogmatic claims regarding the natural order, the good man, and the right education. Here I propose that Rousseau did develop an in-depth account of the theoretical legitimacy of a democratic authority, which he presented in a special text, La Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard (or Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar), included in part 4 of Emile. By raising this problem at this point in my essay, I am certainly not following the logical order, which would have been to settle the theoretical questions before the practical ones. In taking
27. The Christian priest, for example, is not an authority in himself; he receives his authority from the church that he represents and, ultimately, from God. The medical doctor has taken the place of the priest in recent times, but the authority of the latter is not different in nature from that of the former, as it gains its sense and validity inside a specic institution: the medical institution.

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this approach, however, I am following the order of Rousseaus own presentation, which makes the reader patiently await the unveiling of theoretical justications for an education against, toward, and ultimately with authority. While Rousseau mixed literary genres and made some parts of Emile stand out from the rest, none of them have the quality of the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. First, the length of the text is quite impressive, constituting one third of book 4. Second, this text is a pure monologue, from the rst line to the last. This has to catch our attention, as Rousseau repeated again and again throughout Emile that the education of the child should not be achieved through discourses but through experiences.28 Third, Rousseau mentioned to us that the story told in this text really happened to him. Emiles literary complexity is thus increased, as we pass from a mixture of novel and treatise to a confession.29 In reading this confession, we enter a new theoretical level: it is now the author, Rousseau, who provides an account of how he accepted the authority of God through the experience of a particular authority, his encounter with a vicar. Moreover, the strangeness of this text increases when we look at its content: the question of the existence of God. This text poses a fundamental problem for our autonomous project: even if we agree on the need for authorities, they all nd their logic and existence in our reality; thus, is there a place for a transcendent authority in our autonomous project? The Rousseauian proposition is certainly provocative, as we usually dene the rise of modernity as the progressive erosion of Gods place in human society.30 Everything is done to unbalance the reader, to create an openness in the reader. As we will see, the form of the text cannot here or elsewhere in Emile be separated from the message it contains.31 To understand this text, we must rst notice to whom it is directed. The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar is not dedicated to all individuals, but to a particular individual who nds himself in a particular situation: someone who has lost faith. Those who still believe in God should not be taken on such a metaphysical quest. Therefore, we should not push people who have authority to doubt it. However, certain people, including Rousseau as rendered in the Profession of Faith, may need to undertake such an inquiry:
So long as there remains some sound belief among men, one must not disturb peaceful souls or alarm the faith of simple people with difculties which they cannot resolve and which upset them without enlightening them. But once everything is shaken, one ought to preserve the trunk at the expense of the branches. Consciences which are agitated, uncertain, almost 28. Rousseau reiterated this principle in book 4, as a matter of fact: I do not tire of repeating it: put all the lessons of young people in actions rather than in speeches (EOE, 251). 29. To increase the strangeness, Rousseau began Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar by telling us that this story was told to him by someone else, which is why the account is initially in the second person. A few pages later, Rousseau admitted that this event actually happened to him. 30. See, for example, Marcel Gauchet, La democratie contre elle-meme [Democracy against itself] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). 31. See Tyson E. Lewis, Rousseau and the Fable: Rethinking the Fabulous Nature of Educational Philosophy, in this issue.

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extinguished, and in the condition in which I have seen yours, need to be reinforced and awakened; and in order to put them back on the foundation of eternal truths, it is necessary to complete the job of ripping out the shaky pillars to which they think they are still attached. (EOE, 310)

There are two different perspectives on why the unbeliever needs God in the Profession of Faith. First, there is our subjective judgment. The vicar asserts repeatedly that he only inquires about what has a direct impact on his life: I seek to know only what is important for my conduct. As for the dogmas which have inuence neither on actions nor on morality, and about which so many men torment themselves, I do not trouble myself about them at all (EOE, 318). Thus, his metaphysical quest is rooted in an existential need. Having metaphysical discussions for the sake of having metaphysical discussions holds no interest or usefulness for the vicar. Second, the vicar makes a judgment about Rousseau the vicar makes his profession of faith because he believes that his interlocutor, Rousseau, needs it for his life. These two perspectives, the subjective and objective, are completely intertwined in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar to the point that we do not really know if we are reading the vicars profession of faith or Rousseaus profession of faith. The existential need for God is based on two elements that are always interrelated in Rousseaus thought: God is necessary for mans happiness and in order to live a good life. Those who begin to doubt God fall into complete uncertainty regarding metaphysical questions, as we cannot resolve them only by our nite and all-too-human means. This state is characterized by unhappiness because it is painful to live in skepticism (EOE, 267). By enclosing men within themselves and their own private interests, such skepticism leads slowly to a degenerate life.32 Thus, God settles the intellectual and moral world, a settlement that is necessary to mans happiness: it gives the force for a man to be good, which means to order himself in relation to the whole, instead of the whole in relation to himself (EOE, 292). It is in their belief that this is the good life that men nd the happiness and the strength to engage in such a way of living. I contend that this discussion of God is about the fundamental issue of authority in democracy. It is about an individual who has lost natural faith in the religion of his fathers and who cannot get back to God by his own means. If we are unsure of the existence of God, we are certain that we need this presence in our life. This is the tragedy of modern humanity: the experience of the need for a foundation that we can only give to ourselves, yet that we are unable to fulll by our own means. The issue is settled in a surprisingly democratic way by Rousseau. Indeed, the reader is invited to follow Rousseau in a proof of God that is complete, yet, at
32. Irreligion and the reasoning and philosophical spirit in general causes attachment to life, makes souls effeminate and degraded, concentrates all the passions in the baseness of private interest, in the abjectness of the human I, and thus quietly saps the true foundations of every society. For what private interests have in common is so slight that it will never outweigh what sets them apart (EOE, 253).

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the same time, never fully realized. The text is written in an innite spiral. On the one hand, Rousseau gave us his few articles of faith, articles that deserve our full belief. Those articles can be summarized as follows: God exists, God is good, there is an eternal life, and we have to be good to our fellows. On the other hand, Rousseau told us how impossible it is to know God, how God, by his innite distance, cannot be attained through our nite means: heart and reason are both insufcient for this task. Rousseau articulated clearly this tension between the knowledge and the impossibility of attaining this knowledge: I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me. But as soon as I want to contemplate Him in Himself, as soon as I want to nd out where He is, what He is, what His substance is, He escapes me, and my clouded mind no longer perceives anything (EOE, 277). The proof is in the process, in this continual passage from belief to doubt. It is this experience that may lead us to take the Pascalian wager.33 Therefore, the heteronomy is something like a ction that the individual creates, and almost forgets that he is the author of this ction, and to which he gives the force of truth and the existence of reality. Rousseau was categorical: our autonomy requires this small piece of pure heteronomy, a heteronomy that transcends us and our world. This authority is the pressure point on which our freedom can rest in order to fully develop. Heteronomy, here presented as God, becomes the cornerstone of our autonomy. The issue of democratic authority is made explicit in Rousseaus description of the vicars faith in God. Indeed, his faith is contaminated, if I may say, by its source: by the autonomy of the individual, by this innite doubt about the rightness of his beliefs. This is why the vicar can say, The fact that I act in good faith does not mean I believe myself infallible. Those of my opinions which seem truest are perhaps so many lies (EOE, 294). Ultimately, this God is always eroding its own foundation. As philosophers, as teachers, and as democratic citizens, we are not only interested in the best ways to subject individuals to our authority or to the authority of others which is usually the way we frame the problem of authority, because this is the problem we want to resolve but also in the question of the legitimacy of a particular authority. In The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau gave us a proposition for how we may establish the theoretical foundations of our own authority in democratic conditions.

Sixth Principle: The Necessity of Particular Relations

There is one more lesson to be learned from the vicar concerning democratic authority. The vicar is not making a speech to the air even if that might be the impression of a careless reader. The speech takes place in a particular situation for which the vicar has spent months preparing. In addition, it is directed toward a particular human being: Jean-Jacques. Thus, the abstractness of the democratic
33. Blaise Pascal, Pensees [Thoughts] (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1976).

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authority as presented in the last section is insufcient: authority has to be developed in a particular and specic relation, that is, between two human beings. Rousseau emphasized this point through his depiction of the two important relations in Emiles life: the one between Emile and Jean-Jacques, and the one between Emile and Sophie. I suggest that these relations represent the highest achievement of a democratic authority. Rousseau presented them as a way to counter the amour-propre with the amour-propre that is, as a way to counter the negative effects of amour-propre by channeling it toward a particular form. I see the relations of Emile and Jean-Jacques and of Emile and Sophie as the fullest expression of democratic authority. They present a movement between equality and inequality, a form of dialectic between these two opposite concepts. In the rst movement, Rousseau created a climate of equality between the governor and his pupil, as the former never imposes his authority on the latter. It is one of the principal tasks of the governor to not appear superior to his pupil, but instead to put himself on his pupils level: make them your equals in order that they may become your equals; and if they cannot yet raise themselves up to you, descend to their level without shame, without scruple (EOE, 246). This articial equality, fabricated in the limits of what is possible between two unequal human beings, creates the conditions necessary for the growth of a very special relation: friendship. Indeed, Emile sees in Jean-Jacques not a governor, but a friend, and this is even true in his childhood: He [Emile] comes, and I [Jean-Jacques] feel at his approach a movement of joy which I see him share. It is his friend, his comrade, it is the companion of his games whom he approaches (EOE, 159). Friendship can only be achieved in an egalitarian relation: there is no friendship between two human beings that see themselves as fundamentally superior or inferior to each other. Friendship is not a mere technique that Rousseau proposed we use in order to manipulate younger people, because by its nature friendship is not a technique but a special mode of being together that implies, among other things, sincerity and honesty. However, and this is the point I want to underscore, friendship is not only an egalitarian relation: it is an equality that implies a form of inequality. The friend is not the equal of everyone. The friend occupies a special place in each individuals life. And this special place gives the friend a power over us that we do not even have over ourselves. Indeed, the friend has inherently a form of authority: he can tell us a truth that no one else can tell us, and that we are unable to see by ourselves. The power of the friend brings us to a concept of pure authority in democracy, because the use of force and manipulation is completely foreign to this form of power. Thus, the friend will never impose submission on us, but we will always listen to the friend with respect. He may not order, but we will consider his advice. As Rousseau observed,
Nothing has so much weight in the human heart as the voice of clearly recognized friendship, for we know that it never speaks to us for anything other than our interest. One can believe that a friend makes a mistake but not that he would want to deceive us. Sometimes one resists his advice, but one never despises it. (EOE, 235)

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I speak of the purity of authority because this implies our recognition of its legitimacy and our freedom to submit or not to submit to it. The movement of Emile is a movement toward more and more friendship. As we advance through the book, Emile and Jean-Jacques refer to each other more often as friends, until nally in book 5 they refer to each other only as friend. The movement toward more friendship occurs together with a movement toward greater equality a natural movement as the child is becoming an adult. Moreover, and this is the essential point, this movement permits another movement: the development of a pure form of authority and, therefore, the movement toward a special kind of inequality. Thus, the more we enter into a friendship relation and the more we abandon the use of power or manipulation, the stronger the authority becomes and the stronger is our decision to enter into relations with rather than against authority. A similar phenomenon is depicted in book 5, as we see the loving relation between Emile and Sophie develop. There is an exchange and balancing of power between them, as each of them submits to the other and, at the same time, shapes the other. From all the passages I could quote from book 5, I will limit myself to this one to show the complex system and balance of powers that Rousseau presented as integral to the loving relation: This partnership produces a moral person of which the woman is the eye and the man is the arm, but they have such a dependence on one another that the woman learns from the man what must be seen and the man learns from the woman what must be done (EOE, 377). Love creates a bond between individuals where we are at the same time master and servant, shaping and shaped, superior and inferior, equal and unequal. Democracy erodes the basis of authority since democratic society is based on the principles of equality and autonomy. Rousseau proposed that friendship and love are the most complete expressions of democratic authority because they are fully compatible with equality and autonomy or, stated more precisely, they arise naturally from equality and they permit our autonomy. Rousseau seemed to be intuitively correct in this respect: who does not value friendship and love, who does not wish to have friends and to experience loving relations? It is, however, more problematic to see how our educational system promotes these types of relations, but it would be a mistake to believe that these relations are not possible or that they do not already exist.

Conclusion and Last Principle: Educate Ourselves

My essay does not aim to resolve the issue of authority in democratic education, because such a claim would be, if not ridiculous, at least useless since authority in democracy is inherently and necessarily a problem. Instead, I have attempted to produce a topography of the problem of authority in the education of Emile with the intention of offering some insights into the problem of educational authority in contemporary liberal democratic society. This topography may be used differently depending on who employs it: if it is a parent working with his or her child, a teacher in a crowded classroom, an academic who tries to open future teachers to the problem of authority, a researcher who looks for sources

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to help think through the issue of authority in his or her research, a counselor working with a patient, a friend with another friend, and so on. Therefore, the topographical signposts that I have presented are more tools to be used in specic encounters between particular individuals than dogmas to follow. I conclude by looking at a particular relation: the relation between Rousseau and his readers. We would be remiss if we failed to note that Rousseau drew his readers into an educational relation. Rousseau constructed this relation through a dialectic between two movements. The rst movement establishes Rousseau as an authority: Rousseau told the truth about what he believed constitutes a good education, and we should share these beliefs. This truth is formulated in clear dichotomies: either you are good or you are bad, either you are adhering to the practices required for providing a good education or you are undermining good education. But this movement is accompanied by another one, in which Rousseau deconstructed his own authority. He began his text by admitting in the preface that he was a dreamer, that the ideas he presented in Emile may be wrong, but that he will have attained his goal if they give birth to good ones.34 Later in the book he led his readers to understand that a good education is impossible to achieve: how could we nd this great educator or nd ourselves in a situation where we can control all the parameters of our students education? The reader has the impression that Rousseau was presenting a systematic theory on education, but he stressed that he had no system to offer (see, for example, EOE, 366). The reader of Emile should always keep in mind this footnote: I will be told that I, too, dream. I agree; but I give my dreams as dreams, which others are not careful to do, leaving it to the reader to nd out whether they contain something useful for people who are awake (EOE, 112). Therefore, Rousseau constructed his authority at the same time that he deconstructed it. Those simultaneous movements of construction and deconstruction draw us into a specic experience of authority one that I believe is distinctively democratic because they create a space of freedom to reject this authority. Ultimately, Rousseau forced his readers to enter into an inquiry with him on the nature of educational authority in democracy, but he created the conditions for such an inquiry to take place. I claim that this is the most important experience of authority in democracy, because it is about the most important subject: ourselves. We usually think of the problem of authority as a problem for others, when perhaps we should start with an inquiry into our own relations with authority. We must rst educate ourselves before thinking about educating anyone else. How could we pretend to educate good individuals if we are not at least trying to be such individuals? Rousseau was explicit about this: Remember that before daring to undertake the formation of a man, one must have made oneself a man (EOE, 95). This work on ones self is never ending it always has to be done again and again. To be the good man is to always be negotiating
34. For a slightly different interpretation of this passage, see Lewiss Rousseau and the Fable.

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and renegotiating our relations with authority in a variety of forms, even in our relation to Rousseau the philosopher. According to Rousseau, When [man] begins to sense his moral being, he ought to study himself in relations with other men. This is the job of his whole life, beginning from the point we have now reached (EOE, 214, emphasis added). Throughout this essay, I have shown that what Rousseau called the fundamental job of human beings our moral relation to each other and particularly our relation to authority is central to our quest for autonomy. Thus, autonomous education cannot be disconnected from how we understand the role of educational authority or from how we negotiate our own relation with particular authorities. Because of their commitment to democratic education, progressive educators are naturally pulled into this mysterious and unbounded space of educational authority. However, as Pace and Hemmings remind us, the issue of authority is not only in the progressive classroom; it also permeates the contemporary schooling system.35 If we are ready to confront the issue of democratic educational authority without trying to encapsulate it in simple formulas, Rousseaus Emile is a key resource to help us inquire into this central and complex issue of our everyday experience.

35. Pace and Hemmings, Understanding Authority in Classrooms.

I WANT TO THANK Nataly Chesky, Lenore Rosenbluth, and Joyce Atkinson for proofreading this text, and Avi Mintz, Tal Gilead, Amy Shuffelton, Tyson Lewis, and the three anonymous reviewers for Educational Theory for their comments.

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