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ABSTRACT
Rousseau coined the term perfectibilité to name what he claimed was the faculty that distinguished human beings from other animals. Although Rousseau himself largely associated perfectibility with the tendency of the human race to become corrupt, later thinkers adopted his term but then transformed it into a concept denoting the human capacity for progress. This article has two goals. The first goal is to analyse Rousseau’s discussion of perfectibilité in order to identify a specifically Rousseauean of perfectibilité. I identify three related features of Rousseau’s perfectibilité: the ambiguous status of both instinct and freedom, the unique malleability of human nature, and the fact that perfectibilité operates on both the levels of the individual and the species. The second goal is to examine the transformation of this specifically Rousseauean conception in the thought of one of the thinker largely responsible for giving it a very different direction, Condorcet.
KEYWORDS:
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Notes
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in Major Political Writings, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 72.
2 See ed. n. 3 to Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1959–95), 3: 142, where Jean Starobinski argues that the word is Rousseau’s neologism. His argument is supported by the standard Littré Dictionnaire de la langue française and is generally accepted by scholars.
3 Germaine de Staël, De la littérature, Préface, 2nd ed., cited in Dictionnaire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Raymond Trousson and Frédéric S. Eigeldinger (Paris: Champion, 1996), s.v. Perfectibilité.
4 Julia Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20. See also Bertrand Binoche, La raison sans l’Histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), esp. 257–60.
5 Rousseau, Inequality, 72.
6 John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1999), 276.
7 Florence Lotterie, Progrès et perfectibilité: un dilemma des Lumières françaises (1755-1814), SVEC 2006:4 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006), chap. 1.
8 Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 147–51. Victor Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 288–92. Lee MacLean, The Free Animal: Rousseau on Free Will and Human Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 39–45. Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the “Second Discourse” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 43–6.
9 N.J.H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to his Psychological, Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 96. Timothy O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999), 22, 42.
10 Rousseau, Inequality, 72.
11 Ibid., 89, 136 [note X].
12 Ibid., 72.
13 For a fascinating analysis of Rousseau’s use of reflexive verbs in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, see James F. Hamilton, Rousseau’s Theory of Literature: The Poetics of Art and Nature (York, SC: French Literature Publications, 1979).
14 Rousseau, Discourse, 72.
15 See Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique, 292. See also Michael Sonenscher, ‘Sociability, Perfectibility and the Intellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History of European Ideas 41 (2015): 683–98.
16 Rousseau, Discourse, 54–5.
17 Sonenscher argues that Rousseau’s substitution of perfectibilité for more traditional conceptions of sociability ‘was the catalyst for the transformation of the various ways of thinking about sociability into the cluster of claims about freedom and history, or the subordination of the real to the ideal, that came to be associated with the idea of historicism’ (‘Sociability, Perfectibility and the Intellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, 684).
18 Rousseau, Discourse, 80–1.
19 For a discussion of perfectibilité in relation to natural law theory, see Timothy Brennan, ‘‘I Believe I Have Demonstrated It’: The Status of Rousseau’s Original State of Nature’, History of Political Thought 51 (2020): 586–621 (605–8).
20 Marc F. Plattner, therefore, concludes that perfectibilité is not a properly a ‘faculty’ in the traditional sense of the term. Rousseau’s State of Nature: An Interpretation of the ‘Discourse on Inequality’ (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979), 47–50.
21 Céline Spector, Rousseau (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 22. Robert Wokler argues that perfectibilité is central to Rousseau’s account of how humans have a capacity for acquiring culture (‘Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited’, Daedalus 107 [1978]: 107–34).
22 For those who argue Rousseau embraces a dualist view of freedom, see Robin Douglass, ‘Free Will and the Problem of Evil: Reconciling Rousseau’s Divided Thought’, History of Political Thought 31 (2010): 639–55; Lee MacLean, The Free Animal, chap. 1; Timothy O’Hagan, ‘Taking Rousseau Seriously’, History of Political Thought 25 (2004): 73–85. For scholars who argue Rousseau abandons freedom for a metaphysically neutral claim about perfectibilité, see Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau, 69–71; Plattner, Rousseau’s State of Nature, 43–6; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 265–6.
23 Rousseau, Inequality, 71.
24 Ibid., 66.
25 Ibid., 73.
26 See Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau, 150.
27 Rousseau, Inequality, 71–2.
28 Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 72.
29 Ibid., 74,
30 For a more developed argument concerning a phenomenological reading of freedom in Rousseau, see John T. Scott, Rousseau’s God: Theology, Religion, and the Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 112–24.
31 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 271–2. See also Asher Horowitz, Rousseau: Nature and History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), esp. 80–5.
32 Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 72.
33 Ibid., 73.
34 Ibid., 78.
35 Ibid., 77.
36 Ibid., 88.
37 Ibid.; emphasis added.
38 Ibid., 90.
39 Ibid., 92.
40 Ibid., 100.
41 Ibid., 97.
42 On the limits of the malleability of human nature, see Laurence D. Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 43 ff.; Jonathan Marks, Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 2, 32–3.
43 Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 89–90.
44 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in Major Political Writings, III.11 (231).
45 Florence Lotterie focuses largely on the Cinq Mémoires sur l’instruction publique (1791) in her discussion of the centrality of perfectibilité for Condorcet’s thought. See Lotterie, Progrès et perfectibilité: Un dilemme des Lumières françaises (1755-1814) (Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2006), chaps. 4–5.
46 Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat and Marquis de Condorcet, Vie de Turgot, Oeuvres, 12 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromman, 1968), 5: 14.
47 Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Oeuvres, 4 vols. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1913–23), 1: 276–77, 285.
48 Marquis de Condorcet and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Oeuvres, 12 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromman, 1968), 5: 306–7.
49 Condorcet, ‘Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’, in Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 93. I have altered the translation based on the text in the Oeuvres (op. cit.).
50 Ibid.
51 Sonenscher, ‘Sociability, Perfectibility and the Intellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’ esp. 690–1.
52 See Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 215.
53 Condorcet, ‘Sketch’, 1.
54 Ibid., 1–2.
55 Ibid., 2.
56 Ibid., 146.
57 Ibid., 125–6.
58 Ibid., 133–4. Although Condorcet emphasizes the positive aspects of perfectibilité, Lotterie points out that he also attributes certain historical errors to it as well, arguing that ‘Condrocet signals his debt to Rousseau’ in acknowledging ‘this ambivalent character of perfectibilité’ (Progrès et perfectibilité, 93).
59 For the German treatment of perfectibilité, especially in Friedrich Schlegel, see Binoche, La raison sans l’Histoire, chaps. VIII-X; and Sonenscher, ‘Sociability, Perfectibility and the Intellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’.
60 Ibid, 102.
61 See the Marquis of Landsdowne to Richard Price, 22 November 1786, The Correspondence of Richard Price, ed. Bernard Peach and David Oswald, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 86.
62 Priestley does, however, write in the Essay on the First Principles of Government: ‘The great instrument in the hand of divine providence, of this progress of the species towards perfection, is society, and consequently government’ (London, 1771, 2–3).
63 Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 73. See also Virginia Sapiro, Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 168–75.
64 Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993), 294.
65 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, in ibid. 95.
66 Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York; Basic Books, 1979), 37.
67 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, 78–9.
68 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 50. For an argument that Godwin was not as decisively influenced by the philosophes, but instead must be understood in relation to rationalist dissenters such as Richard Price, see Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap. 2.
69 Ibid., 43–4.
70 Ibid., 118.
71 Ibid., 49–50.
72 See Binoche, La Raison sans l’Histoire, chap. VI-VII. Lotterie concludes her survey with a brief discussion of Constant and Mme de Staël (Progrès et perfecitibilité, 160–78).
73 Benjamin Constant, ‘De la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine’, Ouevres completes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010–), 33: 435.
74 Constant, On Religion Considered in Its Source, Its Forms, and Its Developments, trans. Peter Paul Seaton, Jr. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2018).