I. Self-Respect and the Social Problem

Classical liberalism conceives of political society as a restricted cooperative venture undertaken for mutual advantage and maintained by a strong respect for individual rights, particularly private property rights.Footnote ¹⁴ On this view, self-respect is, like happiness, not the sort of good that the state can or should seek to distribute but is, rather, a subjective psychological condition for which each individual citizen assumes ultimate responsibility. To the extent that the attainment of self-respect is a private matter lying outside the purview of the state, claims about its importance should have little if any bearing on the design of social institutions. It is, for example, easy to see that a classical liberal would strenuously object to a policy that aggressively redistributed income in the hope of increasing the self-respect of the less advantaged: such a proposal could be criticized not only for violating the property rights of the well-off but, worse still, for doing so in the service of a good that the state has no business distributing in the first place. Something like this would seem to be the view of Kant, who characterizes the effort to publicly provide “happiness” for citizens as both futile and degrading: futile because “no universally valid principle” of happiness exists, and degrading because state attempts to provide for happiness constitute a “paternalistic” violation of autonomy that unduly interferes with each citizen's right (and duty) to provide for his own subjective satisfaction. Kant also affirms that, though citizens must be treated equally under the law, juridical equality is perfectly compatible with the widest possible inequalities in wealth and income. Thus the hypothetical proposal above would, as a matter of justice, have been doubly offensive to him.Footnote ¹⁵

Rawls, however, deviates both from Kant and the classical liberal tradition in arguing that public institutions are “seriously defective” unless they provide the social bases for self-respect.Footnote ¹⁶ Rawls's decision to zig where Kant zags is especially interesting given the extraordinary impact that the latter had on his thought, and in order to understand why he did so it may be helpful to examine Rawls's other intellectual influences. Such an examination must begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influence on the psychological dimensions of justice as fairness, in spite of being explicitly acknowledged by Rawls himself,Footnote ¹⁷ remains underexamined. Though Joshua Cohen, Frederick Neuhouser, and Celine Spector have done much to address Patrick Neal's old complaint that “the voice missing from the conversation Rawls has initiated is Rousseau's,” Bercuson's recent observation that “the extent to which justice as fairness is motivated by psychological concerns—in particular the need for recognition and the need for self-respect—has not been fully appreciated by Rawls's interpreters and critics” remains just.Footnote ¹⁸ We address it, then, by understanding Rawls's conception of the social problem, and his embrace of self-respect as a solution to it, as a product of Rousseau's influence. Rawls follows Rousseau in thinking that the presence of pervasive inequality, whether political or economic, will undermine the self-respect of the disadvantaged and, in its place, generate attitudes of envy and apathy. He also follows Rousseau in believing that these attitudes threaten political stability so gravely that social institutions must be capable of preventing their emergence.

Envy concerns Rawls because it arouses an active desire to undermine the well-being of the more advantageously placed. He defines envy as “the propensity to view with hostility the greater good of others even though their being more fortunate than we are does not detract from our advantages,” and claims those who lack self-respect are especially susceptible to the sway of this most powerful emotion.Footnote ¹⁹ He goes on to emphasize the politically destabilizing effects envy can have, observing it creates tendencies that erode social trust and destroy the conditions under which it is possible for anyone—regardless of social status—to achieve his goals:

Envious persons act solely out of spite, and engage in the public realm only in order to disrupt the social and political arrangements they believe to have failed them—even if their actions make everyone, including themselves, worse off. Stable societies must therefore have ways of combating this most destructive passion.

In addition to envy, Rawls argues that those who lack self-respect will also suffer from apathy. The question of meaning figures prominently in part III of Theory, where Rawls repeatedly expresses concern that those who lack fulfilling plans of life will not be able to live happily or justly.Footnote ²¹ Where citizens lack either a sufficiently inclusive life-plan or, alternatively, a reasonable hope of realizing their desired plan, they become skeptical about their prospects for success and never develop the energy to vigorously pursue their ends. Such people, Rawls claims, live lives of quiet despair, for they feel that “nothing may seem worth doing,” or that “if some things have value. . . [they] lack the will to strive for them.” As a result their lives are “without zest” and their desires “empty and vain.”Footnote ²² As destructive as such feelings are in private life, they promise to be even more so in the public sphere, for those who lack the energy to realize their personal aims can hardly be expected to be dutiful in the discharge of their civic obligations. To the degree persons are apathetic, then, they will surely be poor citizens in addition to leading unrewarding lives. Thus it is imperative that social institutions beat back the demons of anomie and accommodate our need for meaningful and suitably complex activity.

Far from being novel, Rawls's emphasis on the instabilities introduced by systemic inequality reflect the deep influence Rousseau had on his understanding of the social problem. On this score, Celine Spector claims that Rousseau is Rawls's “main reference for contractualist theory” because of the core insight that “the reduction of socio-economic inequalities” is the “indispensable foundation” of liberty.Footnote ²³ Rawls at least partially acknowledges this debt in Theory, Footnote ²⁴ but its full depth emerges most clearly in the Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, where he credits Rousseau with having been the first to make systemic inequality the cause of the very psychological tendencies about which he himself is concerned: “Rousseau is keenly aware of the significance of feelings of self-respect and self-worth, and [that] the vices and miseries of self-love are aroused by political and economic inequalities that exceed the limits required for personal independence.”Footnote ²⁵ Rawls here attributes to Rousseau virtually the same argument he himself makes in Theory, namely, that social inequality is the root cause of a host of socially destabilizing sentiments—those “vices and miseries” of self-love.

Rawls's own characterization of Rousseau's argument thus helps to illuminate Rousseau's formative influence on his understanding of the social problem, which, like Rawls's own, highlights the very same psychological dangers we have already seen Rawls emphasize. The most evident connection between the two thinkers is their shared concern about the destructive effects of envy. A number of distinguished interpreters—including Rawls himself—have noted that Theory's analysis of envy is clearly influenced by Rousseau's uniquely searching diagnosis of malignant amour-propre. They point in particular to Rousseau's claim that social institutions turn us against each other by arbitrarily distributing in unequal shares that most sought-after of goods—public recognition.Footnote ²⁶ Because social status is necessarily scarce, the drive for preeminence creates a zero-sum dynamic in which one person's gain inevitably comes at the expense of others. “If,” Rousseau holds, “I am answered that society is so constituted that each man gains by serving the others, I shall reply that this would be very well, if he did not gain still more by harming them.”Footnote ²⁷ Rousseau's summary rejection of the claim that narrow self-interest can ground political community is based in part on his novel understanding of what self-love most deeply desires: since the form of amour-propre that can be expected to arise under inegalitarian social arrangements seeks relative rather than absolute gains, citizens—far from being content with the absolute gains they are promised—will instead be willing to bear great risks in order to attain high relative standing.Footnote ²⁸ Given these psychological dynamics, men inevitably find that another's gain always comes at their expense and that, in order to gain themselves, they must be willing to harm others. Thus wherever systemic social hierarchies are found, we can also expect to find envy and all its deleterious consequences.

Rawls himself alludes to the impact that Rousseau's analysis of envy had on him in Theory, but perhaps less appreciated is the extent to which Rawls's concerns about apathy are anticipated by Rousseau.Footnote ²⁹ Rousseau associates the emergence of widespread disengagement from social institutions with the rise of modernity and the attendant ascent of the vapid bourgeois, whose generalized indifference is an expression of his internal “dividedness.”Footnote ³⁰ Where meaningful human lives—those that are “something” and “one”—follow a set of coherent impulses that give them a unified character, bourgeois life lacks any fundamental impetus or determinate drive beyond the unhelpfully broad requirements of comfortable self-preservation. In the absence of a unified life-plan that directs the development of his capacities, the bourgeois spends his life in perpetual “conflict and floating” between unrealized possibilities and dies without ever having been good for himself or for others.Footnote ³¹ Thus Rousseau sums up the tepid and deeply meaningless character of bourgeois existence as the negation of a life with unified moral purpose—as precisely “nothing.” He goes on to argue the costs of this nothingness are damaging to city as well as soul, for bourgeois moral psychology reduces all social affection to a “secret egoism” that “prevents [men] from being born by . . . detaching them from their species” and makes each “view what he owes the common cause as a free contribution, the loss of which will harm others less than its payment burdens him.”Footnote ³² Such self-centered indifference undermines the sources of subjective meaning as well as the vitality of the political community. Rousseau, like Rawls, emphasizes the public effects of private apathy by pointing to the collectively disadvantageous results of deciding the search for meaning isn't worth undertaking. In emphasizing the destructive work done by envy and apathy, then, Rawls articulates a social problem that bears deep structural similarities to that diagnosed by Rousseau.

II. Self-Respect, Equality, and Liberty: Solving the Social Problem

We have so far seen Rawls follow Rousseau in emphasizing the formative role that systemic inequality plays in the development of two particular, and particularly destructive, attitudes, but Rousseau's influence is seen not only in Rawls's conception of the social problem but also in his solution to it. This influence is especially evident in Rawls's own account of the relationship between self-respect and political equality, which, as Rawls himself notes, is deeply indebted to Rousseau's moral psychological insights:

Rawls finds in Rousseau the key insight that laws do not merely define social positions and allocate formal power—they also structure patterns of social recognition that have profound consequences for the way citizens think about themselves. Structurally inegalitarian societies inevitably engender “natural indignation” and the destructive attitudes that attach to it by subjecting some to “the arbitrary power” of others. However, institutions that affirm the equal dignity of all “at the highest level” cultivate prosocial forms of self-respect by recognizing the basic worth of each citizen.

Rawls's own justification of political equality in Theory almost perfectly mirrors the argument he attributes to Rousseau in the Lectures, and the clearest parallel in this regard is the connection he draws between political equality and self-respect. While recognizing self-respect is not reducible to any one thing, Rawls nonetheless claims an equal distribution of fundamental rights and liberties is its most reliable support: “The basis for self-respect in a just society is not then one's income share but the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. . . . No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political ways of securing his status.”Footnote ³⁴ Like Rousseau, Rawls believes the provision of political equality is the cornerstone both of just institutions and of the attitudes that support them. Also like Rousseau, his belief is predicated on the claim that differential levels of legal and social standing in the same political society do not merely bias political bargaining in unjust ways. They also publicly establish the inferiority of some in a way that is “humiliating and destructive to their self-esteem” and, in so doing, cultivate the socially destabilizing attitudes discussed above.Footnote ³⁵ When, however, a regime publicly recognizes the moral worth of all in a way that is meaningful to each, an essential condition of self-respect has been realized. To this end, Rawls believes that, under the right conditions, “equality at the highest level” will be so psychologically meaningful to citizens that it will override “income share” as the salient status consideration. Thus for Rawls as for Rousseau, equal citizenship helps citizens secure a sense of their own worth that—far from being based on dominion over others—is instead predicated on affirming their equal dignity.

Though Rawls argues equal recognition from public institutions is an especially meaningful support of self-respect, he also believes private activities and associations to be centrally important in this regard. Indeed, it is essential for self-respecting citizens to have a strong sense of themselves as selves—as unique individuals with particular interests and identities—and robust liberties of choice and association are needed in order to develop this sense of individuality. To this end, Rawls gives the equal liberty principle (ELP), which gives citizens the widest possible latitude in selecting and revising their plans of life, lexical priority over the other principles of justice. The broad liberties of action and association protected by the ELP encourage individual self-respect primarily through their accommodation of the “Aristotelian Principle,” a psychological “tendency” that directs us to develop our capacities in ways of ever-increasing sophistication. Social forms that fail to accommodate this tendency will produce disengaged and apathetic citizens who “find their culture and form of life dull and empty.”Footnote ³⁶ However, those that encourage the free development of “realized capacities” facilitate the sense of self-worth by allowing citizens to think of themselves as capable of doing things that are worth doing.

To broad freedoms of choice and action is joined the liberty of association, which supports self-respect by allowing like-minded individuals to create communities in which they can cultivate their shared interests and forms of life.Footnote ³⁷ Rawls recognizes individuals have “varying capacities and abilities” and that “what seems interesting and challenging to some will not seem so to others,” but the proliferation of plural excellences—far from threatening self-respect—instead provides its enabling condition: comfortably ensconced in supportive social environments that nurture their distinct interests, citizens develop “associative ties” that “provide support against the sense of self-doubt” both by giving them the social supports necessary to cultivate their talents and by catalyzing feelings of fellowship and mutual esteem.Footnote ³⁸

Though Rousseau is rarely viewed as a friend of civil liberties and is even thought to be their avowed enemy, a primary objective (and contribution) of Rawls's interpretation is to exonerate him from age-old charges of authoritarianism, and to show that Rousseau's social compact supports the self-respect of citizens in part by respecting their selfhood. Rawls, as Celine Spector correctly notes, claims that “the ‘problem’ addressed in the Social Contract is how not to sacrifice our freedom—how to satisfy our fundamental interests under conditions that provide for the development of our civil and moral freedom.”Footnote ³⁹ To this end, Rawls reinterprets Rousseau's (in)famous distinction between the particular will (i.e., the private interest each individual has in his personal well-being) and general will (i.e., the broader interest each citizen has in the continued reign of just institutions) in a way that squares with liberalism's commitment to individual rights: “Observe that the existence of particular interests is taken for granted. The society of the social contract is not one in which people have no interests separate from those of the political society.”Footnote ⁴⁰ One's particular and general wills, far from being fundamentally opposed, are instead complementary forms of “deliberative reason” that apply to different domains of decision making: where the former is appropriate when assessing matters of personal happiness, the latter is relevant when “we are acting as members of the assembly in enacting constitutional norms or basic laws.”Footnote ⁴¹ Under the appropriate social conditions, then, citizens are able to assume both these “point[s] of view” without feeling that they are opposed.Footnote ⁴² Thus whatever the authoritarian caricature may suggest, Rousseau does not distinguish between the “particular will” and the “general will” in order to subordinate the former to the latter. To the contrary, his distinction carves out a meaningful place for the particular concerns, interests, and identities of each individual citizen.Footnote ⁴³ On Rawls's reading, then, Rousseau's underlying purpose is not to diminish the importance of citizens' private lives and associations, but rather to reconcile the demands of private and public life so that citizens may experience their individual flourishing and the discharge of their civic duties as integrated aspects of a unified plan of life.

Rawls's interpretation of Rousseau's social compact, which seeks to show that Rousseau is far friendlier to individual liberties than he is often believed to be, is far from unique to Rawls. Indeed, Rawls's reading of Rousseau is heavily influenced by the interpretations of Kant, Ernst Cassirer, and N. J. H. Dent.Footnote ⁴⁴ And since Rawls's Lectures were published, both Frederick Neuhouser and Joshua Cohen have joined Rawls in seeking to rescue Rousseau from the charge that he is hostile to individual liberty: Cohen claims on Rousseau's behalf that individual freedom is “the source of humanity's special worth, and the basis of our standing as responsible, moral agents,” and Neuhouser argues Rousseau's citizens “conceive and value themselves as individuals” and “submit to the general will only on the basis of their rational insight into the goodness of the laws that obligate them.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus the more individualistic reading of Rousseau that Rawls develops in his Lectures is not sui generis but rather exemplifies an increasingly common tendency to view Rousseau's social compact as promoting the attainment of self-respect not only through equal citizenship but also by respecting the civil liberties of individual citizens.

III. Self-Respect, the Sense of Justice, and the Symphonic Social Union

Rawls has drawn deeply from Rousseau in order to argue that citizens must enjoy recognition from both the private and public spheres if they are to have an appropriate respect for themselves and their aims: the provision of “equality at the highest level” ensures self-respect is not predicated solely on individual achievement by providing each citizen with a baseline level of moral worth, and the broad freedoms contained in the ELP allow us to seek out private associations in which our particular interests can be affirmed and developed. These preconditions, Rawls believes, are necessary to stabilize political society, for they make it possible for citizens to attain self-respect without forcing them to undermine their fellows.

However, Rawls believes self-respect promotes political stability in another and deeper way when it becomes wedded to “the sense of justice,” for when this happens citizens come to see how respect for themselves and respect for the law are mutually reinforcing, and even mutually constitutive, conditions. Rawls, of course, describes this reconciliation of self and society as the “congruence” of the right and the good, and devotes the entire last third of Theory to explaining the conditions under which it might be possible. It is worth noting that, though most interpreters either neglected or criticized the congruence argument, Rawls himself expressed a deep fondness for it, confessing that “the part of [Theory] I liked best was the third, on moral psychology.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, though Rawls, under pressure from critics, eventually turned away from Theory's account of congruence, Freeman correctly observes that it “would be a mistake to forget about the congruence argument” because it touches on the fundamental question of “whether or not justice can be a part of the human good.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Freeman himself has written searchingly on the topic of congruence, and has sought to show that Rawls's effort to reconcile the private and public goods “particularly exhibits [his] indebtedness to Kant.”Footnote ⁴⁸ We, however, believe that important features of Rawls's congruence argument require a Rousseauan rather than a Kantian interpretation—in particular, we view Rawls's claims about the depth of congruence that must be established for the purpose of political stability to have far more in common with Rousseau's view than Kant's. Rawls, that is, follows Rousseau not only in seeking to show that the right is congruent with the good but also that it is a constitutive component of it.Footnote ⁴⁹

Rawls's debt to Rousseau's account of how citizens come to love their political society shows itself as early as the 1963 essay “The Sense of Justice,” which begins by invoking Rousseau's claim that “the sense of justice is no mere moral conception formed by the understanding alone, but a true sentiment of the heart” and goes on to elaborate “the way in which Rousseau's thesis might be true.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This indicates that Rawls's wish to enrich the psychological attachment to the principles of justice was, from the beginning, a deeply Rousseauan one, and, indeed, the more his account of congruence develops the clearer Rousseau's influence becomes. It is especially apparent in Theory's discussion of the “social union,” where Rawls distinguishes his own conception of political community from “private society”—a more minimalistic view he associates with classical liberalism—on the ground that citizens of the latter do not experience the good of congruence. To the contrary, they have “private ends which are either competing or independent, but not in any case complementary,” and as a result they tend to regard each other with indifference if not hostility. They are motivated solely by considerations of private gain and view public institutions as instruments to be utilized “solely as a means to [their] private aims.” Whatever alignment of particular and general interests happens to emerge in such a society is the fragile, contingent result of “stabilizing institutional devices” rather than the emergent product of shared ideas and conceptions, and the stability of the system as a whole rests upon “the calculations of everyone . . . that any practicable changes would reduce the stock of means whereby they pursue their personal ends.” Arrangements like these treat human sociability as something “trivial” and generate attitudes that are inconsistent with the demands of self-government: far from encouraging citizens to see their own success and self-respect as compatible in any deep way with that of others or with the good of society a whole, “private society” instead produces precisely those forms of social competition that destabilize the entire system.Footnote ⁵¹

Interestingly, Rawls's critique of private society is broad enough to implicate Kant's discussion of political stability in “Toward a Perpetual Peace.” Kant claims there that institutions need not instill in citizens the appropriate attitudes and sentiments in order to preserve themselves through time. He argues, to the contrary, that a rational institutional design that incorporates checks and balances solves the problem of stability because it can make a person “a good citizen even if not a morally good human being.” From this, he concludes that “the problem of establishing a state, no matter how hard it may sound, is soluble even for a nation of devils.”Footnote ⁵² This, of course, is not to say that Kant would deny the possibility or the desirability of congruence as Rawls understands it, but it is to say that he believes the problem of stability can be solved without it: insofar as citizens of a Kantian commonwealth are required to refrain from violating the equal basic rights of others, they may in the fulfillment of this very broad negative duty be motivated by any number of reasons—even narrowly instrumental ones. Just regimes thus owe their persistence through time to a rational institutional structure that pits selfishness against itself rather than to a “common and normally effective sense of justice” that motivates citizens to obey the law for the right reasons.Footnote ⁵³

Rawls, however, thinks it necessary to enrich the psychological attachment that citizens have to the principles of justice, and he seeks to do so in a most ambitious way—by making those principles constitutive components of individuals' respective goods. That is, when Rawls claims that the rules of justice are congruent with the individual's private good he does not simply mean that the two are formally compatible, but rather that they are experienced as deeply interdependent elements of a fully integrated plan of life. This deep interdependence requires for its realization a particular form of social union, one united by a complex and comprehensive form of interdependence that brings citizens together not as egoists concerned to increase their stock of private goods, nor even as independent moral agents willing to respect the negative liberties of others, but rather as fellows with a shared stake both in one another's flourishing and in the continued reign of justice. This union begins in subpolitical associations, where citizens first acquire habits of reciprocity and fair play, but is eventually generalized at the level of political community: citizens eventually learn to “recognize the good of each [member] as an element in the complete activity” of the group, and come to see their particular interests as part of a larger scheme of interlocking ends.Footnote ⁵⁴ This self-understanding, far from diminishing the importance of one's personal goals, instead gives them new significance, for satisfaction is found not only in expressing one's individuality in isolation but also in having one's talents recognized as socially valuable.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus the Rawlsian citizen comes over time to see his life as an ordered whole within a larger ordered whole, and the political community as a site of shared understandings founded on the basic, and deep, complementarity of human ends. It is with this in mind that Rawls claims his social union is in fact a “social union of social unions” in which each citizen's individual plan is nested happily within the “superordinate plan” being realized “in the public institutions of society.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In order to further illustrate the deep complementarity built into his conception of social union, Rawls uses (among others) the metaphor of an orchestra:

Like a symphony, a just political community requires the harmonious concordance of its constituent parts. Just as each musician's contribution to the overall performance is different from but compatible with the contributions of others, so too are all citizens able to develop their individual talents in ways that complement the like talents of their fellows. And while principal players may shine more brightly than others, such inequalities do not diminish the self-respect of the rank-and-file musicians because they occur in the context of a larger cooperative scheme from which all benefit and in which all are able to display their respective excellences in meaningful ways. Note, too, that each musician in the Rawlsian symphony not only contributes to the whole but also has an active desire to do so, for though the players might have developed their musical talents in any number of ways they all elected to “perfect their skills” in a way that “realized the powers of all in their joint performance.” In so doing they find they are not “mere fragments” but are rather all the more realized as individual performers for having developed the particular skills required to advance the collective aim of the entire symphony.Footnote ⁵⁸

Just like those cooperative musicians who seek individual excellence in ways that advance the collective aim of the entire symphony, Rawlsian citizens are said to desire only those forms of self-respect that are compatible with respect for others and for public institutions. But the sense of justice that motivates them to act is not merely compatible, consistent, or congruent with their individual goods—rather, it helps to constitute that good and specify its content. That is, Rawls's account of congruence demands that citizens view the rules of justice not as a condition external to but compatible with their good, but rather as part of its intrinsic architecture. This is because the sense of justice, more than any other sentiment, expresses our nature as free and equal beings, and unless we exercise our capacity for self-legislation in the public realm it is impossible to fully realize ourselves as private individuals: the sense of justice “reveals what the person is,” and those who ignore its voice do not “achieve . . . free reign” for themselves but rather “give way to the contingencies and accidents of the world.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, since the “desire to act justly and the desire to express our nature as free moral persons turn out to specify what is practically speaking the same desire,” those who lack an effective sense of justice will inevitably have impoverished plans of life, for they will find themselves unable to express precisely those capacities that most enrich and dignify their lives.Footnote ⁶⁰

Though in Theory Rawls cites Humboldt as the immediate inspiration for his ideas concerning social union, the Lectures show Rousseau's important influence in this regard. In fact, in characterizing the kind of interdependence uniting Rousseau's citizens he returns to the very orchestral metaphor he employed to describe his own conception:

Rawls finds in Rousseau the same symphonic idea of social relations that he himself articulates in Theory. Perhaps more interesting, however, is that Rawls does not use the orchestral metaphor to characterize the view of any other canonical political philosopher except Rousseau: he uses it only one other time in the Lectures, and then it is in order to contradistinguish it from Marx's critique of the division of labor.Footnote ⁶² Rawls's selective use of the orchestral metaphor, then, strongly suggests that he views Rousseau as a vitally important source of ideas about social union that, later modified by Humboldt, he would eventually adopt himself.

Rawls finds in Rousseau not only a similar idea of social union, but also a parallel citizen psychology. In fact, in Rawls's lectures on Rousseau, he assigns to “moral freedom”—a form of rational self-legislation that Rousseau defines as “obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself”—precisely the same function that the sense of justice serves in his own work.Footnote ⁶³ Moral freedom, on Rawls's accounting, is the key to the Social Contract because, like the sense of justice in Theory, it allows Rousseauan citizens to experience the deep congruence of the right and the good. Morally free beings experience the act of obedience not as constraining, but rather as expressing, their most deeply held commitments—in Rawls's terms, they are “acting in accordance not only with the general will, but from [their] own will.”Footnote ⁶⁴ It is possible for them to experience obedience in this way because they themselves are the authors of the law, and the activity of lawmaking empowers each citizen in his personal quest to realize the capacities that are central to his nature: “the problem [for Rousseau] is how, then, without sacrificing our freedom, to unite with others to secure our fundamental interests and to guarantee the conditions for the development and exercise of our capacities.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Thus for the morally free citizen of Rousseau's social compact no less than for the self-respecting member of Rawls's well-ordered society, the desire to live in accordance with the law and the desire to realize one's nature as free and equal are, to steal a phrase from Rawls, “practically speaking the same.”

IV. The Social Union and the Sense of Justice: Rawls's Reading of Rousseau

So far we have been concerned to show the Rousseauan character of Rawls's account of self-respect and the social institutions that support it. To this end, we have put particular emphasis on both thinkers' insistence that self-respect requires a symphonic conception of the social union that leads each citizen to view the common good as a constitutive part of his private interest. Rawls's own interpretation of Rousseau points to these parallels by highlighting the crucially important role “moral freedom” plays in establishing such attitudes, and it correctly finds in Rousseau a desire to reconcile the demands of public and private life. We suggest, however, that Rawls's interpretation mischaracterizes both the terms and the robustness of the reconciliation that Rousseau seeks: Rousseau argues that the intrinsic instability of the sense of justice requires a systematic subordination of the particular to the general will, but Rawls omits these parts of the Social Contract and attributes to Rousseau a view far closer to his own. These omissions, as we shall explain here and in the conclusion, are important, for they not only paint “Rousseau with a particular, and partly deformed, face” but also silence a potential criticism of Rawls's own account of congruence.Footnote ⁶⁶

Rousseau's skepticism about the possibilities Rawls finds in his work shows itself in the very passage that Rawls relies on so heavily—the discussion of moral freedom. Rawls, we recall, holds that only the morally free citizen understands the compatibility of private and public interest because only he is capable of viewing the law as a generalized expression of his deepest personal commitments. Rousseau, however, does not go this far: he first distinguishes between “natural freedom,” which is “limited by force,” and “civil freedom,” which is “limited by the general will,” and goes on in the next paragraph to say:

Three things deserve attention. First, Rousseau's paragraphing. After contrasting the “natural” and “civil” forms of freedom Rousseau cordons off his discussion of moral freedom by introducing a paragraph break, thus indicating its distinctness from the forms of freedom already mentioned. Second, Rousseau's language hardly implies that the emergence of moral freedom is necessary in the way Rawls claims, saying instead that moral freedom “could be added” (on pourrait . . . ajouter) to civil freedom. This formulation suggests the two forms of freedom are compatible with but certainly not entailed by one another. Finally and perhaps most tellingly, Rousseau raises the question of moral freedom only to drop it entirely: immediately after introducing moral freedom Rousseau breaks off his discussion, stating that he has “already said too much about this topic” and that “the philosophical meaning of the word freedom is not my subject.” In order, then, to put moral freedom at the center of the Social Contract, Rawls omits Rousseau's effort to put it to the side.Footnote ⁶⁸

Despite these exegetical difficulties, an interpretation emphasizing moral freedom's centrality in preserving the sense of justice might still be sustained if Rousseau had carried the theme through in the Social Contract.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, his own discussion of political stability does quite the opposite: it shows that citizens attain the sense of justice not through a rational grasp of the connection between the individual and public goods, but rather through a passionate devotion to the motherland that delimits rather than empowers genuine individuality.Footnote ⁷⁰ Rawls's Lectures do not explore Rousseau's suggestion that political stability is only possible where private concerns are systematically subordinated to public ones, and this exclusion seems especially odd since the topic of Rawls's third lecture on Rousseau is on political stability. But Rawls's reticence to discuss the darker aspects of the Social Contract becomes comprehensible when we find Rousseau arguing that the equilibrium between the public and private dimensions of identity is intrinsically unstable, and its maintenance is possible only where particular interests are subsumed by the common interest: Rousseau tells us that the general and particular wills within us are “incessantly” warring for control of our psyches, and that the tendency for the particular will to win out is “natural” and “inevitable.”Footnote ⁷¹ Political institutions must therefore continually push back against the particularizing tendencies that are intrinsic to self-love, and provide citizens with constant reminders of the importance of the public good. A crucially important mechanism in this regard is “regular, periodical” popular assemblies that are established by law and that “nothing can abolish or postpone.”Footnote ⁷² Rousseau signals the identity-constitutive function of the sovereign assembly by claiming that public service ought to be “the main business of citizens,” and that when “they prefer to serve with their pocketbook rather than with their persons, the State is already close to ruin.”Footnote ⁷³ Sovereign assemblies are important, then, not only because there is important public business to conduct and representatives cannot be trusted to conduct it with integrity, but also because such assemblies refresh citizens' consciousness of their roles as citizens.

Though Rousseau's insistence on the necessity of strong civic engagement need not, in principle, entail the diminution of the private sphere, his belief in the particularizing tendencies of natural self-love leads him to think about the public and private dimensions of identity in zero-sum terms. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that “the better constituted the State, the more public affairs dominate private ones in the minds of the citizens. There is even less private business, because since the sum of the common happiness furnishes a larger portion of each individual's happiness, the individual has less to seek through private efforts.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Social institutions must combat the inevitable human tendency to privilege particular over general interests, and this requires ongoing psychological adjustments designed to marginalize the importance of the private and particular. The form of internal unity contained within the ideal of citizenship inescapably requires a subordination of the private to the public. Far, then, from pointing to the essential complementarity of the public good and private interest as Rawls claims, Rousseau emphasizes that such complementarity, though necessary to political stability, is also fragile, and comes at a cost: the congruence of right and good becomes available only when the ideal of citizenship becomes the good, and this involves a systemic subordination of private life to public.

Rousseau's depictions of subpolitical associations also point up the inevitable conflicts between the public and private worlds by emphasizing their tendency to distract citizens from their civic duty. In contrast to Rawls, who argues our private associations do much to prepare us for political life, Rousseau inveighs against the proliferation of “partial societ[ies]” on the ground that they privilege the claims of the particular over the general will.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rousseau's concern would seem to hold not only for interest groups with explicit policy goals but also—albeit to a lesser extent—for domestic associations like the family, which promote civically corrosive habits through their encouragement of “softness and love of comforts.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Of course, Rousseau does recognize the political value of certain kinds of subpolitical associations: in the Letter to D'Alembert on the Theater, for instance, he vigorously defends “the circles” (cercles)—informal social groups with no explicit policy aims—on the ground that they reinforce citizens' sense of justice. He believes these rustic and time-honored social groups better suit the “simple and innocent” morals of Geneva than the haughty cultivation of the theater, and argues that these groups, however imperfect, help preserve the civic unity of Genevans in two ways. They do so, first, because they are gendered, which requires the effective social segregation of men and women. Gender segregation has, for Rousseau, a number of happy civic effects, including the reduction of infidelity and the increase of martial toughness.Footnote ⁷⁷ Second, the cercles provide small group contexts in which citizens learn to identify ever more intimately with their regime. However, in order to understand the politicizing function of these groups, it is necessary to understand that they are only nominally “private” associations: on this score, Rousseau notes that the cercles grew out of celebrations following military festivals and drilling exercises, and that they were purified by “civil discords” that led their members out of raucous taverns and into places more suited to reasoned discussion of public affairs.Footnote ⁷⁸ He goes on to say that it is in the cercles as much as the agora that members learned not only how to fulfill their civic duties but how to be the kinds of persons who care about such duties in the first place: “these decent and innocent institutions combine everything which can contribute to making friends, citizens, and soldiers out of the same men, and, in consequence, everything which is most appropriate for a free people.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus in their beginnings and ends, the cercles prove to be little more than the State in another form.

V. Conclusions: Therapeutic Liberalism

Rawls's treatment of self-respect is one of the most important, most studied, and most ambiguous arguments in his Theory of Justice. We have shown that it is a central, and indeed a necessary, part of his account of political stability: buoyed by the appropriate social supports, citizens are in a position to develop self-respect and, with it, a host of other prosocial attitudes, including an active sense of justice, that allow them to see the deep compatibility of the right and the good. Unless they apprehend this compatibility—which is possible only under conditions of strict political equality and bounded economic inequality—Rawls believes they will fall prey to the twin evils of apathy and envy and fail to develop an appropriate respect either for themselves or for public institutions. In making this argument Rawls takes inspiration not from Kant, who is commonly credited as the chief if not the only source for the congruence argument, but rather from Rousseau.

Our Rousseauan interpretation of Rawlsian congruence gives rise to a redemptive vision of politics, one which conceives of political life not as a means of exercising dominion or of increasing private holdings, but rather as a therapeutic activity that discloses the compatibility of public good and private interest and, in so doing, effects unity both within and between citizens. This redemptive ideal could perhaps be criticized as psychologically “unrealistic,”Footnote ⁸⁰ but we think that Rawls's account of moral psychology as we have described it is both rich and broadly plausible—especially when it is understood not as an empirical description of how people in fact behave but rather as an account of how citizens might behave under more favorable conditions. We also think that understanding the depth of Rousseau's influence helps one to view Rawls's theory in precisely this way, for we have seen that Rawls follows Rousseau in thinking that moral dispositions are shaped as much by social and institutional circumstances as by innate or inborn propensities. Thus to those who would claim that Rawls is overly optimistic about the capacities of everyday citizens, he could do no better than to borrow Rousseau's old warning not to confuse human beings as they might be with the ones we see before us.Footnote ⁸¹

Since concerns about Rawls's “realism” often come from classical liberal quarters, we wish to emphasize that the therapeutic conception of politics that we find in Rawls contains a different and perhaps deeper critique of classical liberalism than has been previously understood. When Rawls argues that political stability is as much about shaping the appropriate attitudes as aligning incentives through formal institutional design, he self-consciously deviates from classical liberal orthodoxy as it was developed by Kant and others and does much to address the ongoing complaint—voiced most recently by Martha Nussbaum—that liberalism neglects the affective dimensions of politics.Footnote ⁸² Thus the vision he offers is distinguishable from classical liberalism not only because of its willingness to qualify private property rights, as Tomasi and Freeman have shown, but also for its willingness to flesh out the attitudinal, social, and interpersonal details of life in a well-ordered society.Footnote ⁸³ In showing that Rawls's concerns with classical liberalism extend beyond distributional questions and into the realms of political culture and psychology, then, our analysis is a step forward in at least two separate directions: it helps both in assessing Rawls's significance within the liberal tradition and in coming to an understanding of the intellectual influences guiding his work.

With respect to Rawls's influences, we have demonstrated that Rousseau was an especially important source for his arguments concerning deep congruence and the symphonic social union. We have also shown, however, that when it comes to stability, Rawls turns Rousseau's thinking in a direction that is somewhat foreign to it: far from arguing, as Rawls claims, that the sense of justice and the form of individual autonomy embodied in moral freedom are coextensive, Rousseau instead holds that sustaining a strong civic identity involves a diminution of private life and a subordination of the particular to the general will. Thus though Rawls correctly locates in Rousseau an imperative to resolve the conflicts between private interest and public good, he reads into that imperative a program of citizen-craft about which Rousseau himself expresses some doubt.

Rawls's unwillingness to explore the darker corners of Rousseau's thinking is clearly guided by a reasonable desire to reconstruct it in its best possible light,Footnote ⁸⁴ but it also obscures a potentially powerful criticism of Rawls's approach to congruence. Rawls is, on balance, optimistic about the possibility that citizens can under the right conditions effectively balance their private and public obligations, and he interprets Rousseau as a “reasonable optimist” who believes much the same.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, we have seen that Rousseau does not share in this optimism: to the contrary, he shows that the reconciliation between the public and private dimensions of identity is very fragile, and unlikely to be available under the broad conditions Rawls specifies. We are on Rousseau's accounting far too susceptible to the particularizing tendencies of self-love to have both a rich private life and an active sense of justice; hence we must choose between making a “man” and a “citizen,” for it is untenable to seek to be both simultaneously.Footnote ⁸⁶ From a Rousseauan perspective, then, Rawls's solution to the problem posed by the public/private divide is little more than an articulation of the problem itself. Thus though Rawls is correct to find in Rousseau's political philosophy a demand for comprehensive reconciliation between self and other, he neglects Rousseau's repeated statements that such a reconciliation is unavailable in modern times and his discussion of the (illiberal) conditions that its realization would require. In so doing, he drafts Rousseau's thought into the service of possibilities that it is not only unable to support, but in fact may well preclude.