If your guts have ever churned with envy while reading a favorable review of someone else’s new book, then you have experienced the passion Rousseau called amour-propre. That expression means “self-love,” but it names a peculiar and unreasonable sort of self-love, distinct from a more basic form of self-love (called amour de soi même by Rousseau) that is the desire to advance one’s interests. In The Psychology of Inequality: Rousseau’s “Amour-Propre,” Michael McLendon offers an account of what amour-propre is, speculates on the sources on which Rousseau drew to construct it, and explains the role it plays in Rousseau’s critique of commercial societies. That account is well grounded in the relevant primary texts and bolstered by a deep engagement with the secondary literature, although much of that has been relegated to the endnotes. McLendon’s central contention is that amour-propre is a “classical aristocratic passion,” the desire both to be the best (aristos) and to be honored for being best (p. 2). Far from taming this passion or displacing it by the reasonable desire to advance one’s interests, commercial societies “both awaken and corrupt” amour-propre (p. 6).

In support of his thesis that Rousseau’s amour-propre is fundamentally the desire to be best, McLendon points to the passage, early in the second part of the Discourse on Inequality, which introduces the idea of amour-propre. Narrating his philosophical history of humanity, Rousseau depicts a moment in the distant past when our primitive ancestors gathered for the first time into villages and began to sing and dance together, with the result that “the one who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, or the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded” (Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, qtd. at p. 13; emphasis in McLendon). Against scholars such as Nicholas Dent, David Lay Williams, and Frederick Neuhouser, who more optimistically suppose that amour-propre may be satisfied by something like reciprocal recognition from others, McLendon insists that what Rousseau’s amour-propre demands is recognition for being best, which is a claim that, in principle, refuses reciprocal satisfaction and is therefore laden with the seeds of conflict.

To appreciate the full power of amour-propre, McLendon argues, we should study Sophocles’s dramatic portrayal of the supremely aristocratic hero, Ajax. Ajax demands recognition for his “superior abilities”—his “aristeia”—and he constructs his identity around his abilities and achievements, which also define his public identity, his “social persona” (pp. 24–25). To Ajax, life is a “zero-sum competition” for honor (p. 25), and to one thus consumed by amour-propre, an honorable suicide is obviously preferable to living in disgrace. Sophocles’s Odysseus, by contrast, exemplifies the “prudent and calculating” pursuit of well-being inspired by amour de soi même (p. 18). He sees no advantage in dishonoring Ajax’s corpse, but rather urges the Atreidae to permit their dead enemy’s burial, on the pragmatic and reasonable grounds that he and they will someday also need funeral rites.

McLendon sees that in eighteenth-century Paris, the Odyssean virtues of cleverness and persuasive speech had displaced the martial excellence of Ajax as the basis of public esteem; nevertheless, he reads Rousseau as claiming that his contemporaries, the philosophes, have much in common with Sophocles’s doomed, archaic hero. Like Ajax, the new intellectual aristocrats base their social personas on their talents, seeking recognition and glory for their excellence while displaying arrogance and contempt for their inferiors. McLendon not only explores Rousseau’s concerns about the damage that inflamed amour-propre inflicts on the character of high achievers; he also—and this is one of his book’s great virtues—draws attention to Rousseau’s concern for people of mediocre or low ability, who are deprived of any grounds for public esteem (and therefore also for self-respect) in a moral economy that values people only insofar as they possess exceptional talents.

McLendon deepens his account of amour-propre by exploring the parallel idea of amor sui in Augustine. Although he considers Augustine’s account to be complex, he finds one strand of the argument to have particular resonance in Rousseau’s writings: the idea that the desire for glory, rooted in one’s pride in one’s abilities, tends to degenerate into libido dominandi, the desire to oppress others. Surveying the writings of some prominent seventeenth-century neo-Augustinians, such as Abbadie, Nicole, Malebranche, and Sénault, McLendon finds that they tended to emphasize the contrary strand in Augustine’s thinking about amor sui, noting the ways in which the vices of pride and vanity nevertheless can inspire people to act for the public good. This idea, as McLendon notes, finds its fullest articulation in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees.

Rousseau, McLendon observes, rejects Mandeville’s claim that vanity may be useful on the pessimistic Augustinian grounds that the amour-propre of elites will ultimately degenerate into the desire “to demean, harm, and even tyrannize” those who lack conspicuous talents or abilities, as is established in part two of the Discourse on Inequality (p. 105). After setting forth Rousseau’s critique of modern inegalitarian societies, McLendon surveys Rousseau’s efforts in his constructive works to “contain amour-propre and keep it from turning into libido dominandi” (p. 111). He finds that, in their different ways, The Social Contract, Emile, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker develop proposals designed “to minimize the importance of individual identity” grounded in talent or ability and “to deemphasize the social value of individual excellences” (p. 112). In his account of these potential Rousseauian solutions to the problem of amour-propre, McLendon begins to sound like the optimistic interpreters of Rousseau he had criticized earlier in his book. However, McLendon remains pessimistic about the prospects that any of these solutions may succeed, and he insists that they are likely to do so only under quite exceptional conditions.

McLendon concludes his study of amour-propre by turning to Tocqueville’s psychological analysis of bourgeois democracy. Although he never uses the phrase amour-propre, Tocqueville clearly recognizes the phenomenon and describes in Democracy in America some of the distinctively democratic and egalitarian sources of envy, vanity, and shame. McLendon notes, however, that Tocqueville challenges Rousseau’s political teaching and substantially inverts it: whereas the Genevan fears the oppression of the many by the few and holds out hope that ordinary people living far from the glittering spectacle of inequality in Paris may remain relatively uncorrupted, the Frenchman sees the people as “the true source of tyranny in the democratic age” (p. 151).

Although McLendon notes some ways in which Tocqueville challenges or complicates his Rousseauian account of amour-propre, he unfortunately does not pursue that line of argument. Thus one must be left to wonder whether the aristocratic aspect to amour-propre that McLendon highlights—the desire to be recognized as having the best talents and greatest abilities—is the sole or even the dominant feature of that complex passion or whether a fuller account would encompass both Rousseau’s and Tocqueville’s observations. Notwithstanding that limitation, McLendon’s account is consistently illuminating, and he rightly draws our attention to Rousseau’s teaching that “equality… must do more than provide opportunities for the best and brightest to rise to the top”; rather, it must “ensure a dignified life for everyone” (p. 54).