A Third Birth: Rousseau’s Education to Moral Judgment in Julie,or the New Heloise

Second Birth Complications

Rather than Emile being a sincere proposal of properly educating humans at their “first” and “second births,” this text and its sequel, The Solitaries, are better understood as a complex examination of the apparently natural education and its unintended consequences, especially in the context of the relevant works surrounding their publication. Rousseau declares the “judicious mother who knows how to think” as his audience for Emile and warns Philibert Cramer in a letter that Emile is “not a treatise on education” (Melzer 1990, 8; Rousseau 1974, 248, 1979, 248–49). He is not trying to indoctrinate his audience with a miracle solution to social and individual woes but rather invites us through his educational novels to analyze, question, and judge his proposals to fully understand him. Once we establish how questionable his project in Emile is, on its own terms and its effects shown in its sequel, we are welcome to consider if and how Rousseau manages to solve these problems through other means.

In Emile, education comes down to developing virtue, which involves a sort of self-overcoming. This is not a sheer act of will or force that acts against the inclinations to subdue them. Instead, virtue is a self-overcoming that gets the inclinations on board, so to speak (Melzer 1990, 100–4; Reisert 2003, 8, 14, 19–23). The virtuous soul has at least some inherent desire to do what is good even while it might still harbor conflicting desires (Rousseau 1979, 385). Without the maintenance of natural goodness, virtue has no foundation in the soul. ³ But goodness is a primitive form of morality, insufficient for virtue. Goodness is unfit to deal with the moral questions of complex human society as it does not recognize the concept of obligation or duty. As Denise Schaeffer points out, Rousseau believes that virtue requires judgment both to weigh one’s inclinations and duties and to focus on the right objects. The primary goal of his education is to develop this judgment (Schaeffer 2014, 7, 11–12). ⁴

Rousseau distinguishes between masculine and feminine forms of judgment, however. Men’s judgment is based on “general principles” and generates new principles on the basis of reason, whereas women’s judgment is based on “practical reason” and “sharp and continuous observations” of men’s hearts that produce an “experimental morality” (Rousseau 1979, 377, 383, 385–87). If men and women are supposed to work in conjunction to become a “moral person” as a unit, as Rousseau suggests, how do they use their different forms of judgment to produce “the clearest insight and the most complete science regarding itself that the human mind can acquire . . . the surest knowledge of oneself and others available to our species” (1979, 387)? Moreover, if it is women who secretly rule over their husbands, how is a woman to become the “judge of her judges” if she has only her particular judgment and “knows neither the source of human judgments and the passions determining them” (1979, 383)? Rousseau warns against keeping this knowledge from her, but it is not clear where or how she will acquire it.

Indeed, Rousseau’s explicit statements that women cannot reason generally as men can seem to suggest there are insurmountable natural differences between the sexes, even on the dimension of moral judgment (Rousseau 1979, 377). Yet throughout Book V of Emile, he includes numerous qualifications that moderate his statements on the naturalness of gendered characteristics. Penny Weiss extensively demonstrates that Rousseau’s claims on behalf of “nature” are barely veiled appeals to expediency: Rousseau repeatedly qualifies that certain moral considerations ought to follow as if they come from nature (Rousseau 1979, 358, 361–65, 369–70, 396; Weiss 1987, 1993, 37–38, 44–45, 48–50). Consider his explicit statement that “[everything] that characterizes the fair sex ought to be respected as established by nature,” betraying that “nature” is a cover for usefulness (Rousseau 1979, 363; my emphasis). When he says, “The female is female her own life,” he appends the clause, “at least during her whole youth”—that is, throughout her reproductive years when she benefits from the help of a husband during pregnancy and child-rearing (Rousseau 1979, 361). He even opens Book V with an explicit admission that men and women are identical in those aspects not connected to sex, while incomparable in those aspects that are, but that it is also next to impossible to untangle what is and is not related to sex (Rousseau 1979, 357–58). With so many caveats throughout the sections that follow, we are welcome to judge whether the characteristics Rousseau will imbue Sophie with are naturally feminine or if they are the product of education and socialization—with the possibility of reeducating and resocializing them.

For the purposes of his argument in Book V, educating the woman to be the complement of the man, Rousseau needs to make this questionable gendered nature plausible enough to justify this education that ultimately cultivates and enforces the gendered characteristics he seeks. If he can create men and women different enough to require each other for good judgment and good morals, he can bring them together into a cooperative union in which interdependence does not render them servile or false like other social relationships do. By rendering each incomplete, they each find themselves fulfilled by seeking the other, and each “rules” the other in their own gendered ways to establish an equality between them. Rousseau’s denigration of relationships based on dependence and manipulation, however, makes his education for women suspect on his own terms. As he emphasizes women’s weakness and greater dependence on others compared to men, he encourages them to use clandestine control over their husbands to “rule” them for their own benefit (Rousseau 1979, 408).

This ought to raise alarm bells for the careful reader: there is something wrong with this education for women if it does not make them into the moral equals of men or makes them the moral inferiors of men, dependent on their judgment. Many careful readers have been alarmed by this, and a contingent of them see this education as a thinly veiled entrapment of women to restore men to wholeness and virtue at the expense of their wives. Whether this is to ensure women’s inferiority and restrain them in the domestic sphere for men’s benefit (Christenson 1972; Wexler 1976) or to contain women’s inherent power to “disorder” men if left unchecked (Bradshaw 2002; Elshtain 1981; Fermon 1997; Kofman 1988; Lenne-Cornuez 2020; Ormiston 2002; Pateman 1989; Weiss 1993; Zerilli 1994), they see Rousseau as genuinely doubling down on gendered differences to produce men and women restricted to very specific relationships with one another, in order to resolve social humanity’s ills—at least for men.

This conclusion is unsatisfying if we take seriously Rousseau’s concerns about the dependence, insecurity, and manipulation involved in modern social life. Especially because Rousseau does not think that women are naturally suited for such inferiority and dependence in this most crucial moral realm of judgment, we can be suspicious of the education that tries to gloss over the harm, if not the ineffectiveness, of this education. What Book V most effectively reveals is how gender can be manipulated and created through education, and that we can imagine other ways of manipulating it for more salutary outcomes. There are many more positive readings of Rousseau’s gender politics, which better account for Rousseau’s praise of feminine qualities—not as obsequious flattery to obscure some nefarious design against women but as a sincere elevation of the feminine. ⁵

New approaches to Rousseau that include careful analysis of Julie along with Emile provide a helpful inroad to seeing this transformative power of human relationships, and they focus on how women transform men (Kennedy 2012; O’Neal 2011; Wingrove 2000). Similarly to how Schwartz (1984) and Baker (2000) describe Rousseau acquiring feminine qualities, these scholars show how St. Preux in Julie acquires feminine qualities through Julie’s influence, and they argue this shows Rousseau’s preference for feminine particularity as his moral ideal. All of them see Rousseau proposing benefits not from the importance of women contributing their judgment in relationships with men but rather in their power to educate and transform men. ⁶ Rousseau’s women are more important and more impressive than the men they influence, and the benefit of their influence comes from their ability to make men effeminate in serious ways.

Wingrove (2000) emphasizes Julie’s transformative power over St. Preux, describing him as “a teacher who must be taught” (p. 114). To become less “systemic,” St. Preux has to learn from his experiences traveling and be transformed by Julie’s expressions of desire and her appearance of ceding control over her desire to St. Preux (Rousseau 1997, 427; Wingrove 2000, 115–16). Wingrove traces his moral education—his éducation sensible—at the hands of Julie and establishes its basis on the sexual practices of submission and domination, which are “gendered” but ultimately traded off between the two sexes at various times (Wingrove 2000, 76, 85, 102, 105–6). Although she identifies a form of moral education in Julie, Wingrove (2000) does not discuss the educational arrangement of Julie, St. Preux, and Claire at the beginning of the novel, instead tracing St. Preux’s éducation sensible at the hands of Julie from his first admission of love through their various trysts and invocations of each other’s virtue to protect themselves, all the way to the spectacle of Julie as Madame de Wolmar (p. 112, 115, 117, 123). From her account, it is not clear what constitutes Julie’s moral education, and judgment is not designated as the crucial moral faculty.

Moral judgment is crucial to Rousseau’s account of virtue, however. He explicitly links the general judgment of men and particular judgment of women to morality in Emile (Rousseau 1979, 387), and he writes in an attempt to educate his readers’ judgment through his more literary and autobiographical works. ⁷ Considering again that Rousseau describes different types of judgment defined by gender, it is important to highlight the seriousness with which he treats “feminine” particular judgment, repeatedly praising it, perhaps to the point of elevating it over masculine generality (Disch 1994; LeBlanc 2022; Schaeffer 2014). O’Neal (2011) and Kennedy (2012) highlight the effeminacy of St. Preux during his time at Clarens that extends even beyond acquiring feminine judgment (O’Neal 2011, 143–48; Kennedy 2012, 98), which they suggest improves him because of the superior model of particular judgment. ⁸ This follows earlier arguments that Rousseau implicitly critiques masculine generality in his works (MacCannell 1991, 5, 46–47; Marso 1999, 60–61, 136–37) and reveals the better quality of feminine particularity (Disch 1994, 25–26; Marso 2002, 260, 262–63).

Although Kennedy also points out that Julie and Claire violate the strict gender binary and adopt masculine qualities at many points throughout the novel (Kennedy 2012, 12), she does not provide an account of how they have these characteristics, unlike the accounts of how masculine characters are influenced to become effeminate by the women in their lives. If Rousseau’s women have masculine judgment, we need to see how they acquire it, especially when his description of women’s moral education does not seem to yield this in Emile. With the proper education, men and women can experience the third birth that takes them beyond the conventional moral education they receive upon their “second birth” at puberty.

Beyond the Second Birth: Independent Virtue

Other scholarship has already established that Rousseau offers the possibility of adopting both “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics in the same person in one of three ways: men can aspire to androgynous moral independence through their own efforts (Schwartz 1984, 8, 107 n.60), men can be made effeminate by the efforts of women (Baker 2000, 181–83, 194; O’Neal 2011, 143–58; Wingrove 2000, 105–6, 131–34), or people just spontaneously possess characteristics understood to be “masculine” and “feminine” (Disch 1994, 21–22; Kennedy 2012, 12). ⁹ There is no account of education for women to adopt masculine principles, specifically his general judgment, in spite of the many ways in which scholars have shown men acquiring feminine particular judgment. This possibility for women is outlined in Julie, though, and Rousseau’s own education mirrors this.

Rousseau acquires women’s capacity for particular judgment, in addition to his own masculine capacity for general judgment, through his active imagination (Schwartz 1984, 107). Rousseau does not spontaneously transcend his gendered nature, rather the seeds are sown for this transformation in his childhood, as he takes up reading his late mother’s novels and his father’s histories (Rousseau 1995, 7–8). His third birth takes place, however, when he is a young man in the care of Madame de Warens. He learns from her how to see and judge particularly, that is, femininely, and how to combine this with his naturally general (masculine) judgment (Baker 2000, 179–82, 194). This is the condition of moral independence, even if we do not become wholly independent from others. Indeed, total independence is never the goal. Rousseau’s own attempts at independence are imperfect; he never attempts perfect solitude, as he still lives with his wife Thérèse and the one resident family on St. Peter’s Island during his most “solitary” period (Rousseau 1992, 62–64). Schwartz is careful to note that Rousseau never frees himself from sexuality and thereby from others, he only does so through his “imagination” (Rousseau 1995, 26; Schwartz 1984, 108). But imaginative independence is the crucial dimension of moral independence; as Shklar points out, for Rousseau, “[it] is not isolation as such that has a universal value; it is the mental ability to escape into oneself that matters” (Shklar 1985, 26). Schwartz concedes this, claiming that independence requires either the “transcendence of the natural difference between the sexes, or through an incorporation in some way of the principles of both sexes in one person” (Schwartz 1984, 7; my emphasis). The former method would require the elimination of physical differences and physical dependence, but the latter requires neither.

When Schwartz (1984) claims, then, that women cannot hope to obtain Rousseau’s moral independence, i.e. experience a third birth, it is on the basis of the former requirement to eliminate physical differences and dependence (p. 107). He argues that women, to acquire masculine traits, would have to “add strength she does not have” to their being, whereas men must simply give up some strength to do so (1984, 107 n.60). Women, Schwartz argues, are naturally social because of their comparative weakness and therefore cannot escape the sexuality and politics that emerge from their need for others, specifically because of their biological role as mothers (1984, 6–8). But women do need to be able to judge virtuously for themselves, lest they be misled by corrupt society and its erroneous judgments, and they must know how to rule their families by secretly controlling their husbands. When Rousseau (1979) emphasizes that women must court public opinion since the perception of her virtue is a crucial element of her virtue, this comes with a risk: a woman cannot succumb to public opinion (p. 361). Rather, Rousseau explicitly says she must become the “judge of her judges” (1979, 383). To judge her judges, she must have particular and general judgment, to know the principles of virtue, how to adhere to them in different circumstances, and how to portray her adherence to them for different audiences. Again, this does not imply material independence from her husband or community but rather a transcendence of her natural particular judgment in order to independently judge what is virtuous and follow it accordingly while also maintaining her particular judgment in acting appropriately in any situation and illustrating her virtue to others around her. This is the “incorporation . . . of the principles of both sexes in one person” that Schwartz (1984) claims is one avenue to independence, which is possible for women (p. 7).

Schaeffer (1998) argues that Sophie’s education does manage to make her capable of this and that she is self-conscious enough to maintain illusions of wholeness for her husband and family by which she is not herself deluded (p. 617). Because a woman “has to be aware of the nature of amour-propre and how to guide it . . . [and] must understand the character of the whole she is responsible for maintaining,” her education “cannot simply be complementary to the education that her male counterpart receives; it must both comprehend it and transcend it” (1998, 617–18). Women need to be “stronger, smarter, and more independent than they reveal themselves to be to their mates,” and it is the “self-censorship” they engage in that piques scholars’ disdain and leads them to dismiss Sophie’s education (1998, 615). Yet the proper education for a woman gives her all it gives to a man, and then some. Here, I agree with Schaeffer that Rousseau intends for women to effectively rule within their families, and that effective rule even on his own terms would entail a capacity for judgment beyond the particular. I am more pessimistic about the ability of Sophie’s education to produce this judgment, however. Even prior to The Solitaires, Emile implores his teacher to “remain the master of the young masters” and continue to “advise” and “govern” them (1979, 480). This is not exactly the demand of a self-sufficient couple who understands and can exercise virtue. Yet this is where the alternative education found in Julie can actually produce Rousseau’s desired effects.

Education for the Third Birth

Such as we see the possibility for a third birth in the example of Rousseau, he offers an education toward the third birth in Julie. While there are characters who appear naturally to transcend gendered particularity with no indication of having to work toward it, such as Jean-Jacques the Tutor, Wolmar, and even Claire to a certain extent, these figures are only helpful insofar as they illustrate the superiority of moral androgyny. They give us something to aspire to, but if we do not naturally share their qualities, then we need further help in acquiring them.

Julie serves as a guide. After Julie and her tutor St. Preux confess their love for one another, St. Preux proposes a new educational program that takes virtue as its new focus and seeks to make the trio of friends capable of virtue. Prior to this, St. Preux was engaged only to “polish up” Julie and her cousin, Claire, but the recognition of romantic love between them—and the implausibility of their being allowed to marry—requires the development of virtue to remain chaste. At first, they each call upon the other to be their own safeguard since they cannot trust themselves, but they easily recognize the danger in this and devise a different plan. Virtue, again, requires moral independence, which is achievable only by having both components of moral judgment in the same soul: particular and general. To acquire this combination of judgments, St. Preux culls their original curriculum and curates a new one that incorporates both traditionally masculine and feminine studies; he studies alongside his female pupils, and the pedagogical method incorporates masculine and feminine means. I will address each of these components in turn, showing how they each contribute to creating a virtuous individual with the capacity for good judgment. At the same time, I will contrast these methods with similar but ultimately flawed approaches in Emile.

The first aspect of the new education is the new “curriculum,” the selection of materials for the pupils to learn. St. Preux limits their studies to “books of good taste and morality” and eliminates anything that “speaks nothing to the soul,” as it is “unworthy of [Julie’s] attention” (Rousseau 1997, 48). As this becomes the standard, the concern for gender-appropriateness drops out. Mathematics—algebra and geometry—are abandoned for having no part in this moral study for the young women and St. Preux alike, rather than being unsuitable just for the women (Rousseau 1979, 425–26, 1997, 48). Conversely, St. Preux drops almost all poetry and love stories, even though they are “the customary readings intended for [the female] Sex,” because they have nothing to teach the friends about love (1997, 49). They know of love already, through their experience, and anything additional needed for love comes from the moral realm, which they examine through their other books (1997, 49).

The combining of traditionally masculine and feminine studies seems to be echoed in Emile, when Emile and Sophie exchange their formative literature; Emile gives Sophie his Spectator, and she gives him her Telemachus so that they might learn from one another what they ought to be to each other (1979, 450). But they exchange these works as Emile is forced to leave with the Tutor and travel as part of his final education in politics (1979, 442–50). They are exposed to each other’s education, but it is limited and they learn separately from each other. While they are initially courting, Emile does spend time “teaching” Sophie, overjoyed to be on his knees before her (1979, 425). These lessons, Rousseau points out, are not appropriate for Sophie in her role as Emile’s future wife, but Sophie does not really retain anything that Emile teaches her anyway (1979, 425–26). Emile thinks how wonderful it would be to share all of the things he cares about with his wife so they can converse about them together, but ultimately, Emile does not teach Sophie any of these things and does not even realize he has not achieved this goal. He thinks this is what he wants to achieve, but he feels successful just having engaged her attention while speaking of the other things he cares about. The education is not an education but an expression of love, a combining of good things into one figure and one interaction.

The form and content of these educational moments in Emile are similar to Julie’s and St. Preux’s and seem to be fitting for lovers. The intensity of love between lovers makes them want to be the same being, not halves of a whole. A conjoining of parts is still not close enough, not intimate enough for the first passions of love, as Rousseau exemplifies when he expresses his desire to have “two souls in the same body” (1995, 348). Yet in Emile, this education is a futile expression of that feeling, whereas in Julie, St. Preux successfully forms a moral education that expresses this desire for wholeness and has the power to achieve it. When St. Preux involves Julie and Claire in traditionally masculine studies, and he joins them in traditionally feminine studies, they are trying to learn a common form of human morality. It has the purpose of making them “suitable” for one another, but in the sense that human beings ought to fit together, not specifically as husband and wife in the family unit.

Emile giving Sophie lessons on his knees before her again echoes the joint education between the male tutor and the female pupils in Julie, but St. Preux has revised the education specifically to move away from this didactic model. Emile lectures Sophie. St. Preux reads books with his pupils and explains to them “what the others have thought,” while Julie will tell them what she thinks “on the same subject,” with St. Preux anticipating he will “end the lesson more knowledgeable than [Julie]” for having learned from her (1997, 47). There is an active exchange of ideas that does not occur in the education of Emile and Sophie. Emile and Sophie are not self-ruling on the basis of what they learn from each other. Instead, they rule each other in their own ways (1979, 408).

This is the arrangement St. Preux seeks to avoid when creating his educational plan; instead, the tutor will become the pupil and the pupil will become the tutor. Each friend brings something unique to the education, and the others are expected to absorb these lessons for their own use. That is, each individual is meant to supplement their partial knowledge with the others’ partial knowledge to attain full virtuous judgment. In Julie as in Emile, Rousseau does not deny that there are sexual and intellectual differences between the characters, but he has them resolve the problem of their partiality in a different way in Julie. There, they are educated to be moral unto themselves by more reliably acquiring the capacities they do not have by nature or by early education. This still requires the mutual education of men and women; neither sex has perfect knowledge and must rely on others to complete their knowledge. In no way does Rousseau see the sexual adult human being as a natural whole unto themselves, unlike the asexual child’s wholeness prior to puberty (1979, 212–14). Where Julie differs from Emile is its conclusion that adult human beings can attain moral independence in spite of their sexual natures.

In Julie, the characters examine “tableaus of virtuous people” together and begin to imitate them (1997, 48). This alone would be a passive and unreliable method of moral education, but the students learn to judge these examples. To imitate well is to partake in the example’s thoughts as well as their actions, and as they begin to act like these good models, they will experience the particular combinations of moral questions or problems and the appropriate moral responses. Through these particular experiences, they develop particular judgment and good taste. With enough of these experiences, over time, they then develop general judgment and the ability to abstract from particulars. This supplements particular judgment. Rather than thinking every problem through from scratch, they have gained a toolbox of general moral principles they can apply first, then shift to particular judgment to modify those general principles in service to the exceptions of the case at hand. If the student does not learn both forms of judgment, they experience different problems. The particular judge will too often make exceptions, using different size hammers on different size nails; the general judge will too often apply the same rule to every single problem, using a hammer on nails and screws alike. The individual who has both forms of judgment knows which tool to use and what size it should be.

We see the characters using their general and particular judgment throughout the novel, cultivated through the examination of virtuous examples; most importantly, we see Julie use both forms of judgment as proof of the possibility of combining these capacities in one person, specifically a woman. We as readers are, in turn, invited by the epistolary form to judge alongside the characters as they think through and debate different moral questions. One of the clearest examples of this is Julie’s appeals to St. Preux and Milord Edward after a night of drinking leads Milord Edward to make a careless comment about Julie’s favor for St. Preux (1997, 122–24). St. Preux impetuously challenges Milord Edward to a duel, seeking to defend Julie’s honor against the suggestion of immodesty. Julie sends each man a letter: one extensive letter of arguments and counterarguments to St. Preux, and a short emotional appeal to Milord Edward (1997, 124–31; 131–32). In the letter to St. Preux, Julie effectively reasons from a number of principles against dueling in general. While she refers to the particulars of their situation—that the comment was a slander against her rather than against St. Preux, that Milord Edward is well-known as a skilled opponent, and that the comment itself was, unfortunately, true—she makes general pronouncements beyond the circumstances to categorically renounce dueling as genuinely dishonorable for the virtuous and honorable man. Harkening back to their shared lessons, she uses examples from Ancient Greece and Rome to illustrate the truly honorable alternative, rejecting any sort of moral relativism that would dismiss these on the basis of “[d]ifferent times, different customs” (1997, 126). She recognizes and reminds St. Preux that there exists a standard of honor that “is not variable, it depends not on time nor place nor prejudice, it can neither pass nor be reborn, its timeless source lies in the heart of the just man and the inalterable rule of his duties” (1997, 126).

Each paragraph of the letter poses a new anticipated counter from St. Preux, which Julie deftly responds to, especially when she anticipates he will object to any apparent inconsistencies in her position. As she praises true honor and virtue, specifically courage, in her arguments, she anticipates that he may not be able to understand her combination of particular and general judgments. She clarifies to him that it is crucial to discover what passes for “honor” and “virtue” in a society and what is genuinely honorable and virtuous (1997, 129). She greatly admires courage—even that courage to kill and risk being killed—but only in the context of protecting the fatherland, in service to truth and justice, and privately in one’s response to personal hardships (1997, 129). She reveals herself to be principled and explains to him how to properly identify when the principle applies. ¹⁰

She admits her letter is primarily based on general reasoning and that reason ought to prevail in serious situations, but she also demonstrates her particular judgment in concluding her letter with two emotional appeals as safeguards against St. Preux’s anticipated sophistry against her reasonings, and an invocation of authority. First, she reveals that her father had once killed his best friend in a duel and has lived in horrible regret since then—a parallel to St. Preux’s own situation given his close friendship with Milord Edward up to this point. And in case this is not moving enough, she reminds her lover of their spiritual union that would effectively leave her a “widow” should he duel and inevitably lose (1997, 130–33). If none of this is sufficient, she appeals to her own authority, which St. Preux willingly granted to her over him (1997, 131). Julie has anticipated every argument, every retort, and every effective maneuver against St. Preux particularly and against dueling generally.

In keeping with her excellent particular judgment, she knows precisely how to apply to Milord Edward: in one short letter, she admits the truth of his careless comment, her relationship with St. Preux, and in no uncertain terms ties St. Preux’s potential death to her own. If Milord Edward kills St. Preux, he will be killing her also. This would-be philosopher does not receive lengthy arguments against dueling in general, only an appeal to his sentimental humanity (1997, 131–32). It turns out to be the crucial letter of the two. St. Preux admits to mulling over his letter for the week Julie asks for, unable to refute her arguments but still angrily willing to duel all the same; it is Milord Edward who comes to him with two witnesses to retract his comments and make amends (1997, 132–33). Julie correctly judges how to influence the individual but never sacrifices or obscures the general principles from which she works.

We see the lifelong effects of this education over the course of the novel, even after Julie becomes Madame de Wolmar and benevolently rules over Clarens with her husband. While Wolmar “experiments” in reuniting the lovers to “cure” them of their love, keeping St. Preux as a guest at Clarens, Julie and St. Preux remain chaste, and the now-Madame de Wolmar never forsakes her virtue as a wife. They do not do this without difficulty, but they do maintain their virtue in this bizarre and cruel situation. They are impressive in this, and Julie’s positive virtue in raising her children well is additionally impressive.

As St. Preux outlines in a letter to Milord Edward, the Wolmars have developed a system of education for their children that reveals that Julie continues to exercise her general and particular moral judgment, even as wife to the authoritative Wolmar (Rousseau 1997, 455–80). She describes to St. Preux her hopes and fears while she was pregnant with her first son, worried she would not be able to raise him properly, and that she and Wolmar discussed how to raise their children extensively (1997, 460). Although he presents many maxims that she adopts to direct her child-rearing, she does not simply accept them all and explicitly contradicts his belief that all natural characters are good (1997, 461, 465). She develops the method of education herself in accordance with the principles she sees the truth in, some of which are her own and not shared with Wolmar (1997, 465–73). ¹¹ Indeed, she still uses her own lights to judge; when considering how she is “preparing” her children for an education in reason when they come of age, she says to St. Preux: “Even in that [preparing them for education] I am doing no more than following Monsieur de Wolmar’s system point by point, and the further I go, the more persuaded I am of how excellent and just it is, and how well it accords with mine” (1997, 473; my emphasis). She is truly the judge of her most important judge and follows her judgment when particularity demands it. Considering that she continues her studies in a solitary hour each night, we can be assured she has never given up her efforts to develop and maintain her general judgment to supplement her natural particular judgment—and that her family and estate benefit from this (1997, 455). In Emile, men and women must always rely on each other to generate complete knowledge together (Rousseau 1979, 387). In Julie, we see them each adopt the other’s form of judgment and become capable of virtue.

Conclusion

While scholars have brought us beyond the understanding of Rousseau’s gender politics being based on women’s inferiority or even enforcing women’s sociopolitical inferiority, the possibilities they open up for us in interpreting Rousseau’s true proposals deserve further expansion. As shown previously, Rousseau does not simply pay lip service to the particular virtues or characteristics he attributes to women but rather takes them up to point out how they are typically—and incorrectly—neglected or denigrated by men. He explicitly praises those characteristics that are considered “feminine” and accuses those who criticize them: “You [men] constantly say, ‘Women have this or that failing which we do not have.’ Your pride deceives you. They would be failings for you; they are their good qualities. Everything would go less well if they did not have these qualities” (Rousseau 1979, 363). Although his arguments that these qualities are “natural” fall apart, he is highlighting those features typically associated with women, the masculine pride that rejects them, and the dangers of doing so. ¹²

This elevation of “feminine” qualities, including “contextualized” or “particular” judgment, has led some scholars to interpret Rousseau as proposing that women have superior characteristics, like “contextualized thinking” (Disch 1994, 25–26; Marso 1999, 50, 60–61), and/or are superior models of citizenship (MacCannell 1991, 46–47, Marso 1999, 3, 7, 11, 74) because of their incorporation of particular concerns and ability to understand or deal with difference more effectively than the generalist approach of masculine citizenship. Penny Weiss has helpfully pointed out that whatever looks like anti-feminism in Rousseau’s thought is actually anti-liberalism, and that he only critiques women’s pursuit of independence and freedom insofar as he critiques this pursuit for everyone (Kennedy 2012, 78; Mall 2012, 182; Weiss 1993, 18, 31, 46, 70). ¹³

This orientation to Rousseau’s thought, however, suggests that Rousseau subtly replaces masculine, general judgment with a new ideal: feminine, particular judgment. He no doubt values this particularity and is at great pains to include it in the fullest possible understanding of moral virtue, but I mean just that: he wants to include it along with general judgment to produce actual moral virtue. Particularity does not replace generality but instead must coincide with it. Superficially, this could be achieved through the harmonious couple bringing their “natural” forms of judgment together, but as I have highlighted, this is an ineffective means of doing so. As Weiss questions, how could individuals so differently educated be “capable of fully communicating with each other, that there is enough common ground to build community” (Weiss 1993, 52)? Indeed, moral communication would require a shared education like the one Julie, St. Preux, and Claire engage in, which has the power to develop the form of judgment each lacks prior to this new education. Men like Rousseau or St. Preux are not the only ones capable of mixing these “gendered” types of judgment in the same person; as Julie reveals, women can be educated to develop masculine “general” judgment as well. If both sexes can do so, they are both capable of self-governance through virtuous self-control and can work together on moral problems with a common model of particular and general judgment.

Rousseau’s critique of enlightenment liberalism, then, should not be taken as a wholesale critique of the generalized reason and judgment it favors but rather a challenge to consider and incorporate the missing element of contextualized reasoning and particular judgment for the benefit of our political institutions and culture. We very much remain Rousseau’s intended audience with our admiration for general principled thinking, and it is our internalized liberal sexism that keeps us from seeing the value in the particular judgment that we associate with the “feminine.” Like those feminist scholars who illuminated this particular form of prejudice against women’s ways of thinking about, judging, and interacting with the world, such as Gilligan (1982), Belenky et al. (1986), and Pateman (1989, 210–23), other feminist scholars point out that this emphasis on sexual difference can in turn limit our understanding of women’s moral development (Tronto 1993, 15, 61–63, 90–91). I propose that Rousseau is not simply elevating an “ethics of care” over and above virtue ethics but rather has a way of educating individuals to incorporate the respective types of judgment in each system to produce good moral judgment across general and particular concerns.

We should still be wary here; we do not want to make the same mistake with Julie that we can make with Emile in following it as a guide. We must still consider whether Rousseau recommends adopting anything like Julie’s education to his readers at all and whether our social, political, and historical context is an appropriate setting for adopting any of the educational proposals in Julie, if it passes the first test. These concerns about us taking Julie and St. Preux as a model for our own liberal education are entirely reasonable. Yet I contend that Julie still offers us a helpful model of education; Rousseau permits us to imitate his students in Julie and we perhaps have an even better context to do so than the one for which he was writing.

One might object that Julie is not intended as a guide since the charge of failure leveled at Emile and Sophie’s education seems to be applicable to Julie’s education as well (Shklar 1985, 22–23). Julie does not seem to develop perfect virtue through her education if she is “fallen” after consummating her relationship with St. Preux (twice) in her youth and if she struggles to live happily as Madame de Wolmar until her pseudo-suicide at the end of the novel (Bloom 1993, 160; Rousseau 1997, 78–79, 120–22, 577–78, 608–10). She is never cured of her love and cannot fully be happy as the benevolent mistress of Clarens because of it, but her education is not meant to make her insensitive to her sentiments. Rather it is meant to elevate and foster a love of virtue so that the sentiments can still work in favor of virtuous actions, even if they have to overcome other sentiments. Julie has successfully maintained her virtue throughout her adult life as Madame de Wolmar, even after her husband invites her former lover to join their household. Unlike Emile and Sophie, whose extreme circumstances reveal the weaknesses and ultimate failings of their educations, Julie’s extreme circumstances reveal the success of her education even while showing the limits of her strength to continue living happily and virtuously. As individuals reading the letters of these extraordinary friends, we can easily follow St. Preux’s education through examples and apply Julie’s method of judging books to determine how far we can apply these examples to our own lives (Rousseau 1997, 46–47, 214). ¹⁴ We are not likely to find ourselves in the same strange circumstances as these characters, but cultivating their taste and judgment would allow us to recognize similar predicaments of balancing virtue and happiness in our own lives.

For citizens of liberal democracies, Julie also presents us with a unique learning opportunity. While Rousseau says novels are meant for corrupt societies (monarchies) and ought to be kept out of virtuous ones (republics), he also laments that reading novels will do little or nothing for the corrupt reader (1997, 3, 13–14). Lest we think our democratic context excuses us from Rousseau’s lessons, it is enough to pause and consider whether we would characterize our own republic as virtuous. This is not likely, regardless of our partisan leanings. Julie herself lives in a republic, and as Madame de Wolmar, she helps run Clarens by combining self-sufficiency with an internal network of care (1997, 448). The estate produces all that it needs, but its needs are also minimized to make this possible (1997, 444–52). ¹⁵ Insofar as the estate might model a healthy republic as some scholars suggest (Wehrs 1988, 79–80), albeit on a smaller scale, we see there the proper combination of masculine and feminine concerns in its structure and in its inhabitants. Its masculine side—the general rules that govern Clarens and its relative isolation from the tumultuous world outside—does not preclude its feminine side, the concern for individuals’ particular needs, mutual care within the community, and ready charity to any visitors from the outside world (Rousseau 1997, 432–55). For those of us in the liberal democracies founded on Locke’s enlightenment principles, our politics favor general reason along with masculine concerns of power and self-sufficiency. Rousseau is not advocating for a republic that eschews these concerns, but he is wary about these being the dominant political and cultural concerns.

In Emile, his idealized family unit seems to be the “haven” Lasch describes as offering a refuge from the amour propre, competition, and unhealthy interdependence of the “heartless” masculine political world (Lasch 1977, xix). In Julie, however, Clarens is not simply a refuge from outside but a well-ordered, well-ruled community unto itself. To make such a community possible, even if only on a small scale, requires an education in both masculine and feminine judgment in each of its members—or at least its ruling members. Rousseau’s suggestion is that those who have not experienced this third birth to complete their judgment and obtain the capacity for virtue are to adhere to the gendered knowledge and concerns they acquire at their “second birth.” ¹⁶ These latter types are incapable of self-governance or of healthy interdependence without the influence of those who have experienced the third birth. Even if Rousseau believes this education is suited only for a few elevated souls, we might not share his elitism. In our pursuit of a healthy democratic republic, we would be wise to consider the education toward the third birth for creating virtuous citizens for our communities, capable of self-rule.