Rousseau on refined Epicureanism and the problem of modern liberty

Rousseau and 18th-century Epicureanism

To do good for the sake of good is to do it for one’s own sake, out of self-interest. (Rousseau, 1997b: 264)

We can fill in the above outline by turning to Rousseau's immediate French context and considering both his explicit engagement with Epicureanism and his reception as an Epicurean. Rousseau was read as an Epicurean thinker as a result of his denial of natural sociability in the second Discourse. One of his earliest and most influential critics, Jean de Castillon (1756: vi–vii, xxx), identified Rousseau's insistence that ‘men formerly lived dispersed’ before forming family and social units to be a revival of the Epicurean denial of natural sociability, and corresponding historical account of moral foundations. The Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel similarly complained that without an active principle of sociability, Rousseau's early humans would be driven solely by a self-interest that could never develop into the properly moral ‘concern for others’ on which social life depended. To Castel, Rousseau had made justice an artificial agreement, and reduced virtue in general to merely the means to the end of personal happiness (Castel, 1756: 119–120).

Rousseau famously rejected the very framework of the 18th-century debate between partisans of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ sociability. The dispute, stimulated by Thomas Hobbes’ rejection of Aristotle's zoon politikon and his adoption of an Epicurean account of ‘thin’ sociability, was reinvigorated by Samuel Pufendorf's conceptual innovation of utilitarian or ‘commercial sociability’ (Hont, 2005: 142). Rousseau intervened with notorious scepticism: with Hobbes, he insisted that sociability was not natural but an artefact of history; against Hobbes, he historicized reason and the passions; and against Pufendorf's imbecillitas, he insisted that the first humans were self-sufficient (Rousseau, 1997a: 135–136). In extending his vision back to the physical harmony of the human and its habitat, Rousseau was taken to have radicalized Hobbes’ denial of natural sociability with an even more uncompromising Epicureanism (Castel, 1756: 117).

This radicalization allowed him both to mark his divergence from Hobbes on the question of sociability, and to bridge the gap with Stoicism regarding the relationship of virtue to pleasure and happiness. For 18th-century writers, the names of the Hellenistic sects functioned as ideal types, extreme poles of a spectrum of diverse opinions; the most frequently cited source for their content was Cicero's de Finibus, the whole point of which was the dialectical interplay between the two doctrines (Hont, 2015: 14; Holley, 2016). Precisely because they were ideal types, Rousseau could rather intriguingly describe the psychological state of Savage peoples in the second Discourse as a synthesis of Stoic apatheia and Epicurean ataraxia (Rousseau, 1997a: 187; Claussen, 2014: 16–20). Or, as he put it in a late fragment discussed further below, ‘every consistent Epicurean is necessarily a Stoic’ (Rousseau, 2010: 682). Indeed, Rousseau's engagement with the doctrine shows that he recognized the internal complexity of the Epicurean position and, I will argue, had a surprisingly self-conscious and sophisticated set of views on what Epicureanism could and should involve. And although he shared the commonplace negative view of vulgar Epicureanism, he still insisted on differentiating this from a refined Epicureanism that he claimed as his own.

Rousseau was concerned with the Epicurean and Stoic approaches to happiness from early on. In an unpublished ‘Memorandum’ on education of 1740, he discussed two paths to happiness: the first was always to satisfy one's passions and ceaselessly enjoy pleasure and voluptuousness; the second was to eliminate one's passions and neither possess nor desire pleasures. But the conventional choice between them was ultimately a false one, for both positions were unrealistic ‘chimeras’. True happiness consisted in the ‘continuous slight agitation’ of the soul, which could be achieved only through a balance of ‘honour and delicacy’. The only ‘reasonable’ approach in practice was thus to seek temperance through taste: to ‘temper the ardour of our passions by means of the multiplicity of tastes that weaken them by dividing them’ (Rousseau, 2006: 99–103). Twenty years later, he repeated this analysis in Hellenistic terms. Because human action is always motivated by some notion of what is good for oneself, one should:

never confuse, as the Stoics did, happiness with virtue. It is certain that to do good for the sake of good is to do it for one's own sake, out of self-interest, since it gives the soul an internal satisfaction, a contentment with itself without which there is no true happiness … virtue does not bestow happiness, but it alone teaches one to enjoy it when one has it (Rousseau, 1997b: 264).

The subsequent development of this position quickly complicated the reputation for Epicureanism he had earned as a result of the second Discourse. It is important to note that, in mid-century France, ‘Epicurean’ was most often used as an epithet to denote materialism and the denial of providence. Such issues must therefore not be ‘bracketed’ (Hont, 2015: 15) when considering either the content of 18th-century Epicureanism or Rousseau's relationship to it (Holley, 2014). In one sense, Rousseau adopted a fundamentally Epicurean position when he denied particular providence. In Emile, the Savoyard Vicar argues that there is no need to look for providence, because God in creating humanity had provided all they required to do what providence might otherwise supply: he provided reason to know the good, conscience to love it and freedom to pursue it (Rousseau, 2010: 457; cf. Rousseau, 1971). Rousseau's position here is Epicurean, not in the sense of hedonism or egoism, but in the sense of accepting the gods’ lack of interest in human affairs. But if we take it at all seriously, his unequivocal affirmation of the immortal soul and general providence in the Letter to Voltaire made clear that his Epicureanism was also refined in religious matters (Rousseau, 1997a: 246; Rousseau, 1997b: 278).

Rousseau's precise relationship to materialism has long been debated. It remains central to the reading of his ‘esoteric’ atheism and denial of free will (Plattner, 1979). In context, de Castillon (1756: 44, 273–283) accused Rousseau of determinism and a materialist conception of judgment. Castel agreed, adamantly maintaining that the moral failings of the second Discourse derived from Rousseau's having adopted the ‘pure physicality’ of Epicurean materialism (Castel, 1756: 31). Of course, not all materialism is simply Epicureanism; but, like Castel and Castillon, Rousseau emphasized the materialist aspects of the doctrine. He claimed to have rebuffed the attempts by Diderot and the d’Holbach coterie to convert him to their brand of materialism, which was peculiarly ‘modern’ because it was atheistic and exhibited nothing of the ‘ancient’ concern with forming the soul (Rousseau, 1974: 52; Rousseau, 1995: 577). Most egregiously, it was deterministic; as he wrote privately, ‘where everything is necessary, there is no liberty, no freedom, no morality in action, no virtue’ (Rousseau, 1764: 198–199). In short, modern materialism was one aspect of vulgar Epicureanism. Rousseau rejected it as both vulnerable to scepticism in theory and destructive of morality in practice – or, as he put it elsewhere, ‘as fatal to good taste as to virtue’ (Rousseau, 1997b: 290).

Alongside these questions of ontology and theology, considering the materialist aspect of Epicureanism helps to clarify Rousseau's theory of moderation as self-command. Responding to Rousseau's account in the Confessions of what he called ‘the wise man's materialism’, the novelist and theorist of ‘sensitive education’, Mme. de Genlis (1806: 9), accused Rousseau of following ‘the materialists, the atheists, the Epicureans’. Genlis objected to Rousseau's materialist-sensationalist premise that physical stimuli ‘act on our machine and consequently on our soul’ (Rousseau, 1995: 343). But to Rousseau, his materialism was ‘wise’ because its ‘fundamental idea’ was that the physical world could be manipulated and controlled to facilitate virtuous self-command. Sensory inputs were not strictly determinative of actions. Instead, they offered ‘almost guaranteed holds for governing in their origin the sentiments by which we let ourselves be dominated’: by designing and implementing what Rousseau called an ‘external regime’, the ‘animal economy’ could be brought to support ‘the moral order it so often troubles’ (Rousseau, 1995: 343). As one of Rousseau's editors pointed out shortly after Genlis’ criticism, the Epicureanism on display here was rather far from the vulgar materialism of the philosophes (Musset-Pathay, 1818: 569–570). Much later, Etienne Gilson (1932: 294–295) noted that this pedagogical method to cultivate virtue was neither materialism nor ‘simply Epicureanism’. Indeed, it was Rousseau's refinement of both.

As Rousseau's clearest but abandoned attempt to describe the relationship between physical sensations and morality, ‘wise materialism’ points to the importance of Epicureanism for what was then coming to be called aesthetics: ‘the science of what is sensed or imagined’ (Baumgarten, 1750–58). In this way, it elucidates what Rousseau called the ‘language of signs’. As he discussed in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, sensory stimuli affected humans both as mere sensations or physical causes – such as a series of musical notes – and as ‘signs or images’ or ‘moral causes’ – such as the mimetic design of a melody (Rousseau, 1997a: 294). He explained further in Emile that the reduced rhetorical ability of moderns was a result of the muted accents and over-rationalization of especially northern European languages, which might convince others to believe in something like a common good, but not to love or pursue it. The persuasive power of the ancients derived from their speaking the language of signs ‘to the eyes’ rather than the ears, arousing affection and persuading to action by directly stimulating the imagination. It was the imagination that allowed listeners to connect the physical input of a particular sensation to a general idea, and to turn a general idea into a particular sensation with emotional content. This, in turn, would ‘engrave’ both the idea and the associated emotion in the listener's memory to be recalled in the future (Rousseau, 2010: 490–491). And if the combination of reason and sentiment involved in this aesthetic process was grounded in ‘nature’ rather than ‘vanity’, then it might cultivate a capacity for virtuous self-command in essentially Epicurean agents.

It has sometimes been remarked that the Lawgiver of the Social Contract utilizes the language of signs to ‘persuade without convincing’ the nascent people to accept an original constitution (Lifschitz, 2016; Rousseau, 1997b: 71). Indeed, the language of signs is at the heart of Rousseau's depictions of republican festivals, in which song and dance stimulate citizens to imagine themselves as part of the common self of the fatherland, to remember its founding and history and to derive pleasure and happiness from the idea that they are both bearer and subject of a sovereign general will (Rousseau, 2004: 343–352). We will see below that it is also precisely the language of signs that is spoken by the tragic heroine of Rousseau's epistolary novel Julie. Moreover, it is in Julie that Rousseau elaborated his own conception of refined Epicureanism as an art of enjoyment supported by the combination of reason and sentiment involved in taste or aesthetic judgment. But because Rousseau's refined Epicureanism also rests on an economic foundation of an equitable proportion of needs and faculties, the following section first turns to Rousseau's theory of balanced growth, paying particular attention to his engagement with Lucretius in the second Discourse (Gourevitch, 1986: 146, n. 57; Gourevitch, 1988; Gourevitch, 2000: 604–605; Hont, 2015: 102–104, 90–91).

Refined Epicureanism and the problem of modern liberty: Economics

… and with that, his needs are satisfied. (Rousseau, 1997a: 134)

But if Rousseau and Vernet shared a critique of vulgar Epicureanism as a moral and aesthetic problem, their respective analyses of its political causes and consequences differed. Vernet advocated a political-theological solution: vulgar Epicureanism stemmed from weakness of will, which could be combatted by practicing the revised Calvinism of the Genevan state Church (Vernet, 1756; Whatmore, 2012: 47–50, 63). Rousseau agreed that vulgar Epicureans lacked self-command, but his civil religion notoriously ruled out any such solution (Rousseau, 1997b: 149–151). Consistent with his refined materialism, moreover, he always emphasized that the severity of the problem was inseparable from the same material conditions that separated ancient from modern politics. As Helena Rosenblatt (2002) has shown, the Letter to d’Alembert intervened directly in Genevan debates surrounding the demographic and political-economic effects of feminine taste. And indeed, Rousseau's was a remarkably ‘realist’ – or ‘optimist’ (Hont, 2015: 74) – assessment that took him some distance from Vernet's tendency to moralism.

Rousseau's analysis of political economy and aesthetics in Geneva and the Swiss cantons mirrored his formulation of the problem of modern liberty. As he saw it, gradual participation in international trade had led the Swiss to imitate French cultural practices, and women such as the patrician demoiselles of Geneva's upper town began to adopt modes of urban sociability inimical to the sumptuary laws that supported their republican constitution. As a result, the Swiss in general began to seek the vain pleasures of luxury while losing the natural taste for rural isolation. Agricultural cultivation therefore flagged, and depopulation resulted from the lack of an increase in production proportionate to the increase in consumption (Rousseau, 1763). His critique of vulgar Epicureanism and the demoiselles of taste went hand in hand: the immoderate pursuit of the pleasures of vanity, luxury and intemperate sensuality combined in a vicious circle with economic imbalance between town and country, and demographic crisis. This analysis is repeated across Rousseau's major theoretical works, including the second Discourse and Julie.

Rousseau first introduced the opposition between vulgar and refined Epicureanism in order to elucidate the political-economic distinction that frames Julie: that between the urban ‘man of the world’ and the ‘country-dweller’. People of the world are ‘vulgar Epicureans’ who lack self-command and mistakenly pursue sensual pleasure. As such, enjoyment of true, natural pleasure remains beyond their continuous grasp. Modern novels provide ideological justification for their licentiousness by celebrating ‘the refinement of city taste … the paraphernalia of luxury, Epicurean morality’. Upon encountering such representations, country-dwellers develop an ‘aversion [for] their station’ and ‘leave the village [for] the capital’, depopulating the countryside (Rousseau, 1997c: 13–14). The salutary morality that Julie inculcates at Clarens is based on the Epicureanism of reason, a ‘temperate sensuality’ that demonstrates her refined appreciation of Epicurus’ system (Rousseau, 1997c: 444, 544, 451, 450). Rousseau's response to his diagnosis of the vicious circle of vulgar Epicureanism at the heart of modern commercial culture, then, was to provide an alternative representation that might generate a virtuous circle of refined Epicureanism. Clarifying at least one of his intentions in writing it, he addressed Julie to women in the countryside so that they might exercise their moral authority in the household and ‘restore their taste for true pleasures’. The protreptic purpose of his notion of refined Epicureanism was evident: imitation of his heroine's refined Epicureanism would attach country-dwellers to their station, addressing economic imbalance and counteracting the scourge of depopulation by inspiring in them what Rousseau termed the ‘taste for virtue’ (Rousseau, 1997c: 15–19).

This concern with depopulation and the tension between town and country is familiar from the second Discourse. There, Rousseau articulated his view of the economic dimension of the problem of modern liberty by refining two aspects of the fifth book of Lucretius’ Epicurean poem De rerum natura. The first concerns Rousseau's account of the state of nature in the first part of the Discourse, in which he describes a being whose physical forces are equitably proportioned to the natural obstacles to its self-preservation. Rousseau referred to this proportion as the ‘pure’ or ‘genuine’ state of nature, and he distinguished it sharply from what he called ‘the genuine youth of the world’ (Rousseau, 1997a: 167). The latter phrase is a direct allusion to the Latin novitas mundi, which appears in Lucretius’ account of the earliest humans (Lucretius, 1992: 451–453). De Castillon (1756: 258) was the first to register widespread recognition of this Lucretian inspiration for Rousseau's famous image of the natural physical harmony of creature and habitat in the pure state of nature: ‘an animal … satisfying his hunger beneath an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that had furnished his meal, and with that his needs are satisfied’ (Rousseau, 1997a: 134).

This is Rousseau's ‘natural goodness’, the balance of (merely) physical needs and faculties in humanity's ‘original constitution’. Rousseau's ‘youth of the world’, however, describes the moral needs of ‘nascent society’ of family units, social esteem and limited property that follows in his conjectural history. He labels his youth of the world ‘genuine’, then, precisely to mark this fundamental contrast with Lucretius: psychologically, it is the ‘golden mean’ between the ‘indolence’ of the pure state of nature and ‘petulant’ amour-propre, a balance of not simply physical but also moral or imaginative needs and faculties. It describes a Hobbesian state of nature, lacking common political laws, whereas the pure state of nature is that of humanity ‘abandoned to ourselves’ without any moral relations whatsoever. As the state reached by ‘most of the savage peoples known to us’, the genuine youth of the world is a fact ‘given as real’, a balance or equitable proportion of nature and artifice; the genuine state of nature is a ‘conjecture’ from which all artifice is radically bracketed (Rousseau, 1997a: 159, 132, 301). Recognizing this refinement of Lucretius thus helps to clarify that both Rousseau's pure state of nature and the radical nature/culture binary it underpins are indeed hypothetical rather than in some sense factual or properly historical (contra Strauss, 1953: 267).

The economic dimension of the problem of modern liberty is further clarified by Rousseau's refinement of Lucretius’ account of the origin of the division of labour. He agreed with Lucretius that human awareness of both agriculture and metallurgy arose from the imitation of natural processes. But he rejected as implausible the poet's view that this knowledge could have been immediately connected to productive processes. For Rousseau, while early humans indeed possessed a basic mimetic capacity, they would have lacked the foresight required to extrapolate the use of iron to forge tools. Crucially, this meant that there was a fundamental barrier to a theoretical account of the development of agricultural production as an organizing principle of society. ‘Large-scale cultivation’, Rousseau insisted, would have required the implements that only metallurgy could have provided (Lucretius, 1992: 475–477, 485; Rousseau, 1997a: 167–169).

With this refinement of his classical model, Rousseau complicated the sequencing that would later become conventional in the four-stages theory of economic development. Just as large-scale agriculture required metallurgy, so metallurgy required sufficient demand for its implements, which itself only arose ‘the moment that one man needed the help of another’ and ‘it became useful for one to have provisions for two’ (Rousseau, 1997a: 167). While De rerum natura was likely an important source in the development of the four-stages theory (Wilson, 2016: 273), we should note that Lucretius placed less emphasis on both chronology and the dependence of social structures on the mode of subsistence (Meek, 1976: 9–10). As regards the former, Rousseau's sequencing was in the first instance logical rather than strictly historical; it was in this methodological sense rather more like that of Lucretius or Plato than Smith or Turgot (cf. Hont, 2005: 354–388; Hont, 2015: 74–76). The point of this part of his history was that civilization was a function of the complicated interaction between the underlying logics of agriculture and industry; specifying which came first was not Rousseau's primary concern, because it was a chicken-and-egg scenario much like the relationship between language and society (Hont, 2010: 17). Thus, rather than proceeding in distinct stages from agriculture to industry, Rousseau insisted on their logical interdependence, arguing that agricultural society required metallurgy and exchange. A solution to the problem of modern liberty thus could not avoid ‘commercial’ society (cf. Sagar, 2018), for modern agriculture was impossible without cities, markets and some luxury, and a radical imbalance between them was as dangerous as intentional attempts to redress it were likely to be.

It was dangerous because, in addition to being necessary, economic exchange between town and country was, for Rousseau, by definition unequal. As he went on to explain, agricultural production is ‘less lucrative’ because its products – subsistence goods – satisfy physical needs that are limited by humanity's natural consumption capacity. And because agricultural foodstuffs are ‘indispensable’ to all, they can be priced no higher than ‘the capacities of the poorest’ to pay for them. Conversely, industrial production is more lucrative because its products – luxury goods – satisfy moral or psychological desires that are both largely ‘useless’ and can be priced according to the whims of humanity's unlimited imaginative capacity (Rousseau, 1997a: 202; Rousseau, 2006: 333–334). Because Rousseau held more strongly than Lucretius that psychological dispositions and social structures were related ‘in principle to the ways in which men provide for their subsistence’, he also held that the necessarily unequal socio-economic structure of modern life produces the two different kinds of people we saw in Julie. And it is precisely this division of the population into ‘the farmer and the citizen’ that generates a fundamental economic limit and tension for modern politics (Rousseau, 1997a: 272). The great danger was that the tension would resolve itself upon the establishment of a military dictatorship, when a disastrous taxation regime would cause hordes of dispossessed farmers to move to the city and take employment in the standing army (Hont, 2010: 16–17; Rousseau, 1997a: 182–186). As noted above, Rousseau's portrayal of Julie's refined Epicureanism was part of his attempt to forestall the depopulation of the countryside. Thus understood, it was equally an attempt to prevent the cycle of despotism and radical egalitarianism he famously predicted at the close of the second Discourse.

Considering these refinements of Lucretius thus elucidates Rousseau's assessment of the problem of modern liberty. The first, concerning the youth of the world, clarifies that his conception of ‘nature’ is opposed not to culture per se but to vain or corrupt culture. This allows us to see the aim of his constructive political theory as being the establishment of ‘something like a natural culture’ (Sonenscher, 2008: 148): an artificial approximation of the natural balance of needs and faculties. The second refinement, concerning the division of labour, helps to clarify that such a correction had to take account of the underlying logic of commerce rather than indulging in pure-agrarian back to the land fantasies. Striking a balance between town and country, or agriculture and industry, meant establishing an equitable proportion between not simply physical but also moral or imaginative needs and faculties. And because it was grounded in sense and imagination, the problem of modern liberty was both economic and aesthetic. The following section thus examines Rousseau's treatment of refined Epicureanism and taste to clarify this aesthetic dimension.

Refined Epicureanism and the problem of modern liberty: Aesthetics

Taste is in a way the microscope of judgment. (Rousseau, 1997c: 48)

As noted, Rousseau's refined Epicureans preferred the goods of ‘nature’. In Emile, he defined nature as an individual's disposition to pursue pleasure on the basis of: first, physical sensation; then, the perception of a ‘relation’ between the self and objects of pleasure; and, ultimately, judgments regulated by ‘the idea of happiness or perfection given us by reason’. This progression from sensation to reason mirrors that in the second Discourse: physical nature is always and necessarily adulterated by opinion, such that it can be only ‘more or less corrupted’ (Rousseau, 2006: 163). And just as Rousseau followed the premise of Epicurean hedonism, so did he ground his regulative idea of happiness on a basic Epicurean foundation: the ‘continual flux’ between pleasure and pain meant that the height of human happiness is a ‘negative condition’ consisting in the least amount of pain. Attaining it meant redressing the necessary ‘disproportion between our desires and faculties’, also familiar from the second Discourse: ‘the road of true happiness … consists in diminishing the excess of the desires over the faculties and putting the power and will in perfect equality’. This ‘absolute happiness’ is humanity's ‘natural condition’ and, like the natural goodness of the pure state of nature, it is ‘impossible’ to regain. For just as in the second Discourse, so here in Emile the physical harmony of needs and faculties is upset by the imagination, a ‘superfluous’ faculty tending endlessly to increase desires. The imagination could not, of course, be eliminated; in this sense, superfluity was natural and necessary for happiness. Achieving happiness thus required tempering the imagination in order to approximate the natural equality of need and ability in an unequal but equitable proportion (Rousseau, 2006: 210–214).

Alongside the economic decline discussed above, the second Discourse also charts a perhaps more familiar story of modernity as the gradual separation of humankind from natural sentiments, such as pity, through increasing rationalization. And as in the case of economic imbalance, so did Rousseau look to women to solve this psychic imbalance of reason and sentiment. It is a crucial but frequently overlooked feature of the second Discourse that Rousseau appealed to Genevan women to temper the imagination and correct the taste of both male household-heads and their children. Famously, he suggested that comparative self-love (amour-propre) was erotically grounded in sexual attraction, and described how, with increasing social interaction, physical desire generated ideas of ‘merit and beauty’. These first aesthetic judgments led to song and dance competitions, a social hierarchy of winners and losers and, as a result, the growth of moral sentiments of resentment and revenge, on the one hand, and a desire for recognition and love, on the other (Rousseau, 1997a: 166, 277–278). In the Epistle Dedicatory, Rousseau called on women to defend their city against ‘vain luxury’ by using their ‘simple and modest attire’ to create the conditions most favourable to ‘beauty’. Their ‘persuasive’ sweetness would disabuse especially young men of their corrupt taste for French culture; instead of the ‘easy pleasures’ of a puerile and ‘fatal taste’, they would reinstate the taste for ‘useful things’ and ‘august freedom’. And while their ‘amiable and innocent dominion’ was restricted to ‘conjugal union’ in the household, it served the political imperative of maintaining the ‘love of laws in the state and concord among the citizens’. That is, by speaking the language of signs in the household, Geneva's ‘citizen-women’ would cultivate the habits of good taste necessary to prepare male citizens for making the kind of sound political judgments involved in articulating the general will (Rousseau, 1997a: 122).

Like many of his contemporaries, Rousseau was intrigued by the distinctive combination of reason and sentiment involved in judgments of taste. For him, both ‘the good’ and ‘the beautiful’ were rooted in nature. Their common source allowed taste and wisdom to be ‘perfected by the same means’ of judgment. Something of his understanding of this relationship is captured by the memorable metaphor that provides the epigraph to this section. In his Dictionary of Music, he described taste as providing ‘spectacles to reason’. He repeated the thought in a passage in Julie that, despite its helpfully clarifying the relation between reason and sentiment in Rousseau, is almost never discussed:

How many things are there which one perceives only through sentiment and which one cannot account for? How many of those je-ne-sais-quoi that so frequently recur and about which taste alone decides? Taste is in a way the microscope of judgment; it is taste which brings small objects within our reach, and its operations begin where those of the latter end. What then is required to cultivate taste? To practice seeing as well as feeling, and to judge the beautiful by inspection as well as the good by sentiment.

This education cultivates Julie's natural taste and prepares her to adopt refined Epicureanism as a ‘philosophy’. As mentioned, the rational core of refined Epicureanism is the distinction between the true pleasures of nature and the pleasures of ‘fashion’ or ‘vanity’ pursued by vulgar Epicureans. Rousseau explained that judgments of taste concern ‘the agreeable’: amusements and pleasures that are ‘not connected with our needs’ (Rousseau, 2006: 512–513). Natural beauty provides a criterion of aesthetic judgment, but it is always only more or less corrupted by culture and fashion, the ‘arbitrary conventions’ and ‘prejudices of custom or education’ (Rousseau, 1779: 428–429). This distinction between true and fashion-based taste grounds a subsequent redefinition of superfluity and luxury. We saw that Rousseau considered superfluity to be natural insofar as the imagination is a superfluous faculty that cannot be eliminated. Julie's refined Epicureanism, he explains, allows her uniquely to indulge in superfluous imaginary pleasures: ‘she counts nothing as superfluous that can contribute to the well-being of a reasonable person; but she calls superfluous everything that serves merely to shine in others’ eyes’. By redefining superfluity in this way, refined Epicureanism allows the natural ‘luxury of pleasure and sensuality’ to replace the corrupt ‘luxury of magnificence and vanity’ (Rousseau, 1997c: 435).

Establishing a culture of good taste required an economics of balanced growth and moderate inequality. In an important but underappreciated section of Emile, Rousseau wrote an ‘essay on true taste in the choice of agreeable leisure’ in which he explained that inequality and luxury disfigure natural beauty and lead agents to pursue the pleasures of fashion and vanity. ‘This’, he wrote, ‘is how luxury and bad taste become inseparable. Wherever taste is expensive, it is false’. Among many cultural variables, Rousseau identified three fundamental material preconditions to good taste: a large population to facilitate the many comparisons required to cultivate habits of aesthetic judgment; a society dedicated to amusement rather than business, and ruled by pleasure rather than interest; and moderate inequality to limit the ‘tyranny of opinion’ such that ‘voluptuousness’ can rule over ‘vanity’. In the absence of these conditions, taste is corrupted and stifled by fashion, and agents seek social distinction rather than true, natural pleasure (Rousseau, 2006: 512–513). The primary concern of Julie and her husband Wolmar in establishing their household is thus to apportion ‘the state of their holdings’ not to their ‘rank’ but to their needs. Refined Epicureanism allows them to distinguish their ‘real needs’ from conventional opinions concerning ‘wealth’ and ‘fortune’ and, in turn, establish an equitable proportion between their desires and faculties (Rousseau, 1997c: 433–434).

These material and economic conditions are conducive to the cultivation of refined Epicureanism. The sentimental core of refined Epicureanism that Rousseau called ‘temperate sensuality’ was both a theory and practice of deferred gratification. Julie is a voluptuary, ‘made to know and taste all pleasures’. But her sensuality is that of a refined Epicurean: because she tastes virtue as the ‘supreme’ sensual pleasure, she can indulge all other pleasures whilst still savouring them in a manner resembling the ‘austerity’ of the Stoic who would ‘abstain’ from them. Superfluous sensual pleasure ‘changes in nature’ once the sensation becomes habitual; it ‘ceases to be a pleasure when it becomes a need’. Julie avoids dependence on these luxuries not through asceticism but through ‘passing and moderate privations’. That is, by deferring sensual gratification, she ‘gives value’ to those ‘slight’ pleasures with which judgments of taste are concerned. Her enjoyment of sensual pleasure thus becomes precisely the means through which she achieves self-command, enjoying the pleasure of remaining ‘mistress of herself’ (Rousseau, 1997c: 544, 443, 451).

This account of self-command is Epicurean because it presents virtue as the means to the end of greater pleasure. Julie's ‘moderate privations’ are themselves simply a ‘new means of pleasure’. Giving up the daily habit of taking coffee, for instance, serves to ‘heighten her taste for it’: disciplining her craving makes it more acute and increases the sensual gratification of finally taking coffee as a ‘token of festivity’. While Julie is temperate for ‘the same reasons that carry voluptuaries to excess’, her hedonism is nevertheless ‘praiseworthy and honest’. The unpublished fragment on Epicureanism quoted above might well have been an early draft of Julie's summary of her hedonism:

I can see that those vulgar Epicureans for never wanting to miss an opportunity miss them all, and always bored in the lap of pleasures never know how to experience a single one. They squander the time they think they are saving up, and ruin themselves like misers because they do not know how to lose anything peacefully. I do very well by the opposite maxim, and I believe that I would yet prefer on this point too much severity to too much leniency. Sometimes I break off an outing for the sole reason that I enjoy it too much; by resuming it later, I enjoy it twice. However, I work at maintaining the control of my will over myself, and I would rather be accused of capriciousness than allow myself to be governed by my fancies. (Rousseau, 1997c: 451–452, 443–444)

Part of Rousseau's solution to the aesthetic dimension of the problem of modern liberty was to maintain a strict separation of private and public, morality and politics. Like the women of Geneva, Julie exercises moral authority with a ‘persuasive sweetness’ by speaking the language of signs. Her refined Epicureanism is concerned with ‘physical things’ like clothing, food and furniture. For Rousseau, the appropriate domain of women's taste is ‘the judgment of the senses’, whereas one should ‘consult the taste of men in moral things that depend more on the understanding’. But as the microscope of judgment, taste is the means by which ‘the mind is imperceptibly opened to ideas of the beautiful of every sort, and finally to the moral notions related to them’ (Rousseau, 2006: 513, 522). Julie's taste in furniture, for example, generates moral or intellectual pleasure because through it, like her modest clothing, she speaks the language of signs ‘to the heart through the eyes’ (Rousseau, 1997c: 446). This is because the evident symmetry, regularity and proportion in her organization of physical space is both known and felt to be imitative of the beauty and goodness of well-ordered nature.

Sensory experience of this natural physical space has the moral effect of enabling the inhabitants of Clarens both to see and to feel the coincidence of the public good with their private good in their imagination – that is, it cultivates their taste for virtue (Rousseau, 1997c: 384, 455, 386). Like the citizen-women of Geneva, Julie speaks the language of signs and inspires a patriotic ‘love of the fatherland and that of liberty’ amongst the peasantry. Indeed, her ‘great maxim’ is to make each person happy in their own condition, and ‘above all to make sure that the happiest of all, which is that of a villager in a free state, is not depopulated in favour of the others’. We should reject the heteronormative and heterosexist assumptions that ground Rousseau's gendered division of labour. But doing so entails acknowledging that patriarchal exclusion of women from formal citizenship is foundational to his theory of the general will (Botting, forthcoming). As the examples of Julie and the citizen-women of Geneva illustrate, Rousseau's theory of erotically reinforced patriotism responds to both the aesthetic and economic dimensions of the problem of modern liberty. Because judgments of taste and beauty are formed in the household, ‘the intervention of women’ was required to affect public opinion (Rousseau, 2004: 303). Thus, the harmony of justice and utility that Rousseau identified as the goal of the state was possible only if refined Epicureanism combined utility and pleasure in the household.

Conclusion

Ancient peoples no longer provide a model for modern ones. (Rousseau, 2001: 292)

Hont (2005: 5) once wrote that ‘the history of political thought is at its most helpful when it unmasks impasses and eliminates repetitive patterns of controversy’. I want to suggest that this investigation of Rousseau's refined Epicureanism can help to resolve the controversy surrounding the consistency of his moral and political thought. As noted in the Introduction, today that controversy typically takes the form of an opposition between what has been called the ‘social autonomy interpretation’ and what I will term the ‘incompatibility thesis’. The latter holds that Rousseau's ideals of domestic and political flourishing are both practically unrealizable and, more importantly, theoretically inconsistent – household happiness at Clarens cultivates natural ‘self-expression’ while the politics of the Social Contract require austere ‘self-repression’ (Shklar, 1969: 5–6, 17, 43). The social autonomy interpretation conversely holds that any conflict in Rousseau between man and citizen is merely practical; that he developed a transcendent ideal of ‘rational agency’ demonstrating the theoretical compatibility of personal autonomy and the civic demand to accept the judgments of others as authoritative (Neuhouser, 2008: 258–259; cf. Hasan, 2018). I have argued that the genuine youth of the world in the second Discourse, personal happiness in Emile and, above all, domestic happiness in Julie can each be seen as instantiations of refined Epicureanism. By way of conclusion, then, I want to elaborate on the place of this ideal of virtue as hedonistic self-command in Rousseau's state theory.

There is a familiar sense in which the Social Contract is seen as articulating a sort of political Epicureanism. Most often, this reading takes the form of noting its significant affinities with Hobbes’ state theory (Douglass, 2015; Strauss, 1953; Tuck, 2016). On this view, Rousseau agreed with Epicurus, and indeed Hobbes, that justice is grounded in a conventional agreement among self-interested agents; and the legal standard of justice, the general will, flows from each agent's consideration of their own self-interest in casting their votes (Schwartzberg, 2008). The argument advanced here lends support to this sort of conventionalist, proceduralist reading (Brooke, 2007; cf. Williams, 2005). But it also supplements that reading by elucidating precisely the combination of political-economic and aesthetic dimensions of modern liberty captured by Rousseau's concept of refined Epicureanism.

The political economy of Rousseau's state theory is much better appreciated than is its aesthetic dimension. While his early Swiss and German readers show that this was not always the case (Sonenscher, 2015), it is perhaps understandable. Rousseau was clear that citizens come to know, rationally, what their self-interest truly consists of by observing the relatively equitable re-distribution of the taxable surplus, which forms the political-economic ‘basis of the entire social system’ (Rousseau, 1997b: 56, 100–104). But he was somewhat less explicit about how they might come to feel, sentimentally, the real coincidence of their self-interest and the interest of the common self of the state. The most obvious means of clarifying the issue is to take seriously the Social Contract’s institutional framework: the Lawgiver, the civil religion or, most productively, the Censorship. In the second Discourse, Rousseau claimed that ‘only morals as pure as the ancient Romans can tolerate censors’ (Rousseau, 1997a: 222). But in the Social Contract, an updated censorship provides the primary solution to the aesthetic dimension of the problem of modern liberty by regulating judgments of taste and beauty:

It is useless to draw a distinction between a nation's morals and the objects of its esteem; for all this follows from the same principle and necessarily converges. Among all peoples of the world, not nature but opinion determines the choice of their pleasures. Reform men's opinions and their morals will purify themselves. One always loves what is beautiful or what one finds to be so, but it is this judgment that may be mistaken. Therefore, the problem is to regulate this judgment. (Rousseau, 1997b: 141, translation altered)

There is a less obvious and perhaps more interesting way in which Rousseau gestured towards the political importance of taste. In the Dictionary entry on the subject, he drew an analogy between judgments of taste and the kinds of political judgments involved in articulating the general will. Each individual, he explained, had a ‘particular taste’ distinct from what he called the ‘general taste’. As an intersubjective agreement among the ‘instructed’ members of any given society, the general taste is historically and geographically varied; but its content is not simply arbitrary or contextually determined. In contrast to particular tastes about which no dispute can be settled, the general taste is subject to discussion and debate precisely because ‘there is only one that is true’. But because natural beauty is corrupted by fashion, unanimity of opinion concerning true taste is all but impossible. As such, determining the content of the general taste in any given context requires a conventional procedure – there is, Rousseau wrote, ‘scarcely any means of ending the dispute than that of counting the votes’ (Rousseau, 1779: 428–429). Or, as he expressed the same point in Emile, because fashion and vanity change the object of taste, it is necessary to ‘see to it that each man has his own sentiments’, so that ‘that which is most agreeable in itself will always have the plurality of votes’ (Rousseau, 2006: 512–513).

Readers of the Social Contract recognize this language. The distinction between the particular and general taste is analogous to that between the particular and the general will. In a well-ordered republic, each individual can conceive that their actions stem from either the particular will they possess in their capacity as a private individual, or the general will they possess in their capacity as a citizen. Like the general taste, the general will is historically and geographically varied, but its content is not merely arbitrary: it must, for instance, protect certain interests, such as freedom, self-preservation and property (Sreenivasan, 2000). In contrast to particular wills about which no dispute can be settled, the general will is subject to public deliberation precisely because it ‘is always upright’. But because particular wills tend towards partiality, unanimity of opinion regarding the general will is all but impossible. As such, determining its content requires a conventional procedure – for a will to be general, Rousseau notes, ‘it is necessary that all the votes be counted’. And just as fashion corrupts the general taste, so faction corrupts the general will. Thus, for the general will to be ‘expressed well’, it is necessary to forbid private communication so that ‘each citizen gives only his own opinion’ (Rousseau, 1997b: 52, 59, 58).

Considering the analogy alongside the microscope metaphor noted above helps to clarify further the fundamental importance of taste in Rousseau's political theory. The analogy holds because the process of determining the content of both taste and the general will is rooted in the natural human ability to compare – the capacity for judgment, or the ability to recognize a ‘relation’ between the inner and outer world, and to compare the self with others (Rousseau, 2010: 430). But the analogy eventually fails, for taste is not political judgment per se but ‘the microscope of judgment’. This difference elucidates the suggestive comments made above about Rousseau's appeal to women in the Epistle Dedicatory of the second Discourse. In a well-ordered republic, ‘citizen-women’ must cultivate the habits of good taste or aesthetic judgment that prepare male citizens to make sound political judgments in determining the content of the general will (Rousseau, 1997a: 121). If taste is the microscope of judgment, then each citizen receives his microscope in the laboratory of the household. Seen in this light, Rousseau's theory of the general will cannot be properly understood without understanding its relationship to taste; and Rousseau's theory of taste cannot be properly understood other than as refined Epicureanism.

In this way, the Social Contract instantiates Rousseau's ideal of refined Epicureanism. Its theoretical consistency with the account of domestic flourishing at Clarens thus pushes back against the incompatibility thesis. But its content, in turn, pushes back against the social autonomy interpretation. Rather than overcoming the opposition between man and citizen via a transcendent ideal of rational agency, Rousseau's moral and political thought are unified by the more realistic ideal of temperate sensuality. While self-command is typically associated with Stoicism, it could just as well be an Epicurean virtue (Hont, 2015: 37): instead of a heroic virtue of reason dominating the passions, for Rousseau it concerned regulating individual judgments of pleasure by an intersubjective standard of good taste. To be sure, moderation as self-command remained for Rousseau a question of ‘strength’ of will and a ‘struggle’ to remain constant amid the torrent of passion. And because, as noted in the Introduction, self-command secured freedom, moderation or temperance solved the problem of modern liberty (Rousseau, 2010: 390). But if modern agents operated with the refined Epicurean distinction between the pleasures of nature and those of vanity, then their temperance could be sensual. And in that case, ‘in order to eschew splendour and luxury’, they would require ‘not so much moderation as taste’ (Rousseau, 1997c: 447). From this perspective, refined Epicureanism is thus not simply the taste for virtue but, indeed, the taste for modern liberty.

Rousseau's solution to the problem of modern liberty was to ground a politics of the general will in an economics of balanced growth and a culture of good taste. The former allowed citizens of modern states to know that pursuit of the public good did indeed coincide with the private good because it responded to the modern division of labour, which linked individual and collective survival and threatened to produce large disparities of wealth and depopulation. The latter responded to modern citizens’ need to feel that coincidence, so that they might then be able to act on its basis. Only then could laws and morals be compatible, because only then could they work together to cultivate moderation, or the taste for virtue. Rousseau's state was thus at once uncompromisingly modern in its economics – a legal fiction with fundamental fiscal responsibilities – and nostalgically ancient in its aesthetics – the Lawgiver's language of signs, the Censorship's publicly-articulated standard of beauty. This combination explains his insistence that ‘ancient peoples no longer provide a model for modern ones’ (Rousseau, 2001: 29, 292). Its tenuousness perhaps helps to explain both the varying trajectories of his legacy in the subsequent history of modern political thought, and the stubborn fascination with his so-called inconsistency that persists down to this day. Yet I hope to have shown that reconstructing Rousseau's notion of refined Epicureanism explains why he deemed the combination necessary to solve the problem of modern liberty. This, in turn, demonstrates why Hont was right to note both this aspect of Rousseau's thought, and that Rousseau ought properly to be considered a theorist of commercial society, and thus of the modern state – and why we can still expect to learn from him today.