Abstract

Hobbes and Rousseau see various moral, social, and political problems caused by amour propre, the desire for a pleasing self-survey. For Hobbes, this desire plays a dominant role in the generation and maintenance of conflict. He attempts to solve this problem by having the sovereign redirect the pursuit of honour and glory and fix the value of each person. The French, however, see a different problem, one afflicting even the Hobbesian solution. They argue that amour propre forces us to "live in others": our dominant desires are for others to represent us as superior. This leads to isolation, unhappiness, and dependency. I trace the history of this problem in Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Abbadie, and Mandeville. Although the official French Moralist view is that amour propre and life in others re natural, they also suggest that both can be explained by their value to an individual. I then show how Rousseau adopts this thought to give an improved explanation of life in others: where property is private and labour is divided, it becomes instrumentally necessary that others represent us as superior; through conditioning, we come to pursue this representation as an end. I conclude by comparing solutions to this problem. Before Rousseau, solutions proceed by reconstituting relations with others as relations with oneself or God. Rousseau has a similar solution, wherein he sees other people as automata lacking opinions, and so must be satisfied with the opinion of God and himself. But in his other solutions, Rousseau permits us to maintain relations with others. Through education and economic reform he ensures that opinion is not a useful means; by an education in patriotism, he ensures that the desire for opinion has good rather than bad consequences. Overall, I stress how the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries saw ethics and politics as responses to particular problems in human nature, rather than to perfectly general problems in rationality.