Abstract

Political theorists have long been preoccupied with questions concerning community, inquiring as to what draws people together and what divides them. In my dissertation, I attempt to identify a source of social hostility that has escaped the attention of most scholars. Through a novel interpretation of Rousseau's theory of amour-propre, as put forth in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, I show that societies committed to a merit system of distributive justice force individuals to compete for social status in such a manner that they win be less likely to identify with one another. Although amour-propre is usually defined as mere vanity, it is actually an ontological theory of how social interaction alters the motivations underlying human behavior. Once engaged in social living, individuals come to learn about themselves through comparisons with their peers. Upon learning about themselves, individuals develop powerful desires to know themselves as good and valuable. This social ontology is particularly problematic in liberal societies. By distributing wealth and honors on the basis of talent, individuals in liberal societies tend to take their social evaluations and social status very seriously. They think the knowledge they receive from their peers reflects their true selves. The public sphere in liberal societies, then, is not merely a place in which individuals contract for goods and vote, but where they answer difficult existential questions, such as "what is my self-worth?" I thus conclude that individuals in liberal societies have difficulty identifying with each other because there is a lot at stake in their social interactions. After working out a variety of issues connected with such problems through Tocqueville, Rawls, and Nietzsche, I suggest that the answer to the problems caused by amour-propre can be resolved by liberal theories which do not attempt to legitimize liberalism on the grounds of distributive justice. Such theories encourage individuals not to take their public identities and social statuses too seriously