Rousseau and the Development of Identity

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231212901
• Author: John T. Scott
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 359–370

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231212901

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Rousseau and the Development of Identity

John T. Scott

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Abstract

Scholars from very different interpretive traditions agree that Rousseau’s conception of human nature and the self

constitutes a pivotal point in the history of philosophy. I focus on one important aspect of his investigation into human

nature and the self: the development of identity. I reconstruct his understanding of the development of identity as

articulated in the Discourse on Inequality and Emile, focusing on the psychological interplay of identity and identif‌ication

involved in the formation of the self. Finally, I turn to a discussion of how his theory of the development of identi ty

informs his specif‌ically political theory, and especially the extralegal institutions and practices he suggests for forming a

strong political identity.

Keywords

Rousseau, Personal Identity

Scholars from very different interpretive traditions agree

that Rousseau’s conception of human nature and the self

constitutes a pivotal point in the history of philosophy.

Leo Strauss sees Rousseau as the central f‌igure in the “f‌irst

crisis of modernity”(1953, 252), radicalizing the view of

human nature advanced by Hobbes, Locke, and others and

arguing that humans were characterized by almost lim-

itless perfectibility and freedom, a being whose nature is

not to have a nature. In turn, in his monumental study of

“The Making of the Modern Identity,”to quote its subtitle,

Charles Taylor makes Rousseau a pivotal f‌igure in “a shift

in self-interpretation”with our search for the authentic self

and states: “Rousseau is actually pushing the subjectivism

of modern moral understanding a stage further. This is

what made him so tremendously inf‌luential…. He is the

starting point of a transformation in modern culture to-

wards a deeper inwardness and a radical autonomy”

(1989, 356–63). Axel Honneth likewise identif‌ies

Rousseau as a pivotal theorist of the formation of the self

through intersubjectivity and mutual recognition and

surveys the “enormous inf‌luence”he had on “modern

philosophical discourse”(2016, 191). Finally, Michael

Sonenscher argues that Rousseau’s concept of “perfect-

ibility”and his rethinking of human nature, “was the

catalyst for the transformation of the various ways of

thinking about sociability into the cluster of claims about

freedom and history, or the subordination of the real to the

ideal, that came to be associated with the idea of his-

toricism”(2015, 684). Even if they agree on little else, this

diverse set of scholars concurs in regarding the impor-

tance of Rousseau’s conception of the self for his own

thought and beyond.

In this article, I focus on one important aspect of

Rousseau’s investigation into human nature and the self:

the development of identity. Since according to Rousseau

human beings do not initially possess self-consciousness,

the formation of a “self”or personal identity is part of a

developmental process. Rousseau’s understanding of this

process is seen most fully in the Discourse on Inequality

and Emile, but since his account of this process is in both

works is imbedded within much broader investigations of

human nature and development, among other subjects, his

theory of the development of identity must be re-

constructed. Indeed, in using the term “identity”Iam

already involved in reconstruction since Rousseau gen-

erally speaks of the “self”(moi/soi) and only rarely uses

the term “identity”(identit´

e) in this manner, although,

importantly for my analysis, he does write of “identif‌i-

cation”and “identifying”with another person in an in-

novative and inf‌luential manner. Without claiming to offer

rigorous def‌initions, I refer to the “self”as the object

University of California, Davis, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

John T. Scott, Political Science, University of California, One Shields

Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

Email: jtscott@ucdavis.edu