Creepy Sanctimony

One of the Greats

"One of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time" would be a fair description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or J-JR for short.  But he is also one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Modern period.  We need to understand why both assessments are fair and accurate.

First, the appellation of über-sanctimonious creep.

Paul Johnson, concluding his essay on J-JR, writes:

Rousseau's reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not with to admit.  The acceptability of what Rousseau wrote depended in great part on his strident claim to be not merely virtuous but the most virtuous man of his time.

Why did not this claim collapse in ridicule and ignominy when his weaknesses and vices became not merely public knowledge but the subject of international debate?
  After all the people who assailed him were not strangers or political opponents but former friends and associates who had gone out of their way to assist him.  Their charges were serious and the collective indictment devastating.  Hume, who had once thought him "gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested and exquisitely sensitive", decided, from more extensive experience, that he was "a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe".  Diderot, after long acquaintance, summed him up as "deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice".  To Grimm he was "odious, monstrous".  To Voltaire, "a monster of vanity and vileness".  . . . These judgments were based not on the man's words, but on his deeds, and since that time, over two hundred years, the mass of material unearthed by scholars has tended relentlessly to substantiate them.  One modern academic lists Rousseau's shortcomings as follows: he was a "masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latest homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic, introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable, and miserly." . . . .

The truth seems to be that Rousseau was a writer of genius but fatally unbalanced both in his life and in his views.  He is best summed up by the woman, who, he said, was his only love, Sophie d'Houdetot.  She lived on until 1813 and, in extreme old age, delivered this verdict: "He was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive.  But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness.  He was an interesting madman."   [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), p.26f.)

He had abandoned his children, almost certainly to their deaths, but the great J-JR sought to turn his infamy into a virtue--a "virtue" for which he is still celebrated and adored and lionised to this day.

To sum up, it is widely known and well documented that J-JR was grossly immoral, unethical, deceitful, and manipulative.  He was also an egomaniac.  Why, then, is he held in such reverence and awe, even to this day?  Because he was a man whose life exemplified his teaching and writing.  J-JR was living the dream.  He shacked up with Therese Levasseur, a twenty-three year old laundress whom he made his mistress.  He ridiculed her in public-both in social gatherings and his writings.  He wanted the world to know that she was beneath him.  He despised her as a "coarse, illiterate servant-girl and despised himself for consorting with her."  [Ibid., p. 19]  She bore him five children, all of whom Rousseau abandoned, leaving them at the Hopital des Enfants-trouves. 

Roussseau needed to justify this monstrous behaviour.  He did, by resort to developing a doctrine of the state which has proved music to the ears of all who would worship and adore power.  It is at this juncture that J-JR moves from moral monster to virtuous saint in the mind of contemporary Unbelief.  He had abandoned his children, almost certainly to their deaths, into the care of the State, but the great J-JR sought to turn his infamy into a virtue--a "virtue" for which he is still celebrated and adored and lionised to this day.

Rousseau developed the idea that

. . . education was the key to social and moral improvement and, this being so, it was the concern of the State. [Hence he was justified in giving up his five children to the State's care.]  The State must form the minds of all, not only as children (as it had done to Rousseau's in the orphanage) but as adult citizens.  By a curious chain of infamous moral logic, Rousseau's iniquity as a parent was linked to his ideological offspring, the future totalitarian state.  [Ibid., p. 25].

As everyone was given up to the State it would train everyone to think and act in concert.  Everyone would therefore be content.  None would resist the General Will, which is the command of the State.

Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to "consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State. . . . For  being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it.  It will be all they have and will be all they are."  The educational process was thus the key to the success of the cultural engineering needed to make the State acceptable and successful; the axis of Rousseau's ideas was the citizen as child and the State as parent, and he insisted the government should have complete charge of the upbringing of all children. [Ibid.]

For these doctrines, Rousseau is lionised in the West to this day.  He is the first Western apostle of  the State as Saviour and Redeemer.  From him descend the Marx's, the Lenin's, the Mussolini's, and, albeit in milder form, the statists of our day, still clamouring for universal compulsory State education as the key to unlock human redemption. 

It is aptly ironical that the most influential Father of Western statism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, and remains, one of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time.