Rousseau on compassion and the crisis of modernity

Abstract

As the first great modern critic of modernity, Rousseau fostered new depths of self-dissatisfaction and new hopes of social regeneration. He was particularly critical of the erstwhile realism of the enlightenment, with its callow faith in the redeeming power of «enlightened self-interest». Rousseau did not reject realism in principle, but rather argued that genuine realism required less reliance on reason (and so on rational self-interest) and more on sentiment unmediated by calculation. While the first great patron of compassion among the secular thinkers of the West, he promoted it precisely as the most realistic basis for morality. Yet at the same time Rousseau displayed a deep awareness of the limits of compassion and of the tension between universal humanity, on the one hand, and political justice, on the other.