In Our Time - Rousseau on Education

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) on the education of children, as set out in his novel or treatise Emile, published in 1762. He held that children are born with natural goodness, which he sought to protect as they developed, allowing each to form their own conclusions from experience, avoiding the domineering influence of others. In particular, he was keen to stop infants forming the view that human relations were based on domination and subordination. Rousseau viewed Emile as his most imporant work, and it became very influential. It was also banned and burned, and Rousseau was attacked for not following these principles with his own children, who he abandoned, and for proposing a subordinate role for women in this scheme.The image above is of Emile playing with a mask on his mother's lap, from a Milanese edition published in 1805.With Richard Whatmore Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual HistoryCaroline Warman Professor of French Literature and Thought at Jesus College, Oxfordand Denis McManus Professor of Philosophy at the University of SouthamptonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Emile or On Education, which he considered his greatest work. Emil is partly a novel, partly a treatise on how to make children immune

from the corruption as he saw it of civilization, mainly by letting them work things out for themselves, rather than telling them what to do. Only then would they learn self-respect and free themselves from the self-consciousness which he found throughout society and which laid inevitably he thought to unhappiness. Quote, man is born free, but everywhere he is in change, he wrote,

his most famous sentence. We need to discuss Russo on Education R. Dennis McManus, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, Caroline Warman, Professor of French Literature and Thought at Jesus College Oxford, and Richard Wartmore, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and co-director of St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History. Richard Wartmore, can you tell us about his childhood, Rousseau's childhood? Yes, Rousseau is born in 1712.

His mother was rich, his father was a relatively poor artisan. A disaster occurs because Rousseau's mother dies after a couple of days after his birth, and he subsequently has a turbulent education himself. The fact that's a profound significance is that he's born at Geneva. Now, it's very important because it's an independent republic. Some people still call the Genevaans Swiss. They were not Swiss until 1815.

They're fiercely patriotic. they have a militia, they build their Republican walls around the city. It's the centre for Calvinism as well, so the fact that the pastors are involved in the lives of the citizens is important. And it's also a place of commerce, so you have a tension between money and morality. And the morality is very strictly needed. A turbulent childhood, turbulent education, till is about 16.

What was turbulent about it? It was turbulent because his father is forced through poverty to move from the upper town at Geneva, which is where his mother's house was. He moves to the lower town where the artisans live. His father, when Rousseau's 10, runs away. He abandons Geneva because he's involved in an altercation with a rich man who he strikes in the face with a sword. and that means that Rousseau is returned to his rich relations but as the poor relation himself. So he is tutored by a Calvinist outside Geneva

and then he becomes an apprentice engraver for three years and that is miserable. What was a standard way of educating a child of his background at that time? He's landing in the well-off part of his family, so what would they normally do? Well, you would have a private tutor. And the private tutor would more than likely be a clergyman. So one of the main differences really with regard to education is the direct relationship between religion and education.

Either the idea that you have to stamp out sin or that you educate somebody to be reasonable, you know, reasonable idea of Christianity, for example, or obviously teach somebody to be good, which is obviously Rousseau's idea. and it was very much sitting desk for hours on end, don't move much, not much physical exercise, and do what I say and learn by road. Is it that sort of thing? Not in Rousseau's case, actually,

because he, when he was educated with the private tutor, when he's with his richer relations, the private tutor takes him out into the mountains. But that... But what I said, but it was the normal way people were going about education. in those days. Certainly in lots and lots of places.

Okay, and then he had a privitude and went into the mountains. Yes, and that's his love of nature, his love of botany, is stimulated. Also, he admits at one point that he enjoys the sister of the clergyman who's teaching him spanks him, and he thinks that that excites him as a boy. It's one of the things that he confesses to in his confessions, one of his posthumously published works. All right, does that lead to anything? Well, it leads to a great deal because obviously for Russo,

confessing your sins, but not doing it in the manner of St. Augustine, is a profound importance. Which means what? That's a throwaway line you're not going to get aware of it. What does it mean, but not in the manner of St. Augustine? Well, the idea of confessing your sin is something that you need to do, but with the idea in the back of your mind that you are good. So you confess sin, but you're a good person. You have the capacity to be, to still behave in a natural fashion, in accordance with the natural passions, which is something that Rousseau is obsessed with. Okay, thank you. Caroline, Caroline Warman.

Can we go into that education a bit more? I mean, what is he actually learning? He leaves when he's 60 and he goes to live with the woman in her late 20s, who is his both looks after him and then looks after him. So what did he learn? he learning? Well, what he was learning with Madame de Varrant, apart from on the emotional side, was to use her library and he is an amazing autodidact. So he taught himself absolutely everything. And while he was with her, he wasn't with her just systematically all the time. He kept on going away.

He pretended to be a music master. He was... With some mixed success. I mean, he did all the music in the Encyclical... The great French and Central Pian. Yeah, but that was later. But he's still going training for it then, I presume. Yes, he's training for it. He was a brilliant musician and a composer as well. But in that time, when he was being a music master,

he was also being a footman. He was being a secretary. He pretended to be an English Jacobite called Dudding. You know, he had a number of lives that were all happening simultaneously when he was a very young man. Let's nail what he knew when he was saying his early 20s. What did he know about?

Which these books he wrote? Tons of books. Which tons? Which books, really? He read much tons of classical works, classical history and classical works, yeah, and stoics. And obviously he's obsessed with Plutarch's lives, and he famously says that it turns him into something of a Roman.

But while he's with Madame de Varenne, I mean, I'm being slightly flippant about it, but how did he emerge from that relationship? You know, we can read his confessions and get his idea of what he was, which is a very very, very... sort of like raw and an impulsive person who loved reading and loved learning things and was passionate about his news, the music notation system and passionate about women

and very impulsive. But he also presented himself as a sort of like sort of natural bore, as like complete, not bore as in like very boring, but you know, like a sort of pig. You know, he was unable to, you know, behave properly in society. But he became a tutor. So we have this young man brought up, born in a fierce Calvin society, who then became a Catholic. He became a Catholic. How did that happen and where in his life?

He went to Turing and he needed to get somewhere to live and he became a Catholic in order to be able to live in a seminary. Why did he choose a seminary? There must have been plenty of places to go to live. Why did he choose that? Well, I mean, what's available for a young man with no money, I mean, he left Geneva. He didn't say, okay, well, it's time for me, a young Jean-Jacques, to, you know, go forth in the world. He came back to Geneva one evening, and the city gates were closed, and he just couldn't get back in. So he just went off in the opposite direction. I mean, it was a huge amount of happenstance. And then you went to Paris, which he didn't like.

He went to Paris to try and find Madame de Vara. So he was always trying to find her. So he went there to meet her, but she'd already left, so then he stayed there for a bit, and then he came back again. and they were very happily together in this beautiful house that he talks about with great joy and nostalgia called Les Charmette in Savoy for about four years and then I don't know what happened really he sort of passes over it I think they got a bit bored of each other and off he went to be to be a tutor to these two little boys six and seven and he said you know given what an incredibly sweet-tempered person I am I would have been a brilliant tutor

if I hadn't got so incredibly angry with the boys all the time. But just finally, he's in Paris and he's that where he gets the taste and the antitaste for civilisation. Does he see this as a city as a corrupt place, as a place that you should not grow up to live in? I think he develops that particular line later. I don't think at that point he had it. I think he was extremely excited to be in Paris.

Okay, Dennis, Dennis, let's follow that line. This course on inequality in 1754, can you bring that into play? Yeah, sure. So, in a way, it's a work that sets the stage for Emil, which I take it, we'll spend most of our time on, and the social contract. And what it provides is a kind of speculative history, which explains why we're in the mess we're in now. So he looks at society as it was for him then,

I'm sure you'd think the same of ours. And he thinks that what you see is you see, like a mob of duplicitous self-aggrandizers in competition with each other, desperate to fulfil superficial desires for luxury and so forth. And he sees this, in some respects, he thinks that when you look at life in our kind of society, you might well believe with somebody like a Thomas Hobbs

that there'd be a war of each against all, as Hobbs puts it, if these people were as were let off the leash. But where Rousseau and Hobbs differ is that Rousseau thinks that this is not, if you like, a window on what human beings essentially are, naturally are. And what he does in the discourse on inequality is he tells a story about how we come from what he thinks of as a relatively interesting,

state of nature, an original position, original situation in which human beings found themselves, where they have a kind of self-love, he calls it Amor Des Mo de Sua, which is to do with, it's just the kind of self-love or the kind of care for the self that, if you like, any organism has to have just to stay intact. We also have a certain kind of capacity for compassion. And we have very basic desires. So we want shelter, we want a mate, we want food. But we have very simple desires, so we're not really in competition with each other, because in a way there's nothing much to compete over. And he believes that this is natural, and that if you behave in a natural way, you are therefore innocent, and you are immunised against the evils that Hobbs said society was full of.

Yes, well, he certainly thought that man in that natural condition would certainly, you would not find the kind of conflict that Hobbes thinks is inevitable. Unfortunately, we don't stay in that condition. And he thinks that certain kind of foreign causes, as he puts it, which is, you know, baroniers, as long, hard winters and so on, force us to start cooperating with each other because in that original state of nature, we live a relatively independent life.

And we're forced to start cooperating with each other, and this starts to have all sorts of complex psychological effects on us. And we start having private property, which, as he says, arouses jealousy and off we go. Absolutely. So that's one of the, if you like, the further stages in our degeneration. What seems to happen at first is we start organising with one another. we start hunting in groups.

We become aware of the way in which we're superior to the animals. We also become aware of how some of us are better at hunting than others. And we start thinking about ourselves in terms of these comparisons between one another. We start thinking about the way in which we're seen by others. And this gives rise to a kind of toxic kind of self-love. How did this idea of man born free everywhere is in change? The idea of the innocence coming into the world and be destroyed by the world into which it comes? How far was this radical at the time?

How far did he make it radical by the emphasis he put on it? Well, I suppose in one respect, I think he thought this was just an implication of his religious views. So I think he thinks that everything that comes from the hand of the creator. But was this current at the time or was he striking out on his own and people said, no, it's not like that. Well, he's certainly clashing with people like Hobbs. So Hobbs certainly has this vision of human beings as essentially egoists, essentially self-interested, and what Rousseau is going to try and argue is that that only comes later

as part of this kind of degeneration. And he has this notion of Amor Propra, which is this other kind of self-love, which is where you're no longer just concerned with, if you're like keeping body and soul together, you're concerned to compete with others. And you want to be in the first position, as he puts it. You want to be seen as better than others.

Richard, what more. Can you briefly outline Emil, the book for our listeners? Yes, it's a difficult read. It's in some ways meant to be read out loud and then discussed. That's what contemporaries did. There are five books. They tell the story of Emile's life with his tutor. And the tutor is Jean-Jacques.

And the tutor guides Emil to avoid the corruptions of society and to remain good. And the idea, which we've already raised, is that society can be an arena, but it ought to be a forum. And cooperation makes you happy. Emil is moves from infancy and his first relationships with the natural world and animals, through his first relations with other people. Jean-Jacques, the tutor, is very careful.

Jean-Jacques, that being Rousseau himself. It is Rousseau himself. He's very careful about his meeting other people. That really can only happen in the mid-teenage years. But, and then ideas about religion are introduced. And then finally, he's ready to become a citizen and an adult. I think a lot of listeners were surprised at other. He wasn't very keen on children reading books.

He wanted him to experience the difficult. his life making things, trying to make things, failing in things, playing, socialisation with that. But he, at one stage he says, I hate books. So what's all that about? And he's not, he's not allowed to read a book until you tell me, it's about 13 or something. And that's Robinson Crusoe to teach you how to sort of put your life together out of scraps. I think the point is, and Dennis has already said, that necessity is important. That's really what we should be focusing on. It means that you only only, you only, you only, you only, respond really to practical circumstances and you only really learn if you have to. You can fill your head with a lot of facts and information, but if it's not practically useful, what's the point? And it can also be dangerous because it can lead you to egoism, it can lead you to conflict and take you away from cooperation. You have to not be servile, that's one of the main messages, but you must not be imperious.

either. And books can take you away from what he might have called in our terms, anyway, the real world perhaps. Caroline, Colin Warman, what was startling about Rousseau's views about raising infants for that time? Infants, he particularly wished women to breastfeed their own children. And so he wished the practice of wet nurses to stop. He said that the relationship, the bond between mother and child would be much stronger if they breastfed their own children. the children themselves would be healthier and he has some horrendous pictures I mean word pictures of little babies

in swaddling clothes sort of hung from hooks in the ceiling in villages while you know the woman has gone off to do something and these little children are just sort of stifling and possibly dying. So that was startling. That's a start. What else?

What else? He said he wanted children to run around a lot and run around and play. I mean, you mentioned it already in this sort of question about not being sitting, not sitting down and learning loads of stuff until your 12 was really important. And he said, he made up this, he was endlessly making up people who were disagreeing with him as a sort of dialogue. He says, you will think that, you know, this person is doing nothing. Is it nothing to be happy?

He said, so he said, imagine what it was like for these little kids to be running around and jumping and playing. They'll never be so busy in the rest of their lives. And you said they were learning to be children. Yes, they were learning to be children's beautiful phrase. You know, let's be murier, l'Enfants in infants. So allow childhood to mature and develop in the child rather than teach a little child to be a man. What impact did this have on the readers at the time?

I think it had a huge impact. Because it was written so directly for all of the things that we could criticize Rousseau for, and I hope we will have a go at doing that in a minute, You can't criticise what an amazing writer he is. You read him and you feel like he's talking directly to you. It's extremely emotional and direct. So parents read it and were very affected. And so changes started to come about

and schools tried to change to introduce some of his ideas. So we have this child, Dennis McManus, until about 12, is not encouraged to read a single book to play, do things for himself, fail. start again. There's a tutor there, though, and Rousseau calls the tutor by his own name. So what's the tutor doing when all this is happening?

Well, the role the tutor changes as the child gets older, but perhaps the most interesting phase is that very early phase, how the Caroline mentioned. In that phase, the tutor is, in some respects, it's just kind of staying out of the way, but also making sure that everybody else stays out of the way. because Rousseau has this notion that the child is, if you like, a natural learner and should just go out and learn from nature.

And what the... Sorry, I'd interrupt you. What does he mean by nature? I mean, go out into the woods and look around or build camps or jump rivers or swim or what's going about? Yeah, do the lot. Do the lot. That's fine. Yeah.

So essentially, you know, learning about the world around them and doing it without the, if you like, the intermediary role, of science textbooks telling the child what to think about nature. So he has this idea of negative education that he mentions sometimes. There's quite a lot of different aspects to that idea, but one part of it is this notion of you have to make sure that the child is allowed as the natural learner that they are to get on with it. Now, clearly one of the things that the tutor is also doing, though,

is a certain kind of manipulating of the environment that the child is in. So very early on, I think some readers thought that there's something a little bit fishy about this, something a little bit suspicious about this. And Rousseau himself can't quite resist encouraging this thought. So he talks about the way in which what the tutor will do, although in one sense the tutor is off the scene. What they're actually doing is that they are making captive the will of the child.

So in a sense, you know, the tutor is going beyond just controlling the behavior of the child. He's controlling what the child is interested in, what they see, by, if you like, managing that environment around them. Now, I think what Rousseau would probably say in response to that is, you know, this isn't manipulation because what you're dealing with here with this child is not really yet a proper rational agent. So the child, you know, he talks about the reasonable man is the masterpiece of education, it's what you get at the end of the process of education.

So I think the kind of response that he'd make to this kind of manipulation charge is that he'd say, well, you know, you can't manipulate something that, if you're like, doesn't have a judgment of its own yet. And what we're doing is we're forming it. We're nurturing this child to the point where it will become, if you're like, an independent, rational agent who can make their own decisions about how they, how they're going to live. Richard Wartmore, does the notion of reality enter into this relationship at all? I mean, he's the one tutor to one child and who's the child and why does he roam around and so on and so forth? It sounds terrific, but how is you going to work in, how does he envisage it working? Well, it works gradually and you have to be very, very careful

to avoid contamination, I think, is not an 18th century word, but it's the right one. Because if the child generates a sense of sense of, that is eager-centric, then you're lost. In a sense, you're creating Paris in the child, and that's the worst possible thing. You've got to, in a sense, keep the child in the canton, at the bottom of the Swiss mountain.

You know, the air's pure, it's safe, and relationships are better. And coming back to this point about necessity, they're better because they're harder. where life is easier, where there's temptation about, you have to be very careful. It's also the case that you're likely not to have forms of religious belief that are oppressive, which is another radical part.

Well, are now, in the cantons or in the city? In the cantones. In the city, everything is terrible. You know, you really, if there's one message, and there's another book that he does recommend that people read, and it's Fenelon's Telemachus, and the message of that book is really that people, if they want to have good lives, need to abandon the cities and return to the countryside.

And ultimately that is something that Rousseau believed without thinking it could ever be realized. I'm sorry to nag away and be pedantic, but what happens when you put it to the test? Well, when you put it to the test, the likelihood is that it's going to fail and it can only work for a very tiny proportion of the population. This isn't a plan for a mass education system.

Why not? I think... Well, he says everybody's supposed to be born equal and have equal opportunities. But he's talking about an extraordinary elitist activity. Because the captivating thing about Rousseau is that he tells you how things ought to be and he also tells you that you can't get there. You can't reach your utopia. You have to accept that Paris is Paris, that the world is corrupt,

and that you can plan for a natural child in society and he's saying, obviously, his message isn't to get the human race to walk on all fours or to return to the woods, the attacks on him that were launched time after time. But you're happier as a savage. Yes. With the Oranukangs, I think they get a mention. They do.

And obviously, the idea that animals are happier than humans because they live a more natural relationship, even though the lifespans are shorter, etc. Humans are the miserable ones because of what we do to each other. So it's a thought experiment ultimately, but he doesn't think that it could be the plan for anything other than actually a canton. Because obviously one of his points is we need to have small relationships

in small communities, in small states. Absolutely small states. Yeah, small states. Caroline, we've been talking about the boy. Emile and it is about Emil and people are of their times. Girls don't, they get short shrift, don't they? They do. Do you want to express yourself on that?

I feel like I may wish to express myself on this. Yes, thank you very much. Yeah, I mean, when we've been saying, you know, he, this boy and all the rest of it, I mean, that's not a sort of default gender in an old-fashioned way. It's because it is a boy. And so, you know, Russo does get to the idea of thinking about, you know, a little girl. but she doesn't need to be educated for herself exactly. She needs to be educated to be the perfect partner for Emil when he grows up.

And he, in his thinking about nature, he's very essentialist. So he says, women, like let's have a look at the difference between women and men. So men are much cleverer and then women, they're a little bit hysterical and all the rest of it. And there's motherhood and the home and all the rest of it. So he says that's what the female sex is, and therefore that's what they need to be educated to be. And of course they're a little bit liable to get over-excited about, you know, clothes and all of the rest of it. So they need to be kept away from those sorts of temptations.

And brought up with, you know, really not very many books, even fewer books, although, you know, Sophie is allowed to read Telemachus. And then they can read some helpful books about housekeeping. and that's going to be very interesting. But he'd written about Eloise before then, who was an extremely learned woman. How did this transfer to his view, didn't transfer across his view of women?

Isn't it so interesting? I mean, Rousseau is such a writer of paradoxes and it's what makes it possible to forgive him some of the nonsense that he talks. So in the Emil, there is Sophie being, you know, very much constrained, but then he's just, as you say, he's just written Julie or la Novelle-Elois,

where the heroine, Julie, is the, absolute intellectual heart of the book as an educator as well. And her lover, Saint-Pruhe and tutor learns from her and so does her husband learn from her. She's really the intellectual heart of it. So yes, he does opposite things with different books. He tries out different ideas. Yes. Do you think he tries out different ideas for the hell of it? Or do you think he's a man who keeps changing his mind? I mean, he's a Calvin, then he's a Catholic, then he's Protestant, then he's not a Protestant and he's having friendship with this person and they're not friendship with this person. Changing his mind seems to be part of his perpetual condition, doesn't it?

I think he's in dialectic with himself over time. Are also our relationship between men and women dangerous, don't it? Well, I think in a way he thinks that they aren't as long as you are happy to accept the account of the sexes that he gives. So as long as men do what men should do, and that's dictated by nature and women do what women do, will be fine. So I think in that sense, you know, if you're happy to accept that package, then I think he thinks social relations between men and women are fine. However, for us, it's a very big if, because for the kinds of reasons that Caroline's talked about.

Can I come to you for the bomb that drops on Rousseau's life? And it's his great rival Voltaire, who paradoxly has moved to Geneva for some sort of safety. And they're at each other's throats a lot. They're the two big bulls in the ring, coming from different boxes. Now then, Voltaire intervened with the reputation of Rousseau in what could have been, was for a while a catastrophic revelation. Could you tell us about it?

Yes. Voltaire and Rousseau hate each other. They had been friends in the sense that they sent each other their work, and Voltaire thought Rousseau was. on his side, they come to believe that each other are, their work is so dangerous that it will destroy their own mission. So Voltaire sees Rousseau as an enemy of enlightenment. And Rousseau sees Voltaire as a supporter of tyranny. And because they're both involved in the politics at Geneva, where Rousseau is being accused of attacking the magistrates,

and of going against France, there's really an explosion. And information is fed to Voltaire about the fact that Rousseau had five children himself and he left them all on the steps of the founding hospital in Paris. So rather than educate or support his own children, he abandoned them. Rousseau had told very few people about that. Voltaire learns about it. He puts it into an anonymous pamphlet. Rousseau initially thinks it's a Calvinist pastor who's the author.

And in some ways, it sends Rousseau mad. He's paranoid for the rest of his life. I mean, in some ways he's even more paranoid. There's always been elements of paranoia. Right. So how did this charge of rank hypocrisy? Karine affected his reputation and his future work. It affected him, I mean, affected all of his readers deeply

because of the way in which he talks about speaking the truth and speaking from the heart directly all the time. That was his particular thing that he had developed in the relationship with his readers that he had developed. And then for them to discover that he had had five children of his own and with one woman and forced her to give every single one of them up was and remains difficult to stomach for somebody who talks about nature. And as far as I can tell from the three papers,

I've read of you three, these children died without trace. They seem to have died. And when he was... So when you say, let's stay on how it hit his reputation. I know it's probably more interesting talking about them and so on, but how it hit his reputation. So he finds this and what do people... do. Stop buying his books? Burn his books? What do they do?

Well, they don't stop buying his books, and his books have already been burnt in any case. So by the authorities, the Emil has been burnt in Geneva and in Paris in any case. But that was meant for religious reasons. That was for religious reasons. Can you briefly explain that and then we'll come back to these children. Savoyar Bicker, yeah. Yeah, in the Emil there's something called the Profession de Foire du Vicar, the profession of faith is the Savoyer vicar, which is something like sort of 60 pages.

long and is quite... Inside the book. It's inside the book and it's quite a sort of beautiful, long sermon, sort of his sermon on the Mount, a sort of again an amalgam of Jean-Jacques' views himself. And it's all about the religion of the heart. And it's about saying, you know, God is in your heart. You feel him there. He definitely exists. So his point was, I am not an atheist. I believe in God.

And religion is very important. But he was anti-Catholic, anti-Calvanist. He's anti-organised religion. Anti-the institution of religion. So all of those people who were in charge of the institutions of religion were absolutely outraged and condemned his book and banned it and burnt it and tried to arrest him, but he ran away, so they couldn't. Can we follow up any more? Have we said enough about these children and the impact it had on him

and his writing and his own? So do you want to dwell on a little bit more? It does seem to me to be a huge bomb that's dropped. I think there's a controversy about what he himself really thought about what happened. So he seems to give about seven or eight different reasons why he did it. Can you give us two or three of them? Well, one thing is he claims that at the time he was too poor to care of them. He claims that he thought that they would be taken care of better at these fandling hospitals, which seems when you look at the historical evidence, highly unlikely, but who knows what he thought. He also says that he thinks that these kids would grow up with the stigma of illegitimacy, that his partner would be stigmatized. And there is quite a, I suppose

depending on what kind of faith you have in him, there is quite a touching moment in Emil where he talks about the fact that if you are going to have children, you must take care of them yourselves. And if you can't, you shouldn't have them. And if you don't, then you will weep, weep bitter, hard tears,

and you'll never have consolation. He sort of makes a confession to Matt in one of his later books, doesn't it? Well, that's in what you've been quoting from. So that's actually before, We have this revelation from Voltaire. So in one sense, you know, you could look at that, and he's not exactly fessing up. But he is, I mean, it's impossible to read that passage,

certainly in retrospect, and not think that this sounds like, you know, it sounds like a kind of heartbroken man. Let's go back to the influences as ideas. So these ideas are out. We learn that they're very influential on certain French revolutionaries, and they've been influential on thinkers ever since. What was the power that drove them?

Caroline said quite a bit about it. Could you develop that? Richard. In some ways, Rousseau is an author who is successful like many authors because the following generation completely misunderstands him. And turning him into an advocate

of austere Republican morality. which is what the French revolutionaries do, and also an advocate of rebellion against contemporary society. The idea of a revolution in France, in Paris, which for Rousseau is just so beyond the pale, it's so corrupt, it would never, he would argue it would never be conceivable. So they're going directly against Rousseau, but they believe that he is the ultimate critic of existing society.

and therefore if you want to change the world, it's Rousseau that you go to, and you can see why. You know, he can inspire people. The sense of passion and the sense of Republican pride is there. Caroline, back to the title, education. How did the following generation, how did people respond to his ideas in education? Did they catch on? Did they change the way young men were educated and so on?

I think in all sorts of ways that is true. But to start with the infancy, I think that it started a complete change across Europe of women, in fact, breastfeeding their children. So that's a big change. And I think the idea of exercise was really important. I don't know whether during the French Revolution itself and the way that it tried to set up new forms, of education, whether Rousseau's ideas were adopted in that very much. I don't think that they were. It was more like what he'd written on Poland, where he talked about how, you know, you try and bring up a citizen. You make them love their country and you make them do a lot of collective exercise all in a big field,

and then they become full of love for their country. So all of that was very important. I think maybe one other thing is maybe people, People started writing diaries much more than they, I mean, there never had been this idea of the private diary, where you write down your feelings, where you take your feelings and their development seriously and you express them. And the more that you write, you know, you develop your personality in connection to a sort of like written version of yourself. You can see how that affects Wordsworth, for example, directly. Yes. And so does it roll on into the 19th century and through the 19th century of this, the effect of his work on the way educational, education was developed? Yes, I mean, yes, I mean, I think so.

I mean, you, and you can see that even in Britain, in the way that games become important and all of that sort of stuff, perhaps much more than in French institutions where games are not, in fact, so crucial. We've left out the fact that he became a Catholicist, and also that he wrote the social contract, and there's very little time left. Is this going to be relevant to the education? Is this part of the power of Rousseau, that, that he's switching between religious, between different sects,

you would call different sorts of religion, and also writing about society in the social contact. Is that powering into the influence you had? I think one way of looking at, so the social contract and Emil are published within a month of each other. And one of the interesting questions to pose about them are, do we have there, if you like, different solutions to the kind of problem that he identifies in the discourse?

inequality about the nature of society. So what are we going to do about this toxic society? What are we going to do about this population of egotists? And you could see the social contract gives you one kind of solution where it involves a certain kind of identification with your state. What is that? Is it possible to summarise that? What is the social?

What's the essence of the social contract? I think perhaps the most important thing. thought within it, in a way, it's an attempt to make good on a kind of republicanism, but underpinning it are some very strong requirements on what has to be in place for this to be possible. So he thinks, he's just to go back to some of the issues that Caroline mentioned, there has to be a certain kind of patriotism and social identification, if that's going to be possible. Now, when you look at something like Emil, the view there seems to be,

well, it would be lovely if we could do that, but we can't, because we don't really have that kind of identification available to us. So you can look at a meal as, in a way, offering a different kind of solution to the problem of society, an attempt to try and make possible, if you like, healthy social relations between people, although it's very much focused on, if you like, the way in which the upbringing of an individual can lead to this kind of toxic mindset,

or can instead perhaps lead to a more compassionate mindset whereby we identify with one another, we recognise one another's sufferings, and so forth. Richard, would you say that the business of the five children put out a finding home dropped away from him and people just swerved back to his ideas? I think it does and people read Rousseau and not that many people know about his private life. But he doesn't forget it.

and for the rest of his life it marks him. And you also have to remember that when he tries to finish Emil, which obviously is left in manuscript, it's posthumously published, he comes to the conclusion that Emil can live everywhere and nowhere. And what that means is that there's no place on earth where you can avoid corruption because Emil and Sophie end up in Paris and everything goes wrong. and Emil abandoned Sophie and he travels the world and he ultimately becomes a slave.

He's found everywhere. There's no place on earth where you can actually be free from the corruptions of society. Caroline. Yeah, just to add that this is the continuation of Emil called Emil and Sophie, which was not published, as Richard was saying. So it's not part of the first Emil which ends on Emil and Sophie being gloriously pregnant.

This is the second wave, which was more disastrous. Thank you very much indeed, Caroline Warman, Dennis McManus and Richard Wattmore. If you have a topic for our listener week in December, please use the contact page on our website or tweet with hashtag IOT Listener Week by the 25th of October. Next week, we're discussing the Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I want to say that today is the 225th anniversary of the translation of Rousseau to the Pantheon. It was, so it was three days. It was the 9th, the 10th and the 11th of October, 1794. And they're having a ceremony in the pantheon that involved. little children singing to Rousseau's tomb and also saying poems and various addresses will be made to the tomb and then they'll put a bouquet on his tomb. We missed out his music altogether.

He wrote an opera, didn't it? Which was quite successful. Many operas. And he did all the music references in the great encyclopedia. He did. Why did we miss all that out? It's not about education. Yeah, that was it, yeah.

Just a second, hold on. Now go ahead of this a bit. If it was as important to him, as he said it was to him, did he make no mention of it in the book? Was this not an important thing for a child to learn about, music? It is important, but it's... And actually music is very important in the notion of natural forms of communication. And obviously the idea of the tears of a child being a form of communication

and the idea that the first humans potentially communicate by song is something that Rousseau believed, and he also thought that operas in French were worse than operas in Italian, because he thought that actually the Latin language is a more natural language. Yes, what I was going to say. I wanted to fill in what you were saying

about the language coming from song. It's from his essay on the origin of language. And so there's a boy who's come to fetch water, and there's a girl who's come to fetch water from different families they've each got buckets and they see each other and they have this amazing feeling and the feeling comes out of their mouth in the form of song and they sing at each other.

Can I also just go back to the tears because I think there's something that I wouldn't want listeners to miss out in a meal. And there's a scene early on, there's a discussion early on where he talks about the way in which we should react to the crying child. And you get this amazing kind of psycho drama in that where the big danger is you're going to allow the child to think that they can boss you around

and that they can, as we're take, that you're so in their minds the notion that the world is there at their beck and core. And I think that's a fascinating discussion, not least because of the ways in which it points us towards some of these discussions of, if like, the mind of the infant in psychoanalysis, but also just this amazingly vivid picture of this little tyrant who, you know, this potential potential. This little child will either learn that the world doesn't, if you're like, objects don't care and they'll have to adopt a kind of stoic resignation in the face of the world around them, or they'll end up thinking that they only have to move their tongue and the universe will respond. So I was just reminded of that when the mention of tears comes up, because I think this is

an amazing little kind of drama that you get early on in Emile. We didn't pay much attention to Roman Catholicism, to which he converted for a time, which is an extraordinarily powerful institution and belief system at the time. In some ways, one of the things that we've referred to, but we didn't talk a lot about, is the absolute hatred and worry about Rousseau and his possible effects on society, because the reason that Emile's burned is because it's classed as a solvent to religion and government.

So to think of it as a, you know, it's an, it's a social, it's a societal acid. It's so dangerous. And some of the correspondence, when people talk about Rousseau, they're talking about the devil. They see him in apocalyptic terms because he'll destroy Calvinism, Catholicism, the institutions on which you build society, the very education of youth, people are very, very worried about the things that he says if they're put into practice, if they're generalized. And to something to say, with good cause because of the way in which he leads to, he's a crucial influence on Marx and on brands of anarchism as well.

So in one sense, these people who are worried about the fate of established religions, they are right to be worried about this because certainly, you know, through Marx, the established religions really are in the firing line as a result of the kinds of ideas that Rousseau offers, despite the fact that he himself seems to be a very sincere believer. I mean, that said, the sort of ways in which the censorship operated and the things that it said about him, they said about anybody that they wished to censor, they said, you know, there is, you know, endless, monstrous vomit coming out of that you know is going to drown us all. I mean, absolutely, I mean, those exact word for word, you know, hysterical, you know, idea.

Because isn't that, that's his complaint about his treatment in Geneva, isn't it? Why are you picking on me? Loads of other people are saying, you know, similar things or worse things? Well, he can't believe that Voltaire's books are being sold in the city and his a band. I mean, in a Calvinist city, he thinks that that's the ultimate hypocrisy. Because Voltaire was trying to get permission to have theatres built in at Geneva, which again, Russo attacked him for this. I wanted to keep Geneva free of theatres, and they were at its other strokes again.

That's, I mean, that's really the source of the antagonism. is when Dallumbert writes the article on Geneva and Rousseau thinks that it's actually Voltaire's the author and saying that the Genevaan pastors are not Calvinists, they're Sassinian, and also saying that Voltaire and Dallumbert are trying to destroy Genevaan morality. You know, that's Rousseau's attack by having a theatre.

You can't have it. And that's the source of, of, of so many problems for Rousseau over the following years. And then you want to ask him, I'm so sorry, but then you want to ask him, you know, why, if he doesn't like plays, why does he write operas? It's like, oh, hello, Rousseau. Yet again, we have one of these sort of paradoxes.

And I guess another thing that's noticeable about the literary form of Emil, and I think this is probably part of the reason why it was so important, is that you do get, I mean, there's a great kind of poetry, and there's a great invocation of this image, of the dignity of the independent rational agent. And I think Alan Bloom talks about the way in which sort of earlier forms of modern philosophy were kind of competing with the poetry of the classical tradition and the biblical tradition. And they couldn't really compete with the sort of, if you like, the literary power of those traditions.

And then along comes something like a Rousseau, who is the most quotable philosopher in history, you might say. and he gives us this incredibly vivid and incredibly appealing picture of the dignity of human beings in their equality. Men, dignity of men. Yeah, that's to be said. Is he at university,

is he still received with enthusiasm by students' undergraduates today? Oh, I think so. We have on our first year course discourse on inequality. and people learn all sorts of things. I mean, they absolutely love it. And the discussion of Amour Pop is very important to them

because they are in a state of like unbelievable anxiety about the idea that they're rubbish and other people are better. So when you say, look what Rousseau's arguing, he says that when you compare yourself to somebody else, you cut yourself in half internally and they suddenly see it. It's really important.

He writes so directly. It's really great. And he's a brilliant critic of consumerism. So, I mean, often when I teach him, when I teach this material, I tell them, you know, there are going to be some cookie things here. There are some things you're never going to swallow. But, you know, for instance, think about the possibility that some of the desires that you're devoting your life to are counterfeit desires. They're not really setting you free.

They're not really making you happy. I think that's another Russoen theme that students today definitely connect with immediately. And the love of the environment and animals. Yeah. Except when you put the animals out to animal handling hospitals. Well, thank you very much. So it's terrific. There we are.

You've got to be off at Melbourne. Do you want to your coffee? I love a cup of coffee. It would be lovely. Coffee? Yeah. Tea, please. No, shall I prefer tea. Cup of tea. It would be great.

Coffee for me, please. I don't want anything. Thank you. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I just wanted to tell you about my new podcast. It's called Classical Fix. And it's basically me.

Plemie Burton Hill, each week talking to a massive music fan. I mix them a classical playlist. They have a listen. They come in and we just see where the conversation goes. If you like to give classical music a go but you haven't got a clue where to start, this is where you start. To subscribe, go to BBC Sounds and search for classical fix. Now then, as you were.