Browsing by Author "Liu, Antong"

Amour-propre is a crucial concept of Rousseau's philosophy. Although recent studies have confirmed its moral ambiguity, they paid insufficient attention to Rousseau's account of amour-propre in his Emile and thus failed to appreciate the method Rousseau proposes therein to tame Emile's amour-propre. By close textual examinations of Emile, especially of the first part of its Book IV, this paper analyzes the moral ambiguity of amour-propre and Rousseau's remedy for its almost inevitable inflammation. Rather than eliminating amour-propre, the education of Emile aims at preventing his innocuous amour-propre from being inflamed. This at first requires that a cosmopolitan type of friendship be cultivated in Emile's heart so as to further cultivate his pity. Yet since the origin of the problem of inflamed amour-propre is the relativity intrinsic to human society and comparisons, pity, which is equally relative/inter-subjective, may suffer from the same problem of amour-propre. Therefore, Rousseau bases his remedial project upon the indestructible "true relations of man" (i.e. natural equality of man) that is objective (or non-relational) and guides Emile's affections towards these relations so as to make it possible for Emile to know all human relations and comparisons without taking any of them seriously.

In this dissertation, I investigate the efforts in eighteenth-century political theory to modernize the sense of honor. Contrary to the belief that influential thinkers of this century—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, in particular—deviate from the tradition of honor and transform honor from a public matter of defending one’s reputation against disrespect and injustice into a private matter of maintaining one’s integrity, I argue that they not only faithfully inherit the medieval legacy of chivalric honor passed down to them via Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, and Montesquieu, but also significantly democratize and secularize it and improve its compatibility with the modern state characterized by equal citizenship, centralized government, and the rule of law. Honor is understood as a uniquely structured motivation, which combines an individual’s sensitivity to and independence from social opinion into an integral whole. In modernizing honor, eighteenth-century thinkers attempt to preserve it as a political motivation for modern individuals to balance their spirits of resistance and law-abidingness so as to stand up to injustice without themselves becoming unjust in the process. Thus, honor can help liberal-democratic citizens today to fulfill their civic responsibility.

In this dissertation, I investigate the efforts in eighteenth-century political theory to modernize the sense of honor. Contrary to the belief that influential thinkers of this century—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, in particular—deviate from the tradition of honor and transform honor from a public matter of defending one’s reputation against disrespect and injustice into a private matter of maintaining one’s integrity, I argue that they not only faithfully inherit the medieval legacy of chivalric honor passed down to them via Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, and Montesquieu, but also significantly democratize and secularize it and improve its compatibility with the modern state characterized by equal citizenship, centralized government, and the rule of law. Honor is understood as a uniquely structured motivation, which combines an individual’s sensitivity to and independence from social opinion into an integral whole. In modernizing honor, eighteenth-century thinkers attempt to preserve it as a political motivation for modern individuals to balance their spirits of resistance and law-abidingness so as to stand up to injustice without themselves becoming unjust in the process. Thus, honor can help liberal-democratic citizens today to fulfill their civic responsibility.