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The heart of Rousseau's thought, as he himself declared, is the claim that society (especially bourgeois society), while necessary now to man's preservation, corrupts the life it fosters. What, then, is this corruption? What, in Rousseau's view, is the problem of bourgeois society? The corruption, I argue, is disunity of soul, through which men lose the fullness of existence they seek by nature. Unity of soul, which is natural, is lost in society through the contradiction of personal dependence: using others entails serving them. Thus modern or bourgeois society, which builds on this contradiction by deriving men's sociability from their selfishness, necessarily divides their souls. There can be no psychic unity in society without true social unity. (Hence Rousseau's analysis of unity is also his defense of justice.) Psychic and social unity are more or less attainable in the just state through patriotism and virtue (“morality”), but perfect psychic unity is possible only beyond society and morality.

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NY TRUE EFFORT AT COLLECTIVE SELF-KNOWLEDGE, ANY attempt to understand ourselves as a society and a culture, must give particular attention to the question of sincerity. For the canonization of A sincerity or authenticity, its elevation to the highest or most fundamental human virtue, would seem to be one of the defining characteristics of our age. This has been the observation of a long line of critics.-One might immediately object, of course, that the goal with which we are truly obsessed is rather wealth or material success. But one of the strangest things about our society is that while everyone chases money, few wholeheartedly believe in it. Virtually every American will tell you that Americans are too materialistic and sellout too easily. Somehow, we have all internalized the old critique of bourgeois culture; we are-all critics of our own lives. And on this second, critical leve1,when we ask ourselves what it means not to sell out, a little voice within us always gives the same reply: "be true to your inner self." This is our obsession with sincerity. Thus, by the ideal of sincerity, I mean something very generalmore general, perhaps, than is sanctioned by common usage. In the largest sense, I mean the phenomenon that Allan Bloom describes in saying that in our thinking about human happiness and human excellence, we have replaced the RTHUR M. MELZER IS traditional vocabulary of virtue and vice with ssociate profesror such new pairs o f opposites as inner political science at juichjgan State University and codirector of the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy. He * the author of The Goodness Of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago, 1990) and coeditor o Technology and the Wester! Tradition. H~ is cuwently wmk-in& on ~h~~l~~~ phy. directed/other directed, real self/alienated self, sincere/hypOcritical.' For example, if one asks what character trait has been the single greatest subject of condemnation and loathing by the intellectuals and artists of the past two centuries, one would have t o answer: hypocrisy. Even today, as Shklar remarks: H Y P O C~~~Y remains the only unforgivable sin, perhaps especially among those who can overlook and explain away almost every other vice, even cruelty. However much suffering it may cause, and however many social and religious rules it may violate, evil can be understood after due analysis. But not hypocrisy, which alone now is inexcusable.2 Conversely, if one seeks to name the positive characteristic that our culture uses to define the happy and healthy soul, one would have to say: "Being Oneself." If the modern age had a theme song, it would be "I Gotta Be Me." But also included in the ideal of sincerity is the assumption that the self that I gotta be is the private self, even the secret self. Thus the turn to sincerity also entails the "Fall of Public Man," to use the title of a recent work of sociology, that is, the demotion of the public, political realm of life and the concomitant elevation of the world of the personal, the private, and th...

The Social Contract is reinterpreted by emphasizing its relation to Rousseau's other writings and doctrines. In the spirit of Hobbesian realism, Rousseau regards natural law and other forms of “private morality” as ineffectual, invalid, and in practice dangerous tools of oppression and subversion. But, still more realistic than Hobbes, Rousseau thinks it impossible to build a nonoppressive state on men's selfish interests alone and embraces the classical view that morality or virtue is politically necessary (as well as intrinsically good). Rousseau's doctrine of the natural goodness of man, however, which traces all vice to the effects of oppression, leads him to conclude that the non-oppression more or less guaranteed by the absolute rule of general laws is also sufficient to make men virtuous. Thus Rousseau can declare law as such (General Will) infallible and “sovereign”—and he must do so in order to protect rule of law from its greatest danger, the subversive appeal to “natural law.”