- Christopher Kelly, a leading Rousseau scholar, argues that heroes are not optional ornaments but the very foundation of political community—and that the modern world’s hostility to heroes is an existential threat to society.
- For Rousseau, a community exists only when its members identify with one another, and the most powerful medium for that identification is shared admiration of the same heroes.
- Without heroic exemplars, reason itself becomes impotent: people can understand what justice requires but lack the motive to prefer the general will over their own narrow interest.
- The modern age is “anti-heroic” not merely because it fails to produce heroes but because it actively tears them down—through debunking, irony, and egalitarian suspicion of greatness—leaving society without the emotional and imaginative glue that holds it together.
What Rousseau Means by a Hero
- Rousseau defines a hero not by traditional moral virtues but by strength of soul—the inner capacity to be independent of fortune and to achieve one’s ends.
- He systematically rejects the cardinal virtues (courage, prudence, temperance, justice) as necessary for heroism: courage is shared by thugs and fanatics; justice is not what drives great action.
- Strength of soul is the precondition and source of virtue, but it is orthogonal to virtue—it can lead to great good or great evil.
- Rousseau admires “admirable criminals”—figures like the Godfather or Balzac’s Vautrin—who possess an “indefinable quality of pride and generosity” even in crime, because their strength of soul makes them capable of reform, unlike the weak and hypocritical who are incorrigible.
- Rousseau’s four archetypes of a good life:
- The wicked person: weak, dependent, miserable, and vicious.
- The virtuous person: willing to sacrifice everything for justice (e.g., Cato), but not happy because virtue sometimes demands giving up what one loves most.
- The wise man: pursues happiness first, adopts virtue only insofar as it is consistent with happiness—this is Rousseau’s own model.
- The hero: may lack the virtues of the other two but possesses such strength of soul that it yields the maximum intensity of feeling one’s own existence.
Why Heroes Are Dangerous
- The hero does not care about the community for its own sake—the community is a means to the hero’s personal glory.
- Achilles withdraws from battle when his honor is slighted; the hero’s allegiance is to renown, not to the people he benefits.
- Rousseau’s Lincoln example: the revolutionary generation found greatness in founding a just community, but later generations, disconnected from that founding moment, are tempted to achieve greatness by destroying what was built.
- The people who do the most for the community (entrepreneurs, builders) are often the least genuinely compassionate—they act from self-interest and the desire for glory, not from love of others.
- Imitation of heroes involves “denaturing”—leaving one’s natural self to live through imagination and comparison with others—which Rousseau sees as both the source of all social life and a profound risk to individual authenticity.
Why Society Needs Heroes
- For Rousseau, legislation works primarily through character and imitation, not through law and reason.
- What grounded the Roman Republic was not its laws but the character of Brutus, who sentenced his own sons to death for conspiring to restore the monarchy—his example gave the law its emotional legitimacy.
- What grounds America today is the character of the founding fathers; what grounded Christendom was the example of Jesus and the saints.
- Rational discussion can identify what is good for the community, but it cannot motivate people to prefer it over their own interest—only identification with a heroic figure provides that motive.
- When citizens imitate a hero, they do not merely copy the hero’s understanding of justice—they absorb some of the hero’s strength of soul, which elevates their own capacity to act justly.
- Debunking heroes (e.g., pulling down statues of Jefferson) is not a harmless political act but an attack on the bedrock of community itself.
Why the Modern World Cannot Sustain Heroes
- Modernity is hostile to heroes because it equates admiration of greatness with submission to authority and tradition, and modern politics is narrowly focused on economic management and law enforcement.
- Modern art, especially theater, has degenerated into a passive, isolating experience that substitutes phony moral sentiment for real social engagement—Rousseau prefers dances and communal reading, where people are active and genuinely social.
- Language has declined from poetic, musical, and persuasive to rational, analytical, and abstract.
- Early languages (Homeric Greek, biblical Hebrew) were sung and carried emotional and legislative force; modern language has lost that fire.
- Rousseau elevates music as the highest art because it directly communicates feeling—and music is culturally specific, binding communities through shared songs and the homesickness they evoke.
- As language became more rational, persuasion gave way to coercion: without the emotional force of rhetoric, art, and heroes, governance relies on material self-interest or physical force—the ingredients of tyranny.
- Equality poses a challenge: heroes are inherently inegalitarian, but Rousseau designs institutions (e.g., Poland’s step-by-step system of honors culminating in a king whose reign is posthumously judged) that channel the desire for distinction into competitive service rather than destructive rivalry.
- Humor and irony undermine heroism by making people laugh at vice rather than feeling anger at injustice—comedy (e.g., John Stewart) provides a pressure valve that makes vice tolerable rather than intolerable.
- Internet memes and ironic discourse destroy sincerity, making it impossible to sustain the genuine admiration that heroes require.
Rousseau’s Substitutes for Heroes in a Corrupt Age
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Since modernity makes true heroes impossible, Rousseau offers two alternative models: Émile and Julie.
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Émile is raised for radical independence and self-sufficiency, not for glory or community.
- He is shielded from heroic literature as a child; as an adolescent, he reads Robinson Crusoe (with the slave-trading parts removed)—not to imitate Crusoe as a hero but to imagine himself in a situation of radical self-reliance, which gives him a nonsocial standard to resist social temptations.
- Émile is the modern cosmopolitan: he travels Europe not for its own sake but to learn which community is least corrupt for his family; his friendships are instrumental to that end.
- He participates in community out of enlightened self-interest (protecting his family) and duty, not out of love of glory—he is the best one can hope for in a corrupt age, though far inferior to a Spartan king.
- In the sequel, Émile’s limitations as a political leader are revealed: when leading a slave rebellion, his rational speech fails, and the rebellion succeeds only when national pride—an emotional, communal tie he cannot himself feel or invoke—takes over.
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Julie (from Julie, or the New Héloïse) is a “beautiful soul”—spontaneous, sensitive, compassionate, and magnetic, but not strong in the heroic sense.
- She falls in love against her parents’ wishes, is seduced, and later makes a respectable marriage—her life is not a model of virtue, but her expansiveness of personality draws people to her irresistibly.
- Her power comes not from strength of soul but from compassion—she feels along with others, and that shared feeling creates a form of identification and social bond.
- Compassion is tricky: it can make one want to flee from suffering, or it can become a source of pride (“I can help, they cannot”), or it can be felt as condescension by the sufferer—but at its best, it extends one’s being into others the way a hero’s strength does, through a different means.
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Both Émile and Julie share a deep compassion for human suffering, and Rousseau presents the nuclear family built on love and mutual respect as the bridge from individual life to social life.
- This is Rousseau’s alternative route to community in a world without heroes: not through strength of soul and emulation of great men, but through love, compassion, and the social feelings that can conceivably have political consequences.
- It is a more modest, less political form of community—but perhaps the only viable one in the modern age.