By joining virtue with reason of state, Rousseau reveals the necessity to sustain his republicanism, and his proposal for a democratic political order, with a governance that strengthen the capacities for the self-government of people and individuals. Indeed, Rousseau does not intend raison d’état as a derogatory or cunning politics, but as the knowledge of all the rules concerned with the government of a population through policy, administration, economy. ![]() But legislators and politicians should also yield on “reason of state”, as a complex science of politics, in order to set up the condition by which a political community can promote political equality and good government. ![]() And on that relies Rousseau’s republicanism. Legislators and wise politicians, in fact, should rely on their capacity to provide people with good laws and customs, convincing them to join the political society. Within the limits of this short contribution, I will discuss the above mentioned paradox by focusing on a different line of reasoning in Rousseau’s thought. In this sense, Rousseau has to balance self-education and state government in order to draw the lines for making individuals a people upon which to establish a legitimate sovereign political order. This seems to lead to an apparent paradox in Rousseau’s theory: on the one side, it is the purpose of a legislator, and of the State, to promote the moral transformation of individuals through law, civism and education on the other side, it is only from those individuals that a just and legitimate state can be established through a moral pact. On the converse, it is the purpose of wisdom, and the true aim of politics, to make of a disperse multitude of men a “People”, and a community of citizens. Moreover, if a just and legitimate political community can only be established by individuals, but it is only by the art of few wise people that the promises of freedom and justice implied in the social contract can be realized. I will therefore focus on the legislator as that figure that, through persuasion and “sound” discourses, not only proposes laws, but establishes moeurs and shared social meanings in the very first moment of the joining together of men in a political community. In this sense, Rousseau’s theory on language and music is a reflection on the “moral effects” of melody which has relevant implication for his politics. Language is conventional and its conventionality is the result of a development in communication that was driven by human search for perfectibility and pity both these imply mutual recognition and cooperation as well as conflicts and divisions. ![]() ![]() By focusing on the Essay on the origin of languages, I will discuss Rousseau’s belief that music, education and politics, can enhance man’s moral freedom through the establishment of a “melodic” language of wisdom, capable of healing the wounds of moral corruption and social divisions. When placed in the narrower frame of a critique of theories of representation, Rousseau’s philosophy stands within a neo-classical approach to language and music that, during the Eighteenth century, uttered a strong critique of representation in the fields of knowledge, arts and politics.
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