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Emile: Or, On Education

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A natural education is one that "consists not in teaching the child many things, but never letting anything but accurate and clear ideas enter his brain."

Rousseau, in his longing to return to the state of nature, ventures to raise a natural man. Emile (or On Education) is the Corner Stone to Rousseau's "Discourse on the Sciences and Arts" & "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality." Rousseau's imaginary pupil, Emile, will "get his lessons from nature and not from men." Rousseau is not concerned with teaching Emile numerous facts, but with instructing the child to be able to think for himself.

Emile will have one mentor, Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is Rousseau's modern natural man. Crusoe is "on his island, alone, deprived of the assistance of all the arts, providing nevertheless for his subsistence." Rousseau goes to extremes to create a childhood that is free from habit, and one that provides Emile with the greatest adaptability to his surroundings, whatever they may be, for the rest of his life.

Rousseau's ideas are profound. Though he is far less well known than Marx, Nietzsche, and or Weber, to name a few, his ideas are the basis for the philosophies' of these men, who have in return influenced society. Along with Rousseau's Two Discourses, Emile is a must read. (I recommend reading the Discourses before Emile.) However, do not expect Rousseau to tell you everything because he does not spend an extensive time explaining all of the minute details, especially those regarding the first few years of Emile's life. Rather, he says, "if you have to be told everything, do not read me."

If you are interested in the foundation of thought for many of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, then read Emile. (I recommend the Allan Bloom translation.)

Heersink's distillation of the "essence" of Rousseau's Emile is so bazaar, tendentious and misleading that I am left to wonder whether he has read a single page of the book that he finds so tedious and banal. Nature, for Rousseau, is not the vast open spaces of the great outdoors; it is rather, the totality of created beings such as they exist prior to their being worked over by human artifice, and, in particular, the inner, inborn nature of human beings before it has been deflected, distorted, and perverted through their reciprocal, social interaction. In Emile, Rousseau sets out to show how, even in the midst of the corrupting forces of society, it might still be possible to raise a healthy, fully-actualized, harmonious individual; a human being whose inner nature is developed and realized in its potentialities. Such an education is not possible under the instruction of trees, bears and geysers, but only through the most exquisite attentiveness of the tutor, who, through constant vigilance, tries to develop the mind and sentiments of his pupil without giving a foothold to the social passions that make children vain, greedy, manipulative, and deceitful. This requires, above all, that at every moment, the child should learn to judge its actions by their natural effects, and feel its own will limited by the resistance of the nature without it, rather than by the will of other human beings. For whereas the child will submit easily to the force of nature, it will do everything to overcome the force that oppose it once it regards them as expressions of a human will.
I disagree with Rousseau about many things, even about the most fundamental issues. Most of all, I do not think that what it means to be human should be thought limited by a pre-existing, and pristine human nature. Yet I also believe that, now more than ever, we must take Rousseau seriously, and read him rigorously - not merely as an antiquarian piece, but as a profound challenge to our conceits and myopias. There can be no true democracy without citizens who are free not only in the eyes of the law, but in their own eyes; yet we cannot recognize others as free, unless we have eyes for our own freedom. This demands nothing less than a liberal education. In place of this, we have entrusted our children to those whose seek only their own gain and who profit by tapping into human desires, dissociating them from the whole, and crystalizing them into a form in which it seems as though they could be satisfied through some given commodity. As a result, we have become, in the words of my friend, the social critic Dan A. Leythorn, "a nation of slaves - to our desires, to our whims, to money, to power, to each other"

*update: please note that this review is/was for the NuVision Hardcover that is erroneously linked with the Basic Books paperback--if anyone knows how to get Amazon to unlink these books please help!

This NuVision is just a plain public domain re-publishing--probably on demand-- of the Foxley translation from 1911. There are no notes or introduction or anything. If you just want a copy of Rousseau's Emile without concern for edition, translation, etc. you'd be crazy to spend this kind of money when the same or better editions are available at a fraction of the cost.

If you want a quality printing with excellent introduction and notes as well as index you need the Allan Bloom translation(Basic Books 1979). It has a light blue cover. And it's much cheaper than what they're asking for this thing. Curiously it doesn't come up unless you search "Rousseau Emile Allan Bloom"; the Bloom translation is also available in an expensive scholarly edition (collected works of Rousseau) that comes up with just "Allan Bloom Emile".

A deceptively simple text. Rousseau has distanced himself from the Social Contract and the concept of the noble savage here, and has decided to illustrate the principles of an education that will bring about `natural man.' Emile is his guinea pig, whom he allows to grow on his own accord. His governor and nurse impose nothing on him, and he is allowed to build and explore without any external authority, eventually choosing a vocation and place in society.

For Rousseau, the most important property of modern society that is inimical to man is the exertion of authority and power over the subject. Emile is allowed to grow and flourish without the arbitrary directives of parent/authority figures. And as always, Rousseau's prose is light and wonderful. He falls short in the section on Emile's counter-part Sophie, who embodies practically all of the sexist facets of enlightenment prejudice, but this remains a very great work of political theory in spite of its shortcomings and frequent meanderings.

The Basic Books edition, Allan Bloom translator, is still in print and is far and away the best edition available for the money. The Amazon page gives the impression that the book is out of print. This is not true.

A remarkable book by a remarkable philosopher. Amazon was ready willing and able to provide it to me. George Whitney

Rousseau has a reputation as a hypocrite and a left wing nut job. He certainly didn't practice what he preached but his writings cannot be reduced to serve mere partisan purposes. Everyone can learn something from this book. Allan Bloom does a great job of turning this book into good English. The translation is intended to be quite literal, but nonethess reads very smoothly. Highly recommended.

it is in a great condition, however it came little bit late than i expected.
but still i am very happy with my purchase. thank you.

If you want to know how people raised their children over a hundred years ago, read this book. It's interesting for what it is, but it's very intense and negative in my opinion. It's great for research and to acquire insight on how people thought long ago, but besides that, it's a tough read. I read often, but with this book, I have to read each paragraph a few times to get all the underlying meanings. It's a good secondary book to read periodically while in the middle of other books.

Three works mark Rousseau: Confessions, Social Contract, and Inequality. "Emile" is a tedious tome that espouses at great, if not banal, length the issues he has more adequately and eloquently addressed in his major works. The premise is simple: Let nature be the educator. Imagine a kid dropped in the middle of Yosemite National Park, revisit him at age 20, and the kid will know everything he needs to know. Now, you know the substance of the book. If you think nature alone without a preceptor or teacher other than nature alone is sufficient, you'll be bored with the redudancies and polemics against "this" and "that" institution that has developed over the centuries. The core of the book is a vain effort to show that these institutions have corrupted the student, and ergo, society. If only nature could be allowed to "speak," so to speak, then men everywhere would be better off. Right!