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(AP)POINTINGTHE CANON
ROUSSEAU’S LhfILE, VISIONS OF THE STATE, AND EDUCATION
Bernadette Baker
Dept of Curriculum and Instruction
University of Wisconsin-Madson

Jean-JacquesRousseau’s Emile, ou de I’Education (Emile, or on Education)has

been described by Rousseau scholars in latter twentieth century English-language
philosophy as an educational classic. In 1995 Robert Wokler argued that together

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with Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Kant among his contemporaries, Rousseau
had exerted the most profound influence on modern European intellectual history,
“perhaps even surpassing anyone else of his day.’’ For Wokler Emile is “the most

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significant work on education after Plato’s Republic.”‘ Earlier in 1977, Allan Bloom
questioned why Emile had not been the subject of analysis in philosophy relative to
the rest of Rousseau‘s work, for “Emileis truly a great book, one that lays out for the
first time and with the greatest clarity and vitality the modern way of posing the
problems of psychology.” Bloom also saw krnile as “one of those rare total or synoptic
books ...a book comparable to Plato’s Republic, which it is meant to rival or
super~ede”~ and argued that Rousseau himself was a t the source of a new tradition:
“Whatever else Rousseau may have accomplished, he presented alternatives avail-
able to man more comprehensively and profoundly and articulated them in the form
which has dominated discussion since his time.’I3Even Peter Gay’s earlier commen-
tary on John Locke and education in 1964 could not escape this central positioning
of the text. The significance of Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education is weighed in
relation to its impact on Rousseau‘s Ernile. For Gay, the latter is “probably the most
influential revolutionary tract on education that we have.”4
By the latter half of the twentieth century Rousseau’s Emile had been well and
truly canonized. Its importance to the philosophy of education operates now as a
given, even in English-speaking contexts. This canonization was achieved earlier in
the United States, though, and in different disciplines, particularly at the crossroads
of the emergent history of education and teacher preparation fields. By the late-
nineteenth century, for example, Rousseauls Emile was considered a standard part
of formal teacher training insofar as it was deemed necessary to the hstorical study

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of pedagogical techniques. The focus on hmile for its techniques andits canonization
in educational literature by the turn of the twentieth century was not a predictable

1. Robert Wokler, Rozzssenu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

2. Allan Bloom, ”Introduction,” in Jean-JacquesRousseau, Emile or on Education (NewYork: Basic Books,
1977), 3-4.

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3 . lbid., 28.
4. Peter Gay, fohn Locke on EdUCQtiofl [New York Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columhia
University, 1964), 15.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY f Winter 2001 / Volume 51 f Number I

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outcome, however. This essay questions the givenness of the process of canonization
by examining the historical winnows and sways that repositioned the book and its
relevance, particularly in the United States across the nineteenth century. AS one
way of gaining purchase on krnile’s undulating fortunes, the analysis focuses on the
visions of the state that conferred acceptability or debarred Emile’s importance in
synoptic views of education. The significance of state visions and canonization as
intertwined processes will be brought into view through an examination of the
differential reception and framing of &milefrom the 1760s to the late 1800s. In
tracing the controversial and shifting evaluation of its messages, krnile’s admittance
to a late-nineteenth-century educational canon in the United States can be under-
stood as anything but evolutionary, gradual, or commonsensical. The analysis will
indicate how shifting ideas as to what a “state” was and shifting ideas as to what
education had to do with state-formation realigned the conditions through which
Rousseau and his krnilels relevance to an educational canon could be argued.
The documentary sources here are threefold: prefaces or introductions to new
editions of kmile, critiques of the text, and synoptic history of education texts that
explicitly refer to &milein those periods when new English language editions were
not printed. These sources do not include the variety of ways in which it might be
argued that Rousseau’s Emile was of influence on other educators such as Johann
Bernard Basedow, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel, the latter two
whose works were particularly significant in nineteenth-century early childhood
and elementary education in the United States. The aim is not to discern Rousseau’s
influence on nineteenth-century education, other writers, or educational programs,
but almost the reverse -how the conditions of receptivity, particularly the state of
the state, have influenced the “place” or reading, if any, given to Rousseau’s Emile.
This focus is helpful to understanding shifts in the relation that the state and
education in which Emile often became unexpectedly embroiled, ranging from the
conflicts surrounding child-rearing for a Church-focused ethics in the 1760s to the
”practical” problem of teacher training in a Republic in the 1890s. The mapping of
the uneven reception of Rousseau’s Emile across timespace is thus one strategy for
reading among many that provides a window onto linkages between canonization,
visions of the state, and proposals for organizing the young as the future.5

5. This method has been made available by what has opened up in latter twentieth-century social science.
I am not talking here of shifts between original meanings and later meanings given dmile, hut of arguments
that Emile has been used to illustrate in dfferent timespaces. Broader methodological questions arise in
relation to the use of comparative literary techniques; for example, regarding present discourse that might

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enable such distinctions to be drawn between timespaces in which the act of comparison becomes
available. These debates are not the focus here although there is an obvious argument that all of the readings
of bile arc “my” readmgs anyway. There are many rejoinders that problematize the “my” in such lines
of reasoning and perhaps one of the most effective is Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language,
Countermemory, and Pructice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 19771, 113-38.

BERNADETTE BAKER is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Teachers Education

Buildmg, 225 N. Mills St., Madison, WI 53706. Hcr primary areas of scholarship are the history and
philosophy of education, curriculum history and theory, and the implications of “post” literatures for
curriculum.
BAKER zyxwvutsrqp
zy ANALYTICS
OF THE STATE

It was once commonplace in analyses of nationalism and “modern Europe” to

Rousscau’s $mile 3

portray the state as an artifact, a thing that can be pointed to in the form of concrete
institutions, bureaucracies, passports, and set offices and officials. Even the act of
labeling, such as “Europe, “European nations,” and the ”United States” would

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seemingly suggest the obviousness of an artifactual rendition of the state indebted
to territorial boundaries and bureaucratic structures. More recently, however, the
problematization of various concepts that seem to bear a family resemblance has
been undertaken; the differences between the terms ”the state,” “the nation,” ”the
nation-state,’’ “nationalism,“ “modem,” and “modernity” have been debated.
Johann Arnason has noted one effect of such problematization - the shift from an
artifactual rendition of the nation to an interpretive one: “As soon as it is admitted
that the nation has to be analyzed as an interpretive construct rather than an
objective structure, the theory of the nation becomes inseparable from that of
nationalism.” Their connection for Arnason is in part that ”nationalism defines and
defends the nation in relation to the state as a given, desireable, or recoverable form
of political organization.”hAs Arnasonnotes, however, the nation has been variously
interpreted as an interpretive construct, ranging from positing the nation as the
emergence of a new kind of state (“political organization”) to regarding it as
something that emerged as distinct from “the state” altogether (through ethnic,
cultural, and economic forces that overrode traditional forms of ”political organiza-
tion”).
It has also been commonplace to speak of “the state” in timespaces far-removed
from an era of “global nationalism’’ and the redefinition of terms that are constitu-
tive of it. There are analyses of “the state” in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome

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and so forth.7What, then, is “the state?”For the purposes of this analysis the state
refers not to one particular form of organization, such as the nation-states formative
of “modern Europe,” but to a more general phenomenon of human organization that
exceeds the historically restricted range of the term “political organization.” The
state is not to be understood as a pathological, underlying, or pre-existent structure,
but it is to be understood as a condition. It is the conditions that make possible
visions of the form that human relations take and through which certain methods for
getting things done seem to be forged. The state becomes a broader term for multiple

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6. Johann Arnason, “Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity,” in Global Culture: Nationalism,
Globalization, and Modernity (London: Sage, 19901, 230.

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7. LyndaRobinson, Social Stratification and the Statein Ancieni Mesopotamia, 1984;Patriciawattenmaker,
Household and State in Upper Mesopotamia: Specialized Economy and the Social Uses of Goods in an
Early ComplexSociety (Washingt0nD.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1998);YaleFerguson and Richard
Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1996);Kathleen Freeman, God, Man, and State: Greek Concepts [Port Washington, N.Y., 1969; FranGois
Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the C:reek City-state (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995);Peter Charanis, Church and State in the Later Roman Empue: The Religious Policy of Anastasius
the First (Thessalonike: Kentron Vyzantinon Ereunon, 1974), 491-518; Harry MacLeod Curie, The
Individzzal and the State (London:Dent, 1973);and Martin Goodman, The State and Society in Roman
Galilee, A.D. 232-212 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983).
4 zyx
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forms of human organization while the term “nation” has more recently become a
1

dominant kind of interpretive construct for naming and theorizing those conditions.8

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Under this analytics of the state, the place of what is today referred to as religion or
theology is problematized Qfferently from positions that would draw a drscrete

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division between the religious state and the emergence of a secular state. This
dualism is jeopardized even in places that have historically claimed Church-state
distinctions in their laws and bureaucracies because the state is not simply an organ
or an office but a condition or series of conditions that suggest that certain offices
ought to exist and be separatedfrom the religious. Thus the state as it is being referred
to through the oeuvre of the reception of Rousseau’s &miledoes not grapple with the
collection and dstribution of taxes or the provision of public services as “its” main
focus. Rather, these things are effects that become noticeable in certain kinds of
states because the state refers to the conditions that are formative of the kinds of
dealings that humans can have with each other - recommendations for taxation,
civil service, and so on are symptomatic of how humans have proposed interhuman
relationships. The state, then, is inherently suggestive of the shifting meaning of
ethics - the conditions that are constitutive of human relations are also the
conditions that name the preferred discourse on relations as “religious,” “secular,”
or otherwise in a given timespace.
This analytics of the state assumes that there have been and are various kinds of
states that organize a field of human relations that are variously interpreted as
patterned, fluid, or both. Constructions of morality and systems for authorizing
things are unavoidably woven through human relations as well as proposals for new
forms of interaction that educational reform often addresses. Recognizing that there
are different ideas about the ethics of human relations inherent to visions of states,
or to recommendations for new ones, does not permit of absolutist judgments as to
which conditions are better and best, even though that has often become a focus of
naming states as nations. Rather, the state as the conditions that make plausible
visions of human relations and methods for getting things done is a generic term that
paradoxically elides absolutist decisions about a hierarchy of kinds. This orientation
to the state opens to view the difficulty of language, for I will be deploying in

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unproblematized ways the names of nation-states such as the United States, France,
and England in the analysis, while investigating how the imagery of nations was
mediated by other images that allowed such naming and differentiation. These
complexities are not the focus of this essay’s examination of Emile, however. In the
case of Rousseau’s Emile and its differential reception, the analytics of the state
described above and the undecidability of progress in regard to the state’s different
forms is crucial in a different way; without it, one might fail to see, for example, how
8. How the state differs from the term culture is an interesting issue arising from the analytics of the state
offered here. The state is incorporative of those things frequently assumed to be cultural artifacts, such as
the four f’s-fashion, food, festivals, and fables. The four f‘s frequently make up elementary social studies
curricula on “foreign cultures.” Attention to the four f‘s is enabled by the conditions that give rise to them
as commonsensical objects. This essay’s focus on the statc as an ethical concept suggestive of the manner
of human relations (including systems for authorizing things) and ways of getting things done delimits the
analysis away from fashion, food, festivals, and fables, however, and toward what different authors have
proclaimed as ”moral” and “proper” to the organization of human affairs in education.
BAKER zyxwvutsrqp
Rousseau’s proposal in Paris in 1762 for a civil society peopled by followers of a
“natural religion,” and how recommendations for training teachers in the late 1800s
Rousseau’s Emile 5

in “the U.S.,” were comments directed toward different ethical versions of the state,
yet amid a similar faith in education to deliver the desired Utopia. Thus, the visions

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and versions of the state that have shaped the reception of Rousseau’s need to
be understood at the outset less at the level of an artifact and more as a condition, a
relation, and a proposal.
THEUNEVEN RECEPTION OF EMTLE IN EUROPE

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The range of responses to Emile across Europe was linked to different visions of
the ethical state. In some responses the vision of the state resulted in the de-
canonization and debarring of the book while in others alternative visions enabled
the book to be upheld. Much of the reaction took place regardless of Rousseau’s
“own“ framing of Emile.An impression of his framing can be drawn from his letters
surroundmg its publication in 1762 and his Confessions. The initial title for 6rnile
was Treatise on Education although Rousseau did not settle on that title. He overtly
positioned the book’s audience, stating that it was directed to “les sages” (thewise)
and argued that it was much more than a treatise on education, for it was a
philosophical inquiry. It was not written as a manual for parents or tutors, nor as an
educational textbook. Rousseau described &mile as his best work, as that which
ought to have been the history of the species, and asserted that it was part of a whole
series that was begun by his First and Second Discourses in which the unnaturalness
of the arts and sciences were denounced and the unnatural evolution of civil Man out
of a state of nature was criticized re~pectively.~
For Rousseau, the most significant part of the text was the Profession of Faith by
the SavoyardPriest, whichhe argued couldhave stood onits ownas a separate book.1°
Indeed, the publication of the first two parts of Emile in Paris revitalized his efforts
to have the Profession of Faith and conclusion published separately in Holland. In
Holland, the censorship rules were different and Rousseau did not want the Profes-
sion of Faith “mutilated.” The lack of success of this effort saw the latter half of 6mile
also published in Paris.
Rousseau did not describe Emile as being centrally about children. While the
young orphan in the book, Emile, is raised to manhood by a tutor who at the end of

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the book is revealed to be Jean-Jacqueshimself, and even though the rearing advice
appears somewhat chronologically, focusing on children in general in the opening
9. First Discourse refers to Jean-JacquesRousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts: (First discourse) and
Polemics, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and
Christopher Kelly, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 2 (Hanover:University Press of New England,
1992).Second Discourse refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second
discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly,
and Terence Marshall, in Masters and Kelly, The Collected Writings of Rousseou, vol. 3 .
10. Whether one describes the Professions of Faith’s speaker as a Priest or Vicar depends on how one
interprets Rousseau’s target. Given the location of his writing in primarily Catholic France it seems more
likely his critique, while wide-ranging in regard to organized religion, is put into the mouth of a Catholic
priest in Emile. His subsequent fugitive status and rapid departure from France might also suggest that
regardless of who it was directed at, it was received negatively by Catholic royalty and clergy in France who
saw themselves as the target.
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and then shifting to the specificity of raising Emile, Rousseau described the text more
broadly as being about the regeneration of society. Given that he saw the Profession
1

of Faith as the key part of the narrative, education could not be divorced from the

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questions of what constituted religion, reason, and nature that the Savoyard Priest
addressed. In the Profession of Faith Rousseau places into the mouth of the Priest (as
reported by the tutor) a series of rationalizations that indicate a preference for a
natural and direct communication with God through the conscience as opposed to
through an interlocutor. In a natural religon, where miracles, sacred texts, clergy,
and rituals are disposed of, God’s existence is rationally deduced from the observa-
tion of the continuous operation of force on matter, not revealed through a cataclys-
mic event that might only happen to the chosen few.
No matter how Rousseau saw the book himself, to whom he addressed it or how
he framed it as part of a larger history and critique of humanity, its immediate
reception in continental Europe focused primarily on what might be called today its
theological arguments. These theological aspects were not, however, hscrete pages
within the text. Rather, with the Profession of Faith being its key part, and the part
often pirated, the entirety of the educational program described was inescapably
connected to Rousseau’s problematization of current theological habits. Receptions
within France, Italy, and England are just three examples of how an education-
religion-state nexus was differentially construed around krnile, complicating any
judgment of the place it could be given as a classic.
The education-religion-state nexus did not escape Rousseau’s supporters or
detractors in France. &milewas published in Paris in May 1762 and pirated in Lyons.
Those who had heard about or read part of the manuscript before its release were
forced to engage in secretive maneuvers and dexterous measures either to print the
book altogether or to claim distance from knowing about it in advance.” Rousseau
notesin his Confessions also that the author‘s copies he sent to friends elicitedmixed
responses, some coveted and measured and fewer in the form of outright admira-
tion.lZThe nervousness of these responses can be attributed to the inseparability of
that which might be referred to as Church and “official bureaucracy” today. In Paris,
any criticism of the Church was a criticism of the state insofar as the conditions that
established the plausibility of a Catholic Parisianparlement and the kind of human

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1 1 . Rousseau’s friend, Charles Duclos, for instance, on hearing Rousseau read a draft of the Profession of
Faith to him, anticipated thc backlash that it would generate. He asked Rousseau “Well, Citizen, is this a
part of the book they are printing in Paris?” to which Rousseau replied “Yes, and it ought to be printed at
the Louvre by orders of the King.” Duclos’s chilling response, “I agree, but please do not tell anybody that
you have read it to me,” failed to shake Rousseau’sfaith in the “enlightened Parisianparlement” who would
surely not persecute a “poor invalid” such as himself for writing “the truth.” Also, Chretien-Guillamc de
Lamoignon de Malesherbes helped secure the publication of Emile and then distanced himself from it by
claiming to have never been involved once it became banned. Jean-JacquesRousseau, The Confessions and
Correspondence, Including the Letters to Maleshexbes, ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger Masters, and Peter
Stillman (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995).
12. Some colleagues did not sign their name to their letters of thanks to him, others claimed not to have
had time toread it, and a few otherspraised him for his efforts, particularly what they saw as the courageous
expressions in the Profession of Faith. He also suggested, however, that never had any of his books received
so much private verbal acclamation and so little public and written praise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The
Confessions.
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relations (and God-human relations) that one could have were rhetorically insepa-
rable from Church doctrine.
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Rousseau’s Emile 7

Despite support from some colleagues, and even within the Royal family, the
most immediate and dramatic response to Smile’s publication in 1762 (the month
after his The Social Contract)is fairly well-known: Rousseau’s flight from arrest and
his subsequent fugitive status.13The “official” (inother words, Church) commentary
was based on the recognition that there might be something available beyond present
theological habits through which to organize human and God-human relations.
Rousseau’s vision of an ideal civil society as that which ought actually to function
separately from traditional organized religion was not directed toward adjudicating
Catholic/Protestant debates (which he had already been asked to enter into), but
toward sidestepping them in favor of a new organization of human relations justified
outside of revealed religion a1t0gether.l~Rousseau was able to imagine a scene in
which a collective General Will, internalized as part of the rearing process, would be
the authorizing structure for getting anything done where humans lived in shared
space. This would bypass appeal to a priest or to a prince for doing things, for while
General Will was that situation in which “I am obeying only myself,” it was also the
pure and direct “voice of God,“ unmediated and shared within the adult male
populace. This meant that Rousseau could imagine humans interacting on the basis
of something other than existing forms of organized religion that had installed
hierarchies of proximity to God. He could propose an alternative “civil society” and
blueprint for education on the basis of something else that did not require religious
experts or intermediaries. The split between Church doctrine and the methods for
getting things done had been made more explicit by his imaginings, and turned his
book into a black market bestseller.
Smile had made overt an imagined future in which the organization of subjec-
tivity was no longer necessarily receptive to Christian “props.” This possibility
seemingly opened onto an abyss that was recognizable (becauseit was available for
discussion) and yet obscure and threatening. Smile’s perceived denigration of
standard theology and criticism of fundamental Christian doxology incited a ner-
vousness over what would take their place. If the field of ethics and morality had been
previously organized by revelational religions, then how would people treat each
other without them? Emile was interpreted as posing a threat to current arrange-

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ments of authority and what their dismantling might invite, namely a substitution
of hfferent systems for authorizing things, and to a welfare reasoning about human
morality. Even Rousseau’s Dutch publisher was nervous about the absence of such
props, arguing that if ”the people” no longer had faith in the miraculousness of
miracles then there would be seemingly no need for belief in God or an afterlife (the
implicit connection being that such beliefs prevented “the people’, from doing harm

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13. Raymond Trousson, lenn-[occpes Rousseau (Paris: Hatchett, 199.1). I thank Francpis Tochon for
pointing out this reference and for discussion of its contcnts.
14. Rousseau was asked to write a letter protesting the arrest of Jcan Calas, a Protestant man who had
murdered his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. Rousseau did not write a letter but signed
ageneral petition for Calas’s release. Calas was tortured and publicly executed. Sce Mauricc Cranston, The
Noble Savage: Jean-JacquesRoussenu, 175G1762 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 19911,322.
8 EDUCATIONAL THEORY WINTER

to themselves and others for immediate and worldly gain).I5In Rousseau’s Second
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Discourse such justifications for maintaining organized religion among other things
are treated skeptically, that is, as leaving open superfluities to the rich while the
starving multitude lacked necessities. In Emile, they left open to the Clergy generally
the material comforts and immediate spiritual relations with God that were denied
the followers.
Nervousness over and criticism of Emile were not isolated from knowledge of
Rousseau’s other works, nor did such emanations come from one corner. For
example, earlier in the year of 1762 The Social Contract, which had been printed in
Holland and not positively received in Geneva, had been banned in France. While
Rousseau’s Dutch publishers thought that The Social Contract would be less widely
read than Emile because of the former’s scholarly nature, the chapter indicating the
limitations of Christianity as the ideal basis for the organization of a civil society
catalyzed a dxcontent in some quarters favoring a different kind of Utopia, a
discontent that Emile would further aggravate.
Even where criticisms were leveled on several grounds, however, they were
ultimately tied to the kind of state that would eventuate if the proposals for
childrearing were ever implemented as Rousseau described them. What kind of
Christian citizen and man would result from such a program of education, where the
Bible is not studied or read until the “teenage” years? What kind of animalistic
behavior would be displayed if there were not priests to hear a confession? Dissatis-
faction with the seemingly devious pedagogical techniques of the tutor during
childhood (addressednot at managing original sin but in anticipation of a particular
or selfish Will) and shock at the overtly sexual content (such as allowing Emile to
attend bawdy drinking establishments as part of his Grand Tour into manhood)could
be expressed because such proposals culminated in the radical natural religion
introduced as part of Emile’s education during adolescence (when his faculty of
reason was finally emerging, in Rousseau’s view). In official, negative critiques of
Emile, the citizen and the Christian were inseparable and while they could be named
or listed as though discrete from the “man,” they could not be separate in a “real”
man. For instance, the Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, wrote
a formal response twenty-seven chapters long in order to point out the book to the
reprobation of the faithful. The plan of education “far from being in accordance with
Christianity is not fitted to form citizens, or even men.’’ The Archbishop concluded
that Rousseau was motivated by a spirit of insubordination and revolt and con-
demned the book as
containing an abominable doctrine, calculated to overthrow natural law, and to destroy the
foundations of the Christian religion; establishing maxims contrary to Gospel morality; having
a tendency to disturb the peace of empires, to stir up subjects to revolt against their sovereign;
as containing a great number of propositions respectively false, scandalous, full of hatred toward

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the Church and its ministers, derogating respect due to Holy Scripture and the traditions of the

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Church, erroneous, impious, blasphemous, and heretical.16

15. Ibid.
16. Quoted in Jules Steeg, “Introduction” in Emile, or Concerning Education: Extracts Containing the
Principal Elements of Pedagogy Found in the First Three Books (Boston:D.C. Heath and Company, 18831,
2. This book will be cited as “Steeg” in the text for all subsequent references.
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zyx Rousseau’s Emile 9

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What cannot be separated in the Archbishop’s line of reasoning is the religious
doer from the deed and Church doctrine from governance, human relations, and
techniques of living. To destroy the foundations of Christianity is to be immoral,
which meant to have a tendency to disturb empires and revolt against a sovereign,
which was to be scandalous toward the Church, Holy Scripture, and tradition, and
therefore heretical -one cannot be a citizen without being a Christian and, in this
case, a Catholic one. Upon its publication in May 1762, Emile therefore became
framed in ”official” local commentaries such as the Archbishop’s as destroying the
patterning of identities that linked Christian to citizen and to the maintenance of
present structures of authority and relations in a given territory. The message against
institutionalized religion that the Profession of Faith was thought to proffer incited
a desire to not only bum the book, but quite possibly its author, or more likely to
break him on the wheel in a public execution after his arrest and interrogation. On
June 9, 1762, the Parisian parlement affirmed an indictment of Emile which was
presented to the Grande Chambre by the Procurator-General and Attorney-General.
The indictment declared the book to be subversive of religion, morals, and decency,
claiming that it was seditious, impious, and sacrilegious. The Court decreed that the
author should be promptly arrested, imprisoned, and interrogated at the Conciergerie
and that all copies of the book were to be seized, shredded, and burned by the public
executioner. By the time the officers came to arrest him in Montlouis Rousseau had
fled toward Switzerland, notwithstanding the many previous efforts by colleagues to
get him to leave, preferably for Eng1and.l’ The ceremonial shredding and burning of
,&tile on June 11 coincided with a series of interdictions in other territories,
including the Netherlands where it was also banned. In Geneva, where The Social
Contract was suppressed as well as &mile, another warrant of arrest for the
“blasphemer” was issued.
While such interdxtions may have been the overwhelming “official response”
to Emile in French, Genevese, and Dutch territories, there were quite different
reactions to its publication elsewhere, even where there was disagreement with its
major tenets. There was only one negative critique of Emile that Rousseau thought
worth reading in its entirety and it was that by Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil(1718-
1802)of Italy. Gerdil did not encourage the arrest or execution of Rousseau despite
his profound disagreement with what he saw as the book’s shaky foundations. Gerdd
was a lifelong member of the Barnabite religious order. He was elected a Cardinal in
1798 and in all likelihood would have been Pope except that old age kept him from
it. He became well-known in the latter half of the 1700s as the most eminent Italian

17. It was almost too late that Rousseau took seriously rumors regarding a warrant for hls arrest and the

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compromising position it had put his friends in, noting i n the Confessions that he had missed the early
warning signs and had placed too much faith in those who secured the book’s publication, only to later
denounce it. His friend the Comtesse de Boufflers, for mstance, offered to make arrangements for his hiding
and protection with contacts in England. Rousseau, however, could not bear to go to England, arguing that
he had never loved England or the English, and the eloquence of the Comtesse, far from overcoming his
reluctance, seemed to strengthen it. See Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage, chap. 8 for a fuller account.
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disciple of Malebranche, the Oratarian leader [ 1638-1715),as well as for his critiques
of Locke.ls
In 1764, Gerdil published a critique of Emile that was to advance his reputation
beyond Italy and beyond a contestation of Loclte’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding.In his Reflexions sur l a Thdorie et la Pratique de l’education, contre
les Principes de T. -1.Rousseau (Reflectionson the Theory and Practice of Education,
against the Principles of 1.-I. Rousseau], which focused on Rousseau’s political,
religious, and educational writings, Gerdil argued that “the purpose of The Social
Contract is the universal overturning of the civil order; the purpose of Ernire is to
prepare minds for this through total revolution in ways of thinking.” Granting
Rousseau’s eloquence and “brilliance of colouring” as a writer, Gerdil insisted that
Jean-Jacques‘ clinging to supposedly uncorrupted “nature” would produce “bad
Christians and bad citizens.” Rousseau’s supposed “natural man” was for Gerdil
”the most factitious [being]that has ever existedin the mind of any philosopher.” He
went further to suggest that “no one today has seen a man detached from every social
institution; no one can say what he is.” Despite the “persuasiveness” of Rousseau‘s
“blinding” eloquence, in Gerdil’s view, the citizen of Geneva‘s thoughts amounted
to:
contempt for all revealed religion, and for Christianity in particular ...; a revolt against all
legitimate authority;. ..a false indulgence in not reprimanding the faults arising from children’s
natural liberty; a falser determination not to reason with them, and to cultivate their minds by
any of the studies suitable to their age - such are the fruits of this new plan for education.”
Gerdil further countered Rousseau’s prescriptions for rearing Emile by using
some of Rousseau’s own favorite weapons against him. If Rousseau alone was right
Gerdil argued, then, Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Bacon, and FCnelon
knew nothing about human nature or suitable education. He ends the Reflexions
with a paragraph whose literary effectiveness Rousseau himself acknowledged: ”M.
Rousseau is opening a new career. Men will no longer be depraved by arbitrary
institutions, they will no longer be terrified by the importunate threats of religion;
they will no longer be fatigued by studies which are so remote from their nature.
What chimeras! What visions!”20Gerdil’s concern, then, was not hrectly for the
protection of human relations as patterned around a Catholic Parisian parlement,
but it was for the quality of “the state” nonetheless. kmile is rejected on the basis that
its natural religion would not make a good Christian because it would prepare the

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18. In his earlier criticisms of Locke, The Immateriality of the Soul, Demonstrated against Locke and
Defence of ihe Sentiment of Father Malebranche against this Philosopher, published in 1747-48, Gerdil
defended the principle doctrines of Malebranche arguing, for example, that God governed the universe
through consent, through uniform gencral Wills (volontes generales), not through ad hoc miraculous
volontes particulikres (particular Wills).Human beings were for Gerdil only the occasional causes of their
own acts while God was the true cause. In God, one was to see all things, not in Lockean sense-perception.
Loclre’s questioning and muddying of the natural immortality of the soul was rejected as was Locke‘s
suggestion that on this point it was onlyrevelation and not reason that could offer certainty. Patrick Riley,
“Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 41.
19. Ibid., 41-42.
20. Ibid., 42
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minds of the young to overturn an existing order on the basis of a factitious
Rousscau’s Emile

alternative that could never be returned to: there was no proof of a state of nature in
11

the past and because all of Rousseau‘s criticisms and proposals hinged on the
portrayal of that state, the entire system was compromised. Rousseau’s new plan
would not therefore make a good man let alone a good Christian citizen because of
the impossibility, the chmera as Gerdil calls it, in thinking that a fraudulent
historical narrative could actually drive a reform directed against ”legitimate
authority.” Even if such a state of nature had existed the current “state” would itself

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mitigate against the effort to implement a different kind, as would the true nature of
a child as Gerdil inscribed it, making the Rousseauean plan for education an
unworkable mess.
At the other end of the critical spectrum came a supportive interpretation of
Rousseau’s &milepublished in England in 1763 and translated by the unnamed
translator of La Nouvelle Heloise (often titled Julie in English).z1What is important
to note about Emile in the English edition is how its preface supports Rousseau for
the same reason that French, Dutch, Genevese, and Italian commentators ddiked
it, that is, on the grounds of what it teaches about “the state” in the form of religious
doctrine. To an English audience, unlike a French one, suggests the translator of
Emilius and Sophia; or, a New System of Education, Rousseau could entrust a hope
for sensible reactions to his ideas. His retitled work in the translator’s hands might
give the impression of due and equal consideration to what Rousseau called “the
education of woman” and yet for Rousseau in the French version as in the English,
Sophia or Sophie is but a minor character whose education is introduced only at the
end of the book and circumscribed to make her fit for Emile. Equality in present-day
terms is not what the promotion of Sophia into the title represents. Rather, in the
framing of this translation the title portrays a concern for the final moral product, the
independent yet married man who has internalized General Will as part of some
larger whole. The new title positions Rousseau as having a desire for a greater unity,
providing a storyline that ends not with degradation but with the most beautiful and
perfect form of reproduction in the nuclear family. Rousseau in this reception
therefore is not described as a blasphemer or a colorful rhetorician or even a
philosopher, but as an author and writer. Emilius and Sophia is described not as a
treatise but as a work, a book, and a performance and its relevance to education at
large is portrayed via the subtitle as its provision of a new system, not as a form of
destruction.
The translator states that it is not necessary either to summarize or to commend
Rousseau’s work, for “his reputation, as a writer, speaks for itself.”22The caveat, ”as
a writer” suspended as it is between commas, is the implicit reference to what else

zy
might have been known about Rousseau’s reputation by the anticipated audience

21. @lie, ou La Nouvelle Helolse was Rousscau’s largest selling nonmusical work, more widely circulated
and translated than even his Emile.
22. Anon, “Preface by the Translator” in Jean-JacquesRousseau, Emilius and Sophia; or, a N e w System of
Education (London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 17631, iii.
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12 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y 2001 / VOLUME
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and is dexterously disarticulated from informing the interpretation that the transla-
tor wishes to encourage.23Atthis point the translator becomes boldly explicit for the
1

time and seemingly tactful from the present, indxating how ”certain efforts” which
are never named outright had been improperly engaged in to manage the impression
of the book before its release in English. In a Rousseau-like twist, the translator
points to how such efforts aligned with censorship are reminiscent of the need for
Protestantism, indicating in that one observation both the un-Englishness of such
efforts and the inherent hypocrisy of those who have benefited from previous actions
to overturn censorship strategies only now to re-engage them in a different form
against someone else.
The perception of the state here welcomes the book because the state is not
assumed to be a form of moral perfection. Rather, the “ideal state’’ would be
experimentally open to consideration of different versions of ethics. The translator
provides readers up front with the two main objections to the substantive content,
for instance, in order to rebutt them. The criticisms revolved around two seemingly
irreconcilable observations: that the book had been seen simultaneously as fantastical
and as not unique.24In regard to the former, the text’s fantastical nature would only
be revealed by time in the translator’s view and specifically through efforts to
implement the system of education. Therefore it cannot be considered a feasible form
of criticism at that moment owing to the lack of what might be called today “data”

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regarlng its practicability. The criticism of its lack of uniqueness is countered by
inhcating that there is indeed something recognizable as education, but that the
“many books” devoted to the ”topic of education” have not studied its “immediate

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objects” (presumablychildren)or understood them until now. The focus on the child
and the appearance of understanding the young is what the translator implies as
Rousseau’s unique contribution to the topic (not the “field”)of education.
An ethical vision of the state that sees human relations as still imperfect and as
open to being worked on thus welcomes fimile.The translator defends not just the
content but the style that Rousseau uses to urge such self-labor. “Notorious
paradoxes,” argues the translator, are inevitable when a writer attempts to distin-
guish between nature and habit at every turn. Further, Rousseau might be singular
in hls own opinion but this should not be surprising either if one is professedly and
deliberately differing from the opinion of the generality of mankind. All in all for the
translator, then, education is but “a matter of opinion” and hence there are already
received ideas about it. Without Rousseau’s effort to challenge those received
wisdoms and similar efforts to do the same in “science, politics, and religion,” the

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translator argues that one would be left with the “ignorance and barbarism” of the

23. Rousseau was criticized by Voltaire for a certain “hypocrisy” regarding children and this is believed to
have incited the part of the Confessions that discussed the turning over of his and Thkrkse’s five children
to the Foundling Hospital. Some of the letters composing the main body of the Confessions were written
alongside the kmi2e. Before the publication of the Confessions, however, other aspects of Rousseau’s
personal life were well-known and a source of controversy, including his status as a bachelor while living
with his “housemaid,” Therkse.
24. Ibid., v
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past. Rousseau’s Emilius and Sophia should therefore be read in regard to two
notions of perfectibility. The first is that human perfectibility has not been reached
13

and that Emilius and Sophia,far from being portrayed as simply destructive, is to be
received positively as an effort toward such perfectibility. The second is the
translator’s later claim that “human perfection is relative,” suggesting an openness
to how Rousseau‘s new system of education ought to be tried before being dis-
missed.25As a final recommendation and framing of the pages to come, the translator
highlights Rousseau’s courage and ,‘manly freedom” and argues that “free people”
(theEnglish in this case)ought to give him a candid hearing. Otherwise what remains
is the specter not just of ignorance and barbarism but of slavery, for slavery lies as a
point of contrast to nonsubjection of the mind. ”Protestant Republics,” if they rest
on the “rotten foundations” that Rousseau exposes, “must needs“ to pay attention
and the translator‘s final hope is therefore that England will be different in its hearing
of Rousseau’s book than elsewhere.26
In thevariety of responses considered above, six important themes emerge. First,
the state is envisaged in all of them as an ethical concept that names its ethics in
terms of recognized religions such as Christian, Protestant, Clergy, and Church.
Even where the reception of Emila differs dramatically, there is no parlement or
Republic distinct from the naming of religious loyalties and there is no conception
of human relations tolerable outside of those religions. Even the English translator
misses Rousseau’s challenge to his contemporaries, for Emile is framed as being in
service to a revision of the rotten foundations of Protestant Republics while it is a
book that would problematize that very descriptor.
Second, the extent to which religious doxology organized human relations and
methods for getting things done is brought into view by the Christian/man problem-
atic that arises in the critiques. It is not toward overtly economic factors that either
a dismissal or support for Em‘le is argued but in light of what kind of manhood one
would exhibit to others. For Gerdil, the good Christian and the good citizen were

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portrayed as a binary opposition in Rousseau’s works and as inseparable in Catholic
doctrine. Rousseau’s ”new plan for education” would create neither a good Christian
nor a good citizen for in disposing of the former Gerdil suggested that Rousseau had
similarly discounted any possibility for the latter. For the English translator,
however, the “manly freedom” and couragethat Rousseau has displayed in authoring
Emile is itself indicative of the possibility for separation -Rousseau was clearly no
longer a good Catholic but his Emile spoke to the qualities of his manliness and
incited the “free people” in a Protestant Republic to demonstrate such qualities.
Third, the competing visions of what constituted an ideal state differentially
positioned Emile as of no value and of great value. In official French, Dutch, and

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Genevese reactions it was decanonized and the blasphemer castigated, while in the
English translation it became testimony not only to the spirit of Protestantism to but

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how that spirit had to keep working on itself not to become what it had initially

25. Ibid., viii.

26. Ibid.. ix.
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14 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y WINTER 5 1 / NUMBER
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despised. In a mode of spiritual regeneration and self-surveillance that mirrored the

concerns of the book itself, Emile became worth the read in the translator‘s view.
Lauded in one context, then, while burnt in another, it is fair to say that Emile was
not overtly or immediately canonized even if its banning did it a great favor in terms
of its notoriety and underground circulation. The conditions constitutive of the
vision of the state in each case organized the field of ethics so differently that what
was to be engaged with in one setting as a new system of education would be debarred
from the reading list in another.
Fourth, both the dominant Continental reactions and the English one autoniati-
cally articulated child-rearing to the formation and maintenance of the preferred
state. Thus even in supportive framings of Emile, a text that challenged any
consonance between revealed religion, the organization of human relations, and the
methods for getting things done, the ethical conception of the state is one inextrica-
bly bound to and delimited by religious doctrine and the new use it has found for the
child as both a marked symptom of corruption (original sin) and an unmarked
medicine for reform (transcendent hope for future perfection).
Fifth, education appears in the different framings of Emile less as a field and more
as recognizable practices that pertained to certain things. Education was conceived
broadly at the time to be about an individual and collective’s relationship with
organized religion. To that end, Emile attempted to disarticulate organized religion
from holding the reins on how one might view the world at large. Standardized
theological dogma was not to be everything and education was not to be a tool for its
inculcation. Rather, for Rousseau education was to de-civilize humanity away from
such presumptions so that newer or at least what he thought of as more natural,
simple, and direct ones could take their place. Education was still, though, funda-
mentally a matter of religion. What Rousseau’s &mileand the immediate commen-
taries on it indicated was how education could now be mobilized for or against
organizedreligion, but not outside of discussion of religion altogether. Education was
unavoidably a wider theological discourse ending at the assertion of a supernatural
creator, not reducible to independent arenas of study called “curriculum,” “peda-
gogy,” or “psychology.”
And sixth, the above suggests how “child-centered” education was inextricably
bound to visions of state reform before any public school bureaucracy ever existed.
Emile’s tutor is focused intensely on one child only, but his machinations are both

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reprobated and applauded in differentreceptions because his tutoring is already seen
as being of wider service to others beyond the young boy. Emile’s pathway of rearing,
climaxing in the Profession of Faith, the marriage to Sophie, and the internalization
of General Will as symbolized by the practices of nuclear family formation, can be
recognized as “child-centered” in the reception and framings of Rousseau’s text in
the 1760s not because Emile was portrayed as a child who seemed to be the only factor
in the tutor’s life, but because Emile was to end up outside revealed religion, inside
Sophie, and beside other men in the formation of General Will. Child-centered
education, as a label later applied to kmile, was a new vision of the state rather than
simply a different kind of sensitivity to the young.
BAKER zyxwvutsrqpz
&milewas the imagination of a radical collective authority organized directly
through a tutor-child relation that did not pay homage to a Church-focused ethics.
Rousseau’s Emile 15

It courted a version of the state shifting between what Michel Foucault calls the
shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game.27&mile’s reception highlights the
fear of cleavage in more ways than one because it urged a city-citizen game in which

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reason was to be applied to domains once thought beyond it; in other words, to the
proof of God’s existence through the experience of matter and force in nature as
opposed to through the force of Christian doctrine. The intersection of anti-Christian
reasonings with populational governance in a new form (“child-centeredness”)
manifested itself in the organization of ”biological” reproduction outside Church
mores - a symbol of the achievement of a moral redirection resulting in proposals
for a new kind of ”state.” This identified the “topic of education” to its audience
more so than simply the presence of a child as one who must “learn,” and in
Rousseau’s version unlearn, the errors of the wider degenerating species. Other
analytical supports or struts, such as the three R’s [religion, reason, and reproduc-
tion), are part of what helped translators or commentators identify Rousseau’s text,
beyond the title, as pertaining to education and therefore to something far beyond its
“immediate objects” -in other words, it pertained at every turn in its reception to
the theological organization of relations of authority between those objects-subjects
and God.
&MILE IN THE M ~ D1800s
-
Given the initial controversy surrounding EmileS publication, the subsequent
iconoclastic use made of Rousseau’s name in the French revolution, and the positive
framing given it in the English translation, it may seem that more and more editions
of the book would emerge across the next one hundred years with commentators

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dissecting and arguing over its translation and interpretation. But between 1763and
1883 there is a dearth of reprinted versions of Emile in English. While French and
German language editions of the text as a single work are consistently printed during
~ two major traces of books printed in the English
the first half of the 1 8 0 0 ~the

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language record no new versions of Emile over the same period. Both the British
Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975 and the National Union
Catalog of pre-1956 imprints in the United States have no listings for an English
kmile until the 1883 publication of a new translation by Eleanor Worthington,
formerly of the Cook County Normal School, Illinois. This edition has notes and an
introduction written by Jules Steeg, Depute, Paris, France. While this absence of new
editions and translations does not suggest that commentary on or familiarity with
Emile suddenly disappears, it does suggest that there was not in England or the
United States a noticeable desire or perhaps enough of a profit motive to reintroduce
and reframe the text nor to quibble over the English rendering of particular passages
in previous translations. Because it was not seen fit to print further and further
editions of the text across the majority of the nineteenth century, one might
tentatively conclude either that Emile in this era and in English language countries
27. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and
Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),87-104.
16 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y WINTER zyxw
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was so well-known that it did not need new editions, that the 1763 translation was
5 1 / NUMBER
1

z
considered so remarkable that no amendments were needed, or that it was not
regarded as a great watershed text worth reissuing with new commentaries.

zy
The absence of new editions of a book does not mean the noncirculation of ideas
that had been espoused. However, if one goes outside actual editions of Emile there
is support for the conclusion that the honored place given it in synoptic views of the
history of education field is relatively recent, hearkening back in the United States
only as far as the turn of the twentieth century. The shifting “homage” paid to Em&
has much to do with new visions of the state and the effort to secure particular kinds
of Utopias through the professionalization of education. In order to professionalize
education it would have to be made a dstinct realm of study with a distinct history.
Efforts toward naming the vision of the state as a “nation,” (forexample, “French,”

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Dutch,” “English,” or “American”) and toward professionalizing childrearing,
linked as they were, suggested the changing nature of commentary on human
relations and methods for getting things done that would reorient what was
acceptable to acknowledge as part of education’s unique history.
For example, EmileS importation into a field now known as the history of
education in the United States was hosted by a series of changes that Rousseau could
never have anticipated and in honor of which he was not writing. Its “reintroduc-
tion” in the latter nineteenth century in the form of new translations and editions
was mediated by the spread of public schooling, which was not a strong nor
consistent Rousseauean theme and which cannot in any originary or singular way be
attributed to Emile, whose emphasis was on individual tutoring for a boy outside of
an institutional context. While early nineteenth-century public schooling advocates
in the United States such as Horace Mann cited Rousseau’s extenders such as
Pestalozzi in their arguments for the implementation of schools funded through the
collection of taxes, Rousseau was but one indirect source to be turned to in building
such arguments. Sometimes, however, Emile was not suited to such a cause at all and
it was completely absentedin synoptic narratives on the history of education. When

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Mann delivered his Lectures on Education in 1855 to the members of the Board of
Education of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for example, he began his “big-
names” history of education lecture with Pythagoras and ended with Locke. Mann’s
purpose in this lecture was to provide a ”historical view of education; showing its
dignity and its degradation.” The lecture followed four others, the first on the means
and objects of common school education, the second on special preparation as a
prerequisite to teaching, a third on the necessity of education in a Republican
government, and a fourth on what God does and what he leaves for man to do in the
work of education. Education is defined in this synoptic view as that which supplies
the warrants of self-control that become necessary when a society has few mecha-
nisms for fear or external authority to regulate “the mass of people.”28It has become

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28. ‘‘I have endeavored to demonstrate that, in a land of liberty- that is, in a land where the people, in their
collective capacity, are free to do wrong, as well as free to do right; where there is no sanguinary or surgical
code of laws to cut off the offending members of society; no thousand-eyed police to detect transgression
andcrushitinthegerm-infine, where therearefew externalrestraintswhichcanbebrought tobearupon
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reduced to "common schooling" and has property protection and law abidance as key
objectives. It has become a proposed form of mass surveillance, suggesting the need
Rousseau's Emile 17

for specially trained teachers, not tutors. Education has become articulated to the
image of a Republican government in the wake of the French and American
revolutions, but its "practical" focus is not the distancing of the Church or the
qualities of liberty, fraternity, and equality, but the attraction of funding. The study
of the history of education would help illuminate and inform the question of its
status, which was central to the question of its funding:
Lct us scek an answer to questions such as these: -Have men assigned to the cause of education
a high or a low position? What things have they placed above it: and what things, (if any,) have
they placed below it?What means, instrumentalities, accommodations, have been prwided for
carrying the work? In fine, when its interests have come in competition with other interests,
which have been made to yieldP
This focushad ramification for hnile-it "solidified" its absence. Education did
not begin at birth so much as refer to an institution outside the family that was in
competition with other such institutions. Rousseau and Emile never appear in
Mann's history of education narrative as of significance, perhaps partly because the
argument is one primarily designed to convince of the need for more funding for
public schools. Perhaps, too, the unspoken link between Locke and the U.S.
Constitution signals an implicit shift of contexts that positions Locke as the segue

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into speaking about American education. Whatever the reason, for Mann, it is the
question of funding and providing more free schools, for the purposes explicated, that
drives the composition of the history:
The most important and most general fact which meets us, on approaching this subject, is that,
until within less than two centuries of the present time, no system of free schools for a whole
people was maintained anywhere upon earth; and then, only in one of the colonies of this
country, -that colony being the feeble and inconsiderable one of Massachusetts, containing at
that time only a few thousand inhabitants.3O
From Locke onward the conversation is exclusively about the internal politics of
population control and what Mann perceived as contradictions in the funding of
projects and agencies in the United States.
In this particular synoptic view of educational history, then, education has
become something other than the responsibility of individual families and it is not
devoted to pleasing or displeasing an Archbishop. Education is portrayed as necessary
for order and obedience to laws in new ways. It still concerns the organization of
human relations but there are new ways of getting things done. Who is thought to be

the appetites and passions of men,-that, in such a land, there must he intcmal restraints; that reason,
conscience, benevolence, and a reverence for all that is sacred, must supply the place of force and fear, and,

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for this purpose, the very instincts of self-preservation admonish us to perfect our system of education, and
to carry it on far more generally and more vigorously than we have ever yet done. For this purpose we must
study the principles of education more profoundly; we must make ourselves acquainted with the art, or
processes, by which those principles can be applied in practice; and by establishing proper agencies and
institutions, we must cause a knowledge both of the science and the art to be mffused throughout the entire
mass of the people." Horace Mann, Lectures on Education [Boston:Ide and Dutton, less),216.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 220.
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responsible for paying for education has been extended. The funding is to come from
somewhere other than those families who would never be able to afford a tutor such
as Jean-Jacques.Emile would be of little use in a situation that focused on balancing
the spending of collected monies betweenvarious projects and agencies that now saw
themselves as entitled to some part of a central fund - a fund that Rousseau could
never have imagined in his wildest dreams would one day be available for taking
children away from time with their families and from learning how to labor. That
&milewas not always well-suited to such arguments and not given a pivotal place in
the composition of American educational histories in the first half of the 1800s’
because of the nature of the state that was being envisioned, is also indicated by the
framing it was given in the early synoptic history of education textbooks.
At the turn of the nineteenth century there were relatively fewer English
language books claiming to survey the history of education or the history of
pedagogics as their sole focus. The majority of synoptic texts that were published
were in German and French. By the end of the century there was a proliferation of
such texts across languages, some designed as manuals for teachers and others
directed to an audience presumed to be more scholarly. In 1845, H.I. Smith claimed
to have published the first English language single-authored synoptic text concern-
ing “the whole ground” of education. It was titled simply, Education:
The subject is one of the very highest interest in itself and of special interest in our day and

zy
country; and so regarding it, the writer has long considered such a work as he has here aimed to
produce, a desideratum in the English language; for while the Germans possess voluminous
works of the greatest merit from such authors as Jean Paul Friedr, Richter, Nieineyer, Schwarz,
and others, no work, covering the whole ground of education, has, within our knowledge,
appeared in the English l a n g ~ a g e . ~ ’
The turn to Germany for assessing educational ideas and tracing them in early
synoptic texts in the United States is a function of what had occurred beyond Emile.
In Prussia and Austria across the 1700s the denominational Sunday and day schools
had become converted to Volksschulen (people’sschools) funded by the absolutist
Crown.,32The Theresian and Frederickian reforms of the mid-1700s especially
provided subsidies, such as wood for heating, salaries for schoolmasters, and
eventually new buildings, rather than letting the burden for such schools fall directly
on local parishes and villages. The installation of systems of compulsory schooling
in the United States and the advent of formal teacher training in colleges and the
Academy, in imitation of German models especially, made different definitions of
education available, opening new orientations to Rousseau’s text.
In Smith’s Education, for example, the weight or place given Emile is circum-
scribed by the book’s understanding of education that unites God with the Republic

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and with childrearing as something that ought to be engaged in by those beyond the
family or a private tutor. Education is defined in the subtitle to part two of the book

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31. H.I. Smith, Education (NewYork: Harper Brothers, 1845),v. This book will be cited as Education in the
text for all subsequent references.
32. James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in
Prussia and Austria [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 zyxwvutsrqpo
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BAKER Rousseau‘s Emile 19

as that which concerns “a plan of culture and instruction, based on Christian

principles.” It is further explicatedvia its target group and three arenas of instruction,
as the practices “designed to aid in the right education of youth, physically,
intellectually, and morally.” The Preface ends with: “If the writer knows himself at

z
all, his sole object is to do good; and his prayer to God is, that this humble attempt
may, in some measure at least, subserve the interests of his country, the welfare of
the rising generation, and the praise of his Maker’s name’’ (Education, vi).
The state has become a “thing” seemingly to be served, a country and a Republic
with God on its side and with the future articulated to the welfare of “the rising
generation.” This is not the state being both defended and critiqued in the 1760s ,
however, despite the similar presence of God. This is a version of the state that is not
concerned simply with the kind of Christian man a boy might become but with the
kind of Christian man the boy might become in relation to men in other countries.
On several occasions, for instance, the modifications for an American audience are
indicated. The lecture notes that constitute the text’s sources were expanded and
adapted “to the wants and peculiar circumstances of the American public, and to the
character of American institutions.’’ Schwarz’s history of education, which was also
a source, was “modified in various ways,” in order to “accommodate” it “to the
peculiarities of our country,” and the German words pedagogik and paedagogisch
which “have long been used“ needed to be “domesticated among us also” into the
English substantive, pedagogics - “the science of education, in its whole compass”
(Education,v).
Given the vision of the state as a moral-keeper that distinguishes American-ness
from other kinds, the appeals to German educational thought as the benchmark,
Christian principles in the subtitle, and the prayer to God in the Preface, Ern& and
Rousseau might appear to be doomed from a positive reading from the outset. They
were not only doomed but damned into insignificance through the implicit signifi-
cance that Smith gives to Rousseau’s Confessions. The framing of Rousseau and
h i l e in the Smith text indicates how difficult it was to disarticulate judgments of
a man‘s character from weighing the ideas expressed. Such separation was effected
in places but it had to be worked at:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born 1712 at Geneva, expressed with much genius, and in an elegant form
those principles of the modern pedagogics. We shall not follow him through his erratic and
eventful life. With some few points which we niay admire, it presents on the whole, a vile and
hsgusting spcctaclc. His writings produced an astonishing effect on the public mind, and had,
perhaps, inconsiderable influence in bringing about the French revolution. In 1762 appeared his
celebrated pedagogic work, with which we are here more particularly concerned entitled,
“Emile, ou de 1’Education.”This work bears a deep impress of its author’s character (Education,
149).
The author’s character, manifested as vile and disgusting in Smith’s view, gives
a sense of where the critique was headed. In present-day terms the author was not
dead but alive and Rousseau’s personal life was a strong marker being taken as the
yardstick by which to ascribe invalidity to the text outside of France. Thus even
though the effects it produced could be described as astonishing and the writing as
elegant, the reading of Rousseau limited the reading of Ernile, minimizing the book‘s
place in Smith’s history of American education:
20 zyxwvutsrq
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We deem it unnecessary to exhibit Rousseau’s pedagogic views in dctail; the more so, because
his general principles were more completely reduced to system by men of whom we shall
hereafter speak, and who were guided by other, and higher, and purer principles than this
unhappy man (Education, 150).
Rousseau’s name appears in a section called the New Pedagogics. The New
Pedagogics follows several other sections that are listed chrono-geographically,
beginning with the ”Old World,” specifically “Eastern Asia,” and placing the New
Pedagogics after the “modern development of the idea of education.” Within the
wider focus of Smith’s history, the New Pedagogics is considered a pivotal point all
told, but Emile as part of it is not given a central or important place in the history of
education as it is being comported. Although Rousseau’s name is listed separately in
the table of contents its presence suggests not a positive prominence but an

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obligatory and negative one. The substantive content of Emile is devalued, for
example, through describing the early pedagogy as an imitation of Locke and as
emanating from a negative view of humanity:
His (Rousseau’s]rules for the physical treatment of children correspond, on the whole, with
those of Locke. He regards man from a false, a low, worldly, utilitarian point of view; and while
he gives many excellent rules for the physical and intellectual education, and the general worldly
culture of man, he abounds in glaring absurdities; and to h m are chiefly to be traced the groveling
tendencies which have manifested themselves in modem pedagogics (Education, 1 SO).
This last statement is supported through a footnote which quotes from a text titled
The School and the Schoolmaster in which Emile is depicted as a ”moral romance”
full of absurdities, inaccuracies, and contradxtions. The man that emerges from
Rousseaufs plan of instruction would, for example, have a terrible fate:
[the man] thus thrown into a mass of human beings, actuated by hfferent motives, guided by
different principles, and pursuing mfferent objects from itself, like a skillfully constructed bark
without its rudder, and stripped of its canvass and cordage, can have no other [ate than that of
being dashed against the cliffs, or sunk beneath the waves (Education, 150-51).
The footnote turns from a critique of the plan of instruction and its anticipated
outcomes to a critique of Rousseau’s writing and his religious reasonings:
In discussing the subject of religious education, he exhibited the same inconsistency and absurd
views. The French savants were displeased with his glowing sentiments of piety, with his
impassioned admiration of the morality of the Gospel, and of the character of its Founder; whilc
the friends of religion and social order were shocked with his attacks upon miracles and
prophecy, with his insidious and open objections to Christianity, and with the application of
human reason to subjects beyond its sphere and above its power (Education, 151).
In consonance with its source, the Smith text reiterates Rousseads lack of
qualification to make the claims made in Emile. He was for Smith an unqualified
commentator:
Heutterlyrepudiates religiousinstruction for the youngas absurd. But, as he hadnot himself any
knowledge of the great God of the Bible, and would have none of the relison of the New
Testament, of whose character he had certainly, not the remotest conception, he is not entitled
to a judgment in the premises, and his assertions are worth nothing, for he knew not whereof he
testified. In announcing these views, he seems to have been in some measure, actuated by a spirit
of hostility against Locke, between whose educational opinions and his own there are strong
points of resemblance, but not less obvious ones of difference, especially on the subject of
religious education [Education, 150).
The Smith text speculated that while the works of Rousseau and Locke had been
completely domesticated in Germany there was already a new spirit of culture there
“that had manifested itself under a somewhat different aspect. New institutions of
BAKER

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various descriptions, had been everywhere established, and domestic education had
Rousseau’s Emde 21

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experienced considerable changes” (Education, 151).Thus the impact of Locke and
Rousseau in the history of education might have mattered at the level of ideas
regardingprivate tutoring but it is attenuated in Smith’s account by the independent
emergence of public schoolingin Germany, which became the model imported to the
United States.
The conclusion of the section on Rousseau confirms its opening - kmile
influenced events in France, not in America, and while his mile might have been
domesticated in Germany it was other events that mattered more to education’s
history. Rousseau’s Emile was portrayed as having been celebrated in certain locales
but it was not systematic enough nor written by a man with a high enough moral
character to be dissected in detail for “theAmericanpublic.” RousseauandEmileare
thereby positioned in the text as the lesser points in a series of names who not only
provided a better educational system in Smith‘s view but did so from the side of
“morality.” The Other that Rousseau and his Emile became were being used to
buttress the ethical orientation of America as aunique, discerning, essentialized,and

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morally better place. The vision of the state as a nation and the nation as an
interpretive construct comes into view - the changing combination of discourses
mobilized as traditional and modem, as self and other, was a cultural interpretation
that served to situate the nation within the imagining of a pluralized ba~kground.~~
A similar pejorative positioning of Emile occurs in another synoptic text that is

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printed in 1860. This text argues that except for the Smith book discussed above, it
too is unique in tracing education’s history in English “for the field is almost wholly
untrodden in our own language.’, The book is called History and Progress of
Education, from the Earliest Times to the Present, “a manual for teachers and
students,” authored by Linus Pierpont Brockett with an introduction by Henry
Barnard. Like Smith, Brockett provides a list of European authors whose histories of
education are valuable but notes that “all of them view the subject too exclusively
from the continental stand-point.” At this point, “The complete history of education
in the United States is yet to be written.” Not only was such completeness thought
available but it was known to be in process: “let us hope that the life and health of
the eminent scholar [HenryBamard]who has so long been engaged in its preparation,
may be spared, till he shall have completed a work which cannot fail greatly to
” ~ ~sources for The History and Progress
enhance his already exalted r e p ~ t a t i o n . The
of Education were gleaned “from the pages of the American Journal of Education,
and other educational perio&cals,“ which provided “sufficient facts to answer the
purpose of our manual” (HPE, 6 ) .
The text’s chrono-geographicalstartingpoints are the “intellectual and physical
training in the antediluvian period” followed by ”the ages after the Flood” and the

33. Johann Arnason, Nationalism, Globalization. and Modernity, 229.

34. Linus Pierpont Brockett, “Preface”in History and Progress ofEducation, from theEarliest Times to the
Present (New York: A.S. Barnes and Burr, 1860), 6. This book will be cited as HPE in the text for all
subsequent references.
22 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y WINTER zyxw
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“circumstances favoring civilization and intellectual development.” (HPE, 9).Edu-

cation is considered positively a characteristic of civilizations and civilizations were
1

those forms of organization that understood the necessity for castes, divisions, and

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hierarchies. India is the first to be considered. The book ends with a review of the
present condition of education “in the principal countries of the world,” concluding
with a chapter on North and South America (including central America and the
“West India Islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti” (HPE, 14).
In this travelogue of educational history, education is defined through appeal to
its etymology: “leduco, I lead or draw out), implies the idea of development, and
hence we include in the term education, whatever tends to develop the physical, the
intellectual, or the moral powers of man. In this extended sense, it commences with
the birth of the infant, continues through life, and, we have reason to believe,
progresses through the future state of being” ( W E , 2). Education for Brockett is
described as a field, not a topic, and the place Rousseau finds in its history is again

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his influence on German teaching. Rousseau is framed as one of several Humanists
contemporaneous with and in opposition to Pietist reformers. Rousseau is listed
separately in the contents, out of chronological order, before Locke. His name is
introduced in the chapter on “The Humanists, and their system of instruction.”
Under the subtitle “Eminent Humanist Teachers” the table of contents reads “J. J
Rousseau -Influence of his ‘Emile’upon education.” Rousseau’s was the first name
to appear but just how positive his eminence was thought to be is put in doubt by the
analysis offered. Once more, the visibility of the name Rousseau does not equate
with a favorable judgment of his texts. Rousseau’s Confessions again outbids Emile,
an almost incredulous air being given to his description of his own character: “Jean
Jacques Rousseau 11712-1 778),a man who, if his own confessions may be believed,
was any thing but exemplary in his character, had, by his pedagogical works, opened
the way for the establishment of a new system of teaching, which, for many years,
exerted a powerful influence in Germany” (HPE, 232-33).
Rousseau’s authorship is problematized in a new way in this synoptic text. The
emergence of experience at both teaching and parenting had become implicitly
essential to authorizing one’s statements in education. Experience had become a
grounds of criticism in the field and Rousseau’s Ernile, now described as a “pedagogi-
cal work,” was posited as deficient on that basis:
The Emile of Rousseau, the work of a man who had never taught, and of a father who had sent
his own children, at birth, to the Foundling Hospital, contained some pedagogical truth, mixed
with much of sophistry, falsehood, and immorality. Its pretense in following nature awakened
theminds of somcbcttermen toaconsideration of thenaturalmethods of instruction (HPE,233).
Rousseau is being framed here in relation to the wordnature rather than the word
Christian, as for Smith, but the substitution is not a complete one. This becomes
noticeable when it is again to Locke that Rousseau loses the battle for influence, at
least temporarily: “The educational works of John Locke.. .also exerted some
influence in turning the attention of teachers to nature, as a safe guide in the matter
of education. Locke, like Rousseau, was a theorist; but unlike him, his instincts and
sympathies were on the side of morality and virtue.” Both Locke and Rousseau lose
the spotlight later in the volume, however, to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: “The man
 zyxwvutsrqp
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BAKER Rousseau’s Ernile 23

who has exerted the most influence over the education of the race, in the last hundred
years, is J.H. Pestalozzi” (HPE,241).What is of significance here is that in the chain
of names that are producedin this synoptic text, it is Rousseau‘shile that reappears
as the continuous influence - at least on the European continent. Brockett notes
that Pestalozzi, for instance, like John Bernard Basedow before him, had read and
been impressed by kmile:
Like Basedow, his [Pestalozzi’s] own education was imperfect and one-sided; like him, he had
read, and was greatly impressed by Rousseau’s hmk; like him, too he was visionary and
extravagant in his hopes and expectations, and even to a much greater degree than Basedow
himself; hut, unlike him [Rousseau], he [Pcstalozzi]was a man of warm and loving heart, high
and pure aspirations, and of a deeply religious spirit” (HPE,241).
By 1860, then, it had become possible to name Rousseau’s kmila as a source of
influence across reformers compartmentalized by “nationality,” but Rousseau’s
character was still considered so problematic that despite the chains of association
beingreportedEmile would not find aplace as apositively pivotal text in the synoptic
histories of education that claimed to be foundations for the field in the United
States. Rather, it was only from a “continental stand-point” that hrnile was to be
regarded as having opened the way to something else. If it had a presence in the
history of American education it was because its less palatable aspects, in Brockett
and Smith‘s views, were considered well-known absurdities and its better aspects
distilled, appropriated, and systematized elsewhere by “better men.”
This positioning of kmile speaks to a new ethical version of the state that was
being appealed to in Smith’s and Brockett’s constructions. In the 1760s the kind of
state being defended or imagined around Emile was a Church-focused one, defining
what could be said and done and by whom based on denominational doctrine. An
affront to the Catholic Church is not the source of Brockett’s and Smith‘s displeasure
with kmile, though. By the mid-1800s, the version of the state being imagined in
proposed reforms such as enforcing schooling and securing funding had become far
more Newtonian than even Rousseau could have believed. The systems for autho-
rizing things do not end clearly in the body of a king or pope. Forces do not issue forth
from a single, fixed sovereign point. Rather, Newton’s universe of multiple particles
that are acted on by forces and that affect each other is what physics lent to policy.
The interpretive construct of the nation was being mediated by the interpretive
construct of a Newtonian universe.
It had become possible, for instance, to imagine humans as individual particles
possessing special powers that suggested the right and the ability to use them for or
against each other. Humans were no longer invested as subjects in an empire.
Humans were (theoretically)no longer being allocated the position of either repre-
sentative for the divine or as a follower on the basis of God’spower to determine one’s
place. Mechanical philosophies had opened a view of how people treated each other
as that which was explicable through images of multiple, intersecting forces acting
seemingly without intermediaries in the machine of society. True to Newton’s study
of motion, external andimbalanced forces created effects in particular directions that
could be monitored. Once particle-force relations were assumed to exist between
objects (including humans) in absolute space, then, the notion of human law,
24 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y WINTER zyx
2001 / VOLUME

contractual agreement, and social administration could become the mechanical

concepts that mehated a potentially chaotic clash of such powers or forces in a
51 / NUMBER
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confined area. The slavery characteristic of many parts of pre-civil war United States
was an extreme incarnation of this “mediation” between an imbalance of “forces.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, reforms for a broadly worded morality in areas such

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as Massachusetts had attempted to regulate the multiple influences imagined to be
swirling in close proximity, for without such regulation the ability of one particle to

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affect another in a potentially undesired direction seemed to remain a genuine
possibility.
Compulsory schooling and km’le’s reception in relation to it were dependent on
this version of the state. In order to articulate policies that it seemed acceptable to
inflict on others within a common area, the influence of one group of humans on
other “imagined” groups (groups unseen but targeted) had to be thought of as
justifiable and plausible. That such imaginings were not easy to justify in every case,
though, even by mid-century, is indicated by the lengths that Mann and others had
to go to urge the building of common schools and to persuade contemporaries that
compulsory, publicly funded schooling was a good thing in a society that, as he noted,
had no experience of it. This condition of relations and ways of getting things done
also speaks to the new proposals for governance that had emerged and that had
positioned the constant surveillance of the individual as its most celebrated form,
particularly in the hope of facilitating the internalization of self-monitoring tech-
niques in the absence of external threats.
This was a broader moment than simply Emile’s reception brings to light,
however. In a Political Sociology of Educational Reform, for example, Thomas
Popkewitz notes that across most of the nineteenth century educational reformers
tended to be “Eastern patricians, children of merchants, clergy, physicians, educators
and editors, whose worldview decried a moral and social degeneration and the eclipse
of democracy. They passionately believed in their public duty, which combined a
Protestant Unitarianism with aphilosophical tran~cendentalism.”~~ To that end, the
state in educational terms in the mid-nineteenth century implied hierarchical
relations of reform where funding was sought for particular projects under the
imagination of a mechanical universe partial to the regulation and administration of
forces.The projects to which childrearing debate was tied had shifted somewhat from
religious conversion to knowledge administration and behavior management, with
the financial sources shifting from private philanthropy to “public” monies.

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By the mid-l800s, then, the receptions of Emile indicate the complexity and
uneveness of the shift between a Church-focused ethics of the state and a more
quantifiable and Newtonian one. In the case of the former, the naming of nations was

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mediated by this Church-focused ethics; for example, in a “Protestant Republic”
rather than “England.” In the case of the latter, post-revolutionary imaginings of
equality and inequality that need to be managed in a Newtonian universe structure

35. Thomas Popkewitz,A PoliLicnl Sociology of Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press,
1991).
BAKER Kousseau’s BmiIe 25

the interpretive lens that the naming of nations becomes. Concomitantly, the
description of the problems that education was thought to be addressing changed.
Problems expressed in terms of revolt and the disturbance of empires and worded in
regard to sinners in need of salvation in the 1760s were somewhat modified in mid-
nineteenth-century United States by posing problems in terms of crises in institu-

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tional reform in cities especially. The rhetoric had moved from that of individual sin
and salvation to civic reform which was meant to incite a return to agrarian values,
personal entrepreneurship, and individual opportunity through private philanthropy
and then later through “federal” programs.36The populist movements of the mid-
century challenged business concentration and agricultural policies such as those
criticized by Mann in his Lectures on Education, simultaneously challenging the
relevance of Emile as a book written against a hfferent kind of authority and
organization of relations.
Synoptic views of education in mid-century had, then, both included and
excluded Emile in regard to accounts constructing American identity and educa-

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tional history. It had mysteriously become necessary to name, yet there was an active
distancing of it and its author that suggested a better moment had been achieved or
arrived at that was not “continental” and that did not require homage to Rousseau,

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yet still required some perfection through the work of dedicated reformers. On the
basis of early synoptic narratives that constructed the history of ”American educa-
tion,” it would not have been easy to predict that Rousseau’s Emile by the end of the
century would be described in educational publications in the United States as an
“epoch making book in the history of education,’’ as exerting a ”powerful
influence ...even in the New World,” and as “the Gospel of Childhood” with
Rousseau being canonized as a “prophet.”
E THE
~ U L AT OF THE TWENTIETH
TURN CENTURY
The above indicates how different visions of the state constructed the narratives
of education’s past, shaped the definition of education and its purposes, and thereby
decanonized Emile as an unsuitable text that if mentioned at all somehow had to be
“disciplined” and circumscribed for an essentialized American audience. By the end
of the same century, new commentaries on hmile indicate its more pronounced,

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positive, and pivotal place in history of education narratives. By far the strongest
catalyst in regard to textbook-style surveys of educational history was the late-
nineteenth century itself, where there was a proliferation across languages regardmg
education having its own unique history that seemingly must be recorded in a single
volume and taught to future teachers. This is also the period of Emde7sreawakening
and the publication of new translations of it in England and the United States. In
addition to reprints during the 1870s and 1880s of Henry Barnard’s synoptic text,
German Educational Reformers - which acknowledged Rousseau’s significant
influence in Germany and as a result, American educational history - there were
several new editions of hmile published in English before the end of the century.

36. Ibid
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These editions targeted an educational audience and became very popular if reprints
are the criterion. Worthington’s, for example, appearedin 1883,1886,1891, andagain
in 1899 and together the new editions indicated a markedly different reception of
Amile than that of the early- to mid-century textbooks.
THEWORTHINGTON EDITION
The chfference can be attributed less to changes in print technology than to the
advent of new conditions that reoriented human relations, systems of authority, and
methods for getting things done. Education was not being “authorized” so much by
direct appeal to revealed religion and its interlocutors, or to a natural religion and its
“universal intellectuals,” or to a central pot of money and its administrators of
morality, but through appeal to educational and psychological experts who became
intermediaries in the diagnosis and remedy of the condition of “the race.” What had
been added to the conversations around status, professionalism, and funding from
mid-century, for example, was a much more frequent problematization of the public
school teacher, which redefined Ernile’s relevance. By the late 1800s, knowledge of
kmile was assumed to form part of a canon of pedagogical literature for teachers. The
Worthington edition, for example, was titled Emile: or Concerning Education and
subtitled “Extracts containing the principle elements of pedagogy found in the first
three hooks.” While the translator was American the commentator, Jules Steeg, was
writing for an audience primarily of French teachers. The fact that his commentary
was taken up and provided for an English-reading audience and that the book went
through many reprints in the United States indicates that Steeg’snationality was not
perceived as a limiting factor across the Atlantic. To that end, it circulated as part of
a canon of literature of which prospective teachers were thought to require knowl-
edge.
Why teachers ought to know the book had a great deal to do with a vision of
humanity that had not yet reached its full moral perfection but that believed itself
to be progressing toward it. In the disciplining of teachers as civil servants and into
certain bodies of knowledge a convergence of discourses regarding this moral
perfection became important for justifying &mile’s preeminence among published
educational works. The intersection of discourses of child-sympathy, science, and
citizenship helped inform Ernile’s reception and inclusion in an educational canon
directed toward improving teachers and, in turn, their students and, in turn, the race.
The nature of the improvement was not simply “moral, intellectual, and physical
powers” as discussed mid-century, but what those powers were thought to be in
service to and representative of; the quality or strength of “the race.” Being
sympathetic to the child, claiming one’s work had a basis in science, and articulating
education to the production of citizens “fit for” a Republic reoriented the history of
education around teacher preparation and its experts, renaming education’s “clas-
sics” in the process. In the Worthington edition it is citizenship and child-sympathy
especially that make it possible to court h n i l e positively. Emile was made to matter
on the basis of new visions of the state as democratic and childhood as sacred.
The opening lines of the Worthington edition’s Introduction speak, for instance,
to why &mile has been published again:
BAKER zyxwvutsrqpo Rousseau‘s Emile 27

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Jean Jacques Rousseau‘s book on education has had a powerful influence throughout Europe, and
evenintheNewWorld [UnitedStates].Itwasinitsdayakindof gospel. Ithaditsshareinbringing
about the Revolution which renovated the entire aspect of our countlry. Many of the reforms
so lauded by it have since been carried into effect, and at this day seem evcry-day affairs.. ..it was
not among ourselves.. .that the theories of Rousseau were most eagerly experimented upon; it

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was among foreigncrs, in Gcrmany, in Switzerland, that they found more resolute partisans, and
a field mure ready to receive them” (Steeg, 1).
Steeg names three men, Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, as those most noted for
having ”popularized the pedagogic method of Rousseau.” In this account, it is not
“better men” of purer or higher virtue who systematize Rousseau’smethod, but men
who have been “inspired in their labors by &mile.”Emile had the effect of ”enlarging”
Basedow’s mental horizon, of “transforming” the “whole life” of Pestalozzi, and of
informing “the highly esteemed pedagogic works” of Friedrich Froebel. Rousseau’s
&mileis not simply mentioned in passing on the basis of the Confessions, then.
Rather, it has a new kind of morality in its positioning of a French audience and its
importation for an American one insofar as it is ascribed causality for all the events
thought of at the time as democratic and progressive:
These various attempts, these new and ingenious processes which, step by step, have made their
way among us, and are beginning to make their workings felt, even in institutions most stoutly
opposed to progress, are traceable to Rousseau’s “Emile.” It i s therefore not too much for
Frenchmen, for teachers, for parents, for every one in our country who is interested in what
concerns teaching, to go back to the source of so great a movement (Steeg, 4-5).

A democratic vision of a particular kind therefore informs the judgment of Emile,

indicating how humans were now thought to relate to each other through such
visions and thereby offering &mile a new positive place at the crossroads of the
history of education, state-formation, and teacher preparation.
The concern for teacher preparation within a Republic also provides the ratio-
nale for the editingof EmiIe. Steeg, who authors the Introduction as well as summary
notes at the outset of each chapter, explains the extracts and selections that now end
prior to the Profession of Faith:
There is no one who does not know the book by name and by reputation; but how many parents,
and even teachers, have never read it! This is because a large part of the book is no longer in
accordance with the actual condition of things; because its very plan, its fundamental idea, are
outside of the truth. We are ohliged to exercise judgment, to make selections. Some of it must
be taken, someleft untouched ....We have not, indeed, the presumption to corrcct Rousseau, or
to substitute an expurgated “Emile” for the authentic “Emile.” We have simply wished to draw
the attention of the teachers of childhood to those pages of this book which have least grown old
(Steeg, 5).
The Republic is an image that can stand on its own without explicit appeal to a
natural religion that Rousseau saw as the most important part of the text. The offices
of the teacher and of the theologian had seemingly separated into different institu-

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tions and buildings, but this was not a cause for anxiety at the loss of “morality”
where education was concerned. It was instead the dexterous intertwining of
discourses of ministry and public schooling that paradoxically facilitated the chi-
mera of the separation between theologian and teacher. So confident is Steeg of
&mile’sprofit for teachers, for example, that he points out the rationale for the
inclusion of two controversial scenes: I f We have carefully avoided suppressing the
fictions of the gardener and of the mountebank; because they are characteristic of his
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manner, and because, after all, these pre-arranged scenes which, as they stand, are
51 / NUMBER

anything in the world rather than real teaching, contain, nevertheless, right notions,
1

and opinions which may suggest to intelligent teachers processes in prudent

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education” (Steeg, 7).The intelligent teacher’s morality would not be compromised
by the inclusion of scenes portraying ”devious” pedagogical techniques, for the
teacher intrinsically understood Christian r g h t from wrong in a broad-based version
of ”morality” that did not need to mane its specific denomination.
Nor should the books from the “authentic” &milethat contain the Profession of
Faith be avoided by the reader for they are only omitted because they do not fall
within the “domain of pedag~gy.”~‘ Steegargues that Rousseau saw education as that
which began before birth with the behavior and nourishment of the mother and
which went until betrothal. In modern times, though, he states that education ends
at youth and therefore the only parts relevant to teachers are those concerning the
years that equate with the time that would be spent in school. Education is
institutionalization within and then away from the family, childhood alone is the
zone of teaching, and kmile is now for teachers and therefore ends at Book Three,
before the Profession of Faith and the entrance of Sophie.
Steeg posits the domain of pedagogy as an objective locale and on this basis, the
other interesting information that the Profession of Faith may contain becomes
irrelevant in the immediacy of what teachers need to know:
The fourthand fifthbook.. .arenot within the domainof pedagogy. They containadmirablepages
which ought to be read; which occupy one of the foremost places in our literature; which deal
with philosophy, with ethics, with theology; but they concein themselves with the manner of
directing young men and women, and no longer with childhood ....We will leave Emileupon the
confines of youth, at the time he escapes from school, and when he is about beginning to feel that
he is a man. At this difficult and critical period the teacher no longer suffices ....Artifices and
strategems are then no longergood for anything; they are very soon laid open to the light. All that
can be required of the teacher is that he shall have furnished his pupils with a sound and strong
education, drawn from the sources of reason, experience, and nature (Steeg, 8).
Philosophy, ethics, and theology now lie outside the domain of pedagogy as an act of
instruction directed at the child. Moreover, Emile is laid out like a textbook with
summary notes and subheadings containing terminology that when drawn together
speak not to Rousseau’s time but to Steeg’s. Subheadings called ‘’The Objects of
Education,” “Maxims to Keep us True to Nature,” “Language,” the wonderfully
paradoxical ”Avoid Taking Too Many Precautions,” followed by ”Childhood is to be
Loved,” “Neither Slaves nor Tyrants,” ‘fReasoning Should not Begin too Soon,”
“Well-regulated Liberty,” and so on structure the narrative. The reorganization of
the text has taken place around the preparation of teachers and an implicit pressure
to sift through or cut to the core of what now counts in teaching: techniques. It also
suggests something else that is presumed about the audience relative to the 1763
English version. The subheadings have the effect of ”dumbing-down” the content
and compartmentalizing its narrative into epistemological units that are demarcated
by guides and props for those seemingly too impatient or lacking the skill to follow
an argument without signposts and breaks. The text is thereby devoted to pedagogy
37. Pedagogy is synonymous with education in Steeg’s Introduction.
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Rousseau’s Emile

and becomes pedagogical in its air, engaging in the art of instruction as it documents
Rousseau’s recommendations for the same.
29

The teacher’s somewhat lesser position in the Introduction relative to academ-

ics and university-based intellectuals presumably is secured through their subjects:
children. Childhood is sacred in this edition, but paternalistically so, positioning the
teacher as both a necessary form of scaffolding and as a potentially dangerous
influence on the divinity of the young. In the late-nineteenth century, “the child”
was uttered as though it were an objective entity, yet that nonneutrality is brought
into question through the lstinctions drawn on to name and demarcate ~ h i l d h o o d . ~ ~
The Profession of Faith is repositioned in the Worthington edition not only as that
which does not pertain to core educational endeavors but as that which does not
pertain to the child. Whereas Rousseau saw childhood as inclusive of adolescence

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and as that which extended until the faculty of reason had fully unfolded, Steeg’s sees
the value of h i l e in its description of teaching techniques of artifice and stratagem,
which are only appropriate for a child young and naive enough to fall for them.
Childhood ends at a different point, indicating the specificity and non-neutrality of
the discourse of child-sympathy as a rationale for the selection of extracts and the
positive reading of Emile.
This edition’s reification of childhood was concomitant with the emergence of
several developmentalist movements such as Froebelianism, Herbartianism, and
Child-study, which all attended to the child’s nature in different ways, yet similarly
argued that schools and curricula should be built around the child and what children
were capable of at different “stages of development.” These movements were
“European” and “American” in their varieties and often anthropological, that is,
based on the observation and recording of children’s language-actions, rather than
experimental. Together, they challenged the preeminence of classical content such
as Latin and Greek in public school curricula and were well-suited within the
preferred discourses of the time to honoring Emile as that which documented child

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life and paid close attention to children‘s feelings and capacities through observation
of their actions. The Introduction draws on this wider moment, portraying life before
Emile, for instance, as that which did not treat the child well in regard to certain
principles: “The child was treated as a machine, a man in miniature, no account
being taken of his nature or of his real needs; without any greater solicitude about
reasonable method - the hygiene of mind - than about the hygiene of the body”
(Steeg, 1).
The principle of mental hygiene, expressed as a sympathy for the child, was to
have extreme racializing undertones in its North American versions, speaking to
populational management through the prevention of miscegenation or ”mixed
blood.” The observation of the child in developmental movements was also the

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38. For accounts of the nonneutrality of “the child,” pedagogicaltechniques, and developmental reasonings
in “Western” contexts see Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology [London:Routledge,
1996);Gail Sloan Cannella, Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social lustice and Revolution
(NewYork: Peter Lang, 1999);John Mom, Growing Critical: Alternatives to Developmental Psychology
(New York: Routledge, 1998);Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul [London: Routledge, 1989);and Valerie
Walkerdine, ”Beyond Developmentalism?” Theory and Psychology 3 (1993):451-69.
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surveillance of race relations. This is not made explicit in Steeg’s Introduction for a
French audience and can only be inferred from the multiplicity of movements such
1

as Froebelianism, Herbartianism, and Child-study, which made appeal to child-

sympathy at the time in the context of managing relations between states of
“savagery” and “civilization” through theories such as racial re~apitulation.3~ What
is announced in Emile’s canonization for teachers, then, is the new format of human
relations and methods for governance. People are not resisting, managing, and
surveilling each other so much for how closely they adhere to and mimic a singular
Church doctrine, but for how they “develop” the qualities and attributes thought
suitable and necessary to a Republican form of government and “civilization.” What
had happened to the administration of morality toward a Christian Republic relative
to the mid-nineteenth century was that it had become relocated into a narrative of
racial recapitulation, a sympathy for the child, and the problematization of teachers
that Rousseau’s Ernile could now help illustrate and remedy.
Rousseau is described, therefore, as offering counsels for parenting and teaching
that “bear the stamp of good sense and experience; or rather, they result from a power
of divination singular enough in a man who was not willing to take care of h s own
children” (Steeg,7).This one brief remark, which is the only mention of that which
previous commentators had found so distressing, is couched in a paragraph of praise
for how “day by day” in Emile, Jean-Jacques “follows up the physical and moral
development of the little being, all whose ideas and feelings he analyzes, whom he
guides with wisdom and with tact throughout the mazes of life made up of
convention and artifice’’ (Steeg, 7). Rather than Rousseau’s character being used to
read Emile, the child-sympathy now being read into Emile is used to read Rousseau.
The good sense and wise counsel offered in the book are considered all the more
remarkable because Rousseau had no experience raising children.

zy
In sum, this rendition of Emile justifies its editing of the text and Rousseau’s
place in educational history very differently from those of the mid-nineteenth
century. Steeg‘s is a positive reading and if Emile’s quality in places is compromised,
it is due not to the moral character of its author, but to subsequent events that have
made its plan anachronistic. Faults attributed to the text are attributable to time, to
the advent of democratic institutions, to what Steeg’scalls ”modern prejudices, I’not
to the reading of Rousseau as a man. Overall the text is worth the read for Steeg and
one does not need to be contoured away from Rousseau and redirected to subsequent
men of “higher” or ”purer” morals to ascertain its ideas. Whatever might be seen as

zy
its bad points are included within a turn to the positive: “It is true that fimile contains
pages that have outlived their day, many odd precepts, many false ideas, many
disputable and destructive theories; but at the same time we find in it so many
sagacious observations, such as upright counsels, suitable even to modem times, so

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lofty an ideal, that, in spite of everything, we cannot read and study it without profit”
(Steeg,5).This orientation to Emile suggests how Rousseau’s “character” couldnow

39. Bernadette Baker “Childcentered Teaching, Redemption, and Educational Identities: A History of the
Present,” Educational Theory 48, no. 2 (1998):155-74.
BAKER

be disarticulated from the techniques for state-reformation in ways that were not
considered possible several decades earlier. What was important to consider where
zy
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Rousseau’s Emde 31

Ernile was concerned was not the author’s personal life or the scandal at point of
publication, but the effect of innovation that it inspired beyond Rousseau‘s lifetime:
Scandal, by attractingpublic attention to it, did i t good service. What was most serious and most
suggestive in it was not, perhaps, seized upon; but the ”craze” of which it was the object had,
notwithstanding, good results. Mothers were won over, and resolved now to nurse their own
infants; great lords began to learn handcrafts, like Rousseau’s imaginary pupilj physical
exercises came into fashion, the spirit of innovation was forcing itself a way (Steeg, 3 ) .
The emphasis on child-sympathy, citizenship, and the preparation of teachers by
experts speaks therefore to the emergence of a new kind of state that enabled a
different version of human relations and methods for getting things done. Popkewitz
argues, for instance, that the social and economic transformations that occurred
during latter nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States intertwined the
formation of the modern state with the problems of governance by experts. The
organization of schooling, work, pedagogy, teacher education, and educational
sciences provided a social field in which special techniques for the governance of the
individual was to emerge and take form. The issues of school reform and
professionalization were incorporated into organizational relations in ways that
indicated a shift from overt missionary zeal into seemingly objective experts
concerned not with the spread of specific sub-branches of religion per se but with
discourses of morality organized through registers of social administration.
In Governing the Young, Barbara Finkelstein notes how such registers were
made manifest and keenly directed at the young. Orphanages, children’s hospitals,
common schools, and reform programs for juvenile delinquents were established
across the first half of the nineteenth century and crystallized as commonsensical by
the end of the century. The official segregation and institutionalization of the young
brought to visibility the twin inscription of the child and their carers as both problem
and potential and also had the effect of sorting or sifting real from not-so-real
children, teachers, and citizens. Public schooling would be a complicated and uneven
form of governance relative to other and earlier methods where children were also
enslaved or confined to reserves or in institutions for people with mental or severe
physical disabilities. These methods of governance were both counterparts and
complimentary to those for public schooling, indicating its convoluted limits. The
techniques for governing the young that hnile was to somehow throw light on were
therefore inseparable from decisions as to who needed to be more overtly and
differently governed from whom, based on a “fitness” for self-monitoring and
participation in a Republic. Relative to the 1760s)Steeg’s framing of Ernile in the late
1800s miraculously brought into view not Rousseau’s critique of Christianity, but
how “the Republic’s” dominant Christianity could be honored and encoded through
a bland appeal to a generic “morality” buttressed by discourses of “democratic”
citizenship, child-sympathy, and the problematic teacher.
THEHARRIS EDITION
The notion of the state as governance-by-experts who monitor and remedy
human relations within the discursive limits of who counts as human and what an
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appropriate form of relations would be also informs the reception of &milein further
editions published at the turn of the century. In 1892, another English-language
1

translation of Emile was printed and it was reprinted until 1908. In the one volume,
it both supported the celebratory locale of Worthington’s &mileand tried to temper
it to some extent. The upshot was not a cancelingout or a return to the insignificance
given Emile in histories of education in the mid-1800s but the securing of its place
as foundational to a proper knowledge of teaching. William Torrey Harris was editor
of the International Education Series published in New York by D. Appleton and
Company and the title, Rousseau’s &mile, or, Treatise on Education, was one of the
texts in the series. Harris wrote an Editor’s Preface to the text which was followed
by a separate section, the Introduction by the translator, William H. Payne. Payne
was at that time Chancellor of the University of Nashville and President of the
Peabody Normal College. What unites the two pieces is the appeal to science as one
of the key discourses allied with child-sympathy, citizenship, and teacher prepara-
tion and the turn to a new metaphor for imagining the state and its (relform of
relations. That metaphor is not one of a Newtonian system of machine-like forces
intersecting in shared space, but of Darwinian evolution that explains how humans
came to be humans in the same space. Emile is necessary to study for both its errors
and its insights in regard to the advent of science and Darwin, which together
indicated the parameters for citizenship and authorized new methods for getting
things done both within schools and outside of them.
On the surface the criteria by which &mileis judged in Harris’ Preface lie in two
realms, the former being the conditions that inflamed Rousseau’s conceit and
inspired his authorship of destruction and revolution, the latter arising primarily in
regard to his conceptualization of nature. There is both beauty and danger in what
Harris sees as Rousseau’s multiple meanings of nature and it is at this point that a
discourse of (Christian)science announces its significance to canonizing &mile.The
beauty arises for Harris when Rousseau sees nature as a spiritual being which is
inclusive: “When nature as a spiritual principle is followed for a while in Rousseau’s
Emile, there is wholesome truth.. ..” The danger occurs when nature is conceived of
as purely matter and force for the nature or principle of matter is exclusion: “when
he takes Nature as the principle of matter and force, the result is paradox and error.”
Harris argues that there is a confusion between spiritual and material laws “which
we find in the school of writers that demand freedom from external authority” and
that this confusion “explains the mixture of good and bad, wise and unwise
prescriptions which we find side by side in their books.”40Thescience of education
is not the science of matter alone, but a “fuller” understandmg of how science
captures and explains the spiritual and how it does this in particular through an
understanding of environment and evol u tion.

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What Rousseau misses in Harris’s account is how

40. William Torrey Harris, “Editor‘s Preface,” In Rousseau’s Emile, or, Treatise on Education (NewYork:
D. Appleton and Company, 19081, x. This book will be cited as “Harris” in the text for all subsequent
references.
BAKER zyx
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nearly all the education he describes as a result of nature is only education from men ....Human
nature does not come from the hand of the Author of Nature directly like the sun and stars, nor
33

even like plants and animals; for human nature is directly the product of man’s will.. ..For human
nature is the result of the realization of moral ideals.. ..Beforemoral ideals and without them we
have only the natural man [or perhaps only the anthropoid ape) (Harris, xi-xii).
Rousseau’s argument that natural man is complete in himself is therefore erroneous
for Harris as ”the state of human nature exists as the product of culture” The
supernatural that Rousseau is charged with dismissing from the very make-up of
nature as matter and force is thus the point at which Rousseau’s anti-Christian
message now arises. Harris’s complaint is not about the absence of interlocutors but
about erroneous views of human nature Human nature is not independent from the
influence of evolution, environment, and culture. Rather, these three things are
causally united in the production of human nature.
These “errors” of judgment about nature are not attributed to Rousseau’s
immorality as in the mid-l800s, however, but to the Darwinian revolution: “Since
Rousseau’s time natural science has turned through half a circle ....Under the
leadership of Darwin, it is no longer mechanical action of the environment, but
internal reaction against environment, that produces development. Newer and
higher species are developed through the struggle for existence” (Harris, xiv). This
stands in contrast to Rousseau’sprinciple of “let alone” for it suggests the principle
of the opposite, to strive: “If man had let himself alone, he would have remained the
monkey that he was. Not only this, but if the monkey had let himself alone he would
have remained alemur, or a bat, or a bear, or some other creature that now offers only
a faint suggestion of what the ape ha: become by his struggle to exist” (Harris, xiv).
Rousseau’s Emile is read in light of Darwinian evolutionary theory transported
into the social realm, which suggested to Harris the providential evolution of higher
as opposed to just different and random species. Significantly, it is read against a
backdrop of new reasonings that give the terms “savage” and “civilized” an inverted
meaning - one opposite to Rousseau‘s normative positioning of the terms in the
Second Discourse. For Harris, savagery is the problem and the ”failure” of the
existence of savage man is his failure to realize something beyond nature:
The invention that makes man successful in the struggle for existence is participation of the
fractional individual in the integer or total which he createsin the formof institutions-family,
society, and the state; for it is the savageman [contra Rousseau]that is the fraction. The civilized
man is made a whole by socicty, which offers him his share of the products of all ages and all
climes as an equivalent for his daily labor [Harris, xiv).
Rousseau therefore “builded better than he knew,” for while he was a “prophet
of the French Revolution” and “is still a prophet for the youth who has begun to
question external authority” his attitude to external authority was based on a
misguided conception of human nature. Thus, he is voicing the problems of
eighteenth-century Europe (which Harris argues Goethe alone solves), not of the
present. For Harris, external authority is necessary not as an end in itself but because
it increases the self-direction of the individual and that authority can be subjected to
reason presumably without undoing the cardinal institutions that mark a man as
“civilized” as opposed to “savage”: “Each learns the lesson of morality and religion
because they contain the wisdom of the race; but he is bound to change the lessons
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out of the form of external authority into internal conviction through verification
and insight” (Harris, xv). h i k e is important to study, then, not because it is
1

scientifically correct but because it is not: It highlights the misguided reasonings in

Harris’ view that have circulated about human nature through “natural education.‘’
The same principle operates in further reasons given by Harris for why Emile
should be studied- because the book is so wrong about citizenship. Harris’s Preface
indicates an outward-looking awareness of the multiplicity of nations, opening a
space for Emile’s renewed relevance in ways that are quite different from the 1763
version of “national differences.” It was in an International Education Series that
Rousseau’s text is given space. It is canonized not because one ought to be able to
exposcthe rotten foundations of Protestant Republics but because oneought to know
about education as it evolved in different countries in order to know one’s own place
better. The project of nation-building implicitly incited a belief that the reader had
to know the status quo elsewhere to gauge progress at home. The reader is thereby
actively invited to view Emile as subject to multiple interpretations, which in the
opening commentaries and the Appendix are compartmentalized by nationality.
While the 1763version of Emilius and Sophia made appeal to territorial differences,
these were steeped in impressions of religious similarity and Ifference: for example,
“Protcstant” as nomenclature for a Republic. In the latter nineteenth century, it is
nations as ”economic,” ”cultural,” and ”moral” entities that shape the categories for
analysis of education and the production of its history. Emile is called on to provide
a different kind of service to education, not one comprising claims for or against a
Catholic Parisian parlement, but one indicating how education can now be under-
stood through the “evolution” of civilizations that have come to the ”superior”
realization of the responsibility to fund and provide better teachers for public
schools. The nation as an interpretive construct had been mediated by Darwinian
biology and Social Darwinian sociology.
Overall, Harris’s reading of Ernile is a negative one, compared to Steeg’s and
Payne‘s. Rousseau is portrayed as a revolutionary for the sake of it. Words such as axe,
raid, attacked, sapping, and uproots open the Editor’s Preface as a way of indxating
Rousseau as a demolisher of “the four cardinal institutions”: family, civil society,
state (bureaucracies),and Church, together with the school, which for Harris “is the
means of preserving them.” This is why Rousseau is so wrong about citizenship in
Harris’s view. Yet, Emile is important for this very reason: “The significance of
Rousseau in education as well as in politics must be found in his revolutionary
attitude toward established institutions” (Harris, vii). Rousseau is not exiled and
Emike is not burned - the revolutionary attitude canonizes rather than debars the
book. Rousseau’s “errors,” as described in the Harris framing, suggest the extent to
which “the state” was imagined as a hierarchical form of human relations that
preserved judgments about human races and their ”evolution” and that could now
reposition Emile not as a book that attacked order within an empire but within a
civilization.
There is something beyond Rousseau’s “errors of reasoning’’ that makes Emile
special and unique in Harris’s argument, though. It is not its wrong-headed views on
BAKER zy
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nature and culture, on savagery and civilization, on citizenship and external author-
ity, but the importance of the child: ”It has made educators recognize the sacredness
of childhood. Its author is the great pioneer in the work of studying human character
as it develops in children.” Harris closes with: “Without a study of the Emile one can
not explain Pestalozzi, Basedow, Froebel, or any of the great leaders in education that
belong to the present century” (Harris, xvi). hmile, rather than being deemed
unnecessary to follow closely as in the mid-nineteenth century, is now an origin for
what happened not just in France, but beyond, and to such an extent that American
educators ought to know about it. In its positive child-sympathy, in its erroneous
view of nature and science, and in its misguided sentiments about the relation
between citizenship and civilization krnile is canonized in regard to a vision of the
state as part of a biologically evolved civilization controlling its savagery through its
governance of children’s “character development.”
FRAMING
THEPAYNE
There is one final framing of kmile that is worth considering because it draws out
and makes explicit another aspect of visions of the state and the process of
canonization that is taken-for-granted in the other receptions; the extent to which
the conceptualization of gender mattered to the reformulation of “relations,” the
idea of “the race,” and child-sympathy. To understand the role of gender, Payne’s
overall evaluation of &mile needs to be contextualized. In Payne’s Introduction,
Emile is a typical “educational classic.“ He gives a self-consciously circumscribed
list of who and what he sees as the classics in education and then argues that out of
that list there are three standouts: Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s kmile, and Spencer’s
Education; “and if a further reductionwere to be made, I would designate Rousseau’s
Emile as the greatest educational classic of the While Payne notes that the
judgment of a classic depends on what one means by ”classic” he argues that “an
epoch-making book in the history of education’’ is that which has been “the greatest
stimulus to educational thought, and which has longest held a high place in the
esteem of thoughtful men.” On this account kmile fails to qualify for it was held in
very low esteem just three decades earlier if synoptic history of education texts are
the marker. Such was the verve of late-nineteenth century reform, though, that
zy
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Rousseau was now being credited with the invention of universal schooling:
When we consider the fact that the idca of universal cducation has prevailed in the civilized
countries for only about one hundred years; that the great leader in the socid and political reform
which characterizes this period was Rousseau; that all the great writers o,n education since
Rousseau’s time, irrespective of country.. .have caught inspiration from the Einile; and that the
ideas which dominate in the education of the moment -sense perception, self-instruction, mild
discipline, the sacredness of childhood, care of health, etc. -are easily traceable to the pages of
Rousseau; we are justified in saying of the Emile what Rousseau himself said of thc Rcpublic,
“C’estle plus beau traiti d’education qu’on a jamais fait“ [“It is the most beautiful treatise on
education that anyone has ever done”] (Payne, xviii!.
Emile was now being held responsible, through a convoluted chain of events, for a
new kind of state and new form of universal education that it had never described.

41. William Payne, “Introduction,” InRousseau’s krnile, or, Treatise on Education (NewYork:D. Appleton
and Company, 1908), xviii. This book will be cited as “Payne” in the text for all subsequent references.
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One of the key reasons for this is because child-sympathy is taken by Payne to
be a very positive aspect informing ErniIe’s significance to educational history,
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“even” in the United States. Not only was child-sympathy one of its key contribu-
tions, but this was to be expected given the sympathetic nature of Rousseau himself:
Despite his obvious and lamentable imperfection in other respects [these are assumed to be
known], Rousseau was an ardent patriot, a devoted advocate of the rights of the people, and had
a heart overflowing with sympathy and affection for the helpless and the friendless ....Rousseau
had in full measure another characteristic of the reformer- he was tender-hearted and humanc,
and his foremost motivc was the happiness and good of the human race. I believe this is the one
constant virtue that runs through his entire career (Payne, xx).
These qualities were in addition to yet another: “he was liberally endowed with
another [quality]which distinguishes him from all other reformers-he was a genius
in literary art, and could clothe with matchless grace and eloquence whatever flowed
from his voice and pen” (Payne,xxii).To that end, the paradoxes that were considered
inevitable in the 1763 edition and constituted absurdties in the mid-1800s are now
deliberately stylistic:
His aphoristic, unqualified statements, and particularly his paradoxes, give us an unpleasant

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mental shock, and we decline to be taught by a man who falls so easily and so frequently into

zy
what seem rank absurdities; but when wc discover that aphorism and paradox are with Rousseau
favorite rhetorical devices - that their very intent is to surprise and startle; when we discover
by further reading that theseextreme statements seemingly so arbitrary anduntrue, arequalified
and illustrated in such a way as to give a glimpse of a many-sided truth that had hitherto escaped
us; and when finally, by a sort of syntax or synthesis, we catch the general spirit of thc book as
a whole, we find ourselves in a state of wholesome respect, and even of admiration (Payne, xxv).
hnile is therefore not rank and absurd but “the Gospel of Childhood” and

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Rousseau was “the prophet, if not the Author, of the French revolution.” krnile
specifically “revolutionized modem education.” The once problematic nature of
Rousseau‘s character mattered less while the once wider and more overt theological
discourse of education had become concentrated on and concertinaed into the earlier
years of life that were now posited as sacred and &vine.
For Payne, though, these years had become too sacred and here the excesses of
women are to blame. After a general portrait of Rousseau’s political writings and
summary of Ernile, the translator argues that Emile led to three recommendations
that had subsequently emerged in modern education: education should be natural,
progressive, and negative (keepingthe child away from harmful things). It is under
the first two headings that a discourse of child-sympathy again emerges to establish
Emile’s significance to the history of education in the United States. It is given a
twist, though, insofar as chdd-sympathy is considered by Payne to have been taken
too far. Rousseau’s Emile is thereby used to moderate what are perceived as excesses
in the late-nineteenth century, The excesses are implicitly attributed to the zealous-
ness of women teachers of infants, for the infant methods had spread to being used
inappropriately for grown men as well as for infants:
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Rousseau’s theory on this subject [progressive education] embodies reaction from an old-time
error, which consisted either in ignoring the rights of children altogether or of prescribing thc
same general treatment for children and men. Modem education is peculiarly the education of
children. Childlife has been so much stuhed, and so much sympathy and sentiment have been
created in the child’s behalf, that infant methods havegained ascendancy that isnot onlyharmhl
to children but to adults, for infant methods have been transported into the higher schools. It is
not altogether wise to treat children as though they were men, but it is still more unwise to treat
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BAKER Rousseau’s Emile 37

men as though they were children ....I think it can not be doubted that in many cases the
education of children has become so puerile as not only to be worthless, but positively harmful
(Payne, d i ) .
Like Steeg’s version, the goodness of &milelay not just in how it made childhood
divine and how it could be used to discipline teachers, but in how it disciplined
mothers:
If it had no other claims to consideration it would deserve homage of parents and teachers by
reason of that sacredness with which it invests the personality of every child. In what other book
of human origin can we find such compassion for the weakness of childhood, such tender regard
for its happiness, and such touching pleas for its protection and guidance? What other book has
ever recalled mothers to a sense of their duties with such pathos and effect? (Payne, xxxvii).
The disciplining of mothers, teachers-as-mothers, and the child are forms of
expert governance delivered through commentary on Ernile. As Popkewitz notes, by
the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern patrician of educational reform was
replaced by the reformer who was typically the child of a family headed by a
clergyman. The new kind of reformer had a sense of religious commitment and duty
that was given moral direction by a secularized training in the new social sciences.
A stratification had emerged within occupations Concerned with education and its
spirited reform - those who were thought to be at the top focused on knowledge
production and administration of the occupation, and those thought at the bottom
(women by the late-nineteenth century) were to be concerned with instrumental
knowledge of the p r o f e ~ s i o n . ~ ~
In her reading of discourses of sentimentalism in the Republic of nineteenth-
century United States, Eva Cherniavsky argues that this was a typical pattern, not
one that separated “Woman” from the state and its reform, but one that indicated
how the stereotype of Republican Womanhood was constitutive of the realm
thought of as the public sector.43The ghostly tropes that produced, displaced, and
elevated the motherly spirit that daily instructs were cast onto fleshy bodies in
unique ways that related especially to race. Cherniavsky argues that the production
of Mother in the United States was the phantasmic limits of politics made possible
by Enlightenment conceptions of identity and democratic principles of representa-
tion. That is, Mother is not anterior to or outside republican and then liberal
democratic traditions but a figure born of them. The essentialized mother of
nineteenth-century texts appears remarkably stylized exaggerated, overwrought,
improvised, seamed. Cherniavsky suggests that what is left today to unravel is a
specifically modem paradsgm in which the mother grounds or guarantees a rational
political order by being made to embody the politically impure, the nonrational
political alliances and affinities that “consensual” democracy proscribes. In nine-
teenth-century U.S. political rhetoric and novels, however, which are Cherniavsky’s
final focus, the figure of the bourgeois mother marks the boundary, not between
nature and culture or between excess in general and the law but between proscribed

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and legitimate forms of political behavior in a specific historical context. What is

42. Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational Reform

43. Eva Cherniavsky, That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discour.res and the Imitation of Motherhood
in 19th-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
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38 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y 2001 / VOLUMC
WINTER 51 / NUMRER

specificto the American context for Chemiavsky is that motherhood needs t o be read
within and against the juridical determination of the African American mother for
1

whom motherhood reduces to an ambiguously signifying condition as opposed to a

“hood.” That is, the birth of an African American child follows the “condition” of
the mother, but the African American mother is not treated in nineteenth-century
literature as a mother - she simply had a “condition” that excluded her from the
bourgeois meanings of motherhood, or by extrapolation to Emile, its ”duties.” In the
context of latter nineteenth-century America, then -the period in which common
schooling was most urged to spread and professionalize - a double disappearance

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encircles the visibility of black females: a disappearance from the political into the
affective and from the affective into the “biological black body.” Mothers are not
black and black women are not mothers. This double Qsappearance is suggested by
the interhscursivity of that which appears in framings such as Payne’s where
recapitulation theory is thought the proper narrative explaining racial supremacy,
where Spencer’s E d u c a ~ o ndrawing on Social Darwinism is considered one of the
three top classics of the field, and where the problematized teachers of infants in
public schools were actually rarely anything but “white women’’ in their teens.
The “securalized”training of catechetic reformers and topdown administration,
of recalling mothers to their duties and chastising their puerile techniques was thus
also a way of seeing the state through Darwin rather than just through Newton. The
state that was being appealed to was not just a mechanical universe of forces that
shaped and influenced the direction of a particle but a Darwinian one of biological
evolution minus the randomness. The lack of randomness is brought into view
through the emergence of patterns that still persist. The racialization of sexuality
was implicit to the scientization of the administration of morality in “the Republic.”
As for Harris, the debate over nature and the child, authority and revolution is drawn

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into a nature/culture binary in Payne’s framing, where Darwinism patrols the
borders between the binaries, determines the ascendant gender, and encodes its race:
Should the child be adjusted to his environment, or should his environment be adapted to him?
Doubtless there should he created within the child a power of resistance, and even of conquest,
that will not only allow him to support existence under change of surroundings, but will enable
him to modlfy, almost to recreate, his environment to suit his caprices or his necds (Payne,
xxxvi).
The “he” of education is not just the product of the writing conventions of the
time, for Payne sees himself as somewhat liberally minded and supportive of new
orientations to womanhood. The above quote is, for example, briefly accompanied
by observations regarding Sophie, announcing the impact perhaps of “first wave”

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feminism. Rousseau’s portrayal of Sophie as representative of girl-woman is casti-
gated, but the judgment can only turn on that which is of interest to ”all sensible
men”:
when Sofia’s education is taken in hand Rousseau makes an abrupt descent. It is not a woman
who is to he trained to the perfection of her own powers as a human being, hut a servant to man’s
needs andpleasures, or at most a companion to sharehis joys and sorrows. In kind, his conception
was the Hebrew ideal, which is doubtless the ideal of all sensible men, but Sofia falls far short
of this lovable, matchless original. Rousseau earns our applause when he counsels against the
selection of a blue-stocking for a wife, hut Sofia bears too much resemblance to his Theresa to
merit even our respect (Payne, xxuvii).
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zy Rousseau‘s Emile

In describing Emile’s education at the outset of this passage as “of the liberal
type” Payne captures quite plainly its available meaning, as that which attends to the
39

perfection of a boy’s powers, and in light of that a girl’s, in the eventual hope for the

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creation of a society of good marriages among the ”best” racial types: “The Emile has
made the ministry of the school-room as sacred as the ministry of the altari and by
unfolding the mysteries of his art and disclosing the secret of his power, it has made
the teacher’s office one of honor and respect (Payne, xxxvii-xxxviii).Apart from
suggesting how little respect teaching must have actually had in order to keep
announcing its honor, Payne’s Introduction, like Harris’s and Steeg’s, frames Ernile
in light of present concerns regarding human relations in the late-nineteenth
century, attributing a sacredness to teaching and to childhood through the reason-
ings of science and progress, citizenship and welfare, and child-sympathy and
methods of surveillance that drew on Darwinian theory in the midst of efforts to
manage the wider meanings of “racial evolution.”
CONCLUSION: NATION, EDUCATION, AND HISTORY

The above suggests how Emile was woven into three related projects of image-
construction. Through an analysis of the shifting receptions and significance that
.6mile was given, the processes of nation-state building, of building an educational
canon, and of building a history for both are brought into view. The different portraits
of , b i l e expressed through its framing also illustrate at a broad level, three different
visions of the state. In the problematization of a Church-focused ethics in the 1760s,
disagreements over kmile bring the state-as-a-religious-doctrine into view. By the
mid-1800s it is a reliance on a Newtonian Mechanical Republic that authorizes
imaginings of the state, while by the turn of the twentieth century, Newton has given

of plausible human relations and methods for doing things.

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way somewhat to Darwin, with biological and cultural evolution structuringvisions

While the Church is the state made manifest in the 1760s)by the mid-1800s in
theunited States the key terms associated with the state (theorganization of human
relations and methods for getting things done) are morality and welfare. These
become reiterated key terms under the weight of Newtonian imaginings of shared
space and intersecting forces that are not in balance and that do affect other. Policies
can be written, central funds can exist, and reformers can imagine themselves
making a difference to someone else’s children whom they have never met. Denomi-
nations remain visible but the state is now defined as democratic and a broad desire
for morality and keenness to organize welfare outside of naming a specific denomi-
nation can be articulated. &mileis decanonized in the Newtonian state not because
it was an affront to a Catholic Parisian parlement, but because of the immorality
attributed to its author in the form of a lack of self-control in particular. Rousseau
was portrayed as an out-of-balance force whose effect on other particles would be
hsastrous. He therefore becomes a tethered presence in synopses of the history of
education. Ernile is further decanonized in these texts because even though it seemed
to influence many an educational theorist on the Continent it was positioned as
being of little help in securing funds from a central pot being competed over by other
agencies elsewhere. Shared space had become localized in ways that made Emile
report its significance to its “home” nations first.
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40 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y

By the late 1 8 0 0 the

WINTER 51 / NUMBER
2001 / VOLUME

~ ~ concern for the administration of morality and for religion

1

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do not disappearso much as become relocatedandcrystallizedin the problematization
of who teaches and governs whom, with what techniques, and in what kind of
institution. The state is less Newtonian and more Darwinian, with a cadre of experts
to monitor, draw out, and if possible at all redirect the bio-cultural heritage that now
inheres in every physical organism. In the organization of public schools for a moral
citizenry kmile can be reheardina more positivevein despiteits “wrong-headedness”
about “savage man.” Even where it is considered outmoded or erroneous it will be
of value not because of the Profession of Faith, which Rousseau saw as its most
important part, but because there are specific teaching techniques and maxims
offered within it that can contribute to a teacher’s toolbox. The focus on teaching
indicates the realignment of relationships that different discursive conditions had
spawned; the appeal to child-sympathy, science, and citizenship as important
aspects of teacher preparation paved the way for Rousseau to be blessed as a prophet
rather than denigrated as a blasphemer.
To understand part of what made the teacher into a problem and potential to
which commentary on kmile could be dedicated requires a turn away from under-
standing the child simply as a vulnerable, developmentally inscribed individual and
toward argument over the processes of nation-state formation. Andy Green in
Education and State Formation notes that relative to centralized European states
that initiated public schooling, the classic conception of the emergence of public
education in the United States is one of seeming statelessness, making public
education’s uneven emergence from the early 1800s in the North to the post-Civil
War South quite distinct from European versions:

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Not only were the ethnic and class relations which underpinned the emergence of public
education in the United States quite distinctive, contributing their own effects on the unique
forms of American education, but also the whole nature of state and civil society was dderent.
Whereas education systems in northern Europe arose.. .in extremely centralized states and owed
much to the etatism and constant interventions of monarchs and governments alike, in America
public education arose in a decentralized system, and one, at least according to the official
version, that owed more to spontaneous forces in civil society than to any central state direction.
Ironically, the country which developed the quintessentially”pub1ic” form of schooling was also
that which had the least visible state m a ~ h i n e . ~ ‘
This seeming lack of visibility is perhaps attributable to the hfferent strategies
required to define and recognize what form “the state” took in the United States
where education is concerned. By the end of the nineteenth century, a change in the
questions being asked around the definition of “social problems” had accompanied
a change in what the response could be. As noted above, the questions were not so
explicitly about sinners and religious redeemers but about savages and the formation

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of civilization and “the race.” Avenues for a new kind of expert, one that Foucault

to studying the ”differen~e.”~~

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calls a “specific intellectual, ” had emerged alongside scientific disciplines indebted
In late-nineteenth-century educational discourse,

44. Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France, and
the USA (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 19901, 172.
45. Michel Foucault. “Truth and Power,” in PowerIKnowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writing
1972-2977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York Pantheon Books, 19801, 10933.
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science was not primarily experimental or that which was considered to interfere
with a natural state, but that which observed and recorded data about anatural state.
Rousseau’s Emile 41

It was perceived as rationally organized segments of knowledge that could be linked

as independent variables in ascertaining the causes of particular effects or problems.
Hence the main adult character in Emile is no longer the tutor but the teacher who
could be urged to treat pedagogy as a process of the rediscovery of knowledge that is
drawn out from the child rather than construing knowledge as that which is
didactically communicated through memory-lessons of Latin and Greek. Through
portraying the teacher in ,bileas a technician deploying seemingly neutral artifices
and contrivances regarding a drawing-out of knowledge with the young, the regula-
tion of populational groups, which was of such concern in late-nineteenth-century
welfare reasonings, was incorporated as the hidden meaning of Emile “for our times.”
The texture of “our times” is evident in both late-nineteenth-century editions of
Emile.Through making discrete what is human above animals, what is civilized man
above savage man, and what is boy above girl, Emile was drawn into all the loaded
meanings of progressive education available - a concern for hygiene of mind and
body and a care of health that could not be dmarticulated from the installation of
castes, divisions, and supposedly discrete identities that the term “citizenship” now
embodied, As Grant Rodwell argues, the meanings of progressive education at the
turn of the twentieth century could not be disassociated from the meanings of

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eugenics, which far from being reducible to programs for sterilization, incorporated
a wide array of “soft” and ”hard” welfare reasonings that were ultimately articulated
to a notion of racial i m p r ~ v e r n e n t . ~ ~
Post-Darwin specific intellectuals were thus a sign of new forms of service in
new chains of human relations. In particular, they were in service to the idea of the
nation-state as a discrete or distinctive locale through which one must now describe,
define, and recognize oneself as a race and all of its loaded meanings that included and
went far beyond “color.” Such forms of service were not seeking as per Rousseau the
undermining of existing forms of doxology in a revolutionary way. Rather the subject
position of the specific intellectual was formed within a discursive matrix that
suggested that existing styles of administration needed to be tweaked and remobi-
lized toward particular moral ends, specifically those aligned with the very popular
terminology of “progressive education.“ New professions such as education at-
tempted to direct progressive reforms and in the process transform a popularist and
democratic ideal of service into one of expert knowledge for charting what was
thought of as material and social progress. Emile was thereby brought into the canon
of education as a pedagogical text teaching about progressive pedagogy as a liberal and

46. Grant Rodwell provides this description of eugenics in h s discussion of the history of education in
Australian teachers’ colleges. Theorists from England and the United States, such as William James, G.
Stanley Hall, and William McDougall were drawn on to educate future teachers in the first half of the
twentieth century. As Rodwell notes, the chscourses that intersected within eugenics were not unique to
just one “national” contexts, nor were they restricted simply to education or psychology. Grant Rodwell,
”Australian Teachers’ College Psychology Textbooks, Hereditarian Theory, Instinct Psychology, Eugenics,
and Racism, 1900-1960.” Paper presented to the International Standing Conference on History of
Education (ISCHE),Alcala de Henares, Spain, 6-9 Sept 2000, 1-14.
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42 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y WINTER 2001 / VOLUME 51 / NUMBER

liberating event. As liberating as progressive modes of pedagogy presented them-

1

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selves as being, they unavoidably hosted disciplining moments. The concern for
governance of individuals, including teachers and what they “knew,” who their
students related with, to, and how announced itself in persistent references to “the

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race,” the ”progress of the race,” the contents of children’s minds, to savagery and
civilization as discrete states of being and to comments regarlng the education of
women via Sophie. In the anxiety that such framings demonstrate Emile is not
described as a “performance” as in the 1763 ehtion but turned into an advice book

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on stirpiculture. The nation as an interpretive construct had been reconstructed,
made use of in new ways that spawned a nationalism that sought to “define and
defend” a form of organization that was thought ”given, desirable, or recoverable”
within the respective framings.
Finally, in late-nineteenth-century framings of Emile, trends in historiography
can be gauged that seem to have been influenced by the same discourses through
which education was advertising itself. Writing histories of education at the turn of
the twentieth century meant struggling with the suspension of judgment about a
man, with naming what are the objective facts thought to be held within a document
as opposed to the subjective opinions, with writing a narrative around the binary of
savage/civilized, with the idea of progress as that which is signified by what is
progressed away from (barbarism).The writing of history becomes the writing of the
origins of “human species” and their ”cultures” under the presumption of discrete
and distinct racialized and sexualized categories thought to have determined quali-
ties, and yet with some possibility for direction. While culture is thought to make
some difference to the processes that history thinks it documents - and for Harris
t h s holds “even” for “savage man” - in the dominant educational reasonings of the
time culture can only go so far in modifying nature, even for Harris. Hence
Rousseau’s Emile is well-suited to pointing out such limitations and complexities
not because of its commensurability but because of its seeming misguidedness and
anachronism. Harris’s criticism of Rousseau’s wrong-headedness on what is natural
where education is concerned exemplifies how history could now be rewritten
around a very different “biological” meaning of nature and “anthropological”
meaning for culture than was available to Rousseau. Emile can thereby become
significant to the history of education and teacher preparation in the United States,
not because it is perceived as completely right, or simply necessary for a field to have
a history, or for a teacher to have some knowledge of the past, but because debates
over the origins of humans and the content of the past were debates attempting to
justify and rationalize the present status of human relations and map a course for the
future. While Rousseau romanticized the past in order to problematize his present,
late-nineteenth century educational history found his Emile useful in precisely the
opposite way, for it was woven into a romancing of the present and future in relation
to what was thought of as aless knowledgeable, less civilized, and more barbaricpast.
The malleability of history, just like the partial malleability of the child, had become
significant to the assertion of education as a legitimate and professional field. And
it is here, in the efforts to manage the multiple subject positions being spawned
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around child-sympathy, science, and citizen, that the rewriting of history also
demonstrated that one finds the seemingly stateless state, not simply in a Bureau, a
discrete building alone, or in the invention of passports, licenses, borders, or the
collection and distribution of monies, but in and as the very threads of interpersonal
relations and templates for judgment that flowed back and forth between experts,
teachers, and children who were now meant to profit from a study of Emile.