Rousseau’s philosophy of transformative, ‘denaturing’ education

Rousseau’s political philosophy presents the great legislator as a civic educator who must over time transform naturally self-loving egoists into citizens animated by a general will without destroying freedom. This is an educational process which is ‘denaturing’ but which aims to produce autonomous adults who can ultimately say to their teacher (with Rousseau’s Emile) that they have chosen to ‘remain what you have made me’. The problem of finding a stable equilibrium between denaturing education, political stability and adult autonomy is the central and distinctive difficulty of Rousseau’s social thought, as the paper illustrates and explains by means of a series of structured comparisons with, especially, the philosophies of Plato, Kant, Hegel and Diderot.