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6 - Music, the passions, and political freedom in Rousseau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Christie McDonald
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Stanley Hoffmann
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind … the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking.

Hannah Arendt

Arendt draws here upon the concept of “reflective judgment” in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. “Reflective judgment” is precisely not my taking someone else's point of view, but thinking as myself (“thinking in my own identity”) that which others think. Such judgment thus re-presents the judgments of all those others to whom I make myself present. I will not necessarily agree with them, but I will have had them present while reflecting. In doing so, Arendt observes, I do not take into account “only my own interests.”

Yet, if Arendt is right, it would seem that there is no room for such a politics in Rousseau: notoriously, he seems opposed to representation as such.

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Rousseau and Freedom , pp. 92 - 110
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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