Rousseau S Autonomy And The Ir Essay

, Research Paper

Autonomy is literally self-rule or self-government. Autonomy has often been thought to bear a particularly close relation to democracy. Only in a democracy, it is sometimes said, can an individual or a people be truly autonomous. Spelling out why this should be so, however, takes some care.

In its ancient meaning, autonomy was taken to be a property of states, rather than of individuals. An autonomous people was one that was self-sufficient and self-governing, rather than being ruled by an outside force. In the modern world, we have not lost this understanding of the term: the “puppet” regimes of the former Eastern bloc, for example, were commonly contrasted with the apparently more autonomous regimes elsewhere around the globe. To have autonomy in this sense is part of what is required for a nation to be a democracy, but we should remember that in the ancient world even tyrannical states were often regarded as fully autonomous.

The modern understanding of the term attributes autonomy, or the lack of it, to individuals. In the philosophical literature, personal autonomy has been identified with a great variety of other notions, including self-government, freedom, responsibility, morality, dignity, independence, and self-knowledge. Yet the core concept seems to be simply that an autonomous person is one who makes, and acts upon, his or her own decisions.

The relationship between autonomy and democracy was perhaps most fruitfully worked out by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose views inspired the moral and political works of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (with whom the term autonomy is most often associated). Rousseau’s ideas were also to influence Hegel and Karl Marx in different ways.

Rousseau makes a powerful attempt to bring together the ancient and modern understandings of autonomy. The idea of individual autonomy is given perhaps its classic formulation by Rousseau in The Social Contract. According to Rousseau, freedom is obedience to a law that we prescribe to ourselves. The problem of social order, then, becomes the problem of reconciling the individual’s right to autonomy with the existence of the state, and in particular with the state’s right to create and enforce laws. In Book 1, chapter 6, of The Social Contract, Rousseau sets out this problem as the need to find a kind of association in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

Rousseau’s solution is simple and elegant: all must equally play a part in the creation of laws to which all will equally be subject. In other words, individual autonomy is reconciled with the authority of the state by a form of direct, participatory democracy. At the same time, group autonomy is preserved: Rousseau’s ideal state is self-governing.

Rousseau put this ideology into practice by designing a model of education which preserves the pure nature of children and teaches them to be autonomous. The educational model involved a 5 step process ranging from birth to early adulthood. The stages isolate the child from the corruption of society and allow him to cultivate his morals on his own.

Rousseau applies this educational model only to males for he believes the capability to rationally be autonomous is not achievable by females. This is because of fundamental differences between males and females which Rousseau adamantly believes in. First of all women are born consumed with things of ornament. They do not have the reasoning capability to surround themselves with higher matters of intelligence and therefore are fond of things such as dolls and mirrors. They learn to read and write reluctantly, but learn the trade of needlework quite willingly. Males, on the other hand, are quite capable of rationality and intellectual thinking. They learn to read and write and analyze readily. These fundamental differences play specific roles in Rousseau s theory.

According to Rousseau, women are completely dependant on men not only for their wants but also their necessities while men are only dependant on women for their desires. For this reason women should be educated to please men in every way. They should be educated according to societal laws of how women ought to act. Men on the other hand should be educated to be autonomous. They should at reject society influences and create laws in which to follow themselves.

Mary Wollstonecraft identifies the irony which is so flagrant in Rousseau s theory. On one hand Rousseau rejects the influence of society and educates men in autonomy or self-rule, and on the other hand he embraces the influence of society and educates women in heteronomy or government by an outside force, specifically society itself. After identifying this irony she then goes on to set up several arguments in favor of equality in the education of women.

First of all Wollstonecraft discusses how the social order which convinces women to value trivial things and virtues over true morality and understanding makes women worse than they ought to be. It teaches them to be cunning and sly, tricking their husbands, fathers, brothers or sons into getting their way. They therefore exhert power over men. Wollstonecraft argues that if women were educated equally with men they could rely more on their own efforts to achieve goals and t