Nothing Solid for the Heart

Abstract

Rousseau was stubbornly preoccupied with problems of social morale. Why? It was not because he spoke for collectivist policies, in the way Morelly or Mably did. And neither was his concern merely the magnificent result of an unusually imaginative emotional fantasy. His pessimistic view on the implications of individual rationality and his unusual demands on the task of the economy forced him to search desparately for a way to credibility and trustworthiness in society. This view differed, certainly, from the doctrine and emphasis of other contemporaneous theorists. Adam Smith, of course, claimed that if each individual was rational, in the sense that she acted and chose so as to maximise her gain, then the totality of actions would make the consequent resource allocation optimal for society at large. Rousseau, on the other hand, could base his scepticism on a number of observations of different kinds of market imperfections that would make this kind of resource allocation suboptimal and thus unsatisfactory for a good political economy.