...To understand when feelings became the basis of facts, we must be conversant with the work and thought of the patron-saint and godfather of liberalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s ideology contains the subtleties and nuances involved in the process of making a person’s feelings the basis of facts. The most important starting point is Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of man. From his assumptions about the natural goodness of man, all his other premises and conclusions emanate. Rousseau declared,
The fundamental principle of all morality, upon which I have reasoned in all my writings and which I developed with all the clarity of which I am capable is that man is a being who is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always good.[1]
The natural goodness of man is Rousseau’s single most important contribution to the ideology of liberalism. Rousseau, like the liberals who follow in the footsteps of his ideology, believed that human beings are naturally good, pure, and benevolent, but society corrupts us. He argued “that man is naturally good, and that is solely by these institutions that men become wicked.”[2] The evils of the world come not from within, but are introduced from without via society. To create a better world, we must fix society.
Rousseau’s fame came from his wildly successful novel, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761). The interesting element about this text is that a person who reads it today cannot understand its cultural significance without the scholarly commentary on it. It is extremely tame by contemporary standards. As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer said, “Today, the Nouvelle Heloise as a whole is remote from us; we cannot feel the immediate impact of the force with which it moved and shook Rousseau’s century.”[3] With this novel, Rousseau replaced the concepts of restraint and rationalism with the idea of feelings and emotions as the prime motivators of human conduct.[4] As Cassirer said of Julie,
Feeling is now raised far above passive ‘impression’ and mere perception…. It no longer appears as a special faculty of the self but rather as its proper source—as the original power of the self, from which all other power grow.[5]
Rousseau believed that his feelings were the source of morality. He lauded his emotions as legitimate and just moral foundations. Rousseau “identifies the principle of moral good with positive human feelings.”[6] If it feels good, then it is good, so one should do it.
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The Roots of Liberal Morality
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Originally Posted by Mechanic
