ABSTRACT
Rousseau's interest in education is political and in politics educational. He had made this evident in the Discourse which he wrote before Emile, political economics, the subject of the Discourse, being the art of government. Hence Rousseau's understands education, as does Foucault for the purpose of his genealogies, as being about the economics of power. The real protagonist is Emile's tutor and, ultimately, Rousseau who speaks to the tutor as the real architect of the boys education. In Rorty's language, Rousseau wanted his ethics of authenticity to transcend contingency. Richard Rorty says, a re-description of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be poeticized rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be rationalized or scientized. The poeticization of culture is what the romantic utopian Rousseau offered his society, not as a re-described liberalism, however, but in the form of an anti-liberal republicanism.
