ABSTRACT

This essay explores Rousseau’s own legislative project: to regulate our judgment of what is beautiful or pleasing by providing in his writings an education in taste. Rousseau relates taste to mores, customs, and opinion, distinguishable but interrelated cultural elements comprising, as he says in The Social Contract, a kind of ‘law,’ and forming the true constitution of any state. Rousseau is above all occupied, I argue, with this type of law. The essay examines some of his reflections on the Legislator’s need to inspire mores; on the art of writing in order to persuade; on the relation between mores and taste in Emile’s aesthetic education; and on the value of the comparative study of tastes both for Emile and for Rousseau’s readers. Rousseau’s aim to alter opinion via the imaginary sights or spectacles he presents in his works connects him closely to the theatre or poetry.