Transcript for Christopher Kelly Interview on Rousseau | Selfish Heroes Make Great Leaders

0. Introduction

Superheroes have never been more popular in movies, yet real heroes have never been more absent in society. Who do we look up to today the same way Rome looked up to Caesar, that Christendom looked up to the saints. Nobody, because we tear heroes down and Rousseau thinks that's an existential threat to society.

Christopher Kelly is one of the world's leading Rousseau scholars and today, we discuss the importance of heroes. Heroes aren't just ornaments, a nice-to-have, but the very foundations of community itself. What's worrying then is Rousseau's diagnosis that the modern world is hostile to heroes. It's not just we can't produce them, it's not just we can't sustain them, but that we are actively tearing them down.

You're going to learn how many existential issues we face due to our lack of shared heroes. Issues as seemingly unrelated as the failure of reason in public discourse is due to the lack of heroic models. Without heroes, even reason is impotent. So what can we do? Can we bring heroes back? Rousseau doesn’t think that's possible anymore for reasons we'll explore, but he will teach us what the next best alternative to heroes are and how to live, if not thrive, in our hero-less world.

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1. What is a Hero

Johnathan Bi: I begin with a quote from your book.

Community can come only, only from something like a common identification with the same heroes.

(Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author)

Why do heroes play such a constitutive role in Rousseau's political philosophy?

Christopher Kelly: The idea of what a community is for Rousseau is a bunch of people who identify with each other in some important respect. And one of the most important media for that taking place is that they identify with the same thing.

Johnathan Bi: Same hero.

Christopher Kelly: Same hero in this case. So when Rousseau gives advice to Poland, where they wrote to him asking about forming a new government, he said you should reform the education system so that people aren't learning French literature and so on. They should learn Polish things. They should learn Polish history. And by the time someone is 12 years old, they should be able to name all of the Polish heroes of the independence movement against Russia.

This idea of one person identifying with another is extremely important for Rousseau. It's important in a general way because Rousseau places a great deal of emphasis upon compassion, which involves identifying with someone else, feeling their pain as your pain. It also is true in more complicated ways with the ways in which people develop vanity and pride and so on because they think about the way they look to someone else, which involves identifying with them.

In fact, Rousseau appears to be the first person in French to use the term “identify oneself with someone.” Identification was used as a mathematical term, identity, the principle of identity, and it was used theologically when talking about the three persons of the Trinity as identical. But this idea of one person identifying with another just even grammatically never appeared in French before Rousseau's Second Discourse.

Johnathan Bi: We're going to spend this entire interview unpacking the importance of the hero for the community, but let's start from the basics. When Rousseau talks about heroes, who are the types of people that he has in mind?

Christopher Kelly: Mainly political leaders, people who perform great actions for the sake of the community. But it's also true, of course, that Rousseau is aware that there are dangerous or non-moral sides of people who we admire as heroes as well.

Johnathan Bi: Like Achilles.

Christopher Kelly: Yes. Yes, Achilles is one of the examples he gives. He wrote a discourse on the subject. The question that was posed was, what is the virtue most necessary for a hero and who are the heroes who lack that virtue? He begins by taking the traditional cardinal virtues, which he puts as courage, prudence, temperance, and

Johnathan Bi: Justice.

Christopher Kelly: -- and justice. And he goes through them one by one and denies that traditional cardinal virtues are things necessary for being a hero. And so he ultimately arrives at the idea that strength of soul is what makes a hero. And this is something that he takes most directly, he says, from Bacon. Strength of soul is the one thing necessary to make you independent of fortune. And then I think from that one can also trace it to Machiavelli's notion of virtue. And you can see even from the formulation and the tracing into Machiavelli that --

Johnathan Bi: It's not moral.

Christopher Kelly: -- it's not moral, it's not justice. And courage is the traditional virtue that Rousseau spends the most time on, but he also suggests that courage is a rather morally questionable virtue. Rousseau says there are plenty of thugs who are courageous just --

Johnathan Bi: Nazi soldiers storming the front lines.

Christopher Kelly: Fanatics are courageous, and they're not necessarily heroic by being that. But he also argues there are examples of heroes who aren't courageous. You could be a general who doesn't have to be courageous in the way that a soldier on the front lines is courageous and still be a hero because he knows how to run a campaign. And the general is the one who gets credit for the victories and blames for the defeat more than the foot soldiers do.

Johnathan Bi: Right. What I want to emphasize here is that strength of soul, the actual unifying quality, let's call it that, of heroes is orthogonal to virtue. Now, there seems to be a flip side here where if you're weak-souled, you're easily tempted and you're almost certainly not virtuous. But the fact that you are strong-souled, that could lead you to do many different things. Being strong-souled is simply being effective. It's not about having the right ends. It's about being able to achieve your ends.