THE LOGIC OF NEOCORPORATISM

At the beginning of Emile, Rousseau explains why “the chief thing” in his pedagogical strategy is “to prevent anything from being done”:

In the social order where each has his own place a man must be educated for it. If such a one leave his own station he is fit for nothing else. His education is only useful when fate agrees with his parents' choice. … where social grades remain fixed, but the men who form them are constantly changing, no one knows whether he is not harming his son by educating him for his own class.

In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do well in that calling and those related to it. It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him …. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place.

It was only as an import, domesticated for native consumption, that Emile found a broad audience among German educational reformers. Its German domestication in the last third of the century confirmed the pertinence of Rousseau's distinction between the human being (Mensch) and the “citizen” (Bürger), but reversed his priorities. This was in part because the rationalist preoccupation with “duty” in the German Enlightenment implied a radically different relationship between the natural self and society.