Pride and providence:
Religion in Rousseau’s Lettre à Voltaire sur la providence
John T. Scott
If pride is the root of fanaticism, the need for recognition among developed human
beings is also what leads Rousseau to offer a religious teaching with a God who exercises
particular providence over individuals and their immortal souls that he knows is doubtful, if
not simply false. Rousseau encourages a belief in particular providence because the general
providence of nature he advances as part of his philosophical thought does not suffice to
promote the happiness and virtue of most individuals. A teaching concerning a general
providence of nature or God that leads to the good of the whole — but is indifferent to its
particular parts – provides insufficient consolation to the virtuous and an ineffective check on
the wicked. Yet, by encouraging a belief in a divinity who cares for perfected and therefore
corrupted individuals, Rousseau risks stimulating the very pride that leads to fanaticism. While
he makes a concession to the demands of developed individuals whose self-love and self-
understanding depends upon the regard of their fellows as well as a caring divinity, Rousseau
tries to wed his religious teaching insofar as possible with a strictly naturalistic theology
consistent with his philosophy.
This tension between Rousseau’s philosophical ‘system’ of the goodness of nature and
his religious teaching concerning a caring divinity is evident in the contrast between the
Discours sur l’inégalité parmi les hommes and the ‘Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard’ in
Emile. In the Discours sur l’inégalité, Rousseau seeks natural man and finds a stupid animal
which, he says, was placed thus in nature by ‘une providence très sage.’ Rousseau declares
Prepared for the 2005 American Political Science Assocation meetings.
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