Domination and Care in Rousseau's Emile

Domination, understood as the abusive or capricious employment of power over others for the sake of one's own ends, is among the gravest threats to human freedom. Solving the problem of domination is a crucial normative challenge, and this article identifies in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau a promising and overlooked avenue for addressing it. I propose an interpretation of Rousseau's Emile in which preventing domination requires moral education in the practice and value of care. This interpretation gives Rousseau new relevance as a theorist of domination. In connecting non-dominative to educative care, Rousseau's approach has the potential to forge new connections between neo-republican theories of domination and feminist care ethics, even suggesting new routes by which public policy might foster a non-dominative society.