Educational Theory - 2012 - Shuffelton - ROUSSEAU S IMAGINARY FRIEND CHILDHOOD PLAY AND SUSPICION OF THE IMAGINATION IN

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ROUSSEAU’S IMAGINARY FRIEND: CHILDHOOD, PLAY, AND

SUSPICION OF THE IMAGINATION IN EMILE
Amy B. Shuffelton
School of Education
Loyola University Chicago
Abstract. In this essay Amy Shuffelton considers Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s suspicion of imagination,
which is, paradoxically, offered in the context of an imaginative construction of a child’s upbringing.
First, Shuffelton articulates Rousseau’s reasons for opposing children’s development of imagination
and their engagement in the sort of imaginative play that is nowadays considered a hallmark of early
and middle childhood. Second, she weighs the merits of Rousseau’s opposition, which runs against
the consensus of contemporary social science research on childhood imaginative play. Ultimately,
Shuffelton argues that Rousseau’s work offers an important cautionary note to enthusiasts of children’s
imaginative play, due to the potentially disruptive influence of consumer capitalism, though she also
notes that imagination may play a more redemptive role than Rousseau granted it.
Introduction
Research on children’s play often hails progressive philosophers of education
as proponents of ‘‘learning through play.’’ Opening a sociological or psychological
work on children’s play, a reader is likely to find cited Maria Montessori’s
maxim that play is the work of the child or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s admonition
to parents and educators to promote the games of childhood. To some extent
this association of progressive educational philosophies with play is justified.
Progressive philosophers have indeed tended to support activities considered native
to children, including play. Children’s play takes many forms, however — building
a model robot is very different from playing stickball, and both are at some
remove from playing house — and progressive philosophies of education have
not uniformly supported all kinds of play. Notably, some of the most important
theorists of progressive education, including Froebel, Montessori, and Rousseau,
discouraged imaginative play, while encouraging physical playfulness. In contrast,
social scientific studies of play over the past half-century have often treated
imaginative play as the very pinnacle of children’s play, an activity that is
cognitively sophisticated itself and the precursor of humanity’s most admirable
intellectual and social activities. Recent research connects imaginative play to
many desirable educational outcomes: creative problem solving, sophisticated
literacy, and socioemotional skills.1 This presents a question: inasmuch as
imaginative play has proven to have many positive educational outcomes, what
1. The literature on children’s imaginative play is vast; good sources include Laura Berk, Awakening
Children’s Minds: How Parents and Teachers Can Make a Difference (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001); David Cohen and Steven A. MacKeith, The Development of Imagination: The Private
Worlds of Childhood (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Engel, Real Kids: Creating Meaning in
Everyday Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005); Dorothy G. Singer and
Jerome L. Singer, The House of Make-Believe: Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Marjorie Taylor, Imaginary
Companions and the Children Who Create Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 3 2012

© 2012 Board of Trustees University of Illinois
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306 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 3 2012
difference might it make to our readings of these theorists that they seem to have
gotten this critical aspect of children’s development completely wrong? After all,
these are thinkers who have been praised as astute observers of childhood, and
their theories’ credibility rests in large part on readers’ perception that they tell
plausible stories about human development. If they are wrong about this crucial
aspect of childhood, how should their work be read?
One response would be to view these theorists’ suspicion of imagination
as simply uninformed and outdated. Before making such a peremptory (and
naı̈vely empiricist) judgment, however, it is worth considering their reasons
more carefully. This article focuses on the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
whose ideas about childhood and play, set forth primarily in Emile, have
significantly influenced other progressive theories of education. A look at the
role of imagination and imaginative play in his work illuminates his perceptions
of childhood, human happiness, and education’s potential to create a happier,
better life for human beings — broadly considered, the defining foci of progressive
education.2
One aim here is to articulate Rousseau’s reasons for opposing children’s
development of imagination and their engagement in the imaginative play
nowadays considered a hallmark of early and middle childhood. Although book 2 of
Emile provides a succinct account of the dangers of letting the child’s imaginative
powers increase, a full understanding of Rousseau’s logic requires that we consider
these reasons in the context of Emile as a whole, as well as in combination with his
other writings that connect imagination to vice and unhappiness. I undertake such
an analysis in the first section of this essay. A second aim is to consider the merits
of his opposition. After all, if careful consideration of his views on children’s play
proves Rousseau’s understanding of children’s development to be deeply flawed,
can Emile still be considered a meaningful, illuminating account of childhood?
If not, what might his distance from contemporary judgment of the imagination
imply for how readers approach Emile? Alternatively, does Rousseau’s work offer
2. The reader might wonder whether imagination meant the same thing to Rousseau that it means to
us. In Before Imagination, John Lyons addresses this question, tracing the changes in conceptions of the
imagination from Montaigne to Rousseau. In Lyons’s account, Rousseau’s conception of the imagination,
which linked imagination with the important eighteenth-century notion of ‘‘sensibility’’ — a word that
signifies, for Rousseau, an openness to stimuli from the outside world, including books, music, theater,
nature, and human society — is an important precursor to our present understanding of imagination but
is not identical to it. The imagination invoked by contemporary social science is a creative faculty, and
this conception traces its roots to the post-Rousseau Romantic reenvisionment of imagination. Because
Rousseau tied the imagination to involuntary ‘‘sensibility,’’ his conception anticipates the Romantics
(for whom responsiveness to the world around was critical) but also looks back to the ancients, who
treated the imagination as an inherently passive (and therefore suspect) faculty. See John D. Lyons,
Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2005).
AMY B. SHUFFELTON is Assistant Professor of Education at Loyola University Chicago, 820

N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611; e-mail <amyshuffelton@gmail.com>. Her primary areas of
scholarship are the political and moral dimensions of childhood and child raising.
Shuffelton Rousseau’s Imaginary Friend 307
a plausible critique of contemporary enthusiasm for children’s imaginative play?

In the second part of this essay I consider possible answers to these questions.
Imagination in Emile
In a classic Rousseauian paradox, Emile holds imagination responsible for
much human unhappiness, and yet Emile itself is an audacious act of imagination
that explicitly invites readers to make use of their own imaginations.3 After stating
in book 1 that he is unfit to raise children, and questioning whether it is even
possible that a child can be well-raised by anyone who was not raised well himself (a
category to which, ‘‘in these degraded times,’’ Rousseau assigned nearly everyone),
Rousseau asked his readers to play teacher with him. Because he is ‘‘not in a
condition’’ to raise children, he says, he has ‘‘chosen to give myself an imaginary
pupil, to hypothesize that I have the age, health, kinds of knowledge and all the
talent suitable for working at his education.’’4 This is quite a request! Not only
are we to imagine a pupil, we are to imagine — immediately after he has told us
otherwise — that the author is qualified to write a comprehensive account worth
taking seriously on the vast subject of education from birth through adulthood.
In a further twist, Rousseau then assured us that this use of the imagination will
keep the book on solid ground:
This method appears to me useful to prevent an author who distrusts himself from getting lost
in visions; for when he deviates from ordinary practice, he has only to make a test of his own
practice on his pupil. He will soon sense, or the reader will sense for him, whether he follows
the progress of childhood and the movement natural to the human heart. (EOE, 50–51)5
This sly invitation, with its invocation of the senses as a touchstone, opens up
two possibilities. We may find truth. But if after reading the book we judge Emile
to fall short, we will have learned along the way how our own debased educations
rendered us unable to make a valid appraisal of the truth. The reader should
proceed at his or her own risk.
Although these passages in book 1 suggest an affirmation of the imagination’s
positive effects, in book 2 Rousseau held the imagination responsible for setting
humanity on the road to unhappiness. While readers are advised to use their
3. Steven Salkever offers an insightful explanation of the significance of the many paradoxes that run
throughout Rousseau’s work. Salkever argues that ‘‘Rousseau’s paradoxes are an essential aspect of
Rousseau’s philosophical style because they reflect Rousseau’s conviction that no single answer can be
given to the question of what constitutes human happiness or the best human life.’’ See Steven Salkever,
‘‘Interpreting Rousseau’s Paradoxes,’’ Eighteenth Century Studies 11, no. 2 (1977–1978): 205–206. For a
contrasting view, see Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Melzer argues that when Rousseau’s works are
read as pieces of a whole, many of these apparent paradoxes are resolved. In this issue, Olivier Michaud,
‘‘Thinking About the Nature and Role of Authority in Democratic Education with Rousseau’s Emile,’’
and Tyson Lewis, ‘‘Rousseau and the Fable: Rethinking the Fabulous Nature of Educational Philosophy,’’
also engage with Rousseauian paradoxes.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1979), 50. This work will be cited in the text as EOE for all subsequent references.
5. Note the interconnections Rousseau made in this passage between imagination, sense, and the
reliability of our judgment. See also Lyons, Before Imagination.
imaginations, children should do no such thing. Imagination in childhood opens

the door to dissatisfaction throughout life because it suggests alternate realities in
which unrealizable desires are fulfilled. In a passage with important echoes in his
other texts, Rousseau wrote:
In what then, consists human wisdom or the road of true happiness? It is not precisely in
diminishing our desires, for if they were beneath our power, a part of our faculties would
remain idle, and we would not enjoy our whole being. Neither is it in extending our faculties,
for if, proportionate to them, our desires were extended, we would as a result only become
unhappier. But it is in diminishing the excess of the desires over the faculties and putting
power and will in perfect equality. It is only then that, with all the powers in action, the soul
will nevertheless remain peaceful and that man will be well ordered. (EOE, 80)
This perfect calibration of faculties with desires defines the human condition in
Rousseau’s tale of the state of nature and in the pre-agricultural family-based
societies that constitute humanity’s golden age. The first part of the Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality describes this condition in detail; Emile proposes that
this is the condition in which the young child is to be maintained.
And what is the pivotal factor that causes our wills to outstrip our powers,
and thus yanks us all out of the happiness of the state of nature/childhood and
into the disappointments of society/adulthood? None other than the imagination.
In Rousseau’s words,
It is imagination which extends for us the measure of the possible, whether for good or bad,
and which consequently excites and nourishes the desires by the hope of satisfying them. But
the object which at first appeared to be at hand flees more quickly than it can be pursued.
When one believes that one has reached it, it transforms and reveals itself in the distance
ahead of us. No longer seeing the country we have already crossed, we count it for nothing;
what remains to cross ceaselessly grows and extends. Thus one exhausts oneself without
getting to the end, and the more one gains on enjoyment, the further happiness gets from us.
(EOE, 81, emphasis added)
The imagination, in short, opens up worlds of possibilities but most of these are
unrealizable. Furthermore, in striving to reach these fantasies, the child loses his
grasp of actual happiness.6 In Rousseau’s account, there is no pleasure to be had
in the experience of imagining alternative realities; rather, in drawing the child’s
attention away from the actual, imagination leads to disappointment — and worse.
Rousseau’s argument here has a certain plausibility — after all, it does sound
like a reliable road to happiness to want no more than one can get, and therefore
to get everything one wants. The question is whether the imagination inevitably
disrupts this equilibrium. Contrasting Rousseau’s linkage of desire to unhappiness
(by means of imagination) with the findings of contemporary research on deferred
gratification in developmental psychology shines further light on the differing role
and effects each assigns the imagination. Rousseau suggested that the proper way
6. I am using the masculine here on purpose. Rousseau’s work, particularly Emile, makes it abundantly
clear that he believed men and women to have different capacities, different developmental trajectories,
and different moral teleologies. When Rousseau described the development of the imagination in the
passages I discuss here, he meant the development of boys’ imagination. I have no intention of supporting
the distinction Rousseau made, but it would be a mistake to assume that Rousseau’s use of ‘‘he’’ and
‘‘man’’ can simply be extended to include girls and women.
to raise children is never to let them imagine that matters could be otherwise.
Contemporary research on deferred gratification, on the other hand, suggests that
young children who display the ability to entertain desires in the imagination but
accept their denial or postponement in reality are richly rewarded with higher
achievement later on.7 In Rousseau’s version of affairs, deferred gratification
might get your child into the Académie Française but it also leads him down the
road of misery and vice.8 For Rousseau, of course, these endpoints coincide and
this is no accident. He explained how and why in his Discourse on the Moral
Effects of the Arts and Sciences and also in his Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les
Spectacles (commonly translated as Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater), two
works that make the controversial assertion that the conventional projects of the
Enlightenment, and by extension any education dedicated to their promotion, lead
to the corruption of human virtue rather than its improvement.9
The use of imagination holds two interconnected dangers. First, the child who
imagines too early, and thereby loses the essential unity of self that comes only
when desires and abilities are perfectly in tandem, loses his connection to the
‘‘sentiment of existence’’ that is a key piece of the good life for human beings. By
the ‘‘sentiment of existence,’’ Rousseau seemed to mean neither more nor less than
our perception of our own aliveness and selfhood, or, in David Gauthier’s words,
‘‘both that one is and what one is.’’10 Because this is more a matter of feeling
life than thinking about it, this pleasurable consciousness is accessible to young
children. Newborn infants have no sentiment of existence, Rousseau believed, but
young children do, and in order to maintain this sentiment (which social life places
under constant assault in one way and another), it is necessary to keep the young
7. See Walter Mischel’s famous ‘‘marshmallow studies.’’ Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K.
Peake, ‘‘Predicting Adolescent and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification:
Identifying Diagnostic Conditions,’’ Developmental Psychology 26, no. 6 (1990): 978–986.
8. In contemporary social scientific renderings, imaginative play is one of the key means through which
children learn to manage their desires. See, for example, Singer and Singer, The House of Make-Believe;
and Dorothy S. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005). Rousseau’s account differs sharply.
9. Were this a longer work, I might have included extensive discussion of the connections between
imagination and literacy that run through Rousseau’s Emile, through his other writings (especially his
Discourses and the Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les Spectacles), and through contemporary empirical
research on children’s imagination and the development of literacy. Need I add that Rousseau’s critique
of imagination works hand in hand with his critique of early literacy, as he tied both to self-alienation.
Contemporary educators also recognize the connection, but they promote both imagination and early
literacy for the sake of individual and social well-being. Adequate discussion is beyond the scope of
this essay, but for insightful consideration of the fable in Emile and in children’s thinking, see Lewis,
‘‘Rousseau and the Fable,’’ in this issue.
10. David Gauthier, Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 31. As the subtitle suggests, this book has quite a bit more to say about the sentiment of
existence, all of it helpful, especially as the notion is scattered throughout Rousseau’s work and is never
given precise analysis by Rousseau even though it is fundamental to his ideas. Melzer also provides an
excellent and detailed account of this notion in his book The Natural Goodness of Man, 35–48. See also
Laurence D. Cooper, ‘‘Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and the ‘Desire to Extend Our Being,’’’
American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (2004): 105–119.
child firmly centered in the realities of present existence.11 Laurence Cooper argues
that ‘‘existence is the highest good, indeed the good or the comprehensive good
for Rousseau.’’12 This is debatable, but in any case it is incontrovertible that for
Rousseau existence is good, and the sentiment of existence therefore constitutes
access to human happiness. Losing touch with one’s sentiment of existence is
a grave loss. Readers hear this clearly in Emile, in Rousseau’s exhortation, ‘‘Oh
man, draw up your existence within yourself, and you will no longer be miserable’’
(EOE, 83). And while many of us adults may be too enmeshed in our bourgeois
lives of nothingness to do so, our obligation to the child is to ensure that he
remains in touch with this source of contentment.13 Imagination, which takes
us out of present existence into future possibilities, is a tremendous threat. Until
the child has a stable consciousness of his own existence, educators should take
precautions that nothing disrupt this orientation to the real present.
The second, related danger is that when imagination leads a person to develop
desires that are beyond his own capacity to fulfill, he reaches out to others for
help. At this point, he becomes dependent upon others and therefore no longer
free. Once freedom is lost to dependence on others, man is alienated from himself,
and happiness is lost as well. There are significant moral consequences, as this
is the point at which man starts to think of other men as potential tools, as
sources of assistance, as potential partners in cooperative ventures but also as
potential competitors. It leads to striving for power over others, to manipulation,
deceit, flattery, and oppression — vice on one side and misery on the other.14 It
also, however, leads to love, friendship, and the possibility of harmonious social
life — in sum, to virtue, which is unavailable to people in the state of nature,
whom Rousseau considered amoral.
Imagination plays a further critical role in this spiral downward insofar as it
contributes to the development of amour-propre, which across Rousseau’s writing
is the psychological capacity that drives socialized men and women. Whether
amour-propre is inevitably destructive or is instead a volatile but potentially
positive human capacity is debatable, but it is certain that one of the chief tasks
Rousseau assigned the tutor is to prevent the child’s development of amour-propre
at too young an age.15 Rousseau himself spoke differently of amour-propre in
different texts. ‘‘Amour-propre is a purely relative and factitious feeling,’’ he said
11. On infants and the sentiment of existence, see EOE, 61.

12. Cooper, ‘‘Between Eros and Will to Power,’’ 107.
13. On civilized man as ‘‘nothing,’’ see EOE, 40.
14. This is a quick telling of a long and complicated story. For Rousseau’s telling, see especially the
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality; see also the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Gauthier’s
Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence adds much light, especially chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 5 of
Melzer’s The Natural Goodness of Man also gives a good synopsis, with references to a number of other
sources.
15. See Bloom’s introductory note to Emile; N.J.H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to his Psychological,
Social and Political Theory (New York: Blackwell, 1988); and Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy
of Self-Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Bloom argues that amour-propre is the debased
in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, ‘‘which arises in the state of society,
leads each individual to make more of himself than any other, [and] causes all
the mutual damage men inflict on one another.’’16 In Emile, Rousseau qualified
this and called amour-propre, when unified with its foil amour de soi, ‘‘the sole
passion natural to man.’’ ‘‘This amour-propre in itself or relative to us is good and
useful,’’ he continued. ‘‘It becomes good or bad only by the application made of it
and the relations given to it’’ (EOE, 92). In this telling, amour-propre is morally
neutral, but it becomes treacherous when it is inflamed in the context of social
life, whereupon it works as the emotional wellspring that drives human striving
for dominance.17
The moment when amour-propre ceases to function ‘‘in itself or relative
to us’’ occurs with the recognition that other people are like oneself, have the
same needs and capacities, and therefore can be manipulated to serve one’s own
purposes. ‘‘It is reason that engenders amour-propre,’’ according to Rousseau, and
in his account reason is based on the ability to make comparisons, which depends
upon imaginative leaps that fill in the gaps between one’s own experience and
that of others.18 Imagination is repeatedly mentioned throughout the Discourse
on the Origins of Inequality’s discussion of the differences between the thinking
of men in the state of nature and the thinking of civilized men. ‘‘His imagination
paints no pictures,’’ said Rousseau of the ‘‘savage man’’; and ‘‘[t]he imagination,
which causes such ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of savages,’’ who
‘‘consequently fall into fewer and less violent disputes.’’19 It is the act of comparing
one’s own status with that of another, a mental feat that requires considerable use
of the imagination, that drives vanity, resentment, oppression, and the other ills
related to differential social status, though it drives the eventual development of
reason as well.
An important reason to rein in the young child’s use of imagination, therefore,
is to prevent the dangerously early development of amour-propre. Avoiding reason-
ing with children and keeping them away from human society are part and parcel of
this project. Later, amour-propre will be guided by reason, but, firmly believing the
form of self-love and always negative; Dent challenges this view and suggests that, in a more nuanced
reading of Rousseau, only ‘‘enflamed’’ amour-propre is bad.
16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, ed. and trans. G.D.H. Cole and Peter
Jimack (New York: Everyman, 1931), 73.
17. For further discussion of education and amour-propre, see Avi Mintz, ‘‘The Happy and Suffering
Student? Rousseau’s Emile and the Path Not Taken in Progressive Educational Thought,’’ and Michaud,
‘‘Thinking About the Nature and Role of Authority in Democratic Education with Rousseau’s Emile,’’
both in this issue.
18. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 75. For the entire chain of logic, see the preceding
pages. It is thought-provoking to compare Rousseau’s ideas about the origins of both reason and vice
in humanity’s ability to compare the self with others to the recent research on young children’s
development of ‘‘other minds theory’’ and how it alters their intellectual capacities and behavior. See,
for example, Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Melzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib (New
York: HarperCollins, 1999), which also includes references to the broader literature on this topic.
19. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 62 and 78.
young child to be incapable of reasoning, Rousseau demanded that we check the

imagination in order to prevent the inflammation of the child’s self-love. Believing
the child to be inherently self-centered, and therefore dangerously susceptible to
acquiring the habit of placing his desires above all else, Rousseau reminded the
reader frequently never to accede to the ‘‘fantaisies’’ of the child. The French word
reminds us of the connotative connection between these egocentric demands and
imagination, which is lost when the word is translated, typically as ‘‘whims.’’
Comparison of one’s own state with that of another is also, however, the source
of compassion, and toward this end, Rousseau believed the imagination should
be allowed to flourish in early adolescence. At that point, the imagination can be
guided by reason, and, properly managed, it becomes a means of controlling sexual
impulse. In early adolescence, the real danger is wanton sexual desire, but provided
a man ‘‘is master of directing his imagination toward this or that object or of giving
it this or that habit,’’ he is ‘‘master of his affections’’ (EOE, 219). The imagination,
at this point has two significant uses: it supports friendship and human solidarity,
and it enables human beings to reconfigure amoral sexual encounters as virtuous,
mutually satisfying, and self-perpetuating familial relationships.
‘‘The first sentiment of which a carefully raised young man is capable is not
love; it is friendship. The first act of his nascent imagination is to teach him
that he has fellows,’’ claimed Rousseau in book 4 of Emile (EOE, 220). We learn
that we have fellows through leaps of the imagination that enable us to perceive
that other human beings are like us. Perceiving that other human beings suffer
as we do, we feel pity, and thus sociability is born. Such acts of comparison are
also responsible for inflated self-esteem, of course, so Rousseau emphasized that
Emile’s first encounters must be with others who are worse off than he is. If his
eyes are dazzled by ‘‘the pomp of courts, the splendor of palaces, or the appeal of
the theater,’’ the comparisons he makes will cause him to feel bitter envy. If he
sees suffering, however, his compassion is ignited. At this point, Emile ceases to
be ‘‘stupid and barbaric’’ and develops the human sensitivities that enable him to
live as a truly moral being.
Compassion is a problematic virtue for Rousseau, however, so it would be
a mistake to conclude that this passage signifies a wholehearted embrace of
the imagination. In an astute analysis of Rousseau’s Lettre à M. d’Alembert
sur les Spectacles, David Marshall explicates Rousseau’s ambivalence toward
compassion, or sympathy.20 The Letter à M. d’Alembert is usually read as part
of a long anti-theatrical tradition. As such, it does offer one more indictment of
imagination, but only within the context of the theater, and it would seem to have
limited relevance to child raising, suggesting no more than that we should avoid
taking children to dramatic productions. In Marshall’s reading, however, the Lettre
is one piece of Rousseau’s extensive critique of theatricality in human relations.
20. The standard English translation of this title is Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater, but as
Marshall effectively argues, translating the French word ‘‘spectacle’’ as ‘‘theater’’ leads us to miss the
real charge of Rousseau’s argument.
Rousseau’s greater concern is with ‘‘how spectacles govern our lives: how we are
affected by the theatrical relations enacted outside as well as inside the playhouse
by people who face each other as actors and spectators.’’21 Not only theater but
also relations in which we observe others as spectators (and become aware that
others are observing us in return) lead to a dangerous distancing from our selves.
The trouble with compassion is that, according to Rousseau and other eighteenth-
century interpreters, it transports us outside ourselves, into the position of the
other.22 We then return to ourselves with a feeling of relief that the suffering has
befallen the other, not ourselves. Such spectatorship therefore leads to inevitably
false expressions of feeling (since it ultimately occasions relief, even pleasure,
not shared suffering), and it draws our existence outside ourselves. Although the
passage from Emile cited previously suggests that spectatorship of the right sorts
of people (namely, the worse-off) leads to virtue, compassion and amour-propre are
problematically close, as both involve the comparison of one’s own state to that
of another and judgment of one’s relative status based on what one sees — and on
what one becomes aware that others are seeing when they view oneself. After all,
in the return to oneself after imaginative transport into the place of the suffering
other, one feels pride in one’s relatively better-off position. Compassion is far too
close to self-estrangement and to false displays of feeling — to all the problems of
spectatorship raised by Rousseau’s work — to function as reliable grounds for a
virtuous social life. While compassion is a virtue in some respects, it is dangerously
akin to vice.23 Here too, the imagination is no straight path to redemption.
Rousseau’s second claim on behalf of the positive effects of imagination in
adolescence is that it enables men and women to fall in love. In his words,
And what is true love itself if it is not chimera, lie and illusion? We love the image we make
for ourselves far more than the object to which we apply it. If we saw what we love exactly as
it is, there would be no more love on earth. When we stop loving, the person we loved remains
the same as before but we no longer see her in the same way. The magic veil drops, and love
disappears. (EOE, 329)24
Jean-Jacques the tutor remains ‘‘the master of comparisons,’’ and thanks to his
artifices Emile will not make the mistake of falling in love with an unsuitable
woman before Sophie comes along, but once Emile does encounter Sophie, his
faculty of imagination will enable him to create an illusory Sophie who is a suitable
love object. This romantic love is to facilitate a long and stable marriage, in which
21. Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 135–136.

22. Ibid., 146–147.
23. For a slightly different reading of Rousseau on compassion, see Mintz, ‘‘The Happy and the Suffering
Student.’’
24. Curiously, Rousseau framed this statement with exhortations to the reader to imagine. Several times
in Emile he calls us to ‘‘imagine’’ whether he will be able to influence Emile’s choice of a beloved.
The answer, of course, is yes, he will, because ‘‘by providing the imaginary object, I am the master of
comparisons, and I easily prevent my young man from having illusions about real objects.’’ This passage
is a reminder of the striking call to the readers’ imaginations in book 1, where Rousseau also warned us
that he is the master artificer and what follows is fabrication.
little Emiles and Sophies can be raised for their own happiness. But as with
compassion, the beneficent effects come with a hitch: love only lasts so long as the
illusion does. Love and marriage are not reliable sources of human redemption; the
relationship that begins as a cooperative one can turn sour. (Rousseau recognized
this but reminded us that because Emile was educated for freedom, he will rebound
should his marriage fail, as indeed it does in the unfinished sequel to Emile.)
Imagination, then, even in the realms where it holds most promise — compassion
and love — is only provisionally good for human beings.
The Empirical Challenge, and Some Possible
(but Unsatisfactory) Responses
This all tells a good story, but the fact remains that, according to empirical
researchers, this is not how imagination functions in human development. The
inaccuracy of Rousseau’s claims about the imagination in childhood is less of a
problem for his theory than are some of his claims about other aspects of human
development (for example, sociability, romance, and other subjects outside the
purview of this essay), but his argument that the imagination plays a critical role
in human downfall is no mean piece of his overall pedagogical, moral, and social
theories. This raises a question: What difference does it make that he seems to
have gotten this piece wrong? Is it properly irrelevant to readers of Emile, or does
it influence the insights that contemporary readers unwilling to ignore what we
now know about imagination might take away from the book?
First, a few words about what we do think we know now about children’s
imagination. Contemporary research into children’s development has come to a
consensus that imagination, rather than disempowering human beings, makes it
possible for us to function in the world, natural and social, and to thrive even in
conditions of adversity. Through their imaginative play, children develop the abil-
ity to understand the difference between the ‘‘world in their heads’’ and the ‘‘world
outside’’ — a matter not as easily resolved as it might seem.25 Also, children use
imaginative play as a means to gain the emotional competence to handle the
various hurdles life places in their paths. In happier situations, children play out
interpersonal conflicts and thereby become able to resolve the real ones; in horrific
situations, children have used imaginative play as a means to cope with the terrors
around them. Children at Auschwitz played ‘‘going to the gas chamber,’’ and
children in war zones play at war in order to come to terms with their otherwise
psychologically devastating circumstances. Enslaved African American children
played out the circumstances of violence, familial separation, and oppression as a
means to withstand the reality of slavery. Such play is initiated by children — their
games that Rousseau asked us to love — but adults have often promoted it as well.
25. Rousseau also blamed imagination for giving children fears — of death or of the dark, for
instance — that they would otherwise never entertain. Rousseau was far from alone in his belief
that engaging in imaginative play makes children more susceptible to childish fears, but recent research
suggests that imaginative play, rather than inciting these fears, enables children to master them by
coming to understand the lines between reality and the imaginary. See, for example, Marjorie Taylor’s
Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
For instance, therapists help traumatized children find solace and psychologi-
cal stability through imaginative play. Vivian Paley’s work, particularly Boys and
Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner and Kwanzaa and Me, suggests that imagina-
tive play can enable young children to successfully enter social life without becom-
ing alienated from themselves as uniquely situated individuals.26 As therapy and
school are institutions open to Rousseauian criticism, however, it is worth empha-
sizing that children themselves appear naturally to use imaginative play in order
to gain an intellectual and emotional handle on their worlds. Even on Rousseau’s
grounds, imagination is valuable to children. One might even say that imagination
is what enables them to ‘‘draw up their existence within themselves.’’ It may in fact
be the route out of misery and alienation. It certainly provides children with means
for coping with the everyday realities of existence and with the most awful ones.
Suppose we accept Rousseau’s claims that the advancement of the arts and
sciences have only corrupted us, and bracket out the technological and artistic
achievements that imagination has made possible. Imagination has more powers
than simply enabling people to invent new things. Suppose we also bracket the
role of imagination in enabling us to live together in a pluralistic, democratic
society.27 These are, of course, major accomplishments to set aside, and many
of us will want to argue against Rousseau that they merit our appreciation, but
Rousseau’s work does pose some serious challenges to both of them. Yet even if
we accept Rousseau’s claim that a technologically developed, pluralistic, modern
society can never truly operate in a way that ensures human freedom — in short, if
we keep the argument on Rousseau’s grounds — the imagination still turns out to
have a place. If we accept Rousseau’s goal of raising children to be free, unalienated
from themselves, and capable of facing the adversities of life without succumbing
to despair, research shows imagination to play a critical function.28
So where does that leave Emile?
There are several possible responses. First, the defender of Rousseau might
argue that the empirical research has no relevance whatsoever to reading Emile. A
philosophical defender might argue that a classic text such as Emile should be read
for its enduring insights about the human condition, or because of its traditional
standing and influence, not for empirically verifiable facts. To criticize Emile
on the basis that it inaccurately depicts children’s psychological and intellectual
development is to mistake philosophy for social science. If Emile still speaks to
us about the great conflicts in human life — between manhood and citizenship,
freedom and solidarity, society and nature, and the list could go on, as Emile
26. Vivian Gussin Paley, Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984); and Vivian Gussin Paley, Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher’s Story (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1995).
27. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
28. See Yossi Yonah, ‘‘The Quest for the Good Life in Rousseau’s Emile,’’ Studies in Philosophy and
Education 12, no. 2–4 (1993): 229–243.
touches upon so many labyrinthine questions — there is no need to fuss about

whether Emile’s childhood is realistic. Similarly, a historical defender might
argue that texts should be read in their own terms, not ours. All perspectives
are necessarily limited, and reading historical texts through lenses polished by
contemporary social science erroneously privileges our own perspective, making
the fallacious presumption that our vision is uniquely unobstructed — and thus
limits our ability to take in the text’s real meaning. After all, in another 250 years
our ideas about the imagination are likely to appear as outdated as Rousseau’s.
Alternatively, perhaps factual inaccuracy does matter. At some point,
speculation might stand too far outside what readers can accept as true to offer any
insights. As Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us in Experiments in Ethics, our
insistence that philosophy should be read as making only abstract, nonempirical
claims is a curiously modern interpretation of philosophy and not one that
would have made sense to pre-twentieth-century philosophers. Philosophical
texts written before the twentieth century often combined theoretical speculation
with empirical commentary, and the plausibility of their theoretical claims is
often based on the stories they tell about the human psyche. In Appiah’s telling,
conceptual analysts tried to build a moat around philosophy by disembarrassing the
field of its empirical preoccupations, but philosophical criticisms of this attempt
have proven the moat to be intellectually waterless.29 As for whether this failure
of the moat is disastrous or grounds for productive commerce, Appiah is quite
clear: philosophy has much to gain by letting those past empirical entanglements
with the real lives of human beings back in. ‘‘If moral philosophy is to connect
with moral life — if it is not to be, in the pejorative sense, ‘merely theoretical’ — it
must attend, in articulating and defending norms, to how they can come to bear
in actual lives.’’30 If Emile’s claims about the human psyche place it too far from
what contemporary readers can believe about actual human development, the
book should perhaps join the ranks of books written by philosophers that no one
except specialists finds very important anymore.
Rousseau would not have divided philosophy neatly from anthropology and
psychology, and in Emile ideas about what children are really like are inextrica-
bly intertwined with ideas about social ideals and moral virtue. In the preface,
Rousseau called the book ‘‘a collection of reflections and observations’’ (EOE, 33),
and throughout, the observations are the basis for the reflections. Arguably, the
more egregious historical and philosophical error would be to ignore the fact that
the book bases its premises about education, childhood, and society on empiri-
cal claims about the nature of real children.31 Remember that Rousseau himself
invited his reader to ‘‘sense . . . whether [he] follows the progress of childhood.’’ If he
29. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 2008).
30. Ibid., 22–23.
31. Although Rousseau abandoned his own five children to the foundling home, earlier in his life he had
some experience serving as tutor to young children.
was asking us to draw on our understanding of the real nature of children and child-
hood to judge this story, can we ignore that and yet read the text on its own terms?
The fact that Emile straddles several genres of writing, and thus implicitly
claims several kinds of purchase on truth, adds credence to this approach. Emile’s
reflections on political and social life and on the nature of moral character give
it a foothold in philosophy, and modern readers tend to read it in this light. In
its structure, though, the book follows the lines of the early modern child-raising
guide, drawing on empirical observations as a basis for its prescriptions.32 As
such, it makes an implicit claim to provide practical advice to actual parents and
educators. Certain passages are a direct counterargument to other books in this
genre, and throughout, Rousseau spoke directly to readers with admonishments
and commands. Furthermore, on the first page of Emile, Rousseau specified, ‘‘It
is to you that I address myself, tender and foresighted mother’’ (EOE, 37), and
although in other writings he claimed that the book was not addressed to parents,
his language in Emile certainly gives readers reason to believe it was.33 Often, he
gave quite specific instructions about how children should be raised, for example,
the long passage exhorting women to breastfeed their infants and explaining why
they should. Inasmuch as Emile chooses to make its philosophical arguments in
the context of a story of human development, it is reasonable to take it on its own
terms and not ignore the social scientific aspects of the argument.
If we treat the book as a text that bases its theoretical claims on what we
now see to be inaccurate practical and empirical foundations, historians of ideas
might go on reading Emile for its portrayal of an influential eighteenth-century
viewpoint on such matters as family life, childhood, human development, and
gender relations. Philosophers might mine the text for connections to Rousseau’s
other, more straightforwardly philosophical moral and political texts. More
general readers interested in education, however — including future teachers,
policymakers, administrators, and education scholars without a specialized
interest in Rousseau or eighteenth-century thought — would have little reason to
bother with such an unwieldy text.
Rousseau’s Insights: The Colonization of the Imagination

A third possibility — and this is the one I actually endorse — is that Rousseau
was not completely wrong about the imagination after all. His ideas about
imagination and its connection to self-alienation, read properly, do correlate with
some of the important findings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century researchers,
although imagination can play a stronger redemptive role than Rousseau granted it.
Left to their own devices, children play, and quite often this play involves
imagination. Cross-cultural researchers have observed that children all over the
32. Rousseau mentioned John Locke in the preface, and many passages respond directly to Locke’s Some
Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which did claim to be offering useful advice.
33. See also Bloom’s footnote on this quote, which links it to contradictory statements about the
audience for Emile.
world use whatever scraps of time and material resources they can glean to play.
What form that play takes, though, depends heavily on social context. Children
play at what the adults around them are doing, and adults influence their play
in other ways as well. As they observe adults and gain increasing mastery of the
scripts of everyday life (for example, cooking dinner, making a phone call, going
to the doctor’s office), children play out narratives that incorporate these scripts,
though often with interesting embellishments, shifting of roles, and intermingling
of different scripts. Furthermore, adults pass down values through the toys they
give children, inasmuch as the toys provide the material props for imagined
scenarios. In Kids’ Stuff, historian Gary Cross has documented how twentieth-
century American toys — and their marketing — reflect adults’ values when those
toys were produced.34 For instance, in the early twentieth century, when girls
were expected to grow into roles as nurturing wives and mothers, they were given
realistic baby dolls, toy ironing boards, toy stoves, and such. The promising life for
boys was seen in technological advancement, in careers in engineering or science,
and this was the age of the erector set, the chemistry set, and the model railway.
There is often a tangible nostalgia in the toys adults give children, so at a time
when the frontier was closing and more children than ever before grew up in
cities, children were encouraged to play cowboy and to ‘‘hunt’’ big game. As Cross
argues, these nostalgic toys, like the future-oriented ones, can be interpreted as
an adult effort to pass on the values that adults held dear.35 There might be no
frontier outside, but self-reliance could be passed on by means of the cap pistol.
This passing on of values becomes more complicated, and the history of toys
grows proportionally more troubling, however, when adults are uncertain for just
what kind of a future they should be preparing their children. In the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s, as American adults grew increasingly uncertain what gender roles,
what social roles, and what economic prospects their children were likely to face
as grown-ups, parents backed away from what had become staples of childhood
play. Baby dolls and toy washing machines were antifeminist. Guns were too
militaristic. Technology was of questionable repute and promise, and erector sets
lost their allure. But, as Cross points out, children will go on playing and will have
toys. And if adults prove unable to agree on an alternative set of social ideals that
toys and narratives can teach children to aspire to, corporate capitalism will fill the
void. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by the rise of children’s toys set at a farther
remove from reality than the toys that preceded them. For girls, these include
Strawberry Shortcake and My Pretty Pony, which encourage feminine ideals of
sociability, attention to one’s appearance, and nurturing, without making direct
reference to child rearing or housekeeping. For boys, there arose a range of robot-
like toys — such as Transformers, Star Wars figurines, and Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles — often living in outer space or created by some environmental disaster,
34. Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
35. Ibid.
that could be used to play out war and struggle in harsh conditions without direct
reference to shooting human beings or real animals. The downside of this is that
such vacuous toys offer children little guidance in how to live well as an adult.
The toys contemporary children use in their imaginative play are often
inextricably connected to mass media narratives that function simultaneously
as entertainment and marketing. Contemporary media provides toys to enact the
stories, and stories to sell the toys. Many of the popular toys mentioned above
were created alongside television shows. With children accessing media as never
before, possessed of increasing amounts of pocket change, and encountering
entertainment-related merchandise at every turn, their imaginations can be
quickly colonized by the corporations that most effectively take up shelf space
and screen space.36 Unless a parent were to, say, take her infant child right out
of modern society and quarantine him up to the age of adolescence in some rural
location, it would be impossible to keep desires for the latest fad from creeping in.
The desires creep in, and, just as Rousseau warned, it is impossible to satisfy all
of them. It is impossible because there are always more products out there, and
someone else always has more of them than you do.37
So Rousseau had something very important to say after all. Consider Sophie.
The account I have provided here of imagination in Emile focuses on the
development of Emile as a free and unalienated self, but, infamously, Rousseau’s
account offers a very different trajectory for girls, who have no prospects as
independent, undivided, free selves. Girls, Rousseau told us, are to be kept
constantly aware of opinion and status, as the ‘‘particular purpose of the fair
sex, . . . its inclinations, . . . its duties’’ all involve dependence on men:
They depend on our sentiments, on the value we set on their merit, on the importance we
attach to their charms and their virtues. . . . [W]hen a woman acts well she has accomplished
only half of her task, and what is thought of her is no less important to her than what she
actually is. From this it follows that the system of woman’s education ought to be contrary in
this respect to the system of our education. Opinion is the grave of virtue among men and its
throne among women. (EOE, 364–365)
This logic, of course, has outraged feminists for the past 250 years. Suffice it to say
that if Rousseau had set out to paint a portrait of a completely alienated person,
completely divided from any internal wellsprings of selfhood, someone who could
only think of herself as the object of other people’s desires, he could do no better
than Sophie. It is therefore instructive to read about Sophie’s play, which unlike
Emile’s includes the use of toys as imaginative alter egos. Sophie is to be given
a doll, as she needs to learn ‘‘the art of pleasing,’’ which begins with adornment.
36. See Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New
York: Scribner, 2005); and Susan Gregory Thomas, Buy, Buy, Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates
Parents and Harms Young Minds (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
37. For further discussion of how Rousseau’s conception of happiness, which is dependent on an
equilibrium between desires and powers, speaks to contemporary consumer culture and its intersections
with education, see Tal Gilead’s ‘‘Rousseau, Happiness and the Economic Approach to Education,’’ in
this issue.
In adorning and playing with her doll, she learns to adorn herself. And the effect
of doll-play on Sophie? ‘‘She awaits the moment when she will be her own doll’’
(EOE, 367).
If we combine the insights of feminism and our experience with consumer
capitalism, and accept that boys and girls alike can either ‘‘draw up their
existence inside themselves’’ as free and contented beings, or else become the
objectified toys of others’ fantasies, Rousseau’s account of the connection between
imaginative play, esteem, and alienation becomes very insightful indeed. Suppose
that happiness does require a balance between desire and the power to achieve it,
as Rousseau contended. Colonization is a state of affairs that minimizes the power
of the colonized while maximizing desire for inaccessible social status and for the
goods the colonizers market. A colonized imagination creates a state of terrible
disequilibrium between desire and power; a person with a colonized imagination
has, therefore, no chance of achieving happiness. Writing in a society that was,
like ours, marked by extreme disparities of wealth, status, and power, Rousseau
provided a profound warning of the dangers of subjecting children’s imaginations
to such colonization.38
Now, it would be very easy to draw the conclusion that mass media, in cahoots
with the toy industry, is a pied piper leading all our children to await the moment
when they become their own toys. Our girls wait to become princesses; our boys
to become the ‘‘big man.’’ In fact, progressive educators and their allies often come
to this conclusion and set up a Manichean contrast between consumer products
(bad) and children’s imagination (good). If only we could get rid of television and all
that plastic, the logic goes, then we could return to primordial bliss when, using a
few sticks as props, children developed their creative capacities unhindered — and
flourished. But what Emile also reminds us is that the danger is not simply
television, nor consumer capitalism. The passive consumption of other people’s
imaginative productions is dangerous, but, manipulative as the media and toy
marketing can be, it is only through interaction with our psyches that they have
any effect. The danger is also our inclination to turn on that television and buy
those toys, and then to use what we know and what we have to strive for status
among our peers, and to base all our happiness on winning that competition.39
The danger is that we all, men and women, adults and children, wait to become
dolls.
38. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the full implications of this line of reasoning.
39. I mean neither to blame the victim here, nor to let consumer capitalism off the hook. Rather,
I mean to suggest that human beings are psychologically complex beings who do not always make
choices in accord with their rational interests. The critical question is whether children’s development
of imagination functions to support their best interests or to derail them. For further discussion of
consumer capitalism, Rousseau, and early childhood, see Grace Roosevelt, ‘‘Reconsidering Dewey in an
Age of Consumer Capitalism: A Rousseauean Critique,’’ as well as Avi Mintz’s response, ‘‘Rousseau,
Consumerism, and Rearing the Twenty-First-Century Achilles,’’ both in Philosophy of Education 2011,
ed. Robert Kunzman (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2012), 283–291 and 292–294,
respectively.
Is the imagination to blame for this? I doubt it. As documented earlier, a

thriving imagination probably provides children more with a means of coping with
the ills of social life than with support for status rivalry. Does the imagination
offer any hope of redemption, as its promoters suggest? Perhaps, though not
automatically. Emile offers us a reminder of the imagination’s volatility, of
the imagination’s promise and also of the many ways in which its capture
can lead to our capture. Inasmuch as children’s imaginative play always draws
upon the ideals, the fantasies, and the expectations of the society around them,
imagination reproduces the status quo as well as changing it. And yet, Emile is
itself a magnificent work of someone else’s imagination, while our ability to read
and comprehend it, to engage with it critically, and to conceive of alternative
ways of raising children and structuring our social environment is an impressive
effect of our own imaginations. The connection between imaginative play and
redemption is not as simple as its most avid supporters may hope, as a colonized
imagination makes human happiness impossible. A child whose imagination
flourishes uncolonized, on the other hand, is on a promising path to happiness, as
a careful reader learns from the education of Emile, Rousseau’s imaginary friend.

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305

ROUSSEAU’S IMAGINARY FRIEND: CHILDHOOD, PLAY, AND

EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 3 2012

AMY B. SHUFFELTON is Assistant Professor of Education at Loyola University Chicago, 820

a plausible critique of contemporary enthusiasm for children’s imaginative play?

imaginations, children should do no such thing. Imagination in childhood opens

11. On infants and the sentiment of existence, see EOE, 61.

young child to be incapable of reasoning, Rousseau demanded that we check the

21. Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 135–136.

touches upon so many labyrinthine questions — there is no need to fuss about

Rousseau’s Insights: The Colonization of the Imagination

Is the imagination to blame for this? I doubt it. As documented earlier, a

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