Self and Authenticity: Marshall Berman’s Reading of Rousseau

Abstract

The concept of authenticity has recently been associated with Rousseau’s views of the self and its role in modern culture. Widely recognized and thus, perhaps, underestimated as an interpreter of Marx, Marshall Berman offers a controversial reading of Rousseau in the late 1960s. In his reading, Berman proposes to view the role of the search for authenticity as a means of liberating individuals from what he refers to as self-alienation and social oppression in capitalist modernity. His reading also suggests that the making of an authentic man and a politics of authenticity make it possible for individuals to develop their personal authenticity. This thesis challenges the view of Berman as a purely Marxist thinker and argues that his reading of Rousseau sheds light on the paradox of modernity that modernity liberates both the tendency for self-perfection and the search for personal authenticity, representing a break with various features of Marxist humanism and a revision of liberalism that tends not to merely rely on representative democracy and the establishment of a legal and constitutional framework. The new radical liberalism requires building a politics of authenticity that not only protects its members from inequality but also encourages the development of their personal authenticity and social reforms from within.