Jean-Jacques Rousseau, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Amour-propre is not simply the source of corruption. It is, when properly understood and properly cultivated, the precondition of everything distinctively human — rationality, freedom, dignity, the capacity to recognize others and to be recognized in turn. The Second Discourse showed the malady — amour-propre in its inflamed comparative-dominance form, which makes me want not merely to be esteemed but to be esteemed above others, to dominate the regard I draw, to consume the recognition of others as a finite resource at their expense. Émile and the Social Contract show the cure — amour-propre turned away from invidious comparison and toward the equal regard of citizens, away from domination and toward reciprocal recognition under common law.1
The diagnosis and the cure are one philosophical project, not two: the same passion that destroys human community when left to comparative pathology constitutes human community when developed within the right institutional and educational forms. Amour de soi and amour-propre are distinct passions, not the same passion misnamed; both are natural to social beings; both have legitimate developments.2
The work of philosophy on this question is to learn the distinction and to cultivate the healthy form against the inflamed form.345
Second Dialogue (PI., I. 804-807) 1B Amour-propre is always irritated or discontent, because its wish is that each person should prefer us to all else and to himself, which is impossible. It is irritated by the preferences it feels others deserve even when they don't obtain them. It is irritated by the advantages someone else has over us, without being appeased by those for which it feels compensated.Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, Dialogues, p. 113
In a passage like this the amour-propre seems very close to one Rousseau usually distinguished it from, amour de soi (which does not occur in Julie); cf. Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques: when the passions are "deected from their object by obstacles, they are focused on removing the obstacle rather than reaching the object; then they change nature and become irascible and hateful.Julie, or the New Héloïse, p. 698
Do not give your pupil any kind of verbal lessons; he ought to receive them only from experience. Inflict no kind of punishment on him, for he does not know what it is to be at fault, Never make him beg pardon, for he could not know how to offend you. Devoid of all morality in his actions, he can do nothing which is morally bad and which merits either punishment or reprimand.Emile, or On Education, pp. 101–102
How many times have these hands felt the tears I shed on them! The young couple share my raptures, and they too are moved. Their respectable parents once again enjoy their youth in that of their children. They begin, so to speak, to live again in them—or rather they come to know the value of life for the first time. They curse their former wealth which prevented them from tasting so charming a fate at the same age.Emile, or On Education, pp. 487–491
Picture the unfortunate J.J. on the street or on walks surrounded by people who, less out of curiosity than in derision, since most of them have already seen him a hundred times, turn around and stop to stare at him with a gaze that surely has nothing to do with French urbanity. You will always find that the most insulting, the most Second Dialogue (Pl., I.Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, Dialogues, p. 179
The older reading that took amour-propre as purely destructive misread the work in a fundamental way. Dent's Rousseau (1988) opened the rehabilitation; Neuhouser's 2008 Theodicy of Self-Love is the mature treatment. The diagnosis-and-cure structure is in the texts themselves: the Second Discourse is diagnosis, Émile and the Social Contract are cure. The contemporary recognition-theoretic tradition (Taylor, Honneth) belongs in the family the position inaugurated.