“I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence...[but] has anyone ever heard of a savage man who was living in liberty ever dreaming of complaining about his life and of killing himself?” -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”
The Reading Room
Rousseau Dissents from the Modern World
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” --Jean Jacques Rousseau
There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.” --Jean Jacques Rousseau
“I prefer refined vice under a silk suit [to]...stupid ferocity beneath an animal skin. ...that the savage state is preferable to the civilized state. That I deny.” --Denis Diderot (1776)
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), whose life spanned most of the Enlightenment in France, brilliantly engages the dominant themes of the era—but, in virtually every instance, his point-of-view seemed to his fellow philosophes to be insistently negative, pessimistic. That is, he comes to grips with the Enlightenment’s firmest convictions and its moving spirit of optimism, confidence, and anticipated progress. And does this using Enlightenment methods: reason and observation, critical analysis of accepted premises, and reference to the new “sciences of man.” And he concludes? His fellow “philosophes” and the age itself are mistaken, often motivated less by truth than professional aggrandizement, and leading the world toward destruction and despair.
Had he been less brilliant, prolific in multiple popular literary forms, and dogged, the “greats” whose ideas he attacked might have successfully ignored him. Or he might have been crushed by censorship of his work or by his imprisonment or banishment. As a singularly influential intellectual force in Europe and beyond, Rousseau has made it remarkably easy for historians to portray him as the “cause” of momentous events and enduring cultural themes right down to our own time. Probably more than any other thinker he has been associated with the French Revolution, whose leaders revered him, justified some of their excesses in his name, and caused his body to be exhumed and reinterred in Paris’s Pantheon of revolutionary heroes. Over time, he has been identified with political movements such as communalism, communitarianism, anarchism, socialism, and Marxism (although Karl Marx quotes him only sporadically).
Today, Rousseau’s influence is reckoned as more pervasive than ever. The “back to nature” movement of the 1960s, “environmentalism” and its opposition to technology and industry, the alarm raised at economic growth (“consumerism”), the depleting of the earth’s resources: All are traced back to Rousseau. Even those who make the case that climate-alarmism movement represents an “anti-Industrial Revolution” have much to cite in Rousseau’s fiction and nonfiction.
Prof. Alan Kors summarizes: “The drama of Rousseau’s themes barely can be overstated. [He]...raises questions that have had a permanent place in the Western debate. From the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s to the remnants of that counterculture...in New Age models today—think of Rousseau’s themes and their permanence: the celebration of the primitive and simple over the complex and cultured; that human culture is a decadence that leads us away from simple and satisfying nature...”
In his era of confidence in reason, man’s “goodness,” and progress, what led him to become (as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it): “...overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom…”?
Rousseau often harked back to Geneva, the independent Calvinist city-state where he was born in 1712, as a place where one could live the “simple,” “natural,” authentic life he favored. Untypically, for the French Enlightenment, Rousseau’s origins (like Diderot’s) were ‘common,” his father, Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and his mother, Suzanne Bernard, what we would call a “housewife.”
Education and then Paris
Reading about this era, we can seldom forget the devastating rates of infant and maternal mortality. Rousseau’s mother died nine days after he was born, so that he was raised and educated by his father, an ardent “republican” patriot who was among the relatively few residents who ranked as a citizen, a status Jean Jacques inherited. The status seemed to do Isaac Rousseau no good; he fled the city to avoid arrest, leaving Rousseau with a pastor. A bit later, Rousseau became apprenticed to an engraver. Rousseau later would insist in his writings on education that that suitable preparation of any young man for life must include learning an “honest” manual craft. (Note the telling conjunction of “honest” and “manual.”)
Leaving Geneva at 16, Rousseau, an extraordinary handsome young man, ardent for romantic involvement, came under the influence of a French noblewoman, Françoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens, who promoted his conversion to Roman Catholicism (1728). After briefly training to become a priest (like so many other young Enlightenment intellectuals), Rousseau returned to Mme de Warens to become her lover and household manager (a step that probably freed him from earning a living in the priesthood).
At this time, in a seemingly abrupt transition, Rousseau became an itinerant musician, music copyist, and music teacher. This, too, proved brief—but not dilettantish. Rousseau’s native genius took hold, here (as a composer and theorist), as it did, of course, in philosophy and moral psychology, but also as a novelist, pioneer of modern autobiography, and botanist.
After almost a decade, in 1740, Rousseau left Mme de Warens for Lyon and Paris, where he began his long, often fruitful, but ultimately antagonistic relationships with major figures of the French Enlightenment. First came Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780), a philosopher, economist, and Catholic priest. Then, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783), a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Next came Denis Diderot, with whom d'Alembert was an early co-editor of the great Encyclopédie. And then, the many philosophe regulars at the Paris cafes and salons. To all appearances, Rousseau had settled upon a music career, but his reportedly powerful intellectual and personal appeal were opening new directions. He served briefly as secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice before returning to Paris and music, and, by 1744, was contributing articles on music to Diderot’s and d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
Although he moved through the Parisian social scene with all its glamor, Rousseau chose as his companion a barely literate laundry maid, Thérèse Levasseur, who (much later) became his wife and mother to his five children. All were promptly placed in the foundling hospital, an almost certain death sentence in 18th-century France. Later, when Rousseau became an international celebrity, among other things lecturing readers of his best-seller, Emile, on the sacred obligation to raise and educate children in a way that protected and sustained their “natural” goodness, confidence, and joy in life, Voltaire discovered and revealed to the world Rousseau’s utterly callous disposition of his own offspring.
The First “Discourse” and Fame
Now, in 1749, Rousseau, at 35, was living the life of the philosophe in Paris—but where was the philosophy that would change the world? In this year, Professor Kors tells us, the thesis that Rousseau would explicate and advocate for the rest of his professional life “exploded onto the scene.” It began as he walked to Vincennes to visit Diderot, imprisoned for ideas expressed in the Encyclopedie. As he walked, he later recounted, he came upon an announcement of the Academy of Dijon, one of many academies popping up across Europe to provide venues for intellectual exchange outside the universities dominated by dogmas of scholasticism.
The Academy was sponsoring a competition for essays on the topic: Has development of the arts and sciences improved public morals or corrupted them? Later, Rousseau claimed to have had an epiphany, then and there, built on his worldview that humankind is by nature good but is corrupted by society. He submitted his essay, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (known today as the First Discourse), and took first prize. In it, he argued the contrary proposition, attacking social development, and the arts and sciences broadly, as corrosive of civic virtue and individual moral character. More decadence always accompanies cultural progress (or say, more neutrally, cultural development). Since the Renaissance, European society had lost its ancient virtues.
The social frenzy that characterized the Age of Enlightenment was but the surface of an underlying social depravity. Consider the parallels with Egypt, Greece, and Rome, says Rousseau. They began as simpler societies with plain virtues—and great achievements. With culture and cultivation came decadence. And so Athens succumbed to Sparta, the latter faithful to its martial ancient virtues and simpler life. And the greatness of the Rome Republic, dissipated in extravagant sophistication, cultivation, and pleasure-seeking, fell to the robust primitiveness of the encroaching “barbarians.”
Moving from culture to individual virtue, observe that the cultured Athenians and Romans became too selfish, too self-absorbed, and too “depraved” for the self-sacrifice demanded to sustain community. Rousseau introduced both a contemporary and personal note by offering as examples the rural Swiss with whom he grew up and the American Indian—both more virtuous and happier than the most cultivated urban Europeans.
Probably it was obvious to everyone that the Academy foresaw a competition for the best essay in praise of the progress made possible by the arts and sciences. But Rousseau’s brilliance and originality carried the day. Published in 1751, the First Discourse made Rousseau famous almost overnight. It also introduced themes that Rousseau would spend his life developing: the natural goodness of man and the moral corruption fostered by society.
Rousseau replied to the many comments provoked by his essay, but, for the immediate future, remained involved with music. In 1752 and 1753, he did his most important work in that field. But soon, he was pursuing his ideas in philosophy, again, in another Academy of Dijon competition. This time he did not win, but his entry, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (commonly, the Second Discourse), advanced his thesis with new insights into society’s development and the individual’s moral psychology.
The Second Discourse opened a rift with the Encyclopédists and so with mainstream French Enlightenment thought. This rift became open and “official” in an exchange of letters with d’Alembert about Geneva’s idea for construction of a theater. No, said Rousseau, his native city would lose thereby some of its simplicity and its social attachment to life of the community. (At this time, he regained Genevan citizenship by switching back to Calvinism from Roman Catholicism.)
Rousseau, with two essays, and a few other deft moves, had charted his divergence from the French Enlightenment and his opposition to it. The Enlightenment’s dominant themes became what today we call the “modernism”; Rousseau’s became the philosophy of what we call “postmodernism” or the ”counterculture.”
To fully embed his legacy in the history of ideas, Rousseau went on to create his two greatest works. The Social Contract answered the question: How can a society of truly “natural,” “moral,” and politically free and equal men come into existence and protect itself from decadence and depravity? The novel, Emile, answered the question: How can we educate the future citizens of such a society to be natural, happy, and politically free?
Now, began the most productive years of his career. Each major work, a novel, Julie, au La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Emile (1762), The Social Contract (also 1762), and his autobiographical Confessions (much later in 1790), became bestsellers in his day (Julie almost immediately) and enduring classics.
Julie is viewed as having moved the novel toward the new school called “sentiment;” the Confessions, among the most revelatory autobiographies then known, proved pivotal in the transition from Classicism to the Romanticism that swept Europe in the 19th century.
Had he been less brilliant, prolific in multiple popular literary forms, and dogged, the “greats” whose ideas he attacked might have successfully ignored him. Or he might have been crushed by censorship of his work or by his imprisonment or banishment. As a singularly influential intellectual force in Europe and beyond, Rousseau has made it remarkably easy for historians to portray him as the “cause” of momentous events and enduring cultural themes right down to our own time. Probably more than any other thinker he has been associated with the French Revolution, whose leaders revered him, justified some of their excesses in his name, and caused his body to be exhumed and reinterred in Paris’s Pantheon of revolutionary heroes. Over time, he has been identified with political movements such as communalism, communitarianism, anarchism, socialism, and Marxism (although Karl Marx quotes him only sporadically).
Today, Rousseau’s influence is reckoned as more pervasive than ever. The “back to nature” movement of the 1960s, “environmentalism” and its opposition to technology and industry, the alarm raised at economic growth (“consumerism”), the depleting of the earth’s resources: All are traced back to Rousseau. Even those who make the case that climate-alarmism movement represents an “anti-Industrial Revolution” have much to cite in Rousseau’s fiction and nonfiction.
Prof. Alan Kors summarizes: “The drama of Rousseau’s themes barely can be overstated. [He]...raises questions that have had a permanent place in the Western debate. From the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s to the remnants of that counterculture...in New Age models today—think of Rousseau’s themes and their permanence: the celebration of the primitive and simple over the complex and cultured; that human culture is a decadence that leads us away from simple and satisfying nature...”
In his era of confidence in reason, man’s “goodness,” and progress, what led him to become (as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it): “...overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom…”?
Rousseau often harked back to Geneva, the independent Calvinist city-state where he was born in 1712, as a place where one could live the “simple,” “natural,” authentic life he favored. Untypically, for the French Enlightenment, Rousseau’s origins (like Diderot’s) were ‘common,” his father, Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and his mother, Suzanne Bernard, what we would call a “housewife.”
Education and then Paris
Reading about this era, we can seldom forget the devastating rates of infant and maternal mortality. Rousseau’s mother died nine days after he was born, so that he was raised and educated by his father, an ardent “republican” patriot who was among the relatively few residents who ranked as a citizen, a status Jean Jacques inherited. The status seemed to do Isaac Rousseau no good; he fled the city to avoid arrest, leaving Rousseau with a pastor. A bit later, Rousseau became apprenticed to an engraver. Rousseau later would insist in his writings on education that that suitable preparation of any young man for life must include learning an “honest” manual craft. (Note the telling conjunction of “honest” and “manual.”)
Leaving Geneva at 16, Rousseau, an extraordinary handsome young man, ardent for romantic involvement, came under the influence of a French noblewoman, Françoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens, who promoted his conversion to Roman Catholicism (1728). After briefly training to become a priest (like so many other young Enlightenment intellectuals), Rousseau returned to Mme de Warens to become her lover and household manager (a step that probably freed him from earning a living in the priesthood).
At this time, in a seemingly abrupt transition, Rousseau became an itinerant musician, music copyist, and music teacher. This, too, proved brief—but not dilettantish. Rousseau’s native genius took hold, here (as a composer and theorist), as it did, of course, in philosophy and moral psychology, but also as a novelist, pioneer of modern autobiography, and botanist.
After almost a decade, in 1740, Rousseau left Mme de Warens for Lyon and Paris, where he began his long, often fruitful, but ultimately antagonistic relationships with major figures of the French Enlightenment. First came Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780), a philosopher, economist, and Catholic priest. Then, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783), a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Next came Denis Diderot, with whom d'Alembert was an early co-editor of the great Encyclopédie. And then, the many philosophe regulars at the Paris cafes and salons. To all appearances, Rousseau had settled upon a music career, but his reportedly powerful intellectual and personal appeal were opening new directions. He served briefly as secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice before returning to Paris and music, and, by 1744, was contributing articles on music to Diderot’s and d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
Although he moved through the Parisian social scene with all its glamor, Rousseau chose as his companion a barely literate laundry maid, Thérèse Levasseur, who (much later) became his wife and mother to his five children. All were promptly placed in the foundling hospital, an almost certain death sentence in 18th-century France. Later, when Rousseau became an international celebrity, among other things lecturing readers of his best-seller, Emile, on the sacred obligation to raise and educate children in a way that protected and sustained their “natural” goodness, confidence, and joy in life, Voltaire discovered and revealed to the world Rousseau’s utterly callous disposition of his own offspring.
The First “Discourse” and Fame
Now, in 1749, Rousseau, at 35, was living the life of the philosophe in Paris—but where was the philosophy that would change the world? In this year, Professor Kors tells us, the thesis that Rousseau would explicate and advocate for the rest of his professional life “exploded onto the scene.” It began as he walked to Vincennes to visit Diderot, imprisoned for ideas expressed in the Encyclopedie. As he walked, he later recounted, he came upon an announcement of the Academy of Dijon, one of many academies popping up across Europe to provide venues for intellectual exchange outside the universities dominated by dogmas of scholasticism.
The Academy was sponsoring a competition for essays on the topic: Has development of the arts and sciences improved public morals or corrupted them? Later, Rousseau claimed to have had an epiphany, then and there, built on his worldview that humankind is by nature good but is corrupted by society. He submitted his essay, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (known today as the First Discourse), and took first prize. In it, he argued the contrary proposition, attacking social development, and the arts and sciences broadly, as corrosive of civic virtue and individual moral character. More decadence always accompanies cultural progress (or say, more neutrally, cultural development). Since the Renaissance, European society had lost its ancient virtues.
The social frenzy that characterized the Age of Enlightenment was but the surface of an underlying social depravity. Consider the parallels with Egypt, Greece, and Rome, says Rousseau. They began as simpler societies with plain virtues—and great achievements. With culture and cultivation came decadence. And so Athens succumbed to Sparta, the latter faithful to its martial ancient virtues and simpler life. And the greatness of the Rome Republic, dissipated in extravagant sophistication, cultivation, and pleasure-seeking, fell to the robust primitiveness of the encroaching “barbarians.”
Moving from culture to individual virtue, observe that the cultured Athenians and Romans became too selfish, too self-absorbed, and too “depraved” for the self-sacrifice demanded to sustain community. Rousseau introduced both a contemporary and personal note by offering as examples the rural Swiss with whom he grew up and the American Indian—both more virtuous and happier than the most cultivated urban Europeans.
Probably it was obvious to everyone that the Academy foresaw a competition for the best essay in praise of the progress made possible by the arts and sciences. But Rousseau’s brilliance and originality carried the day. Published in 1751, the First Discourse made Rousseau famous almost overnight. It also introduced themes that Rousseau would spend his life developing: the natural goodness of man and the moral corruption fostered by society.
Rousseau replied to the many comments provoked by his essay, but, for the immediate future, remained involved with music. In 1752 and 1753, he did his most important work in that field. But soon, he was pursuing his ideas in philosophy, again, in another Academy of Dijon competition. This time he did not win, but his entry, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (commonly, the Second Discourse), advanced his thesis with new insights into society’s development and the individual’s moral psychology.
The Second Discourse opened a rift with the Encyclopédists and so with mainstream French Enlightenment thought. This rift became open and “official” in an exchange of letters with d’Alembert about Geneva’s idea for construction of a theater. No, said Rousseau, his native city would lose thereby some of its simplicity and its social attachment to life of the community. (At this time, he regained Genevan citizenship by switching back to Calvinism from Roman Catholicism.)
Rousseau, with two essays, and a few other deft moves, had charted his divergence from the French Enlightenment and his opposition to it. The Enlightenment’s dominant themes became what today we call the “modernism”; Rousseau’s became the philosophy of what we call “postmodernism” or the ”counterculture.”
To fully embed his legacy in the history of ideas, Rousseau went on to create his two greatest works. The Social Contract answered the question: How can a society of truly “natural,” “moral,” and politically free and equal men come into existence and protect itself from decadence and depravity? The novel, Emile, answered the question: How can we educate the future citizens of such a society to be natural, happy, and politically free?
Now, began the most productive years of his career. Each major work, a novel, Julie, au La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Emile (1762), The Social Contract (also 1762), and his autobiographical Confessions (much later in 1790), became bestsellers in his day (Julie almost immediately) and enduring classics.
Julie is viewed as having moved the novel toward the new school called “sentiment;” the Confessions, among the most revelatory autobiographies then known, proved pivotal in the transition from Classicism to the Romanticism that swept Europe in the 19th century.
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