Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes

Notes

Notes Preface 1. Nietzsche (1968): 75. Nietzsche’s thinking on the problem of civilization and the way he construes it in terms of an opposition between the spirit of Voltaire and that of Rousseau was influenced by Ferdinand Brunetière’s Etudes critiques sur l’histoire de la littérature française. For a discussion of this, see Kuhn (1989). 2. Nietzsche dedicated the first edition of Human, All Too Human to Voltaire, “one of the greatest liberators of the human spirit.” 3. Nietzsche (1968): 62–64. 4. Nietzsche (1968): 62–64. 5. Nietzsche (1996): 169. Also, see Ansell-Pearson (1991). 6. Nietzsche’s reading of Rousseau clearly owes much to Voltaire, whose quip about the Discourse on Inequality was the first of many depicting him as an antisocial primitivist. “I have just received your book against the human race,” Voltaire wrote to Rousseau. “Never has so much wit been used in an attempt to make us like animals. The desire to walk on all fours seizes one when one reads your work” (Voltaire to Rousseau, 30 August 1755 [CWV C, 259]). 7. In his essay “The Word Civilization,” Jean Starobinski distinguishes between an earlier, juridical meaning of the word and its later, modern sense. He notes that the Marquis de Mirabeau (1675–1760) was the first person in France to use it in the latter sense, in his L’Ami des hommes ou Traité de la population (1756). The first French dictionary to use “civilization” in this sense referred its readers back to Mirabeau’s work: “The Ami des hommes used this word for sociabilité. See that word. Religion is undeniably the first and most useful brake on humanity; it is the first source of civilization. It preaches to us and continually recalls us to confraternity, to soften our hearts” (Dictionnaire universel [1771], 121 quoted in Starobinski [1993]: 2). By the second half of the eighteenth century , civilization had became closely associated with the Enlightenment values actively promoted by the philosophes, such as “improvements in comfort, advances in education, politer manners, cultivation of the arts and sciences, growth of commerce and industry, and acquisition of material goods and luxuries” (3). This is essentially how Rousseau saw it too. As N. J. H. Dent writes, he identified civilization with the very things that he associated with the philosophes, such as “the growth of arts and letters ; the introduction of refined manners and dress and elaborate social customs; the development of large cities” (Dent [1992]: 46–47). 8. See Mazlish (1989). 9. It is worth noting that G. D. H. Cole translates Rousseau’s “politesse” (OC III, 193) as “civilization” (Cole [1973]: 104), while Maurice Cranston renders it as “civility” (Cranston [1984]: 136). A recent translation by Victor Gourevitch is more cautious, preferring “politeness” (Gourevitch [1997]: 187). Roger Masters translates the French “police” (OC III, 170) as “civilization” (DI, 48). Introduction 1. Berlin believes that Hamann not only “struck the most violent blow against the Enlightenment” but was also “the first person to declare war upon the Enlightenment in the most open, violent and complete fashion ” (Berlin [1994]: 1). Rousseau’s role in the Counter-Enlightenment, by contrast, has been “exaggerated.” Although he acknowledges that the “influence of Rousseau, particularly of his early writings, on this movement in Germany, which came to be called Stürm und Drang, was profound ,” Berlin adds that “even Rousseau did not seem to them to go far enough” to rank among the Enlightenment’s enemies (Berlin [1981]: 9). In principle, he writes, “what Rousseau and the other Encyclopaedists wished to do was the same” (Berlin [1999]: 40, 46, 52–54). However in an essay on Georges Sorel Berlin writes that there is “an anti-intellectual and anti-Enlightenment stream in the European radical tradition, at times allied with populism, or nationalism, or neo-medievalism, that goes back to Rousseau and Herder and Fichte and enters agrarian, anarchist, antiSemitic and other anti-liberal movements, creating anomalous combinations ” (Berlin [1981]: 316). Berlin’s most comprehensive account of Rousseau appears in a 1952 BBC radio broadcast, published in Berlin (2002). 2. Johann Georg Hamann to Christian Jacob Kraus, 18 December 1784, in Schmidt (1996): 147. 122 Notes to Introduction 3. Virtually all of Rousseau’s contributions to the Encyclopédie were on music. His only explicitly political article appeared in volume five (1755), published as a separate “Discourse on Political Economy” three years later. 4. Taylor...