The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

2. The First Attack and First History

2 The First Attack and First History Enlightenment: Rousseau’s Enemy and Milieu How radical was Rousseau’s breach with his contemporaries? Exactly how divergent was the prize essay on the Arts and Sciences from the general tenor of eighteenth-century society? To gauge this it is necessary to understand what Rousseau was fortifying himself against. What was the major force of his day to which he objected so forcefully? For Cassirer, the eighteenth century had an “innate thirst for knowledge, an insatiable intellectual curiosity .”1 The amazing advances in the arts and sciences over the previous two centuries and the flowering of an intellectual climate unrivaled in history bequeathed to the eighteenth century not just a desire to continue such disinterested scientific inquiry, but also to declare a very interested crusade to use it for political purposes . A way of thinking had been carefully cultivated, and the eighteenth century saw its mission in the extension, consolidation , and, most importantly, politicizing of that thinking. To use a familiar and popular metaphor of the day, the status of reason had been raised to the “heights of the sun,” and was going to illuminate society. Regarded as an original force rediscovered rather than as the inheritance it was, it was to be used to sweep away all other inheritances, customs, traditions, and authorities not living 52 1. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 14. First Attack and First History   53 up to its glare. Not only would its rigor dissolve things to their essence for appraisal, but reason could also be used to reconstruct society in its image. In this regard Rousseau is no different from his contemporaries in recognizing the stultifying social structures and the new powers to overcome them. Where he differs is in his opinion of the benefits of art, science, philosophy, and the “community of the enlightened” in society. Rousseau’s later, more mature political ideals were in keeping with his times, but the foundation from which they sprang comes from a different world entirely. Such a conflicted position is evidenced by looking at the projected aims of that “weapon” of enlightenment, the Encyclopaedia —a work that Rousseau contributed to, but was clearly out of step with. Diderot states in his “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopaedia just how important an enlightened society was to the progress of science on nature and Man and on the general advancement of human reason: “The ideas acquired through reading and social contacts are the germs of almost all discoveries. It is the air that we inhale in an unconscious way, and it supplies us with life.”2 The Encyclopaedia spectacularly epitomized its time. Used on the one hand to criticize and evaluate the state and society, it was also to be used as a guide for the reform and education of the society and its people.3 And in this overt purpose Rousseau is an untroubled member. But the enterprise of the Encyclopaedia epitomized something far more profound than the simple critique of society. It was a proud statement of the happy confluence between philosophy and society, condensed in the quote above. Knowledge is first and foremost seen as having a social capacity . Knowledge can only progress with the right social organization, and the right social organization can only be built on a bedrock of rational ideas. Intellectual culture, civilization, progress, society, arts, and science are all collapsed into a vision of future perfected humanity. The Encyclopaedia represents a “new play for power by the philosophers.”4 And so “the eighteenth century is a time of the cultural flourishing of 2. Denis Diderot, The Encyclopedia: Selections, edited and translated by Stephen J. Gendzier (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 13. 3. “Diderot himself, originator of the Encyclopedia, states that its purpose is not only to supply a certain body of knowledge but also to bring about a change in the mode of thinking ”; from Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 14. 4. Robert Catley and Wayne Cristaudo, This Great Beast: Progress and the Modern State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 143. 54  Jean-Jacques Rousseau philosophy and the increasing importance that philosophical ideas will play in the political process which was increasingly absorbing the middle class.”5 But it is here that we locate Rousseau’s departure. He simply could not accept such a view of progress on the heels of a general social culture of science. That a...