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

Preface

Preface In his posthumously published notes The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) traces what he calls the still-unresolved “problem of civilization” back to the conflict between Rousseau (1712–1778) and Voltaire (1694–1778) that began in the middle of the eighteenth century .1 For Nietzsche, the “aristocratic” homme civilisé Voltaire defended civilization as a great triumph over the barbarism of nature, whereas the vulgar plebeian Rousseau—“beyond a doubt mentally disturbed”— inspired the revolutionary overthrow of all social orders in the name of the natural goodness of man.2 Voltaire felt “the mitigation, the subtleties, the spiritual joys of the civilized state,” unlike Rousseau, whose idealized conception of nature led him to cast a “curse upon society and civilization .”3 Nietzsche believed that this clash was decisive not only for Voltaire personally, but for European civilization as a whole. With it, Voltaire ceased to be a mere “bel esprit” and man of letters and became “the man of his century” whose intense envy and hatred of Rousseau spurred him on to the heights of greatness.4 Nietzsche thought that Rousseau simultaneously provoked Voltaire into effectively creating the Enlightenment as we now know it and banished the spirit of the Enlightenment by conjuring its nemesis, the French Revolution.5 Nietzsche’s antisocial Rousseau, like Voltaire’s (on which it is obviously based), is a crude caricature.6 The clash between Voltaire and Rousseau was never really over the abstract question of which is preferable : society or the state of nature? (Even if that is how Voltaire viewed it.) Rousseau was very far from believing that it is either possible or desirable to return to a presocial “state of nature.” But Nietzsche was definitely on to something important in presenting Rousseau’s confrontation with Voltaire as a decisive moment in the debate over the nature of civilization that emerged in France in the second half of the eighteenth century .7 He correctly identified the moment when “the problem of civilization” first emerged as a major theme in eighteenth-century French ix thought. It was in mid-eighteenth-century Paris that the modern concept of civilization was first formulated, as part of a more general surge of interest in the bonds that hold societies together.8 Nietzsche is also basically correct in claiming that, to a very considerable extent, Rousseau and Voltaire set the terms of this debate, and are the most eloquent and important representatives of its opposing sides. Finally, he is right to identify the Enlightenment with the cause of “civilization,” at least as that term came to be understood in eighteenth-century France, against which Rousseau devoted the better part of his energies after the late 1740s. From the mid-eighteenth century, Rousseau openly and repeatedly attacked “the fatal enlightenment of Civil man” (DI, 48 [OC III, 170]), and denounced eighteenth-century civilization for its artificiality, immorality , luxuriousness, effeminacy, inequality, hypocrisy, and social atomism. Fundamental to his critique of the Enlightenment is a belief that it results in a dangerous loosening of already fragile and artificial social bonds.9 His deeply pessimistic social assumptions—based on a rejection of the Enlightenment belief in natural human sociability, a devaluation of the power of reason, and the conviction that “enlightenment” only inflames the divisive power of amour-propre—led him to propose a CounterEnlightenment “republic of virtue” in which a “healthy” ignorance prevails over enlightenment as the only acceptable alternative to the philosophes’ civilized “republic of letters.” Rousseau contrasted what he took to be the social fragmentation and moral degradation of the enlightened civilization of eighteenth-century Europe—epitomized by Paris and personified in the philosophes—with an idealized image of the cohesive, city-states of the ancient world where virtue was sovereign and all aspects of life were tightly integrated. This is apparent in his often-expressed admiration for premodern cultures, above all Sparta and republican Rome, and in his praise for the great legislators of antiquity, who embody the union of religion, politics, and morality that he so much admired. In the pages that follow I develop this rough sketch of Rousseau into the first detailed, book-length portrait of him as the father of CounterEnlightenment thought, the man who fired the first major shot in a war that has raged between the Enlightenment and its opponents for over two and a half centuries and shows little sign of abating. x Preface ...