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

Introduction

Introduction During the period from around the middle of the eighteenth century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) first appeared, to his death in 1778, a movement gradually emerged against the French Enlightenment, eventually giving rise to a complete rejection of its central ideas and assumptions by many writers in the early nineteenth century, particularly, although by no means exclusively , those associated with Romanticism. Rousseau is a pivotal figure in the emergence of this movement. Although, as Isaiah Berlin claims, the German writer Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) may have been the “most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment” of his time, Rousseau was its first serious, systematic opponent.1 By the time that Hamann had taken up arms in his personal crusade against the “cold northern light” of the Enlightenment in the late 1750s, Rousseau’s own public campaign against it was already well under way.2 At first glance this claim seems to belie the facts. Rousseau was, after all, an homme de salon while in Paris in the 1740s associating with the leading philosophes of the day. The editor of the Encyclopédie was one of his closest friends at the time; he owed the circulation of many of his works in France to Malesherbes (1721–1794), the Directeur de la librairie responsible for overseeing the book trade, who was sympathetic to the philosophes and their ideas; he corresponded with Voltaire, whose opinion he eagerly sought on his own works; and he contributed a number of articles to the Encyclopédie, the so-called bible of the Enlightenment in France.3 Even after his “reform,” which took Rousseau back to his native city in 1754 to be readmitted to the Calvinist Church and to have his Genevan citizenship restored, he returned to the salons of Paris and the company of Diderot (1713–1784), Duclos (1704–1772), Condillac (1714–1780), Grimm (1723–1809), and d’Alembert (1717–1783). He even continued to frequent the home of one of the most notorious of the 1 philosophes, the atheist Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789). Also, the appearance of Emile (1762) and The Social Contract (1762) a few years later brought censure from authorities in Catholic Paris and Calvinist Geneva. Charles Palissot’s popular satirical comedy Les Philosophes (1760) parodied Rousseau along with other leading lumières without distinguishing between them. Thus, to the wider public, as Samuel Taylor has written of eighteenth-century France, “the differences between Rousseau and philosophie appeared superficial.”4 Yet the evidence to support the view that Rousseau was basically opposed to the Enlightenment seems no less compelling. He eventually became bitterly hostile towards much of his former friends’ outlook on the world, and he did not hesitate to attack them and their ideas openly. The essay that first established his intellectual reputation at the very height of the Enlightenment, which Diderot helped him to publish, makes it unmistakably clear that he had fundamental misgivings about it from the very beginning of his public career as a writer. Many of Rousseau’s erstwhile colleagues among the philosophes were further outraged by what they took to be the apostasy of his subsequent writings as well. For Voltaire, Rousseau became “[t]hat arch-fool”5 and the “Judas” of the “party of humanity.”6 For his part, Rousseau blamed “that buffoon” Voltaire for ruining his homeland by corrupting its morals through the introduction of “enlightened” Parisian values via the theater. He also alienated Diderot, who referred to the relationship between Rousseau and the Enlightenment as a “vast chasm between heaven and hell” and described him—not unreasonably—as an “anti-philosophe” in his Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero (1782).7 Eventually, as Peter Gay notes, Rousseau “was treated as a madman by other philosophes long before his clinical symptoms became obtrusive,” no doubt because of his seemingly inexplicable (to them) betrayal of the Enlightenment.8 Given these apparently contradictory facts, it is little wonder that the question of the relationship between the ideas of Rousseau and the French Enlightenment has vexed his readers ever since the appearance in 1750 of his first significant political work. His more recent interpreters have been no less perplexed by this question than his contemporaries were.9 “It may be argued with equal plausibility,” Norman Hampson writes in his study of the Enlightenment, “that Rousseau was either one of the greatest writers of the Enlightenment or its most eloquent and...