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Chapter One The Enlightenment Republic of Letters The Party of Humanity Rousseau’s Enlightenment was the “high Enlightenment” of the Parisian philosophes. While many no longer think it intellectually respectable to focus on this often unrepresentative elite when discussing “the Enlightenment” in general, there is some justification for doing so in the particular case of Rousseau, who actually inhabited their world. I will deal exclusively with the Enlightenment in its French context, even though Rousseau was a citizen of Geneva. Notwithstanding this vital fact, he participated in, influenced and was influenced by a social, cultural , political, and philosophical environment that was predominantly French in an age when France was the dominant cultural force in Europe. However, as we shall see, his provincial background on the periphery of this world is crucial to understanding his attitude towards the dominant political and philosophical trends in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. The term “the Enlightenment” only came into common use in English to designate a specific historical period long after the eighteenth century, and it was not until after World War II that it usurped the expression “the Age of Reason.” Although the philosophes used the term “éclaircissement ” and sometimes referred to themselves as “les hommes éclairés,”1 this word refers to the general concept of enlightenment rather than to the specific historical movement we now call “the Enlightenment” (definite article, capital ‘E’). However, the French expression “le siècle des lumières” was used from the late eighteenth century, while ‘Lumières’ on its own has been popular in French since the 1950s to refer to what is now known in English as the Enlightenment.2 As for there having been a single Enlightenment “project,” this belief is most commonly held by its detractors, who have found it much more 11 convenient to dismiss one simplistic caricature than to deal with a complex and heterogeneous range of views. This tendency has provoked a backlash among dix-huitièmistes and some Enlightenment sympathizers. While the more nuanced and historically informed view of the Enlightenment they favor is a welcome improvement on many earlier definitions , it is still compatible with the idea that the philosophes—in France at least—were pursuing a common project, broadly defined.3 That is how Diderot characterized the Encyclopédie, “the text most representative of the French Enlightenment:”4 as a “project” (his word) that could “only be completed by a society of men of letters and arts” who were bound together “by the general interest of humanity and a sense of mutual goodwill .”5 The “society of men of letters” whose project this was in France were the philosophes. It was around the middle of the eighteenth century—just as Rousseau was emerging as a leading European intellectual—that a group of writers in France formed themselves into a loose “society” with a broadly shared conception of enlightenment that they actively promoted.6 It was not until then that the philosophes in France started to think of themselves as an informal party—the “party of humanity”—devoted to the promotion of enlightenment understood in a particular sense. From about this time they came to view themselves as the self-appointed leaders of an “unofficial opposition” to the religious, political and philosophical establishment in France with a mission to “legislate for the rest of the nation in matters of philosophy and taste.”7 As Dena Goodman writes, by then they had come to conceive of themselves as a corps, “a status group within French society . This new French identity was overlaid upon the fundamental principles of the Republic of Letters: reciprocity, cosmopolitanism, status based on merit, and fidelity to truth.”8 In his “Reflections on the Present State of the Republic of Letters” (1760), d’Alembert describes this eighteenthcentury “society” as follows: Among the men of letters there is one group against which the arbiters of taste, the important people, the rich people, are united: this is the pernicious, the damnable group of philosophes, who hold that it is possible to be a good Frenchman without courting those in power, a good citizen without flattering national prejudices, a good Christian without persecuting anybody . The philosophes believe it right to make more of an honest if little-known writer than of a well-known writer without enlightenment and without principles, to hold that foreigners are not inferior to us in every respect, and to prefer, for example, a government under which the people are not...

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