The two greatest critics of the Enlightment are alleged (at least by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind) to be Rousseau and Nietzsche.  Anyone believing this is half right; Nietzsche is serious (and difficult), but Rousseau is a clown – a pantomime intellectual.  You could almost call him the archtype for the woke progressives of our day: boatloads of assertions (often presented as not open for debate), a few sharp observations (pace a blind squirrel) and a great preference for imagination to reality.

The First Discourse

This was an essay judged by the Academy of Dijon to have best answered a question they had posed: Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?  As is too often the case, peer review by intellectuals failed to detect what is substantially a fraud.  Oh, that’s harsh, isn’t it?  Not really, for Rousseau’s essay is sophomoric from beginning to end.  Don’t take my word for it, Rousseau himself added this forward in 1763 as he assembled a collection of his writings:

What is celebrity?  Here is the unfortunate work to which I owe mine.  Certainly this piece, which won me a prize and made me famous, is at best mediocre, and I dare add it is one of the slightest of the whole collection.

Now, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to blame the Academy of Dijon for asking such a foolish question, even if they did reward an impertinent answer, for Rousseau re-worked his thesis to address this question instead: Has the restoration of the sciences arts tended to purify or corrupt morals?  And the particular French word he uses (mouers) translates not just as morals, but also as manners.  This is important because this was his first volley at the French aristocracy (and Voltaire in particular), which would be his bête noir [shamelessly stealing another nuanced French phrase] throughout his writings.  Taking Rousseau out of the French social context of the mid 18th century is the surest way to miss some subtle points he does indeed make.  It is fair to him to remember that the inequality of French society would soon reach a breaking point, and the corruption of that elite still puts our current elite to shame.

So having slightly reworked the question, in his favor, he argues that knowledge has worked corruption upon man’s better nature.  What makes this discourse very strange is that when he revisits the underlying social norm-making in the Second Discourse, he is nearly universal in condemnation of man as a social/civic being; here he praises Sparta and Persia while he condemns Athens (and by implication his contemporaneous France).  This does pose a novel answer to the quarrel of the Ancients versus the Moderns from the preceding century – Rousseau would dismiss them both.

The Second Discourse

What later became known as the Second Discourse was published under the title of On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men.  If his First Discourse was a warning shot, this was intellectual fire for effect.

Before we proceed, I want you to imagine a straw-man argument, but not just any straw-man.  This may be the Ur-straw-man; the Platonic ideal of a straw-man; a straw-man that physically manifested would stand on the ground in Geneva and reach to the edge of space; a straw-man that in full conflagration would out-shine the sun.

With that in mind, you are now properly prepared to consider Rousseau’s conceit of the natural man (in contrast to civil man).  His great object is to refute Hobbes’ state of nature, that man in the state of nature lives a life nasty, brutish and short.  So Rousseau simply imagines a state of nature and a mankind therein that never existed.  He hypothesizes an asocial man – a benign unthinking but happy animal, whereas we know that virtually all primates are social (as well as many other species).  This is necessary because he wants man to be pure and society to be the corrupting agent on that purity.  It’s really that simple, that’s his whole argument, and he writes quite a bit to say that.  If he were to consider that man never lived as a solitary beast, but socially, his argument just falls apart or he would have to identify a tipping point (and a plausible one might have been the development of agriculture) where social behavior goes from positive to negative (or that there is some kind of balancing even in his present time).  The difficult question is – if man was so well off without any social instincts, how did those social instincts form and even moreso prevail over time if they run counter to his natural instincts.  This is one of those points not open to debate.  For him, even family, let alone clan or tribe are fabricated; artifacts of wrong choices that destroyed the natural [purely animalistic] man – who was in essence without sin (again contra Hobbes, and the Church).  Language too is an artifact, not a natural thing, and thence reason; for ideas require language.  He doesn’t elaborate here (as he will later), for doing so probably would’ve cost him his life (and he would end up on the lam as an outcast from all decent society), but religion must be fundamentally an artifact as well – though deftly danced around by always falling back on the creator [of man and the natural world even if not quite the Biblical figure].  Here the irony is lost on him, for absent the Enlightenment he criticizes, the norms of only a few centuries earlier would surely have seen him burned at the stake.  And once religion is accepted as an artifact and not divine truth, his later proposed civil religion (in The Social Contract) is laughable, particularly when invoking God.

One truly curious bugbear for Rousseau is Sparta – he obsesses with it as a purer society than Athens.  Which he shouldn’t because it is as much a betrayal of natural man as any other society, even the societies of the then primitive peoples of the Americas.  Rousseau fails to grasp that the Spanish crushed the Aztecs as allies of the other noble savages of Meso-America that had been brutally oppressed by those Aztecs.  This of course is classic Rousseau – really weak on logic.  You have to wonder, was it because he really saw limitations to logic or was he just flat out bad at it.

It would be a few years later that Adam Smith would publish The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that would address some of the same social ills that filled Rousseau’s mind.  The difference is that Smith understood human nature better, and that man’s social instincts (good and bad) are core to him, not an affectation that bent him away from his true natural state.  Here you can see the appeal of Rousseau to the revolutionaries who would claim him – man is innately good; the social-system is corrupt and was in fact designed (as opposed to evolved or arising out of spontaneous order) to work corruption (in this particular case, inequality – from property).  Destroy that system and free man from his chains!  Like Marx who followed him, Rousseau was not wrong about all of the injustice he saw in his world – it did exist; it is his explanation for it, and the impulses unleashed to set that right that are horrifyingly wrong.  This is also quite at odds with his later argument in favor of the general will (a social construct if there ever was one and beloved of authoritarian and totalitarian alike) since any such will [to power] is a corruption upon the innate goodness of asocial man.  Nietzsche of course builds on the will, but it isn’t really clear from him that it is to power in the political sense.  [Another case of the use of native words subject to mistranslation.]

When Solzhenitsyn said “[T]he line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart”, Rousseau would weep.  For he is refuted without recourse.