Garrard, G (2003) - Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment. A Republican Critque of The Philosophes

ROUSSEAU’S COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT
SUNY series in Social and Political Thought

Kenneth Baynes, editor
ROUSSEAU’S
COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT
A Republican Critique of the Philosophes
Graeme Garrard
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Garrard, Graeme, 1965–

Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment : a republican critique of the
Enlightenment / Graeme Garrard.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in social and political thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7914–5603-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–7914–5604–8 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. 2. Enlightenment—France.
3. France—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. II. Series.
B2137 .G27 2003
194—dc21
2002021242
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To
Jeanette Shannon
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Enlightenment Republic of Letters 11
The Party of Humanity 11
The Virtue of Selfish Sociability 19
2. Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God:
The Many Faces of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 29
Introduction 29
Rousseau and the Philosophes 30
The Invention of the “Revolutionary” Rousseau 35
Conclusion 40
3. Unsociable Man: Rousseau’s Critique of Enlightenment
Social Thought 41
Introduction 41
From Contract to Community 42
Natural Order, Social Disorder 45
Conclusion 53
4. Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Republic of Virtue 55
Introduction 55
Extending amour-propre 56
Statecraft as Soulcraft 59
Rousseau’s “Manly” Republic 64
Conclusion 67
vii
viii Contents
5. On the Utility of Religion 69

Introduction 69
The Religious Basis of Morality 72
The Union of Church and State 76
6. Dare to Be Ignorant! 83
Introduction 83
Messieurs de l’Encyclopédie 84
“A Sweet and Precious Ignorance” 87
The Light Within 92
Conclusion 101
7. The Worst of All Possible Worlds 103
The Cautious Optimism of the Philosophes 103
Rousseau’s Optimism about the Past 106
Rousseau’s Pessimism about the Future 111
Conclusion 115
Conclusion 117
Notes 121
Bibliography 155
Index 179
Preface
I n his posthumously published notes The Will to Power, Friedrich

Nietzsche (1844–1900) traces what he calls the still-unresolved “prob-
lem of civilization” back to the conflict between Rousseau (1712–1778)
and Voltaire (1694–1778) that began in the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury.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 civiliza-
tion.”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 simulta-
neously 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 obvi-
ously based), is a crude caricature.6 The clash between Voltaire and
Rousseau was never really over the abstract question of which is prefer-
able: 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 desir-
able to return to a presocial “state of nature.” But Nietzsche was defi-
nitely on to something important in presenting Rousseau’s confrontation
with Voltaire as a decisive moment in the debate over the nature of civi-
lization that emerged in France in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury.7 He correctly identified the moment when “the problem of
civilization” first emerged as a major theme in eighteenth-century French
ix
x Preface
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 basi-
cally correct in claiming that, to a very considerable extent, Rousseau and
Voltaire set the terms of this debate, and are the most eloquent and impor-
tant 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, immoral-
ity, 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 Counter-
Enlightenment “republic of virtue” in which a “healthy” ignorance pre-
vails 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 enlight-
ened 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 Counter-
Enlightenment 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.
Acknowledgments
T his book began as a doctoral thesis at Oxford University, where it

benefited from the comments and criticisms of my supervisor, Dr. L.
A. Siedentop. During these years I was the grateful and very fortunate
beneficiary of many discussions with Sir Isaiah Berlin, who also supervised
my thesis for a time. While we agreed on almost nothing about Rousseau
beyond the spelling of his name, this mattered much less to me than the
experience of being Berlin’s student. His intellectual curiosity was highly
infectious and his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge was a constant
source of amazement and inspiration to me. Balliol College was my home
during the years that the first version of this work was written, and I am
grateful to the Fellows of the College for admitting me to the ideal schol-
arly community in which to live and study. I spent countless hours in the
Voltaire Room of Oxford’s Taylor Institution Library reading and writing
about Rousseau and the Enlightenment. The task of completing this study
would have been a great deal more difficult, and certainly much less pleas-
ant, without access to this wonderful collection. My thesis was scrutinized
by two examiners, Professors Jack Hayward and Jack Lively, to whom I
am grateful for their civility and their many constructive comments.
The thesis on which this book is based was intermittently revised over
the course of several years, which I spent at Cardiff University, Boston
University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and Williams College.
I made many friends at all of these institutions, and a few enemies at
some. In the spirit of Rousseau’s esteemed Plutarch (author of De capi-
enda ex inimicis utilitate), I am grateful to friend and foe alike for their
constant stimulation.
Over the years I have amassed a great many scholarly debts, the most
substantial and important of which are to Ronald Beiner, David Hanley,
and Richard Lebrun. I am glad to have this opportunity publicly to
express my gratitude to them for their extraordinary kindness and unflag-
ging support over many years.
xi
xii Acknowledgments
My interest in the history of political thought was first aroused while

I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. Professors Alkis
Kontos and Thomas Pangle stand out in my memory of my undergraduate
education for their passion and enthusiasm for the subject, which stimu-
lated my budding interest.
The friendship and intellectual companionship of Blair McDonald,
Gunnar Beck, James Schmidt, James Murphy, Sung-Ho Kim, and Mark
Colby made the years during which this study was written and revised
both memorable and enjoyable. The sharp wit of Chris Ealham has done
much over the years to blunt the countless shocks to which British aca-
demic life is heir these days. To Nora Temple and Roy Jones I owe my
appreciation for many things, not least for regularly reminding me of the
merits of the Enlightenment values that Rousseau deprecated. Darrin
McMahon was helpful in ways both intellectual and practical, for which I
am grateful. My editors, Michael Rinella of SUNY Press, Cathleen Collins
and Laura Glenn, all acted with consummate skill and professionalism,
and I thank them.
Finally, I owe a word of thanks to the following for generously pro-
viding me with the funds to research this study: the UK Overseas Research
Student Awards Scheme, the University of Oxford, the Voltaire
Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, and the Leverhulme Trust.
Abbreviations
I have used a dual system of notes. All quotations from Rousseau are fol-
lowed in the text by the appropriate reference to the English edition
listed below, as well as to the corresponding reference to the Oeuvres
complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited by B. Gagnebin and M.
Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–1995). Where good English trans-
lations of other French texts exist, I have used them. Otherwise, I have
translated from French editions.
Rousseau
C Confessions. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 5. Edited

by C. Kelly, R. D. Masters, and P. Stillman. Translated by C. Kelly.
Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1995.
CC Correspondance complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Edited by R.
A. Leigh. Geneva, Banbury, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
1965–1998.
CPC Constitutional Project for Corsica. In Rousseau: Political Writings.
Translated by F. Watkins. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1953.
DSA Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. In The Collected Writings of
Rousseau. Vol. 2. Edited by C. Kelly and R. D. Masters. Translated
by J. Bush, R. D. Masters, and C. Kelly. Hanover and London:
University Press of New England, 1992.
DI Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality. In The
Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 3. Edited by C. Kelly and R.
D. Masters. Translated by J. Bush, R. D. Masters, and C. Kelly.
xiii
xiv Abbreviations
DPE Discourse on Political Economy. In The Collected Writings of

Rousseau. Vol. 3. Edited by C. Kelly and R. D. Masters. Translated
by J. Bush, R. D. Masters, and C. Kelly. Hanover and London:
E Emile, or On Education. Translated by A. Bloom. New York: Basic
Books, 1979.
EOL Essay on the Origin of Languages. In The Collected Writings of
Rousseau. Vol. 7. Edited and translated by J. T. Scott. Hanover and
London: University Press of New England, 1998.
Final Final Reply to Critics of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. In
The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 2. Edited by C. Kelly and
R. D. Masters. Translated by J. Bush, R. D. Masters, and C. Kelly.
GMS Geneva Manuscript. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 4.
Edited by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly. Translated by J. Bush, R. D.
Masters and C. Kelly. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 1994.
GP Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Projected
Reformation. In Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later
Political Writings. Translated by V. Gourevitch. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
JNH Julie, or the New Heloise. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau.
Vol. 6. Edited by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly. Translated by P.
Stewart and J. Vaché. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 1997.
LA Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater. In Politics and the Arts: Letter
to M. d’Alembert on the Theater. Translated by A. Bloom.
Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960.
LB Letter to Beaumont. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 9.
Edited by C. Kelly and E. Grace. Translated by C. Kelly and J.
Bush. Hanover and London: University Press of New England,
2001.
LF Letter to Franquières. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol.
8. Edited by C. Kelly. Translated by C. E. Butterworth, A. Book, T.
Marshall. Hanover and London: University Press of New England,
2000.
LV Letter to Voltaire (18 August 1756). In The Discourses and Other
Early Political Writings. Translated by V. Gourevitch. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Abbreviations xv
LWM Letters Written From the Mountain. In The Collected Writings of

Rousseau. Vol. 9. Edited by C. Kelly and E. Grace. Translated by
C. Kelly and J. Bush. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 2001.
PF Political Fragments. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 4.
Edited by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly. Translated by J. Bush, R. D.
Masters, and C. Kelly. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 1994.
PN Preface to Narcissus. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol.
2. Edited by C. Kelly and R. D. Masters. Translated by J. Bush, R.
D. Masters, and C. Kelly. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 1992.
RJJ Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. In The Collected
Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 1. Edited by R. D. Masters and C.
Kelly. Translated by J. Bush, C. Kelly, and R. D. Masters. Hanover
and London: University Press of New England, 1990.
RSW Reveries of a Solitary Walker. In The Collected Writings of
Rousseau. Vol. 8. Edited by C. Kelly. Translated by C. E.
Butterworth, A. Book, T. Marshall. Hanover and London:
SC The Social Contract. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol.
4. Edited by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly. Translated by J. Bush, R.
D. Masters, and C. Kelly. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 1994.
SW The State of War. In Rousseau on International Relations. Edited
by S. Hoffmann and D. P. Fidler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Traité Traité élémentaire de sphère. In Oeuvres et correspondence inédites
de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Edited by M. G. Streckeinsen-Moultou.
Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861.
Other works frequently cited
CWV Complete Works of Voltaire. Edited by T. Besterman. Banbury,

Oxfordshire: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–1977.
OC Oeuvres complètes.
OCD Oeuvres complètes de Diderot. Edited by J. Assézat and M.
Tourneux. Paris: Garnier, 1875–1877.
xvi Abbreviations
OCV Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. Edited by Louis Moland. Paris:

Garnier, 1877–1886.
SVEC Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Edited by T.
Besterman, et al. Geneva, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
VC Voltaire’s Correspondence. Edited by T. Besterman. Geneva: Ins-
titut et Musée Voltaire, 1953–1977.
VN Voltaire’s Notebooks. Edited by T. Besterman. Geneva: Institut et
Musée Voltaire, 1952.
Introduction
D uring 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 exclu-
sively, 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 arti-
cles 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
2 Introduction
philosophes, the atheist Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789). Also, the appear-

ance 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) paro-
died 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 writ-
ers of the Enlightenment or its most eloquent and effective opponent.”10
Ernst Cassirer’s conclusion is no more helpful: “Rousseau is a true son of
the Enlightenment, even when he attacks it and triumphs over it.”11
Robert Wokler has recently written of Rousseau that “he at once belonged
to the Enlightenment and opposed it.”12 R. G. Saisselin’s entry on the
philosophes in The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment claims
that “Rousseau, though a philosophe, was anti-philosophe.”13 According
Introduction 3
to Arthur Melzer, Rousseau’s criticisms of the Enlightenment are

“intend[ed] to be less a rejection of the Enlightenment than a more self-
consistent expression of it.”14 Raymond Tallis believes that “it is arguable
that, in the person of Rousseau, Enlightenment and Counter-
Enlightenment were born twins.”15 For Frederick Artz, Rousseau was
simultaneously “the last of the great writers of the French Enlightenment”
and “the first of a new and different dispensation.”16 Maurice Cranston
declares that it is “impossible to say that he [Rousseau] was only a man of
the Enlightenment, but equally difficult to say that he was not a man of
the Enlightenment.”17 His biography of Rousseau describes him as “a man
of the Enlightenment at war with the Enlightenment,”18 a view endorsed
and systematically developed in Mark Hulliung’s The Autocritique of
Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (1994). Amazingly, the last
of these is the only book-length study devoted exclusively to Rousseau’s
relationship to the Enlightenment. As such, it is worth pausing here briefly
to consider in greater depth Hulliung’s basic finding: “that as Rousseau
evolved from philosophe to exphilosophe to antiphilosophe he never for a
moment left the Enlightenment.”19
Hulliung’s book is at least as much about the Enlightenment in gen-
eral as it is about Rousseau, although his interchangeable use of the terms
“enlightenment,” “Enlightenment,” and “the Enlightenment” does much
to obscure his main point. For example, he refers to both an “alternative
Enlightenment” (2, 40) and an “alternative enlightenment” (4). He also
uses “the Enlightenment” (35), “the French Enlightenment” (4, 9), “the
original, standard version of Enlightenment thought” (108), the phil-
osophes’ “version of enlightenment” (112), and the struggle over “the
leadership and definition of the Enlightenment” (111) without clarifying
the essential differences between all of these usages. As a consequence, it is
never entirely clear whether Rousseau’s criticisms are meant to be of
“enlightenment,” “the Enlightenment” or merely “the French Enlighten-
ment,” a fatal confusion given that this is a matter of decisive importance
to Hulliung’s entire argument. His lack of clarity on this point must be
considered a major shortcoming in an otherwise impressively learned and
insightful study conspicuous for the extent of its knowledge of the work
of both Rousseau and the philosophes.
In fact, as I shall be arguing, Rousseau was an opponent of that par-
ticular conception of enlightenment prevalent among the philosophes in
France during the second half of the eighteenth century, a conception that
has since come to be known in English as “the Enlightenment.” In his
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, for example, he writes that
“[s]uspicions, offenses, fears, coldness, reserve, hate, betrayal will hide
constantly under that uniform and false veil of politeness, under that
much vaunted urbanity which we owe to the enlightenment of our century
4 Introduction
[aux lumières de notre siècle]” (DSA, 6 [OC III, 8–9]). A bit later, he
remarks that all “that is most shameful in debauchery and corruption,
most heinous in betrayals, assassinations and poisons, most atrocious in
the combinations of all crimes, forms the fabric of the History of
Constantinople. Such is the pure source from which we received the
Enlightenment [les Lumières] of which our century boasts” (DSA, 8 [OC
III, 10–11]). The same pejorative use of “enlightenment” occurs through-
out Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755). “[N]othing is so gentle,”
he tells us, “as man in his primitive state when, placed by nature at equal
distances from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil
man [des lumières funestes de l’homme civil], and limited equally by
instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm that threatens
him, he is restrained by natural pity from harming anyone himself . . . ”
(DI, 48 [OC III, 170]). In a political fragment written some time later,
Rousseau’s hostility to “enlightenment” is made abundantly clear:
The first philosophers [philosophes] all preached virtue, and it is
lucky for them that they did, for they would have gotten them-
selves stoned to death if they had spoken otherwise. But when
peoples began to be enlightened [éclairés] and to believe them-
selves to be philosophers also, they imperceptibly accustomed
themselves to the most peculiar propositions, and there was no
paradox so monstrous that the desire to distinguish oneself did
not cause to be maintained. Even virtue and divinity were put
into question, and since one must always think differently from
the people, philosophers were not needed to cast ridicule on the
things they venerated. (PF, 72-3 [OC III, 557])
It was to a particular conception of enlightenment—“the enlightenment of
our century”—that Rousseau objected, not to enlightenment per se.
Indeed, he often used “enlightened” (éclairée), “enlightenment” (lum-
ières), and “to enlighten” (éclairer) in a positive way, as, for example, in
the preface to his second Discourse, where he remarks that Geneva stands
above other states by virtue of its “enlightenment [par ses lumières]” (DI,
8 [OC III, 117]). As we shall see, Rousseau favored an “enlightenment” of
the spirit achieved through the cultivation of virtue with the aid of con-
science, rather than an “enlightenment” of knowledge and reason.
One of the principal objectives of Hulliung’s study is to broaden our
understanding of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment so that it encom-
passes Rousseau’s “immanent critique” of it, thereby showing that the
Enlightenment was much more internally diverse, complex, dialectical,
and self-critical than has commonly been assumed. By situating
Rousseau’s criticisms of the Enlightenment within the bounds of the
Enlightenment, Hulliung hopes to establish the latter’s self-correcting
Introduction 5
nature. On this view, Rousseau was on the side of the Enlightenment even
as he voiced doubts about it that many philosophes shared. By publicly
articulating these doubts, he became “the Trojan horse in the camp of the
philosophes,” for which they never forgave him.20 Hulliung presents
Rousseau as an advocate of a “self-enlightened Enlightenment” which is
less vulnerable to the criticisms of its real enemies. On this reading,
Rousseau “added a third party to the picture” with his own revised—and
improved—version of the Enlightenment of the philosophes, which cor-
rected their deficiencies from within without going as far as openly reject-
ing their basic goals and ideals.21 Hence his description of Rousseau as at
once “a fervent advocate of Enlightenment” who was in “entire agreement
with the goals of the Enlightenment,” and the author of an “anti-
Enlightenment . . . or counter-Enlightenment” who “turned the Enlighten-
ment against itself.”
The principal difference between this account and mine is that I pres-
ent Rousseau’s critique as deliberately undermining rather than correct-
ing—and thereby strengthening—the Enlightenment. Borrowing a
distinction from Isaiah Berlin, I would say that Rousseau, like Hamann,
was an enemy rather than merely a critic of the Enlightenment.22 As such,
he emerges in the present study as a significantly more radical opponent of
the Enlightenment than he does in Hulliung’s account, where he is its
“friendly critic.” Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment was so strong,
thorough and deep that any attempt to expand the Enlightenment of the
philosophes to encompass it would stretch it to the breaking point. While
Hulliung’s emphasis on the internal diversity and complexity of
Enlightenment thought is entirely welcome, he has seriously overstated his
case in arguing that it is broad enough to include Rousseau’s critique and
that Rousseau was in “entire agreement with the goals of the
Enlightenment.”
An example of this difference can be seen in our respective treatments
of Rousseau’s views on science. Hulliung writes: “Not in the least did
Rousseau’s turn inward signify an abandonment of the Enlightenment
project of human betterment through science . . . Rousseau’s thought from
beginning to end is that of a fervent advocate of Enlightenment.”23 He also
claims that Rousseau was “a thinker who from beginning to end shared
the high estimate of the philosophes for scientific endeavour.”24 This view
of Rousseau is denied in my account, in which he is depicted as calling
precisely this fundamental aspect of the Enlightenment into question. One
of the most consistent themes in his work is the insistence that virtue
requires that the individual listen to what his heart tells him directly,
something that excessive reasoning and the acquisition of knowledge, par-
ticularly scientific knowledge, only obscures. He also associated modern
science with vanity and a destructive and unhealthy urge to dominate.
6 Introduction
The Rousseau that emerges in the pages that follow is not the one
that we are used to seeing: the idiosyncratic supporter of the
Enlightenment, the radical democrat, the champion of freedom and equal-
ity, the scourge of despots who inspired the French Revolution. This famil-
iar image of Rousseau—the dominant image—is seriously incomplete, and
therefore to some (I think significant) degree misleading. It has been
bequeathed to us by both the French Revolutionaries and their opponents,
and it has eclipsed and distorted our understanding of Rousseau’s rela-
tionship to the context in which he actually lived and wrote: the French
Enlightenment. There was widespread agreement—if not actual unanim-
ity—among both supporters and opponents of the Revolution that it con-
tinued and completed a process begun by the Enlightenment. This
presumed link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution implies that
the “revolutionary” Rousseau was a supporter of the Enlightenment too.
The Rousseau that I present here is a Counter-Enlightenment Rousseau
unequivocally committed to the view that the “republic of virtue” that he
favored requires the very opposite of what the philosophes understood by
enlightenment. It is in this sense that I understand him to have been a
“Counter-Enlightenment” thinker.
Although what follows is the most sustained case to date for seeing
Rousseau as the Enlightenment’s first really serious opponent, many of the
arguments that I make about particular aspects of his thought are not
new. After over two centuries of Rousseau commentary and interpreta-
tion, this is true of virtually everything written about him now. What orig-
inality there is in the present study is to be found primarily (although not,
I think, exclusively) in the systematic manner in which I have brought
together and developed various arguments and themes within the broad
framework of Enlightenment thought in order to make the case for
Rousseau as one of its earliest and most serious opponents.25
At the heart of Rousseau’s critique of Enlightenment civilization is his

belief that the social naïveté and simplicity of the philosophes blinded
them to the deep tensions and complexities of collective life and the pow-
erful disintegrative forces that pose a constant threat to social order.
Rousseau saw an ineliminable social problem at the heart of “enlight-
ened” civilization, and charged that it promoted a destructive atomization
that undermined the very social conditions that even the philosophes
believed were indispensable to human development. As a result of his pes-
simistic assessment of the social predicament of modern civilization,
emphasizing the precariousness and fragility of social life, Rousseau
believed that the philosophes, who sought to liberate the mind and will of
the individual from traditional moral, religious and social constraints by
subjecting them to systematic rational scrutiny, were disastrously insensi-
Introduction 7
tive to the serious problems that this raises. He maintained that, by dis-
seminating philosophy, science, and letters; attacking the common moral
life, practices, and “good opinion” of society; and subjecting religion to
systematic criticism and doubt, the French Enlightenment had undermined
the very conditions of social life itself, inflaming amour-propre, releasing
the powerful self-will of the individual from salutary moral constraints
and plunging society into a Hobbesian state of war. He argues that the
maintenance of an ordered and cohesive society can only be achieved by
means of an austere republican politics that artificially manufactures “sen-
timents of sociability” that virtually all of the philosophes complacently
assumed were natural and therefore not normally in need of such external
cultivation. Rousseau was the first in a long line of critics of the
Enlightenment who, over the last two and a half centuries, have accused it
of fostering atomism by systematically loosening the social and moral
bonds of community.26
The core of the critique of the Enlightenment developed by Rousseau
lies in his decisive modification of its rejection of social contract theory.
Virtually all of the philosophes criticized social contract theory, affirming
instead their belief in both the indispensability of society to the formation
of a fully human identity and the creation of moral agency, and the exis-
tence of natural human sociability, understood as the disposition of
human beings towards society. While Rousseau agreed with the former, he
rejected the latter. He introduced a discordant note of Hobbesian social
pessimism into the Enlightenment critique of contractualism. In his
Discourse on Inequality he argues that human beings are naturally inde-
pendent creatures with naturally separate interests, out of which a sense of
common interest and identity does not emerge spontaneously. This other-
wise benign natural self-regard (amour de soi) is transformed into a pow-
erful and aggressive form of selfishness in society (amour-propre), which
eventually leads to a state of social warfare.
Thus, while the philosophes took human sociability for granted,
Rousseau was primarily concerned to explore ways of manufacturing
social cohesion and counteracting the destructive atomizing force of
amour-propre. Negatively, this required preventing, or at least minimizing,
the development and popularization of philosophy, science and letters,
and devaluing reason and the intellect in favor of direct, instinctive
sources of moral perception such as conscience, which is man’s link with
the divine, the very source of morality itself. For Rousseau, ignorance was
not only a desirable condition for most people, but was actually necessary
for the preservation of moral, political, and social order, all of which rest
on foundations that are not primarily rational. Indeed, he believed that
the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of reason only exacerbate
the socially disintegrative power of amour-propre to which both are
8 Introduction
closely connected. Rousseau therefore set himself foursquare against the

French Enlightenment project of disseminating and popularizing knowl-
edge, particularly of the arts and sciences.
Positively, Rousseau turned to religion and patriotism as the principal
means of artificially promoting the sociability naturally lacking in human
beings. Contrary to virtually all of the philosophes, he did not believe that
human nature and reason are sufficient to sustain the fragile bonds of
society in the face of the powerful disintegrative forces constantly pulling
against them from within. Instead, he claimed that particular religious and
political institutions and beliefs are needed to promote the strengthening
of “sentiments of sociability,” in the absence of which society will become
a Hobbesian battleground. With their belief in natural human sociability,
the philosophes could confidently rely (more or less) on the self-regulating
forces of civil society to maintain social order and advance human well-
being, albeit with some occasional correction from an enlightened state.
Rousseau had no such faith in the capacity of modern commercial civiliza-
tion naturally to spin a fabric of public good from the thread of enlight-
ened self-interest.
Given his rejection of this crucial Enlightenment assumption,
Rousseau was forced to rely primarily on the state actively to manufacture
sociability. Social disorder can only be controlled by means of the artificial
promotion of order through institutions, attitudes, and habits that reshape
individuals, causing them to identify with the common interests of all
rather than their own narrowly defined, particular interests, thereby trans-
forming the war of all against all into an artificial esprit social. Principal
among these, Rousseau argues, are a strong and exclusive sense of patri-
otic identity, the intervention of a quasi-divine legislator, the integration of
religion, society, morality, and the state, and the restoration of the link
with the inner voice of conscience. All are indispensable to the process of
adapting individuals to society and together constitute Rousseau’s republi-
can, Counter-Enlightenment alternative to the enlightened “republic of let-
ters” of the philosophes.
Rousseau situated the golden age of our species immediately after its
emergence from the state of nature, in what he called “nascent society.”
Since then the faculty of perfectibility that gives human beings a unique
openness to change has led to the “decrepitude of the species” as a result
of the emergence and subsequent inflammation of amour-propre. The
eighteenth century, far from being the apogee of human history, was for
Rousseau close to its nadir, from which he felt a profound personal alien-
ation and deep moral revulsion. If it was not the worst of all possible
worlds, then that was only because he foresaw worse to come, as he pre-
dicted that things would almost certainly degenerate even further with the
advance of enlightenment and civilization, culminating in an “age of revo-
Introduction 9
lutions” that would one day engulf Europe (E, 194 [OC IV, 468]).27
Although the views of the philosophes on the history of human progress
covered a broad range, even at their least optimistic they fell well short of
Rousseau’s pessimism, which was among the most uncompromising in the
history of modern thought.
Rousseau found evidence of the depths to which his age had sunk in
the growing popularity of atheism and materialism in France after 1750.
He feared that such views—themselves symptomatic of a sickness that
infected the “enlightened” elites of Europe—would further corrode the
already fragile bonds of social life as they seeped into the popular culture
through the dissemination of ideas and values of the kind the philosophes
promoted, using, for example, the Encyclopédie. This is what lay behind
his campaign against Voltaire’s support for the theater in Geneva,
Rousseau’s beloved native city and one of the very few places left in
Europe where, he thought, some remnants of virtue could still be found. It
is also what led him to develop a critique of the growing radicalism of
French Enlightenment epistemology in the second half of the eighteenth
century, particularly as expressed in the views of philosophes such as
Helvétius (1715–1771), La Mettrie (1709–1751), Diderot, Naigeon
(1738–1810), and the Baron d’Holbach. According to Rousseau, material-
ism necessarily leads to a weakening of morality by denying the existence
of our moral instincts. Those who are deaf to what God says to the heart
of man, where conscience resides, are no longer constrained by his will,
which is the only possible brake on the naked pursuit of power and self-
interest in modern societies, pervaded as they are by amour-propre and
polarized between the rich and powerful on the one hand and the poor
and weak on the other. By “tear[ing] out from the depths of our hearts
remorse for crime and hope of virtue” (E, 312 [OC IV, 632]), materialists
and atheists have pushed the already precarious edifice of society even
closer to the brink of an unbridled war of all against all.
Chapter One
The Enlightenment Republic of Letters
The Party of Humanity
R ousseau’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, cul-
tural, 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 eigh-
teenth 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 “éclaircisse-
ment” 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
12 The Enlightenment Republic of Letters
convenient to dismiss one simplistic caricature than to deal with a com-

plex 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 defi-
nitions, 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 good-
will.”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 soci-
ety. This new French identity was overlaid upon the fundamental princi-
ples 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 eighteenth-
century “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 any-
body. 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 slaves to one under
The Enlightenment Republic of Letters 13
which they are. This way of thinking is for many people an

unpardonable crime.9
In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
(1795), Condorcet (1743–1794) characterizes the philosophes as, above
all, popularizers concerned “less with the discovery or development of
truth than with its propagation . . . [who] made it their life-work to
destroy popular errors rather than to drive back the frontiers of human
knowledge.”10
All of those who supported the general goals of the Enlightenment in
France were loosely committed to the emancipatory project of liberating
the mind and power of human beings from the fetters of prejudice, intol-
erance, and tradition, to exorcise the “idols of the human mind,” as
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)—one of the heroes of the philosophes—
phrased it. The philosophes wished to reorganize the world so that the
individual would be capable of free and independent action, and to sub-
ject to human control those features of the social and natural environ-
ments that had formerly determined human existence. In its most general
sense, the philosophes understood enlightenment as a process in which
ignorance and superstition are replaced by truth and knowledge.11 “That
is why everything must be examined, everything must be investigated,
without hesitation or exception,” Diderot explains in the Encyclopédie.
“[P]uerile restrictions must be stamped out; any barriers not set up by
reason must be overthrown. The arts and sciences must be granted the
freedom which is so vital to them.”12 The certain result of this process,
they believed, would be the promotion of human well-being, although few
believed that the road leading to this end was either straight or easy. It
could only be achieved by first discovering the truth and then prudently
disseminating it as widely as the maintenance of social, moral, and politi-
cal order would allow, something requiring a constant struggle against
powerful institutions, vested interests, and entrenched prejudices. Such
knowledge can only be acquired and disseminated where “the yoke of
authority and precedent comes to be shaken and to yield to the laws of
reason” and facts are accepted on the basis of scientifically verifiable sen-
sory evidence rather than tradition or the blind authority of others.13
Universal reason was to replace arbitrary and irrational beliefs and tradi-
tional institutions, and those aspects of moral, social, and political life
that had previously been accepted unquestioningly would now be sub-
jected to chronic revision in the light of their practical usefulness and new
information made available through scientific investigation and discovery.
Orthodox religious dogmas and abstruse metaphysical systems were
regarded as nothing more than impediments to our direct experience of
the world and the exercise and development of our mental faculties and
powers. La Mettrie called on his readers to “[b]reak the chains of your
prejudices and take up the torch of experience.”14 This general outlook is
summarized very well by the Baron d’Holbach:
How could the human mind, haunted by frightening phantoms
and guided by men interested in perpetuating its ignorance, make
any progress? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive
stupidity; he has been told only about invisible powers on which
his fate was supposed to depend. Completely occupied with his
fears and his senseless reveries, he has always been at the mercy
of his priests who reserve for themselves the right to think for
him and to regulate his conduct. . . . He [man] believed himself
forced to groan under the yoke of his gods, whom he knew only
through the fabulous accounts of their ministers. . . . The human
mind, confused by theological opinions, failed to recognize itself,
doubted its own powers, mistrusted experience, feared the truth,
scorned its reason, and passed it by in order blindly to follow
authority. Man was a simple machine in the hands of his tyrants
and his priests, who alone had the right to regulate his move-
ments. . . . Science, reason and liberty alone can cure them and
make them happier. . . . Let minds be filled in good time with
true ideas, let men’s reason be nurtured, let justice govern them,
and there will be no need to oppose the helpless barrier of fear of
the gods to the passions. . . . Worn out by an inconceivable the-
ology, ridiculous fables, impenetrable mysteries, puerile cere-
monies, let the human mind concern itself with natural things,
intelligible subjects, tangible truths and useful knowledge. Once
the vain fancies that obsess peoples are dissipated, soon rational
opinions will come of themselves to win those human minds
which have always been thought to be destined for error.15
The project that the French philosophes shared for promoting
enlightenment—as they understood it—had negative and positive dimen-
sions. Negatively, as we have already seen, it required tearing down the
many obstacles to a clear and accurate perception of reality, such as super-
stition, dogma, and prejudice. The greatest of these obstacles, they
thought, was the Church, the Enlightenment’s principal target in France.
Organized religion was regarded as the chief culprit in the historical strug-
gle between lightness and darkness, freedom and slavery, truth and igno-
rance, leading Voltaire famously to call for it to be crushed in the name of
humanity. While the Pope himself had little more direct influence in
France than he did in many Protestant countries, the eighteenth-century
Gallican Church continued to enjoy much of the power and many of the
privileges that it had traditionally held: the Crown was still officially
based on a divine right theory of monarchy; the Church continued to col-
lect tithes and enjoyed special exemption from taxes, despite its enormous
wealth; it exercised responsibility for much civil policy (in education, for
example); and the eighteenth-century French state enforced, in a very spo-
radic and inconsistent manner, outward religious conformity through an
imperfect regime of censorship, the regulation of public worship and crim-
inal prosecution. This was particularly true following the assassination
attempt on Louis XV in 1757, which fueled the establishment’s mounting
fear and intolerance of radical ideas. A decree was enacted in France that
year sanctioning the death penalty for authors and publishers convicted of
attacking religion or the state. In 1759 the Encyclopédie was suppressed
as the source from which Helvétius had taken his atheistic ideas, and the
Pope placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books, warning Catholics who
owned it that they faced excommunication. Voltaire, Diderot, and several
other philosophes had been incarcerated for their irreverent opinions, and
Helvétius and La Mettrie narrowly escaped the same fate by fleeing into
exile, as did abbé Raynal (1713–1796), who ended up in far-off St.
Petersburg. As a result of this continuing ecclesiastical wealth, power, and
persecution, the Enlightenment took on a markedly anticlerical cast in
France not generally found among the Aufklärer in Germany or their kin-
dred spirits in Britain.
One way in which the philosophes sought to loosen the Church’s grip
on French society was by means of the gradual dissemination of new
knowledge and ideas. Yet there was little agreement on how quickly this
gradual rationalization and secularization of life could or should be
achieved. Indeed, many had reservations about the possible consequences
of hastily implemented reforms. Notwithstanding his bitter attacks on the
Church and his enthusiastic support for science and for the Encyclopédie,
Voltaire was typical of most philosophes in his eagerness to avoid revolu-
tionary change and in his concerns about the potentially disruptive, if not
disastrous, consequences of a precipitous spread of “enlightened” ideas
among le canaille, as he often referred derisively to the ignorant majority.16
The moderation, even conservatism, of most philosophes can be seen
in the popularity of deism. Although the French Enlightenment’s humanis-
tic objectives required the retreat of religion, the majority of philosophes
stopped short of atheism. The deist conception of God as a remote and
benevolent primum mobile who did not normally intervene in the human
world was popular with the philosophes, since it avoided some of the dis-
quieting implications of atheism while leaving them free to direct their crit-
ical efforts against established religious institutions and beliefs that they
felt inhibited their broad emancipatory goals. Also, they took some com-
fort from the idea of a benign—if remote—providential force underwriting
natural and social laws and overseeing their orderly and harmonious
operation. Hence Voltaire’s remark that “if God did not exist, it would
be necessary to invent him.”17 Some philosophes sought to undermine
clerical power in France by means of the complete separation of church
and state. “The distance between throne and altar can never be too
great,” Diderot wrote. “In all times and places experience has shown the
danger of the altar being next to the throne.”18 Naigeon, Condorcet, and
Helvétius agreed. Others, such as Voltaire and d’Alembert, preferred an
Erastian subordination of the church to a secular state, in addition to
wholesale liberalization of laws governing religion. All favored greater
religious tolerance.
The heart of the positive dimension of the Enlightenment project in
France lay in building up a systematically organized store of objective,
empirically verifiable knowledge that would facilitate the advancement of
human understanding. This is what lay behind the Encyclopédie, which
sought to bring together as much of the available knowledge of the arts
and sciences then known in as clear and accessible a manner as possible
and, in the process, impose order on a huge and rapidly expanding mass
of disorganized information.
The eighteenth-century French understanding of enlightenment is
epitomized by the Encyclopédie, “the central document of the Enlighten-
ment” in France.19 Most of the philosophes contributed to, and all sup-
ported, this project. D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse (1751) to
it—which was a “manifesto of the French Enlightenment” in its own
right20—placed it at the heart of the conceptual revolution that Newton,
Locke, Bacon, and Descartes had instigated in the seventeenth century.
According to d’Alembert, their heirs in the eighteenth century—“the cen-
tury of philosophy par excellence”—were the philosophes, who undertook
to popularize the ideas of the seventeenth-century philosophical and scien-
tific revolutions in works such as the Encyclopédie. By the time Diderot’s
involvement with this massive work of enlightenment ended, seventeen
large volumes of very dense text had been published along with five vol-
umes of plates. Several supplementary volumes followed, capped by a
two-volume index in 1780. Some four thousand copies of the Paris edition
of the Encyclopédie were issued, although it has been estimated that, by
the outbreak of the French Revolution, over ten thousand sets of various
editions were extant across Europe in one form or another. It went
through seven editions before the end of the century, and included contri-
butions from virtually all of the major and many of the minor luminaries
of the Enlightenment in France. As John Lough writes, “for its editors, the
Encyclopédie was not only a new reference work on a massive scale; at
the same time, both for them and for like-minded contributors, it was also
a means of propounding the ideas of the Enlightenment.”21
The “great Bacon” had himself urged the creation of an ambitious

dictionary that would bring together in an orderly fashion all of the prac-
tical knowledge that was known. D’Alembert, writing in the Preliminary
Discourse, expressed the hope that the Enlightenment would become a
sanctuary “where the knowledge of man is protected from time and from
revolutions . . . let us do for centuries to come what we regret that past
centuries did not do for ours. We daresay that if the ancients had carried
through that encyclopedia, as they carried through so many other great
things, and if the manuscript alone had escaped from the famous Library
of Alexandria, it would have been capable of consoling us for the loss of
the others.”22 This passing reference to the destruction of the Alexandrian
Library is an obvious riposte to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and
the Arts in which he had remarked that, had the library contained works
opposed to the Gospels and had Pope Gregory been in the position of the
Caliph Omar, “the Library would still have been burned, and it would be
perhaps the finest deed in the life of that Illustrious Pontiff” (DSA, 20
[OC III, 28]).23 D’Alembert accurately perceived Rousseau’s essay as a
kind of preliminary discourse to an anti-Encyclopédie, and saw his own
essay as its mirror image.
The philosophes believed that the best means of acquiring the useful
knowledge that the Encyclopédie had assembled was through natural sci-
ence.24 It was this, above all, that distinguished their particular conception of
enlightenment, which had an almost boundless confidence in science as a
means for advancing human understanding and thereby happiness. No
other conception of enlightenment accords to science and its dissemination
the same exalted role. According to Condorcet, experience “also proves that
in all countries where the physical sciences have been cultivated, barbarism
in the moral sciences have been more or less dissipated and at least error
and prejudice have disappeared.”25 Bacon’s scientific method was widely
believed by the philosophes to be the most reliable and effective means of
ensuring the accurate perception of reality, since it explained nature as gov-
erned by a system of objective laws intelligible to reason via the senses,
knowledge of which enables individuals to extend their powers over a very
wide domain. The philosophes wished above all to extend the scientific and
philosophical revolution inaugurated by Galileo (1564–1642), Newton
(1642–1727), and Bacon to society and politics. D’Alembert alludes to the
Enlightenment’s relationship to the seventeenth-century scientific revolu-
tion when he writes in the Preliminary Discourse that “the efforts of illus-
trious persons . . . are almost inevitably of no profit to their own centuries.
It is reserved for following ages to receive the fruit of their enlighten-
ment.”26 The inductive method of experimentation and disinterested empir-
ical observation developed by Bacon, “the father of experimental
philosophy,”27 was taken as the paradigm for all inquiry in the human and
natural sciences. The application of this methodology beyond the natural

sciences became a central element of the Enlightenment project of maxi-
mizing human control of the world, the structure of which was held to be
inherently rational and understandable.
As the architect of this scientific method, Bacon came to occupy a
privileged place in the Enlightenment pantheon in France.28 For
d’Alembert, he was “the greatest, the most universal, and the most elo-
quent of philosophers.”29 Voltaire described Bacon’s Novum Organum
(1620) as “the scaffolding by means of which modern scientific thought
has been built.”30 Diderot, the leading exponent of Bacon’s thought among
the philosophes, openly acknowledged the debt that the Encyclopédie
owed to “that extraordinary genius.” Its reliance on Bacon’s famous “tree
of knowledge” even led to accusations of plagiarism against its editors by
their orthodox enemy the Jesuit priest Guillaume-François Berthier
(1704–1784).31 This tree provided encyclopédistes with a model for the
systematic organization of knowledge by showing, as Robert Darnton has
written, “that knowledge was ordered, not random; that the ordering
principle was reason working sense data; not revelation speaking through
tradition; and that rational standards, when applied to contemporary
institutions, would expose absurdity and iniquity everywhere.”32
Underlying the Enlightenment attitude towards the acquisition of
knowledge was the sensationalist epistemology of “the sagacious Locke,”
according to which the mind is a tabula rasa on which sense impressions are
imprinted. His enormously influential Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690), in which this view was spelled out most fully, was
translated into French in 1700, becoming a core text of the Enlightenment
in France. If all our ideas are derived from sense-experience, it was thought,
then widespread agreement on matters of truth is possible provided the
exercise of these faculties is not impeded or distorted by social, political, and
religious beliefs and institutions. D’Alembert put it succinctly when he wrote
that “[a]ll our knowledge is ultimately reduced to sensations that are
approximately the same in all men.”33 A clear, rational mind and the unim-
peded ability to experience the world directly via one’s own senses were
regarded by the philosophes as the only prerequisites to the acquisition of
knowledge, a necessary condition of human happiness. The immediate
experience of the natural world via the senses was intended to replace tradi-
tional authority and mystical religious beliefs as the ultimate source of
knowledge. Each individual, the philosophes believed, is endowed with the
same basic faculties, which d’Alembert in his Preliminary Discourse labeled
reason, imagination, and memory, corresponding to three forms of knowl-
edge: philosophy, fine arts, and history. Of these faculties, he gave pride of
place to the first, since this is “in conformity with the natural progress of the
operations of the mind.”34 Although he concedes that, once imagination has
“made its first steps,” it moves “much faster than reason,” which frequently
exhausts itself in “fruitless investigations,”35 d’Alembert depicts reason as
the glory of the human mind, and describes philosophy as “the dominant
taste of our century.”36
The Virtue of Selfish Sociability
Social contract theory was already in decline by the time Rousseau’s

Discourse on Inequality was published in the mid-1750s. As J. W. Gough
notes, the “late eighteenth century was a period when men were losing
their belief in the older, naive contractarianism, which accepted the con-
tract as literally true, yet they had not succeeded in finding a new theory
of government to take its place.”37 During the period between the middle
of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, new
ideas about the relationship between the individual and society emerged as
part of the growing disenchantment with contractualism and its correla-
tive conception of human nature as entirely given presocially.
In the eighteenth century, social contract theory was closely associ-
ated with the writings of Hobbes (1588–1672) and Locke (1632–1704) in
particular, who had depicted society as the deliberate creation of individu-
als motivated by a self-interested desire to avoid the many hazards and
inconveniences of the natural, presocial world. The arguments of Hobbes
stimulated debate throughout Europe about the naturalness of society and
it was in this context that the language of sociability first gained currency
in France during the early Enlightenment.38 The social atomism presup-
posed by the contractualist view assumes that individuals are related to
each other only instrumentally and contingently. Society, on this view, is
not regarded as constitutive of human identity; a person in the state of
nature is presumed to have a pre-formed identity, interests, needs and
desires, a free will, and a certain capacity for instrumental calculation.
Society is not seen as either the necessary medium through which human
identity is realized and developed or as essential to human agency.39
With almost no exceptions, the philosophes either ignored or dis-
missed the contractualist view. Most shared the opinion expressed by
Montesquieu (1689–1755) in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) that human
beings were simply “[m]ade for living in society.”40 Condorcet contrasted
contract theory, which he viewed as an extension of the rationalistic, a
priori systems of the seventeenth century, with the inductive empiricism of
his own century. Hobbes was imitating Plato, he wrote, “in deducing from
certain general principles a plan for a whole system of social order and in
constructing a model to which all practice was suppose to conform.”41 The
influence of David Hume (1711–1776) on the trend away from concepts
such as the state of nature, the social contract, and natural law was con-
siderable at this time. His 1748 essay “Of the Original Contract”42 pres-
ents a powerful skeptical case against what he elsewhere refers to as the
“fallacious and sophistical” theory of the social contract.43
Related to this eighteenth-century decline in contract theory was the
growing appeal of the idea of human beings as naturally sociable, a view
that enjoyed almost unanimous support among the philosophes. As
Robert Mauzi writes, “never has man been conceived of less as a solitary
being” than during the French Enlightenment.44 In his Persian Letters
(1721) Montesquieu relates this belief to a rejection of the contractarian
idea of a presocial state of nature. “Every discussion of international law
that I have ever heard,” he writes, “has begun with a careful investigation
into the origin of society, which seems to me absurd . . . they [human
beings] are all associated with each other at birth.”45 Diderot also believed
in the natural sociability of human beings. In his Encyclopédie article
‘Société’ (1765) he quotes Seneca’s De Beneficiis in support of the view
that, in compensation for our natural weakness, we have been endowed
with “two gifts to make him superior to animals, I mean reason and socia-
bility [rationem et societatem].” He asserts that sociability is “the founda-
tion of collective order,” the absence of which, as Seneca had written,
“will destroy the union of the human species on which the conservation
and all the happiness of life depend.”46 Although he eventually gave up his
belief in God, Diderot never wavered from his conviction that men “were
never isolated. They carried within them the seed of sociability which
tended continually to be developed . . . all these facts and arguments seem
to prove that man has a natural tendency to sociability.”47 Louis de
Jaucourt (1704–1780) wrote the Encyclopédie article on ‘Sociabilité’
(1765), which he defined as a principle of natural law “engraved in the
human heart.” “Remove sociability,” he warned, “and you will destroy
the union of the human species on which the conservation and all the hap-
piness of life depend.” Voltaire concurred. “It seems clear to me,” he
wrote to Frederick the Great, “that God designed us to live in society—
just as he has given bees the instincts and the power to make honey.”48
Baron d’Holbach writes in La Morale universelle (1776) that “what is
called the state of nature would be a state contrary to nature.”49 He
describes man in this work as “a sensible, intelligent, reasonable, sociable
being.”50
The French term “sociabilité,” referring to the natural tendency of
humans to embrace society without the need for external prompting or
intervention, was coined in the eighteenth century by Nicolas Delamare
(1639–1723) in his Traité de police (1705), and the Encyclopédie was the
first dictionary to register it in French.51 Both quoted from the same
ancient source as Diderot had on the subject, Seneca’s De Beneficii.
Delamare was also building on the work of modern natural law writers
such as Hugo Grotius (1582–1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694)
on sociability, both of whom had quoted from the same section of
Seneca’s De Beneficii as had Diderot and the Encyclopédie. Grotius held—
against Hobbes—that human beings are unique among animals in possess-
ing a natural “desire for society.” In the 1646 edition of his On the Law
of War and Peace (first published 1625) he writes:
But among the traits characteristic of man is an impelling desire
for society [appetitus societatis], that is, for social life—not of
any and every sort, but peaceful, and organized according to the
measure of his intelligence, with those who are of his own kind;
this social trend the Stoics called “sociableness.” Stated as a uni-
versal truth, therefore, the assertion that every animal is impelled
by nature to seek only its own good cannot be conceded.52
Pufendorf’s position lies somewhere between Grotius and Hobbes.
On the one hand, he agreed with the latter that human beings are natu-
rally selfish. Man, he writes in Elements of Universal Jurisprudence
(1660), is a being who “loves himself to the highest degree” and seeks “to
preserve himself in every manner.”53 On the other hand, he agreed with
Grotius that the individual enjoys “living in the society of those similar to
himself. . . . Nothing is more miserable for man than perpetual solitude.”54
However, he asserted that our sociability is artificial rather than natural;
there is no innate social instinct. Pufendorf thought that these two appar-
ently contradictory tendencies “should by no means be opposed to one
another,”55 since society is the means by which individuals can best pro-
mote their selfish ends; it arises not from a natural instinct to associate but
from our natural selfishness and the realization that society is the best
means by which to advance our interests. “[I]n order to be safe,” he
asserts in On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law
(1673), “it is necessary for him [man] to be sociable; that is, to join forces
with men like himself and so conduct himself towards them that they are
not given even a plausible excuse for harming him, but rather become
willing to preserve and promote his advantages [commoda].”56
The ideas of Grotius and Pufendorf were transmitted to eighteenth-
century France largely through the work of Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1745),
who translated the latter’s On the Law of Nature and Nations (1672) into
French in 1706.57 It is likely that Barbeyrac’s edition of Pufendorf’s book
“did more than any other text to inject the language of sociability into
eighteenth century French philosophy.”58 His Genevan disciple Jean-
Jacques Burlamaqui (1694–1778) also helped to popularize Pufendorf’s
ideas, which reached Rousseau at a tender age.59 In the process of dissemi-
nating Pufendorf’s thought, his translators modified it in favor of a more
optimistic conception of human nature, stressing our natural sociability

and benevolence toward others.60
This conception of sociability—“the mutual sociability of selfish
agents,” as Istvan Hont calls it—was an important precursor of eigh-
teenth-century theories of “doux commerce.”61 Commerce was under-
stood very broadly in Enlightenment France, referring not merely to
economic activity but to a wide range of voluntary forms of mutual
exchange and reciprocity. The Enlightenment proponents of “doux com-
merce” argued that trade softened and refined manners and luxury pro-
moted gentleness (douceur) and civility. An advanced commercial
civilization based largely on the trade in luxury goods was thought to be a
beneficial (or, at worst, harmless) expression of man’s selfish sociability.62
As Daniel Gordon writes in his study of Enlightenment sociability, “the
‘polite’ or ‘polished’ individual (l’homme poli, l’homme policé) was the
individual who did not need to be coerced in order to be content, because
he knew how to find happiness in reciprocity. Sociability thus meant self-
police.”63
A deeply rooted stigma against both commerce and luxury had long
existed in the West.64 However, in the early eighteenth century some writ-
ers began to challenge this prejudice. Bernard Mandeville’s (1670–1733)
famous The Fable of the Bees (1714), which was translated into French
in 1740, led the way by developing the idea that “publick benefits” arise
unintentionally from the free play of “private vices” such as selfishness,
as Pufendorf had earlier claimed. Jean-François Melon’s (1675–1738)
Essai politique sur le commerce (1734) made a similar argument in oppo-
sition to Christian moralists who proscribed commerce. It was “extraor-
dinary sumptuousness,” he thought, that benefitted rich and poor alike
and provided the state with the wealth it needed to be strong and secure.
Voltaire weighed in on the side of Melon and “doux commerce” with his
poem Le Mondain (1736), a verse defense of luxury, and in his essay
Observations sur M. M. Jean Law, Melon et Dutot, sur le commerce, le
luxe, les monnaies, les impots (1738), which defends the advantages of
modern commercial civilization. It was commerce, after all, that helped
to make the English free.65 The new civilization of modernity, of which
England was the prototype, would be a sumptuous commercial civiliza-
tion based on trade and luxury, not self-sufficiency and asceticism. Its
ancient antecedent is liberal Athens rather than austere Sparta; it is “[n]ot
heroism but hedonism [that] is the motor of history.”66 In an article on
“Luxe” in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Voltaire wonders aloud
what Sparta ever did for Greece, particularly compared to its rival
Athens:
Did it ever have Demosthenes, Sophocles, Apelles, and Phidias?

The luxury of Athens produced great men in every sphere; Sparta
had a few captains, and even those in smaller number than the
other cities. Fine! Let a small republic like Lacaedemon preserve
its poverty. We reach death by lacking everything as well as by
enjoying whatever can make life agreeable.67
This view of the benevolent effects of luxury, which Diderot credited with
contributing to “the happiness of humankind,”68 was widespread among
the philosophes. In general, they tended to take the side of the rising new
class of bankers, parvenus, and self-made men who supported commercial
civilization against les grands, the traditional landed nobility and clerical
establishment that was more skeptical, and in many cases openly hostile,
to meritocracy and commerce.69
David Hume’s influential essay “Of Commerce,” arguing for “the
pleasures of luxury and the profits of commerce,” was translated into
French in 1752. In it, he writes that societies that “abound with industry
and that are employed upon delicacies and luxuries” and are animated by
“a spirit of avarice and industry, art and luxury” are much more likely to
be rich, powerful, and happy than more austere or unproductive societies
such as ancient Sparta, which Hume regarded as a completely inappropri-
ate model for modern civilization.70 In his essay “Of Refinement in the
Arts,” he argues that “the ages of refinement are both the happiest and
the most virtuous” and that the “more these refined arts advance, the
more sociable men become.”71 He expanded on this theme in his History
of England (1762), which Adam Smith admired, depicting commerce and
trade as modern substitutes for more antiquated notions of virtue. “When
the tempers of men are softened as well as their knowledge improved, this
humanity appears still more conspicuous, and is the chief characteristic
which distinguishes a civilized age from times of barbarity and ignorance.
Factions are then less inveterate, revolutions less tragical, authority less
severe, and seditions less frequent.”72
Most philosophes in France shared this benign conception of self-
interested commercial civilization, in which individuals naturally and
peacefully interact to their mutual benefit in civil society, below the level
of the state. The selfish pursuit of one’s own interests was not thought to
be socially destructive; indeed, it was actually seen as a form of sociability.
As Pufendorf had put it: “although someone primarily has his own advan-
tage before his eyes when he joins himself to some particular society . . .
this does not prevent him from being bound to strive after his own advan-
tage in such a way that the advantage of society is not hurt or injury
inflicted on its individual members, or, now and then, to care for the good
of society by considering his own advantage as less important.”73
For the philosophes, polite sociability was the “hallmark of civiliza-
tion” itself.74 Most proudly believed that it was actually a distinguishing
feature of French social life, a view that many thought was widely shared
outside of France.75 “Most of our writers brag about our nation’s spirit of
society, and indeed, foreigners see us as the most sociable in Europe,”
wrote Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814).76 It was also thought that
this civilized sociability was facilitated by the many forms of voluntary
association and social “commerce” that abounded in eighteenth-century
France, such as clubs, theaters, concerts, cafés, learned academies,
masonic lodges, and private educational and literary societies known as
lycées or musées. While the French state and church were the more or less
exclusive domain of the king and the aristocratic grandees and senior cler-
ics who surrounded him, the philosophes dominated in the realm of civil
society, a sphere that is, according to Diderot, “a divinity on earth” which
God honors “by his probity, by a scrupulous attention to his duties, and
by the sincere desire not to be a useless or burdensome member of it. He is
‘kneaded,’ as it were, with the leavening of order and rule; he is filled with
ideas of the good of civil society, of which he knows the principles better
than other men.”77
Of the many voluntary associations that made up eighteenth-century
French civil society, the preferred habitat of the Enlightenment société de
penser were the salons, “the civil working spaces of the project of
Enlightenment.”78 The most prominent of these in Paris after 1750 was
that of the Baron d’Holbach, whose biweekly dinners at his home earned
him the title of “maître d’Hotel de la Philosophie.” Rousseau derisively
dubbed the salonnières who made up these weekly gatherings, in which he
participated for a time, the “côterie holbachique,” most of whom were
contributors to the Encyclopédie, which was “largely a Parisian creation,
unmistakably shaped by the lively intellectual life of that city in the mid-
eighteenth century.”79 The salon of Mlle de Lespinasse (1732–1776)—the
“muse of the Encyclopédie”—was also popular with leading philosophes,
regularly attracting d’Alembert, Chastellux, Marmontel, Turgot, Morellet,
Saint-Lambert, La Harpe, Suard, abbé Arnaud, Malesherbes, Diderot,
Grimm, Condillac, Duclos, Raynal, Damilaville, and Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre. This salon served as the “unofficial campaign headquarters for the
execution of d’Alembert’s reforming strategy,”80 whereas d’Holbach’s
salon in the rue Royale tended to be popular with more radical
philosophes.
The salons were enclaves of “amiable and easy” sociability—la bonne
compagnie—that provided an alternative to the political sphere from
which the philosophes were, with very few exceptions, excluded in ancien
régime France. As Dena Goodman writes in her study of the eighteenth-
century French salon, it was, at its best, a “serious discursive space in
which others could develop and exchange ideas, share and criticize one
another’s work, collaborate on the collective projects characteristic of the
Enlightenment.”81 The salon was a place where the art of polite conversa-
tion was both cultivated and displayed, since it is the “sweetest bond” of
social life, as Claude Buffier (1661–1737) put it in his Traité de la société
civile (1726).82 Women, who were barred entirely from the world of public
affairs, often enjoyed a powerful, and in some cases dominant, role in the
private world of the salon, in part because many viewed them as more
polished and sociable than men.
Rousseau came to detest the salon culture of Paris, not least for its
“feminine” quality. “[E]very woman at Paris,” he complains in his Letter
to d’Alembert, “gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish
than she” (LA, 101 [OC V, 93]). In his attack on the decadence of
Parisian life in his novel Julie, Or the New Heloise (1761), he singles out
the dominance of les dames, the “frivolous, devious, wily, foolish, fickle”
women of the French capital, and the hegemony of “feminine” values, as
among the principal causes of the city’s moral decay, in contrast to the
rough Spartan manliness of Geneva. “French gallantry,” he laments, “has
given women a universal power that requires no tender sentiment to per-
dure. Everything depends on them; nothing is done that is not by or for
them; Olympus and Parnassus, glory and fortune are equally under their
power . . . they decide sovereignly about the highest knowledge, as well as
the most agreeable. Poetry, Literature, history, philosophy, even politics,
one can notice right away by the style of all books that they are written to
amuse pretty women” (JNH, 226 [OC II, 276]). For Rousseau the salons
of Paris were nothing more than “voluntary prisons” and breeding
grounds for amour-propre and inauthenticity, like the modern theater,
which the Spartans had wisely banned. He proposed alternative forms of
sociability, such as the cercles of Geneva, which have “something simple
and innocent which suits republican morals,” unlike the sophisticated arti-
ficiality of the Parisian salons (LA, 100 [OC V, 91]). Rather than cultivat-
ing the mind and polite manners or engaging in witty banter and clever
debates about abstruse and contentious matters like the urban salonnières,
the simple citizens of Rousseau’s provincial cercles restricted themselves to
modest pleasures such as gambling, chatting, drinking, and smoking,
which they pursued in the open air and in the public gaze. Unlike the
enclosed and shadowy world of the salonnière, “hiding his conduct from
the public eye,” the transparency of Geneva meant that “individuals,
always in the public eye, are born censors of one another and where the
police can easily watch everyone” (LA, 58-59 [OC V, 54]). Rousseau was
the Diogenes of his age, representing the “ideal of rude dignity” against
the “ideal of polite sociability” favored by the philosophes.83
Virtually all of the philosophes not only took human sociability for
granted, but also viewed social order as a reflection of the spontaneous
order of nature. There was a broad consensus, following the revered
Newton, that nature is an orderly, self-regulating system governed by uni-
form laws. There was more than a hint of providentialism in this view,
albeit of a remote kind compatible with the deism widely favored among
the philosophes. The Newtonian Voltaire linked the harmony of nature
directly to his deist conception of God as “the eternal machine-maker,” a
view very widely held among the philosophes. For Condorcet, the flux
and disorder that is apparent in nature and in human society obscures a
deeper regularity. “Everything goes to prove that the whole of nature is
subject to regular laws; every apparent disorder conceals from our eyes an
order that we have been unable to perceive. This order can only be known
by the observation of facts, the mass or succession of which are necessary
to make it perceptible to our feeble sight.”84 Since the philosophes also
believed society to be natural, it too was held to reflect this harmony.
Thus, by allowing society freely to operate in accordance with the laws of
nature, the harmony of the natural order would be reflected in the social,
economic and political life of human beings. There is, on this view, a
spontaneous order in both the natural and human worlds. Positive laws,
institutions, and beliefs are therefore unnecessary to produce the general
harmony of nature in society, although steps are sometimes required to
eradicate or regulate forces that disrupt this natural harmony, such as reli-
gious conflict. This French Enlightenment conception of the spontaneous
order of nature and society is consistent with its rejection of contract
theory, at least in its more pessimistic Hobbesian form, according to
which order is the intentional product of human will.
After almost two decades of relatively peaceful coexistence, the vari-
ous factions within the “society” that made up the philosophes became
increasingly polarized in the 1770s and 1780s between those who wished
to see it extended and radicalized, and those who wished to contain it.85
The radicals took empiricism to a materialist, utilitarian extreme, denying
the very existence of God and propounding a view of man as a soulless
machine. They pressed for a rejection of the deistic compromise of sepa-
rating God from man and the material world in favor of a monistic view
of man as “a being purely physical,”86 as Baron d’Holbach thought, and
for an outright rejection of the belief in God. Such extreme views deep-
ened the rift between the “moderate” and “radical” elements within the
society of the philosophes, which widened considerably with the publica-
tion in 1770 of Holbach’s Système de la nature, the “atheists’ Bible.”87
Diderot increasingly gravitated toward the Baron’s circle, while his

former coeditor on the Encyclopédie inclined in the opposite direction.
D’Alembert denounced Holbach’s work as a “detestable stupidity” and
collaborated more and more with deists such as Voltaire, who condemned
the Système for playing directly into the hands of their orthodox enemies,
who branded all philosophes as atheists and materialists. Voltaire com-
plained to Grimm about “[t]his damned Système de la nature [which] has
done irreparable harm”88 and told d’Alembert that it “has made all the
philosophes execrable in the eyes of the King and the whole court. . . . The
publisher of this fatal work has destroyed philosophy forever in the minds
of all the magistrates and all the heads of families who sense how danger-
ous atheism can be for society.”89
Notwithstanding these deepening divisions within the ranks of the
philosophes, Rousseau found himself increasingly at odds with both fac-
tions. Indeed, many of his most bitter clashes were with moderates such as
Voltaire, with whom he fought an increasingly acrimonious public war for
over a decade. The differences between radical and moderate philosophes
in the second half of the eighteenth century were differences within the
Enlightenment, whereas their differences with Rousseau were differences
between the Enlightenment and someone who came to reject its funda-
mental assumptions and goals.
Chapter Two
Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God
The Many Faces of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Introduction
I t is not now generally disputed that Rousseau gradually became

estranged from the enlightened world of mid-century Paris. This is well
documented and widely accepted. He became progressively more uncom-
fortable with the sophisticated society with which he had become so
familiar in the French capital over the previous decade, and was genuinely
appalled by the drift toward atheism and materialism increasingly evident
among many leading philosophes during the second half of the century,
particularly in the “côterie holbachique” that he knew so well. Rousseau
eventually initiated a personal reform that commenced with a return to
Geneva and its national church, shortly after which he retreated to a cot-
tage outside Paris, hoping to escape from what he saw as its artifice and
venality. It was here that he produced his greatest works. Soon he fell out
with his close friend and confidant Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie,
who resented Rousseau’s abandonment of the philosophes in pursuit of
his own, independent path to “truth.” “Only the bad man lives alone,” he
wrote in his play Fils naturel (1757), alluding to Rousseau.1 He also quar-
reled with Grimm and wrote a powerful attack on d’Alembert’s proposal
for the establishment of a theater in Geneva, which amazed and repelled
many philosophes. Voltaire in particular became Rousseau’s implacable
enemy from around this time. Eventually, he even alienated “le bon
Hume,” universally loved and respected by the philosophes.2
What is unclear, however, is the depth of Rousseau’s rejection of the
world of mid-eighteenth century Paris; whether it expressed a clash of tem-
perament and background only, with little relevance to the views actually
29
30 Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God
presented in his works, or indicated a more profound alienation, a funda-

mental turning against the whole spirit of the Enlightenment itself. For
increasing numbers of philosophes, Rousseau’s actions and writings from
about the middle of the 1750s were interpreted as evidence of an unsound
mind and an unstable, even pathological, personality. This convenient dis-
missal made the problem of accounting for his defection from their ranks—
the first major such defection the philosophes faced—easier to accept. It
became a commonplace in the “enlightened” circles that Rousseau had
once frequented in Paris that he had, quite simply, gone off his head. While
there is some truth to this view, it is far from the whole truth. It overlooks
the many principled reasons that Rousseau had for repudiating the enlight-
ened world of the philosophes, which he presented with sufficient rhetori-
cal and argumentative force in a steady stream of books and essays to
provoke the encyclopédistes to wage a bitter war against him for over a
decade. To Rousseau’s detractors past and present, the many defects of his
personality have proved an irresistibly easy and convenient means of neu-
tralizing his influence and arguments.3
This chapter provides some personal background to the clash of ideas
between Rousseau and the philosophes that are in the foreground of the
rest of my study. I limit myself here to sketching the broad contours of his
relationship to the philosophes and to the French Revolutionaries. What I
have to say is highly selective as a consequence, with no pretense to provid-
ing a complete, detailed picture of Rousseau’s life in general.4 It is intended
only to give the reader a general idea of how his personal relations with the
philosophes evolved and to highlight some important contextual factors
that bear on it. I also offer an account of the posthumous appropriation of
his name and reputation by the French Revolutionaries, in order to show
how the idea of Rousseau as a leading member of the family of the
philosophes became entrenched in the minds of later generations, and how
his relationship to the Revolution has eclipsed and distorted our under-
standing of his relationship the Enlightenment. The popular image of
“Rousseau the philosophe” has endured in large part because of the per-
sistence of the image of Rousseau as “father of the French Revolution” to
which it is so closely linked. It is therefore necessary to confront a long tra-
dition of Rousseau interpretation that has since taken on a life of its own,
“driven by its own logic, obliterating the work from which it has issued,
marking it, distorting it, and making it disappear.”5
Rousseau and the Philosophes
Rousseau saw his “defection” from the camp of the philosophes as a

return to his true self, rather than as a loss of himself as the philosophes
Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God 31
imagined when they branded him a lunatic. When he arrived in Paris in

1741 (aged 29), he had spent all of his life to that point in either the small,
relatively homogeneous “city-state” of Geneva or in the rustic isolation of
Chambéry. His upbringing in Calvinist Geneva helped to prevent his sub-
sequent absorption into the sophisticated culture of eighteenth-century
Paris, where he spent much of his adult life. His eventual alienation from
this world was partly rooted in the simple provincial values that he
retained when he left Geneva as a young man. “I have received principles,
maxims—others would say prejudices,” he wrote of his youth in his last
work, “which have never completely deserted me” (RSW, 19 [OC I,
1013]). Rousseau continued to think of himself as a patriotic “citoyen de
Genève” for most of his life, and only reluctantly refrained from append-
ing this title to his published works when the Genevan authorities banned
his books. As Benjamin Barber notes in his study of Rousseau’s Swiss
background, “all the chief works are tethered to Rousseau’s native city.”6
This attachment is not only conspicuous in the Dedication to the
Discourse on Inequality, the Letter to d’Alembert (1758) and the Letters
Written From the Mountain (1764), all of which deal explicitly with
Geneva; the imprint of Rousseau’s Genevan upbringing is also apparent in
more abstract works such as The Social Contract.7 For most of his life, he
retained an image of Geneva as the ideal community, a small, virtuous,
self-contained fraternity of independent people of simple faith and strong
morals, which he contrasted favorably with the fragmentation and
immorality of modern, sophisticated, urban civilization, epitomized by
Paris, the “capital city” of the Enlightenment and, for Rousseau, Geneva’s
evil antithesis. Eventually, after several years in the company of the lead-
ing encyclopédistes, the Protestant republican Rousseau openly rebelled
against the civilization of mid-eighteenth-century Paris, where “the whole
order of natural sentiments is reversed” (JNH, 222 [OC II, 270]). He ral-
lied to the defense of his beloved homeland when he thought that it was
threatened by the insidious spread of Parisian values through the modern
theater, which he denounced as a “monument of luxury and softness being
elevated on the ruins of our antique simplicity and threatening from afar
the public liberty” (LA, 96 [OC V, 88]). Rousseau’s ideal Geneva—as dis-
tinct from the city as it actually was at the time8—was as much a small,
cohesive city-state of robust, masculine virtue as his Paris was a sprawling
“abyss” full of “scheming, idle people without religion or principle, whose
imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great
needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes” (LA, 58–59
[OC V, 54]). To Rousseau’s mind, these two cities symbolized the best and
the worst of collective life under modern conditions, one a monument to
sophistication and enlightenment, the other a model of simplicity and
virtue.
Rousseau also drew inspiration from the social and political experi-
ence of antiquity. Like modern Geneva, he idealized the small, morally
unified city-states of ancient Greece, epitomized by Sparta.9 Despite
having had little in the way of a formal education, Rousseau read a great
deal of classical literature as a youth, particularly “the excellent
Plutarch,”10 from whom he acquired a deep admiration for ancient Greco-
Roman culture in general, and republican Rome in particular. In his
Confessions (completed 1770), Rousseau writes of his childhood that he
was “[c]easelessly occupied with Rome and Athens; living, so to speak,
with their great men, myself born the Citizen of a Republic, and the son of
a father whose love of the fatherland was his strongest passion, I caught
fire with it from his example; I believed myself to be a Greek or Roman”
(C, 8 [OC I, 9]). Although virtually all of the philosophes admired the
classical world too, to a greater or lesser extent, very few revered the
ancients for quite the same reasons as Rousseau, who particularly
approved of the civic cults of antiquity, which reinforced the moral bonds
of the ancient polis, in which ethics, politics, religion, and society were all
tightly interwoven, if not indistinguishable.
Rousseau also became marginalized in the beau monde of Paris by his
social status, which contributed to the ackwardness he felt with the cul-
ture and values of the philosophes, most of whom were either titled aristo-
crats or wealthy parvenu. He came from the petit bourgeoisie of Geneva,
although he enjoyed the privileged status of citizen.11 When he was a boy,
Rousseau’s family lived in the St. Gervais district of the city, which was
then the center of the bourgeoisie known for its republican sympathies.
He later spurned the fortune that could easily have been his after he had
become famous in order to avoid becoming the kind of “well-heeled bour-
geois intellectual”12 he seems particularly to have despised. In his
Confessions, he writes that the unsuccessful and disillusioning period that
he spent in Venice as secretary to the aristocratic French ambassador
shortly after his arrival in Paris “left a seed of indignation in my soul
against our foolish civil institutions, in which the true public good and
genuine justice are always sacrificed to some apparent order or other in
fact destructive of all order, and which does nothing but add the sanction
of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the
strong” (C, 274 [OC I, 327]). It was during this disillusioning year in
Venice that Rousseau began working on his treatise Institutions
politiques, a portion of which would later become the bible of the French
Revolutionaries: The Social Contract.
Despite this background, Rousseau initially adapted successfully to
his new environment in the French capital. During the 1740s he lived the
life of an homme de salon in Paris, closely associating with the leading
philosophes of the day. Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie, was one of his
most intimate friends, and he counted Condillac, Grimm, and d’Alembert

among his regular acquaintances. Malesherbes, who was sympathetic to
the philosophes, permitted the circulation of Rousseau’s works in his
capacity as Directeur de la Librairie. It is hardly surprising that Rousseau
was mocked along with other encyclopédistes in the anti-philosophes
satires of the day. In Charles Palissot’s Le Cercle, ou les originaux (1755)
he is portrayed as a philosophe named Blaise-Gille-Antoine le Cosmo-
polite, and he is included in Palissot’s Aristophanic parody Les
Philosophes, which premiered at the Comédie française in May 1760.13 To
the wider public, “a non-partisan view of Rousseau’s relations with the
Encyclopédistes made it possible to conceive of Rousseau as basically an
Enlightenment philosopher.”14
In reality, Rousseau’s apparent contentment with the world of the
philosophes masked a growing alienation. In 1749, while on his way to see
his imprisoned friend Diderot, he experienced his famous “illumination”
while reading about an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon.
“At the moment of that reading,” he later revealed in his Confessions, “I
saw another universe and I became another man” (C, 294 [OC I, 351]).15 It
was from around this time that the trajectory of Rousseau’s ideas and life
began gradually but inexorably to diverge from that of the philosophes.
This is reflected in his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which estab-
lished him as a formidable thinker just as the French Enlightenment was
beginning to peak. In this work, Rousseau praises ignorance and argues
that the strength and purity of morals are inversely related to the presence
of the universal arts and sciences. Many philosophes, such as Voltaire, were
amazed and repelled by such an argument. As Maurice Cranston writes,
“Voltaire could find no reason for tolerating the reactionary views it con-
tained, and very few words were to be spoken or written by him about the
author. Henceforth, he was Rousseau’s enemy.”16 Although Diderot did
much to help Rousseau to publish this work, he later referred to it deri-
sively as an “apology for ignorance,” which, as we shall see in chapter 6,
Rousseau intended it to be.
Throughout the 1750s Rousseau became more and more critical of
the sophistication of the cultured Parisian society with which he had
become so familiar. His contribution to an essay competition in 1753,
later published as the Discourse on Inequality, further estranged some of
his erstwhile philosophical allies. Voltaire’s marginal notes on this work
are extremely hostile; he scribbled words such as “faux,” “abominable,”
and “quelle chimère” in his copy.17 He found Rousseau’s dark account of
history quite shocking, notwithstanding his own pessimism, colorfully
expressed a few years later in Candide (1759). In the Discourse, Rousseau
situates the “golden age” of human beings in “nascent society,” shortly
after their emergence from the state of nature but well before the modern
age, which is relegated to the lowest state human beings have ever inhab-
ited, in society or outside of it.
Having been “[s]educed for a long time by the prejudices of my cen-
tury” (PN, 188 [OC II, 962]), Rousseau finally undertook an “intellectual
and moral reform” (RSW, 21 [OC I, 1016]), forsaking the lifestyle and
values with which he had associated since his arrival in Paris a decade ear-
lier. In 1754 he returned to his native city to be received back into the
Calvinist Church (which he left when he converted to Roman Catholicism
shortly after leaving Geneva as a youth) and to have his rights as a citizen
restored. However, Rousseau’s complete break with the philosophes did
not occur until the end of the 1750s. He returned to Paris after his visit to
Geneva and continued to associate with leading philosophes for a time.
He even complained that, immediately on returning to Paris, “I have
found none of my friends here. Diderot is in Langres, Duclos in Brittany,
Grimm in Provence; even d’Alembert is in the country” (Rousseau to
Jacob Vernes, 15 October 1754 [CC III, 42–44]). Yet Rousseau soon
abandoned Paris and fell out with those philosophes with whom he was
still on speaking terms. His Letter to d’Alembert, directed more at the
“scoffing, cosmopolitan, theatre-going poseur”18 Voltaire than d’Alembert,
was the last straw for most philosophes; Rousseau’s growing estrangement
from them erupted into open war with its publication. Voltaire had been
staging plays at his estate near Geneva with the support of some of its
leading citizens. In a letter to Moultou in 1760, Rousseau exploded:
You speak to me of Voltaire! Why do you let the name of that
buffoon soil your letters? The wretch has ruined my country. I
would hate him more if I despised him less. I can only see in his
great talents something which dishonours him in the unworthy
use he makes of them. His talents only serve, like his wealth, to
nourish the depravity of his heart. O citizens of Geneva, he
makes you pay dearly for the refuge you offer him! He knew of
nowhere else to go to do his mischief; you will be his last victims.
(Rousseau to Moultou, 29 January 1760 [CC VII, 24])
For his part, Voltaire wrote to d’Alembert referring to Rousseau as “a
Diogenes barking against the theater from the depths of his barrel”19 and
took to denouncing him a “Judas”20 and a “monster.”21 He wrote to
Thieriot asking “What about Jean-Jacques’s book against the theater? Has
he become a priest of the church?”22 The fact that the orthodox Jesuit
priest Berthier, editor of the conservative Journal de Trevoux, admired
Rousseau’s letter was simply grist for Voltaire’s mill.23 In a letter to the
Duc de Richelieu Voltaire politely insisted that he “make a distinction
between Parisian men of letters and this madhouse philosopher
[Rousseau].”24 Voltaire wrote bitter pamphlets such as Sentiments d’un
citoyen (1764) and Lettre au docteur Jean-Jacques Pansophe (1766) pub-

licly attacking Rousseau and exposing the flaws and inconsistencies in his
writings and conduct.25 In the former he revealed that the author of Emile
had abandoned all of his children to a foundling home. Rousseau’s essay
on the theater was even a factor in Diderot’s decision to resume the
Encyclopédie, which had been officially proscribed.26 He interpreted
Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert as a personal attack on him27 and wrote
to his mistress Sophie Volland about the work of “the great sophist”
Rousseau:28 “Is it then possible to be eloquent and sensitive without
having principles of honor, or true friendship, or virtue, or truthfulness?
That makes me angry.”29 He counted Jean-Jacques’s claim in his Letter to
d’Alembert that “I do not at all believe . . . that one can be virtuous with-
out religion” among Rousseau’s seven “villainies,” and denounced him as
“false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, a cruel hypocrite, and wicked.”30
Many of Rousseau’s former associates among the philosophes were
further amazed and infuriated by what they took to be the apostasy of his
subsequent writings as well, seeing in them further evidence that, as
Voltaire wrote to Mme d’Epinay, “Jean-Jacques has gone off his head.”31
Rousseau’s behavior in the last fifteen years of his life only reinforced this
image in the eyes of many philosophes. Traces of paranoia are particularly
evident in Rousseau’s apologetic works, the Confessions, Rousseau Judge
of Jean-Jacques (written 1772–1776) and the Reveries of a Solitary
Walker (1782), to which he devoted his energies in the last decade of his
life. Even the moderate philosophe d’Alembert, who often tried to temper
Voltaire’s attacks on “that lunatic Jean-Jacques,”32 was led to conclude
that “Jean-Jacques was mad.”33 After Rousseau’s débâcle with Hume in
1766, even the good-natured Scotsman conceded in exasperation that “the
poor Man is absolutely lunatic.”34
The Invention of the “Revolutionary” Rousseau
It was these later confessional writings, along with Rousseau’s best-sell-

ing novel Julie, or the New Heloise, that first captured the imagination of
late-eighteenth century France and gave rise to a “cult of Rousseau,” par-
ticularly after the posthumous publication of his Confessions in 1781. It
was after his death in 1778 and during the decade before the Revolution
that, as Raymond Trousson puts it, Rousseau “became a god,”35 a far cry
from the “interesting lunatic” of the philosophes. Countless plays,
poems, and essays were written about him and pilgrimages to his tomb at
Ermenonville became highly fashionable in the 1780s. Rousseau had
become a “cultural artefact,” symbolizing above all integrity, virtue, and
authenticity.36 During these years he was the object of a popular adula-
tion that, “in its breadth, intensity, and religious fervor, far outstripped
anything associated with any other eighteenth century writer.”37 Before the
Revolution this cult had been largely, although not exclusively, literary
and biographical. Between 1761 and 1789, seventy editions of Rousseau’s
novel were published in France alone,38 as well as twenty-six editions of
Emile,39 while his principal political work, The Social Contract, was not
reprinted at all in the decade before the Revolution, although many illicit
copies were available in a variety of forms. Daniel Mornet’s study of pri-
vate French libraries during the period 1750 to 1780 found almost two
hundred copies of Julie, but only a single copy of Rousseau’s political trea-
tise.40 However, the latter appeared in four separate editions in 1790, three
more the following year, and no fewer than thirty-two before the end of
the century.41 French Revolutionary soldiers at the front were even issued
with a pocket-sized edition of The Social Contract in 1794.42
During the 1790s Rousseau’s name became a virtual byword for the
Revolutionary cause. The belief in a continuity between his thought and
the French Revolution was cemented during the last decade of the eigh-
teenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, and has remained
stubbornly entrenched ever since.43 The protean character of his writings
made it relatively easy for Revolutionary leaders to present him as the
“father of the French Revolution,” despite his claim that he had “the
greatest aversion to revolutions” (RJJ, 213 [OC I, 935]).44 They sought to
legitimate their cause by linking it directly to Rousseau’s name.45 The first
work performed by the Paris Opera when it reopened after the fall of the
Bastille was Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, as part of a benefit concert
for the families of those who had died in the assault on the prison.46 The
Revolutionary government gave a place of honor in the National
Assembly to a bust of Rousseau and to a copy of The Social Contract. It
also decreed that a statue of Rousseau be erected with the inscription “La
Nation Française Libre à J.-J. Rousseau.” The revolutionary cult of
Rousseau peaked in 1794, when his remains were ceremoniously trans-
ferred to the Panthéon in Paris and laid to rest next to the other great
“heroes of the French Revolution.”47 Carol Blum describes this event as
follows:
On 18 vendémiaire, an III (15 October 1794), the grand proces-
sion began. Rousseau’s funeral urn was carried from the Ile des
Peupliers where he had been buried to the commune of Emile,
formerly the town of Montmorency. The following day a deputa-
tion from the Convention went to receive the remains, which
were placed on a cart decorated with willow branches, to the
accompaniment of songs from Le Devin du village. In the middle
of one of the pools of the Jardin national, formerly the Tuiléries,
an island surrounded by a little building “of antique form” in
which the urn was placed. Throughout the night visitors
streamed past the site, and the next day Rousseau was at last laid
to rest in the Pantheon. Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, the president
of the Convention, who, under Napoleon was to become the
Duc de Parme and effectively arch-chancellor of the Empire, read
the decrees. . . . The speech was followed by a ‘Hymn to Jean-
Jacques,’ composed by Marie-Joseph Chénier, brother of the
guillotined poet, sung by the older men, the mothers of families,
and the citizens of Geneva.48
The following May Robespierre, referring to this event, claimed of

Rousseau that “[a]mong those who, in the times I speak of, stood out in
the career of letters and philosophy, one man [Rousseau] . . . showed him-
self worthy of the ministry as preceptor of humankind. . . . Ah! If he had
been witness to this revolution whose precursor he was and that bore him
to the Panthéon, who can doubt that his generous soul would have
embraced with transport the cause of justice and equality!”49 Even
Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have remarked, while on a pilgrimage
to Rousseau’s grave on the Isle of Poplars at Ermenonville, that it “would
have been better for the peace of France if this man had never lived . . . It
was he who prepared the French Revolution.”50 As one study of his influ-
ence notes, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau as prophet and founder of the French
Revolution was thus a creation of the Revolution itself.”51
This view of Rousseau as the “father of the French Revolution” was
no less common among its opponents.52 Edmund Burke (1729–1797), for
example, described him as “the insane Socrates of the National Assembly”
of Revolutionary France whose leaders were Rousseau’s “scholars”53 who
looked on his writings as “holy writ”54 and whose “blood they transfuse
into their minds and into their manners.” The French Revolutionary
state’s official embrace of Rousseau did not escape the notice of its conser-
vative opponents such as Burke, who remarked on it as follows:
[T]hey [the Revolutionary leaders] erect statues to a wild, fero-

cious, low-minded, hard-hearted father, of fine general feel-
ings,—a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred. . . .
Through Rousseau, your masters are resolved to destroy these
aristocratic prejudices . . . they infuse into their youth an unfash-
ioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and
lewdness,—of metaphysical speculations blended with the coars-
est sensuality . . . the writings of Rousseau lead directly to this
kind of shameful evil.55
Ironically, Burke’s comments on Rousseau here echo those of Voltaire,

despite the fact that he viewed them as kindred spirits of the
Enlightenment, as did the Revolutionaries, who entombed them together
in the Panthéon as “fathers of the French Revolution,” a proximity that

has surely precluded either from resting in peace.
At roughly the same time that Burke published his enormously influ-
ential Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791) in England, Louis-
Sébastien Mercier’s (1740–1817) 1791 book De Jean-Jacques Rousseau
considéré comme l’un des premier auteurs de la Révolution appeared in
France, presenting Rousseau as both a philosophe and one of the principal
ideological architects of the Revolution.56 The Catholic reactionary Joseph
de Maistre (1753–1821), who read and approved of both Burke and
Mercier, wrote an essay on Rousseau in the mid-1790s singling him out
(again along with Voltaire) for the fateful part he played in “unmuzzling
the tiger” of revolutionary violence with his subversive ideas.57 Like Burke,
Maistre noticed and remarked on the French Revolutionary state’s attitude
towards Rousseau:
This book [Mercier’s] and the bronze statue that the National
Convention awarded Rousseau are perhaps the greatest oppro-
brium that has ever tarnished any writer’s reputation. However,
Voltaire contends with Rousseau for the fearful honour of
having made the French Revolution, and there are great authori-
ties in his favor. . . . Actually, the glory of having made the
Revolution belongs exclusively to neither Voltaire nor Rousseau.
The whole philosophic sect lays claim to its part of it; but it is
just to consider Voltaire and Rousseau as its leaders. . . . It is
Rousseau whose stirring eloquence seduced the crowd over
which imagination has more purchase than reason. He breathed
everywhere scorn for authority and the spirit of insurrection. He
is the one who traced the code of anarchy, and who, in the midst
of some isolated and sterile truths that everyone before him
knew, posed the disastrous principles of which the horrors we
have seen are only the immediate consequence. Both of them
were carried solemnly to the Pantheon in virtue of the National
Convention’s decree, which thus condemned their memory to the
last punishments.58
Maistre’s attitude to Rousseau after 1793 is more an example of “the
influence of the Revolution on the interpretation of Rousseau . . . than the
influence of Rousseau on the Revolution.”59
While this association of Rousseau with the revolutionary cause even-
tually became an article of faith in conservative circles, it was not always
so. Some conservative opponents of the Revolution, most notably the
Comte d’Antraigues (1753–1812), actually tried to appropriate Rousseau
to their cause. Indeed, as one study notes, as late as 1791 “the main critics
of The Social Contract were drawn not from the ranks of the opponents
of the Revolution but from those of the Revolutionaries themselves.”60

After 1750 both aristocrats and sansculottes read and admired the works
of Rousseau.61 In the years prior to the Revolution, many enemies of the
philosophes not only exempted Rousseau from their attacks, but drew
inspiration from his religious writings in particular, contrasting them
favorably with the atheism increasingly common—although never domi-
nant—among philosophes in the 1760s and 1770s.62 However, the
attempted conservative appropriation of Rousseau was cut short with the
final triumph of the revolutionaries, who proceeded officially to turn their
hero into a “father” of the French Revolution. Eventually, most Counter-
Revolutionaries accepted that the Revolution was “la faute à Rousseau”63
and began attacking him and his ideas on the grounds that he had “posed
the disastrous principles of which the horrors we have seen are only the
immediate consequence,” as Maistre put it.64
Many conservative Romantic writers in England, such as Coleridge
and Wordsworth in their later years, accepted this connection between
Rousseau, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution, in the process further
cementing these links for posterity. Edward Duffy writes in his study of
Rousseau’s reception among English romantics that “two assumptions
that were the common property of him [Shelley] and his compatriots: that
the notorious Rousseau was an all too typical man of the Enlightenment
and that the Napoleonic disasters were the inevitable consequence of an
Enlightenment ideology wrong headed from the start and most notori-
ously wrong headed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”65 As with Burke, whose
Revolutionary writings were enormously influential in Romantic circles in
England and Germany, the French Revolutionary apotheosis of Rousseau
and Voltaire was taken at face value. They compressed them into “one
ideological bogeyman” of the Enlightenment whose abstract rationalism
had eroded the legitimacy of ancien régime France, resulting in the col-
lapse that led to the Revolutionary terror.66 Only later did many English
Romantics make an exception of Rousseau, who eventually came to be
viewed as a man of feeling “very much like themselves and very different
from the standard notion of a philosophe.”67
The alleged links between Rousseau and the Revolution have been
restated continuously ever since the early nineteenth century. Friedrich
Engels, for example, wrote that “Rousseau’s Contrat social had found its
realization in the Reign of Terror, from which bourgeoisie, who had lost
confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the cor-
ruption of the Directorate, and finally under the wing of Napoleon’s des-
potism.”68 Heinrich Heine is also typical of this attitude. “Maximilien
Robespierre,” he wrote in 1834, “was nothing but the hand of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew forth from the womb of
time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.”69 We have already seen
that Friedrich Nietzsche viewed Rousseau as both the cause and the
embodiment of the French Revolution. This view was shared by many lib-
eral and conservative writers during the Cold War, who liked to draw par-
allels between Rousseau’s relationship to the Revolution, on the one hand,
and Marx’s relationship to twentieth-century totalitarianism, on the other.
Jacob Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) is the locus
classicus of this view, although it has had plenty of subscribers, such as
Lester Crocker. In An Age of Crisis (1959), for example, he writes that a
“faint shadow of collectivist control thus arises from the humanistic writ-
ings of the eighteenth century. . . . We can understand why Rousseau’s
Contrat social crowns the century’s political thought.”70
Conclusion
Rousseau has long been interpreted through the French Revolution, whose
leaders had appropriated him for their own purposes. This inclined both
pro- and counter-Revolutionaries towards seeing a continuity between
Rousseau’s ideas and those of the Revolution, an opinion that was widely
held then and has remained stubbornly popular ever since. This has seri-
ously distorted subsequent perceptions of Rousseau’s relationship to the
Enlightenment in two ways. First, the posthumous association of
Rousseau with the Revolution has eclipsed the question of his relationship
to the context in which he actually lived and wrote: the French
Enlightenment. This goes a long way towards accounting for the fact that
this latter relationship has only once been the subject of an extended
analysis, while there are scores of books dealing with the “Revolutionary”
Rousseau. Second, the belief in a link between the Enlightenment and the
Revolution—the latter of which Rousseau is commonly thought to have
fathered—has reinforced the perception that Rousseau belonged to the
society of the philosophes. This is best symbolized by the spectacular
Revolutionary “pantheonization” of Rousseau and Voltaire next to each
other. As we shall see, Rousseau’s relationship to the philosophes looks
very different when viewed in the context of pre-Revolutionary France.
Chapter Three
Unsociable Man
Rousseau’s Critique of Enlightenment Social Thought
Introduction
V oltaire spoke for virtually all of the philosophes when, in a direct

response to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, he claimed that he
did “not think that this solitary life [in the state of nature], which our
forefathers are supposed to have led, is in human nature. . . .The founda-
tions of society ever-existing, there has therefore ever been some society.”1
Although the normative ideal of the philosophes was individualistic, inso-
far as they believed that our primary social role should be that of the
rational individual motivated by enlightened self-interest, they rejected the
atomism of contract theory, arguing instead that humans are naturally
social beings. Among both the philosophes and many of their orthodox
critics Rousseau came to represent the opposite view.2
In fact, Rousseau parted company with the philosophes not in reject-
ing the desirability of society per se—something he never believed,
although he compared most societies he knew unfavorably with the state
of nature—but in its naturalness. While he accepted the Enlightenment
affirmation of society as the indispensable medium of human develop-
ment, he rejected its belief in natural sociability, the innate tendency of
humans to participate in society. In doing so, he took the Enlightenment
critique of social contract theory in a decisively new direction by combin-
ing it with the problem of social order. This problem is central to his
social and political thought, whereas the philosophes took it largely for
granted. Rousseau portrayed society as a state of war, a view very similar
to Hobbes’s portrait of human beings in their natural, presocial state.
According to Rousseau, as we enter into relationships with other human
41
42 Unsociable Man
beings, new, socially divisive passions emerge. Foremost among these is

amour-propre, which becomes progressively more “inflamed” as civiliza-
tion advances, resulting in a “perpetual war” that eventually leads to insti-
tutionalized despotism in the form of a fraudulent contract. Thus, while
Rousseau accepts with the philosophes that nature is harmonious and
orderly, he disputes their view that such harmony applies to society, which
is not natural. “Concert reigns among the [natural] elements,” he writes in
Emile, “and men are in chaos” (E, 278 [OC IV, 583]).
Rousseau believed that the particular wills and interests of individuals
in society have a powerful tendency to dominate common interests and
the general will, a situation that has given rise to a Hobbesian state of
social warfare. He parted from the philosophes in claiming that order can
only be introduced into our chaotic social world artificially, by means of
particular political and religious institutions and beliefs that deliberately
manufacture “sentiments of sociability.” Given his pessimistic social
assumptions, Rousseau stressed the necessity of finding ways of actively
promoting social cohesion and strengthening the naturally weak and frag-
ile bonds of community. At the heart of his critique of the French
Enlightenment is the belief that its (as he saw it) naı̈ve faith in human
sociability and its misplaced confidence that individual wills and interests
will naturally harmonize have blinded it to the fundamental precarious-
ness of social life and the individual sacrifices needed to sustain it. This
emphasis on the fragility of social order was a common republican theme,
which Rousseau applied to the assumptions and prescriptions of his
enlightened contemporaries who, lacking his pessimistic social premises,
regarded Rousseau’s austere “republic of virtue” as unnecessary at best
and very dangerous at worst.3
From Contract to Community4
By the 1790s the view of Rousseau as, in the words of Voltaire, “an
enemy of society” who called for the smashing of our social chains and a
return to a blissful, presocial état primitif was widespread and has
remained stubbornly popular ever since. Voltaire routinely referred to
Rousseau’s “Contrat insocial” in his correspondence,5 and Diderot
claimed that his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts exalts the “savage
over the civilized state.”6 The performance of Charles Palissot’s play Les
Philosophes depicting Rousseau walking about on all fours eating lettuce
elicited approving smiles on the otherwise disapproving faces of the
philosophes Palissot was satirizing.7
Most interpretations of Rousseau as an extreme individualist—even
anarchist—wanting to release human beings from the bondage of their
Unsociable Man 43
social chains are based on his idyllic portrait of the splendid isolation of
the homme sauvage, “wandering in the forests, without industry, without
speech, without domicile, without war, and without liaisons” (DI, 40 [OC
III, 159–160]). On this reading, Rousseau believed that “the natural state
of man was vastly preferable to the social or civil state.”8 No less an inter-
preter of Rousseau than Hegel (1770–1831) regarded him as essentially a
contract theorist in the Hobbesian tradition, who abstracted the individ-
ual from all ethical, social, and political relationships and asserted the
absolute primacy of the individual over the community. On this view,
Rousseau reduced society to a mere contract, “which is accordingly based
on their [individuals’] arbitrary will and opinions, and on their express
consent given at their own discretion.”9 Marx (1818–1883), who was
strongly influenced by Hegel’s presentation of Rousseau, shared this view.
In the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858; first published 1939–1941) for
example, he includes Rousseau among those who propounded one of the
most “insipid illusions of the eighteenth century;” the asocial individual
abstracted from all social relations.10 With this depiction Hegel and Marx
played a major part in transmitting to posterity the misleading image of
the antisocial Rousseau propagated by his philosophical enemies.
The enormous popularity of this account of Rousseau as an extreme
individualist and antisocial “primitivist” advocating a return to the state
of nature has persisted despite his explicit and categorical rejection of it in
the Discourse on Inequality:11
What! must we destroy Societies, annihilate thine and mine, and
go back to live in forests with Bears? . . . As for men like me,
whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity . . .
they will respect the sacred bonds of the societies of which they are
members; they will love their fellow-men and will serve them with
all their power; they will scrupulously obey the laws, and the men
who are their Authors and Ministers; they will honour above all
the good and wise Princes who will know how to prevent, cure, or
palliate that multitude of abuses and evils always ready to crush
us; they will animate the zeal of those worthy Chiefs, by showing
them without fear and flattery the greatness of their task and the
rigour of their duty. (DI, 79–80 [OC III, 207])
It is obvious that placing Rousseau in the contract tradition without
significant qualification seriously misrepresents his position. Like the
philosophes, he regarded society as a necessary condition of our full devel-
opment as human beings. For Rousseau, the species does not become rec-
ognizably human until it leaves the state of nature, where it is devoid of
all of the essential attributes of humanity: language, reason, imagination,
free will, speech, and morality. While denying natural sociability, as most
44 Unsociable Man
contract theorists do, his view is in striking contrast to the social atomism
of Hobbes and Locke, who ascribe to natural man a degree of humanity
far beyond that of Rousseau’s protohuman homme sauvage. One of the
objectives of the Discourse on Inequality is to highlight the extent to
which our identity as human beings is connected to our social existence,
and to emphasize the radical transformation that we undergo when we
leave the state of nature and enter society, a transformation that amounts
to nothing less than the emergence and development of our humanity
itself. The distinctive faculties and attributes of the species are, for the
most part, still immanent in the state of nature. Beyond a few very vague
qualities, human nature is fundamentally undetermined. Our latent cogni-
tive and moral faculties develop in stages as we are impelled by external
circumstances to cooperate with one another. This interaction results in a
radical transformation in human nature. It is from this stage that we can
properly be called “human,” as our consciousness of others is extended.
In some respects, Rousseau’s conception of human nature was even more
minimal than that of the typical philosophe, since he denied that sociabil-
ity is a feature of human nature. It was to compensate for this absence
that he assigned an active role to political, cultural, and religious institu-
tions and practices in shaping the identity of the individual with a view to
artificially manufacturing conditions that promote social solidarity.12 At
the same time he thought that, just as the philosophes had gone too far by
including in human nature a disposition toward sociability that does not
actually exist, they did not go far enough when they excluded the infalli-
ble moral faculty of conscience—the “voice of the soul” and our direct
link with God.
According to Rousseau, human beings in the state of nature are
instinctually inclined toward their own interests. This natural instinct—
“amour de soi”—is an essentially benign condition of self-absorption or
“self-love” that is common to all sentient beings. This innocuous form of
self-regard is beneficial to the individual and harmless to others. Also, it is
modified by the natural sentiment of “pitié,” the innate tendency of
human beings to identify with, and feel compassion for, other creatures in
their suffering. However, Rousseau adds that this “natural repugnance”
that we all instinctively feel at the pain of other human beings is not as
powerful as amour de soi. At most it qualifies it, “moderating in each
individual the activity of love of oneself.” Yet it is “obscure and strong in
savage man” and “developed but weak” in society, where it is eclipsed by
amour-propre—the powerful and aggressive social form of amour de soi—
and by reason (DI, 37 [OC III, 155–156]).
Rousseau’s homme sauvage also possesses latent faculties that are not
shared by other animals, at least to the same degree. These include per-
fectibility, conscience, free will, and speech. Perfectibility is the faculty that
Unsociable Man 45
gives the species its openness to change. In the state of nature, it is an

essentially dormant faculty which, in society, “with the aid of circum-
stances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much
in the species as in the individual. By contrast an animal is at the end of a
few months what it will be all its life; and its species is at the end of a
thousand years what it was the first year of that thousand” (DI, 26 [OC
III, 142]). In Emile, Rousseau refers to another, even more obscure attrib-
ute he calls “conscience.” Like perfectibility, it is innate to the species.
However, the force of conscience is entirely latent in the state of nature. It
is only through the development of our rational and deliberative faculties
in society that we come to know good and evil, in the absence of which
conscience remains inert. The “awakening” of our minds in society is the
precondition of our development into moral beings. Hence Rousseau’s
comment that “it is only by becoming sociable that he [man] becomes a
moral being, a reasonable animal, the king of the other animals, and the
image of God on earth” (PF, 19 [OC III, 477]). Rousseau also asserts in
his second Discourse that men in the state of nature have free will, which
is one of the few attributes that distinguish them from other creatures.
“Nature commands every animal, and the Beast obeys. Man feels the
same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is
above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his
soul is shown” (DI, 26 [OC III, 141–142]). Finally, in his Essay on the
Origin of Languages, Rousseau claims that “[s]peech distinguishes man
from the animals” (EOL, 289 [OC V, 375]).
Natural Order, Social Disorder
While Rousseau and the philosophes agreed that society is indispensable

to the formation of human identity and the development of our moral and
cognitive powers, he diverged sharply from the Enlightenment with his
claim that our otherwise benign self-love (amour de soi) is transformed in
society into a powerful and aggressive form of selfishness (amour-propre)
that eventually leads to a state of social warfare. Left to their own devices
in society, he argues, individuals would soon be plunged into a condition
of conflict identical to that which Hobbes had attributed to the presocial
state of nature. Thus, while Rousseau shared the Enlightenment rejection
of the social atomism on which contract theory is based, he diverged sig-
nificantly from the philosophes in his application of the Hobbesian
account of man in the state of nature to society. While Rousseau agreed
with the Enlightenment view of nature as orderly, he denied its applicabil-
ity to society. “Oh, if an order reigned in human affairs similar to that
which reigns in nature,” he laments, “how touching and how good the
46 Unsociable Man
sight that would transform the face of the earth. But instead, wretched
and uncivilised mankind takes pleasure in disfiguring it with their crimes
and their misdeeds” (Traité, 212). This led Rousseau to a view of social
life that is virtually identical to Hobbes’s depiction of man in the state of
nature.
Although Rousseau’s references to “le sophiste Hobbes” are predomi-
nantly critical, they are by no means exclusively so.13 In his posthumously
published essay on “The State of War,” for example, he refers to
“Hobbes’s horrible system” as a system “both revolting and absurd” (SW,
34, 45 [OC III, 602, 610]), while acknowledging him as “one of the finest
geniuses who ever lived” (SW, 45 [OC III, 611]). In The Social Contract,
Hobbes is both praised as “the only one who correctly saw the evil and
the remedy” of modern politics and condemned as a “proponent of des-
potism” (SC, 137, 218 [OC III, 359, 463]). Both sentiments are expressed
in a single breath when Rousseau comments in this work that “[i]t is not
so much what is horrible and false in his [Hobbes’s] politics as what is
correct and true that has made it odious” (SC, 218–219 [OC III, 463]).
Rousseau’s principal criticism of Hobbes is directed at his account of
human nature, which he dismisses as little more than a projection of the
modern, amour-propre-dominated individual onto the “naturally peaceful
and timid” homme sauvage. Much of Rousseau’s essay “The State of
War” is a refutation of this Hobbesian view of human nature. “[T]he
error of Hobbes and the philosophers,” he writes in this work, “is to con-
fuse natural man with the man before their eyes. . . . It is only when he
has entered into society with other men that he decides to attack another,
and he only becomes a soldier after he has become a citizen” (SW, 34, 46
[OC III, 601–602, 611–612]).
As a corollary of this view of human nature, Rousseau argues,
Hobbes erroneously claims that the state of nature is a state of war “of
every man against every man.” He is severely critical of Hobbes for main-
taining that a social contract is necessary to bring an end to a state of war
that naturally exists among human beings. “There is no strong natural
disposition to make war on one’s fellow men,” he insists. “There is no
general state of war between men” (SW, 34 [OC III, 602]). According to
Rousseau, evil has social, not natural, origins. The writers of the contract
tradition to which Hobbes belonged are guilty of projecting the current,
warlike state of society onto the peaceful state of nature, just as they had
projected modern man onto natural man, thereby including “in the savage
man’s care for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions
which are the product of Society” (DI, 35 [OC III, 153]).
Finally, Rousseau claims in the Discourse on Inequality that there is
“another principle which Hobbes did not notice” which, he argues,
“having been given to man in order to soften, under certain circum-
Unsociable Man 47
stances, the ferocity of his vanity or the desire for self-preservation before
the birth of vanity.” Although he writes that “all the social virtues he
[Mandeville] wants to question in men” flow from “this quality [pity]
alone” (DI, 37 [OC III, 154–155]), Rousseau clearly does not consider it
nearly strong enough to overcome the natural self-regard of individuals or
the enormous power of amour-propre. By itself, the weak instinct of pity,
which he mentions only briefly, could never act as a basis for social life or
morality by itself.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, there is much that Rousseau agrees
with in Hobbes. As we have already seen in the Discourse on Inequality,
the homme sauvage is an isolated creature whose exclusive, instinctual
concern is with its own physical preservation and well-being. Thus,
Rousseau remarks on “the little care taken by Nature to bring Men
together through mutual needs and to facilitate their use of speech, one at
least sees how little it prepared their Sociability, and how little it con-
tributed to everything men have done to establish Social bonds” (DI,
33–34 [OC III, 151]). On this view, our social identity is a product of his-
tory rather than nature, evolving gradually as part of the process through
which our faculties develop in association with others. “Basically the body
politic, in so far as it is only a moral being, is merely a thing of reason,”
Rousseau notes in his fragment on “The State of War.” “Remove the
public convention, and immediately the state is destroyed, without the
least change in all that composes it” (SW, 42 [OC III, 604]). In his
Encyclopédie article on “Natural Right” Diderot had claimed that human
beings formed a natural society with its own “general will” before the
existence of political society, and that this will is “evident to anyone who
uses his reason, and that whoever chooses not to reason, thereby forfeiting
his status as a man, ought to be treated as an unnatural being.”14 Against
this view, Rousseau argues in the “Geneva Manuscript” version of The
Social Contract that “there is no natural and general society among men”
with its own will (GMS, 81 [OC III, 288]). In the state of nature we are
independent creatures with no natural motive to subordinate our particu-
lar interests to the interests of others. Every individual in the state of
nature is therefore the sole judge of his or her own interests and acts to
secure them. This echoes Hobbes’s account of society as unnatural and
marks a major divergence between Rousseau and the philosophes, for
whom humans are naturally sociable beings.
Rousseau also denies that the providentially directed harmony of
nature applies to society, as the philosophes assumed, and dismisses what
he sees as the unfounded optimism of the advocates of commercial society,
according to which an “invisible hand” turns “private vice” into “public
virtue.” “For two men whose interests agree,” he insists in his preface to
Narcissus (1753), “a hundred thousand can be opposed to them” (PN,
48 Unsociable Man
193 [OC II, 968]). This discontinuity between natural order and social
disorder is conveyed very clearly in Emile:
But when next I seek to know my individual place in my species,
and I consider its various ranks and the men who fill them, what
happens to men? What a spectacle! Where is the order [of
nature] I had observed? The picture of nature had presented me
with only harmony and proportion; that of mankind presents me
with only confusion and disorder! Concert reigns among the ele-
ments, and men are in chaos! The animals are happy; their king
alone is miserable! (E, 278 [OC IV, 583])
Despite his criticisms of the Hobbesian account of the state of nature
as a state of war, therefore, Rousseau adopts his view of the relations
between individuals as a description of modern civilization. According to
this view, the species moved from the peaceful state of nature to a state of
social war via the transitory “golden age” of nascent society. “Nascent
society gave way to the most horrible state of war,” he writes. “[T]he
human Race, debased and desolate, no longer able to turn back or
renounce the unhappy acquisitions it had made, and working only toward
its shame by abusing the faculties that honour it, brought itself to the
brink of its ruin . . . a perpetual war” (DI, 53 [OC III, 176]). Thus
Hobbes’s mistake, according to Rousseau, “is not that he established the
state of war among men who are independent and have become sociable,
but that he supposed this state natural to the species and gave it as the
cause of the vices of which it is the effect” (GMS, 81 [OC III, 288]).
Hobbes was wrong, in other words, because war springs from peace
rather than peace from war. By simply inverting the two, Rousseau was
free to appropriate much of the Hobbesian account of natural human
relations.
Rousseau argues that this state of social warfare is a consequence of
the fact that the self-absorption natural to man (amour de soi) has been
transformed in society into a destructive and rapacious form of selfish-
ness, which he calls amour-propre,15 a quality that Voltaire describes
approvingly in his Philosophical Dictionary as “the instrument of our
preservation; it resembles the instrument for the perpetuation of the
species; we need it, we cherish it, it gives us pleasure, and we must hide
it.”16 In one of his last works, Rousseau describes this transformation in
our natural sentiments as we enter society as follows:
The primitive passions . . . focus us only on objects that relate to
it, and having only the love of self as a principle, are all loving
and gentle in their essence. But when they are deflected from
their object by obstacles, they are focused on removing the
obstacle rather than the object; then they change nature and
Unsociable Man 49
become irascible and hateful. And that is how the love of self
[amour de soi], which is a good and absolute feeling, becomes
amour-propre, which is to say a relative feeling by which one
makes comparisons. (RJJ, 9 [OC I, 669])
Later in this work, Rousseau remarks that, “[i]f you ask me the origin of
this disposition to compare oneself . . . I will answer that it comes from
social relations, from the progress of ideas, and from the cultivation of the
mind” (RJJ, 113 [OC I, 806]).
A more detailed account of this process occurs in the Discourse on
Inequality. In this work, “the first stirrings of pride” in human beings
occurred when they became self-conscious of their superiority over other
animals. However, it was only in the presence of other human beings that
this feeling of relative superiority really became dominant in the species.
“[C]onsidering himself in the first rank as a species,” Rousseau writes of
man, “he prepared himself from afar to claim first rank as an individual”
(DI, 44 [OC III, 167]). Human beings were forced into collective action
by natural accidents such as floods and earthquakes. As our proximity to
others increased, so did our awareness of them. Eventually, as was the
case with our contact with other species, individuals began to compare
themselves with each other, as a result of which the natural differences
between them became increasingly apparent, with fateful consequences.
Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at
himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or
danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit,
or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and
that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time,
toward vice. From these first preferences were born on the one
hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the
fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced
compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. (DI, 47 [OC III,
170–171])
Unlike amour de soi, which is a condition of passive and basically
harmless self-absorption that exists when human beings have little or no
awareness of one another in the state of nature, this aggressive new social
form of selfishness is entirely “other-directed.” Its origins lie in the state of
nature, where a “new enlightenment [nouvelles lumières]” emerged in
human beings when they recognized their superiority over other animals,
the presence of which first prompted self-awareness in our primitive
ancestors by providing a basis on which to make favorable comparisons.
“Thus,” Rousseau writes, “the first glance he [man] directed upon himself
produced in him the first stirring of pride [d’orgueil]; thus, as yet scarcely
knowing how to distinguish ranks, and considering himself in the first
50 Unsociable Man
rank as a species, he prepared himself from afar to claim first rank as an

individual” (DI, 44 [OC III, 165–166]). Our expanding self-awareness
and consciousness not only of others, but more important of their aware-
ness of us, results in an obsessive “being-for-others” with whom “one is
forced to compare oneself at each instant” (RJJ, 100 [OC I, 789–790]).
This creates insecurity and self-consciousness, and fuels an insatiable
need for greater standing in others’ eyes, leading to a competition for
social esteem and recognition. Rousseau describes this practice of invidi-
ous personal comparison in the following terms in the Discourse on
Inequality:
Amour-propre is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in
Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem
for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm
they do to one another, and is the true source of honour . . . in
our primitive state, in the genuine state of Nature, amour-propre
does not exist; for . . . it is not possible that a sentiment having
its source in comparisons he is not capable of making could
spring up in his soul. (DI, 91 [OC III, 219])
In his Constitutional Project for Corsica (written 1764; published
1861), Rousseau distinguishes between two branches of amour-propre,
which he calls vanity (vanité) and pride (l’orgueil). The former, which he
denounces harshly, is produced when a person “lays great store by frivo-
lous objects” that are devoid of intrinsic value, such as social status. It is,
by its very nature, individual, and as such “cannot be the instrument of so
great an enterprise as the creation of a national body,” unlike pride which,
as we shall see, Rousseau develops in a national direction as a “good”
form of amour-propre (CPC, 326 [OC III, 938]). He associates the
“manly” virtue of pride with the societies he most admires, such as Sparta
and republican Rome, while linking vanity, a “feminine” vice, with those
he most despised, above all Paris, with its “mannered politeness,” “per-
petual posturing,” and “apish ways.” In his attack on the French capital
in his novel Julie, Rousseau writes that his main objection to large cities is
that in them “men become other than what they are, and society imparts
to them, as it were, a being other than their own. This is true, especially in
Paris, and especially with respect to women, who derive from the way
others look at them the only existence that matters to them” (JNH, 223
[OC II, 273]). In the French capital, he complains in his Letter to
d’Alembert, “everything is judged by appearances” (LA, 59 [OC V, 54]).
Pride, by contrast, is more “natural” than vanity, since it “lights on
objects intrinsically great and beautiful.” In a small town like Geneva,
unlike a sprawling metropolis such as Paris, “the people are less imitative”
and the mind “less spread out, less drowned in vulgar opinions, elaborates
Unsociable Man 51
itself and ferments better in tranquil solitude; because, in seeing less, more
is imagined” (LA, 60 [OC V, 55]).
The account that Rousseau presents of amour-propre in Emile is less
explicitly negative than in either his earlier or his later works, although it
is consistent with them. It is still understood primarily as a disposition
toward comparison. The “first sentiment aroused in him [Emile] by his
comparison,” he writes, “is the desire to be in the first position. This is the
point where love of self turns into amour-propre” (E, 235 [OC IV, 523]).
However, its effects are depicted in basically neutral terms:
This amour-propre in itself or relative to us is good and useful;
and since it has no necessary relation to others, it is in this
respect naturally neutral. It becomes good or bad only by the
application made of it and the relations given to it. Therefore, up
to the time when the guide of amour-propre, which is reason,
can be born, it is important for a child to do nothing because he
is seen or heard—nothing, in a word, in relation to others; he
must respond only to what nature asks of him, and then he will
do nothing but good. (E, 92–93 [OC IV, 322])
Notwithstanding this view, Rousseau does not retract his belief that cir-
cumstances have pushed this disposition in an increasingly invidious direc-
tion. That is why he adds that amour-propre, while sometimes useful, is a
“dangerous instrument . . . and rarely does good without evil” (E, 244
[OC IV, 536]). It is also important to keep the context in mind. Emile
deals with the education of an individual deliberately isolated from social
life, under which circumstances amour-propre is less likely to have
destructive consequences. In all of his other works, where he is much
more negative about its likely effects, it is placed in a wider social and
political context. This is certainly the case in Rousseau’s Dialogues, writ-
ten over a decade after Emile, in which his depiction of amour-propre is as
scathing as that of his second Discourse.
Central to Rousseau’s account of amour-propre is the role of inequal-
ity, which inevitably follows from the obsessive desire for esteem and
standing in the eyes of others. Rousseau distinguishes between natural
inequalities of strength, intelligence, stamina, and the like on the one
hand, and artificial inequalities of wealth, social position, status, and
power on the other. The former are essentially benign and, being natural,
inescapable. The latter, however, are only found in society, and are the pri-
mary source of human unhappiness. “[T]he first source of evil,” Rousseau
wrote in reply to the King of Poland, “is inequality” (Observations by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva on the Reply Made to His Discourse, in
DSA, 48 [OC III, 49]). Private property is the principal expression of this
form of inequality. The second part of the first Discourse, which is
52 Unsociable Man
devoted to an account of the emergence of amour-propre and its disas-

trous effects, begins with the famous statement that the “first person who,
having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine
and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of
civil society” (DI, 43 [OC III, 164]). Rousseau’s depiction of society as a
“perpetual war” is based on this account of the growth of inequality con-
sequent on the emergence of amour-propre:
[T]he destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful
disorder; thus the usurpations of the rich, the brigandage of the
Poor, the unbridled passions of all, stifling natural pity and the as
yet weak voice of justice, made man avaricious, ambitious, and
evil. Between the right of the stronger and the right of the first
occupant there arose a perpetual conflict which ended only in
fights and murders. Nascent society gave way to the most horri-
ble state of war: the human Race, debased and desolated, no
longer able to turn back and renounce the unhappy acquisitions
it had made, and working only toward its shame by abusing the
faculties that honour it, brought itself to the brink of its ruin.
(DI, 52–53 [OC III, 177])
It is for this reason that Rousseau would later advise the Corsicans to
make equality the fundamental law of their constitution.
This social struggle is perpetual because, unlike natural desires, those
generated by society are limitless and insatiable. “Self-love [amour de soi],
which regards only ourselves,” Rousseau writes in Emile, “is contented
when our true needs are satisfied. But amour-propre, which makes com-
parisons, is never content and never could be, because this sentiment, pre-
ferring ourselves to others, also demands others to prefer us to themselves,
which is impossible” (E, 213–214 [OC IV, 493]).
According to Rousseau, this obsessive and ceaseless comparison with
others has the paradoxical effect of leading to divisive social competition
and even warfare while increasing our dependence on others as we com-
pete for their esteem and recognition. Social life gives birth to an endless
proliferation of unnatural “needs” for status and position, leading us into
fierce competition for their satisfaction. The inevitable failure to satisfy all
of these so-called needs lowers us in the eyes of others, which fuels even
greater efforts to satisfy them in a vicious circle that reduces social life to a
state of utter misery. In his preface to the play Narcissus Rousseau
describes the contradictory social effects of philosophy and the arts and
sciences, which he depicts as manifestations of human vanity. On the one
hand, they “loosen all the bonds of esteem and good will which tie men to
society.” On the other hand “the sciences, arts, luxury, commerce, laws,
and all the other ties which, by tightening among men the ties of society
Unsociable Man 53
from personal interest, put them all in mutual dependence, give them
reciprocal needs, and common interests” (PN, 193 [OC II, 968]).
Conclusion
All of this is consistent with Rousseau’s lifelong insistence on the natural

goodness of human beings, a view he shared with virtually all of the
philosophes. The “great principle” of all his works, he tells us in his
Dialogues, is “that nature made man happy and good, but that society
depraves him and makes him miserable” (RJJ, 213 [OC I, 934]). Even so,
Rousseau reintroduced the radical, pre-Enlightenment pessimism of
Hobbes into eighteenth century social theory and, more importantly,
linked it to the principle of enlightenment by claiming that the latter, as
understood by the philosophes, exacerbates the social war of all against
all. Louis Althusser is therefore quite correct when he writes that
Rousseau’s theoretical greatness is “to have taken up the most frightening
aspects of Hobbes” by socializing them.17
Although Rousseau believed that amour-propre is as inescapable as
society itself, he thought that, under highly exceptional conditions, it can
be used to strengthen social bonds. He was deeply pessimistic about the
likelihood that such circumstances would emerge even under the best of
conditions, and he considered the civilization of modern Europe to be the
least favorable to them. However, he did see some faint hope for establish-
ing a semblance of Sparta in those obscure corners of modern Europe that
the philosophes regarded as the most backwards: Poland, Geneva, and
Corsica. The fact that he wrote works such as The Social Contract—
which he claimed was modeled on Geneva—his Letter to d’Alembert, the
Constitutional Project for Corsica, and The Government of Poland (writ-
ten 1770–1771; published 1782), suggests that for a time Rousseau
thought that there was at least some prospect that some approximation of
the ancient “republic of virtue” was remotely possible under modern con-
ditions.18 However, even this faint hope had been abandoned by the time
he wrote his last work, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, a hymn to the con-
solations of virtuous solitude in an age of complete and irredeemable cor-
ruption.19 It is little wonder that Rousseau devoted much of his time and
attention in the last years of his life to botany, as he turned away from the
city of man to the study and contemplation of nature.
Chapter Four
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment
Republic of Virtue
Introduction
G iven his deeply pessimistic social assumptions, Rousseau argues that

sentiments must be fostered artificially by means of institutions and
beliefs that systematically reshape the individual’s antisocial passions in a
way that promotes the formation and strengthening of social bonds that
do not arise spontaneously. “Good institutions,” he writes in Emile, “are
those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence
from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the
common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no
longer one but part of the unity and no longer feels except within the
whole” (E, 40 [OC IV, 249]). By not only denying the naturalness of soci-
ety but asserting the presence of powerful antisocial forces, Rousseau pro-
vided a pretext for the state’s active involvement in social life, as an
agency for manufacturing sociability. The philosophes, by contrast, took
sociability more or less for granted. They saw themselves as liberators of
individuals from the fetters of tradition, social customs and religious intol-
erance, the crushing weight of which prevents us from using our natural
powers to improve our condition and attain happiness in this life. To the
extent that they relied on the state, it was to bring this condition of
“enlightenment” about, and not directly to cultivate sociability, which
they thought natural. Rousseau rejected the optimistic Enlightenment
belief that the delicate equilibrium of society can be sustained primarily on
the basis of natural sociability, reason, and the spontaneous harmony of
diverse and competing interests. He viewed social life as, at best, an
extremely precarious and unstable balance of forces. The philosophes, he
held, are not only blind to this, but actually exacerbate it, whereas the
institutions he prescribed would mitigate the powerful centrifugal tenden-
55
56 Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Republic of Virtue
cies that constantly threaten social life with disintegration. That is why he
regarded a harsh Spartan politics that sanctifies social life and promotes
intense patriotic sentiments as the only effective means of artificially
adapting naturally selfish individuals to society.
Extending amour-propre
Rousseau insisted that any solution (or partial solution) to the social
predicament humans find themselves in must be based on an acceptance
of the fact that individuals in society are necessarily dominated by amour-
propre, the social form of amour de soi. However, he believed that it is
possible to mitigate the social divisiveness of amour-propre by refocusing
it, away from individuals and towards national communities. The “well-
ordered society” is one that maintains institutions, practices and beliefs
that “lead us out of ourselves,” diffusing our individual selfishness
throughout society and minimizing the distance between our particular
interests and the common interests we share. By uniting individual wills
and interests with the social will and the common interest in this way,
amour-propre becomes an extended form of social, rather than individual,
selfishness; love of oneself becomes love of ourselves. “Let us extend
amour-propre to other beings,” Rousseau writes in Emile. “We shall
transform it into a virtue” (E, 252 [OC IV, 547]). This extension of
amour-propre is not meant to negate the interests of the individual, or to
subordinate those interests to the community. Rather, Rousseau wished to
redefine the individual good in terms of the public good, to turn individu-
als into citizens through an extension of individual amour-propre. This
involves an enlargement of the each person’s affections and a reshaping of
his or her interests and identity. For Rousseau, the most virtuous citizens,
as found in ancient Sparta for example, are those for whom the distinction
between the individual and the community cannot effectively be made.
However, Rousseau warns that a global diffusion of amour-propre
would be unable to generate a sufficiently strong bond of attachment
between individuals to preserve social unity. “[T]he feeling of humanity
evaporates and weakens as it is extended over the whole world,” he writes
in his Encyclopédie article on “Political Economy” (1755). “Interest and
commiseration must in some way be confined and compressed to be acti-
vated” (DPE, 151 [OC III, 254–255]). According to this article, the opti-
mal extension of amour-propre, one that mitigates the divisive effects of
individual selfishness without completely dissipating it through over-
extension, focuses on the small patrie. Rousseau maintains that a strong
sense of patriotic identity is crucial to counteract the strength of divergent
wills by redirecting them, rather than actually repressing them, towards a
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Republic of Virtue 57
common end. Henri d’Aguesseau’s (1668–1751) claim in his 1715 address

“L’Amour de la patrie” that in republics the “love of the patrie becomes a
species of l’amour-propre” perfectly encapsulates Rousseau’s argument.1
“[T]he greatest miracles of virtue have been produced by love of father-
land,” he writes. “By combining the force of amour-propre with all the
beauty of virtue, this sweet and ardent sentiment gains an energy which,
without disfiguring it, makes it the most heroic of all the passions. It pro-
duced the many immortal actions whose splendor dazzles our weak eyes”
(DPE, 151 [OC III, 255]). Thus it was to amour de la patrie, modeled on
the small, cohesive city-states of antiquity rather than the modern nation-
state, that the republican Rousseau pinned what little hope he had for a
politics of virtue in the modern age. He wished above all to preserve, to
the greatest extent possible, the unity of individual and society, public and
private, particular will and general will, individual interest and common
interest that he believed had once prevailed in the ancient Greek polis.2
Since individuals do not naturally identify themselves with particular
communities, and private interest and the general good “are mutually
exclusive in the natural order of things” (GMS, 79 [OC III, 284]),
Rousseau argues that something external to the individual is necessary to
engineer this extension of individual amour-propre. This is the job of the
legislator, who occupies a central position in both The Social Contract and
The Government of Poland. Citing the examples of Lycurgus, Moses, and
Numa, Rousseau contends that such semidivine individuals are vital to the
establishment of a well-ordered society. Their “genius” lay in their ability
to engineer moeurs, customary habits and foundational laws, beliefs, and
institutions that shaped lasting communities of public-spirited citizens
from a fractious assemblage of essentially self-regarding individuals or
groups. Their task, in other words, was that of “changing human nature”
so that amour-propre is focused on the national community rather than
the individual. The individual’s identification with a cohesive national
community is therefore dependent on a charismatic authority standing
outside and over it, shaping its identity from birth so that it thinks of itself
and its interests principally in terms of the nation to which it belongs.
One who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel
that he is capable of changing human nature, so to speak; of
transforming each individual, who by himself is a perfect and soli-
tary whole, into a part of a larger whole from which this individ-
ual receives, in a sense, his life and his being; of altering man’s
conviction in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and
moral existence for the physical and independent existence we
have all received from nature. He must, in short, take away man’s
own forces in order to give him forces that are foreign to him and
that he cannot make use of without the help of others. The more
these natural forces are dead and destroyed, and the acquired
ones great and lasting, the more the institution as well is solid and
perfect. So that if each Citizen is nothing, and can do nothing,
except with all the others. (SC, 155 [OC III, 381-382])
Rousseau’s legislator miraculously binds individuals together by man-

ufacturing an intensely powerful sense of national solidarity that can with-
stand the “conquests, dispersions, revolutions, centuries” that gradually
erode the public spirit of most communities. That is why the Jews are a
“unique marvel,” the “divine or human causes of which deserve the study
and admiration of wise men” (PF, 34 [OC III, 499]). The greatness of
Moses as a legislator is that he founded an enduring regime of morals,
laws, and practices that not only indissolubly bound ancient Jews
together, but did so in a highly exclusivistic manner. The laws and tradi-
tions of ancient Israel were designed so that they “could not be blended
with those of the other nations; he [Moses] weighed it down with distinc-
tive rites and ceremonies; he constrained it in a thousand ways in order to
keep it constantly alert and to make it forever a stranger among other
men, and all the bonds of fraternity he introduced among the members of
his republic were as many barriers which kept it separated from its neigh-
bours and prevented it from mingling with them” (GP, 180 [OC III,
956–957]). The same is true of Lycurgus who, by establishing a form of
life that kept Sparta constantly in the minds of its citizens, distracted them
from adopting foreign habits and cultivated in their hearts an “ardent love
of fatherland” that was always their “strongest or rather their sole pas-
sion, and made of them beings above humanity” (GP, 181 [OC III, 957]).
Also, Rousseau believed that the Jews of antiquity wisely distrusted learn-
ing and were preoccupied with religion. Their deep prejudice against the
arts and sciences and the inferior quality of their scholars and philoso-
phers had, he thought, helped to preserve their intense religiosity and their
remarkably resilient national solidarity.
Closely related to the exclusivity of the Jews and the Spartans was
their self-sufficiency, which Rousseau regarded as an essential condition of
freedom. “No one who depends on others, and lacks resources of his own,
can ever be free,” he lectured the Corsicans (CPC, 280 [OC III, 903]). It
was their “isolated and simple life” that made them modernity’s most
promising candidate for patriotic greatness, Rousseau thought. He advised
them to establish their capital city far from the sea, which will “keep the
morality, simplicity, uprightness and national character of its inhabitants
intact longer than if it were subject to foreign influences” (CPC, 293 [OC
III, 912]).
On Rousseau’s account, religion and patriotism come together in the

“extraordinary man” of the legislator. Unlike the foundation of political
society envisaged by Hobbes and Locke, he stresses the need for a legisla-
tor who relies principally on religion and myth rather than reason, self-
interest, or fear to “bind the citizens to the fatherland and to one
another.” Religion, which serves as an instrument of politics at the origin
of nations to awe individuals into obedience, is intended to compensate
for the cognitive limitations of the “blind multitude” and the natural
weakness of reason. For Rousseau, religion substitutes for reason as the
cement of society and the means of inducing respect for the laws. The leg-
islator, who is forbidden from using force and cannot appeal to reason,
“must necessarily have recourse to another order of authority, which can
win over without violence and persuading without convincing” (SC, 156
[OC III, 383]).3 The source of this authority is God; only his will can
inspire individuals to revere the laws. Thus the “great souled” legislator is
capable of “making the Gods speak” in a way that persuades otherwise
asocial individuals to be “subjected to the laws of the State as to those of
nature,” so that, seeing “the same power in the formation of man and of
the city, [they] might obey with freedom and bear with docility the yoke of
public felicity” (SC, 156 [OC III, 383]). Rousseau’s legislator is a prophet
and (perhaps) a poet, whose “magic” produces a nation, rather than a
philosopher who appeals to reason. Hence Rousseau’s disdain for the
eighteenth century’s foremost philosopher-kings, Frederick the Great and
Peter the Great. While a legislator features in the political writings of
many philosophes, virtually all of them agreed with Jean-François de
Saint-Lambert’s 1765 Encyclopédie article on the subject, which opposed
recourse to divine inspiration as a basis for the laws.4 Voltaire was, as
usual, even more scornful, describing the figure of a divinely inspired leg-
islator as a “charlatan,” writing in The Philosophy of History (1765) that,
if he had met with one of these “great quacks” in a public square:
I should have called out to him to stop, and not compromise
with the Divinity; you would cheat me, if you make him come
down to teach us what we all knew; you would doubtless turn
him to some other use; you would avail yourself of my agreeing
to eternal truths, be but ill-acquainted with the human heart, to
suppose it preach thee to the people as a tyrant who blas-
phemeth!5
Statecraft as Soulcraft
The work of Rousseau’s legislator is done once he has formed a nation

and securely established its basic constitution.6 The laws and practices that
he institutes function as he did, continuously shaping souls and relying on

the manipulation of sentiments to reform men into citizens. In the
Discourse on Inequality Rousseau distinguishes between l’homme moral
and l’homme physique, corresponding to the “inner man” and the “outer
man.”7 The latter is the focus of modern political theories, which it is one
of the central objectives of The Social Contract to refute, since they
depend on an entirely external view of law and the state, ignoring their
power to shape values and identity—the inner man.8 Such theories are
based on the brute fact of power and regulate external behavior rather
than altering social norms and beliefs—“written in the hearts of citi-
zens”—as was the case in Sparta, where “the laws are the source of
morals” (PF, 26 [OC III, 487]). The paradigmatic example of such
modern political systems is that of Hobbes. While such a system may be
capable of preserving a precarious peace for a time, Rousseau thought, it
is both immoral and extremely unstable. “As long as Laws only concern
actions and say nothing to the will, they will always be badly observed”
(PF, 31 [OC III, 493]). Hobbes’s authoritarian political system does not
aspire to create any deep bond of attachment or identity between its mem-
bers or to turn them into virtuous citizens. The state, rather than shaping
the identity and intentions of its naturally antisocial subjects in a manner
conducive to the creation of an ethos of mutual identification and fellow-
ship, merely relies on fear, self-interest, and the threat of force to ensure
outward compliance with externally enforced laws.
Rousseau does reluctantly concede that the maintenance of social and
political order will occasionally require the resort to physical force. It is
this need that lies behind his notorious claim in The Social Contract that
freedom in society may sometimes depend on a form of compulsion.
Recalcitrant individuals must be “forced to be free” if the general will is
to prevail over particular wills. Otherwise, as Henry Rempel writes, “the
‘moral and collective person’ of which the general will is the cement
would crumble to pieces, and there would be nothing left to protect each
man’s personal independence from the encroachments of his fellows.
There would remain only a cacophony of private wills.”9 Forcing individ-
uals to be free, Rousseau claims, is simply “the condition that, by giving
each Citizen to the fatherland, guarantees him against all personal
dependence; a condition that creates the ingenuity and functioning of the
political machine” (SC, 141 [OC III, 364]).
However, Rousseau insists that, notwithstanding the exceptional
resort to physical compulsion, social and political life should be based pri-
marily on moral force. Indeed, regular resort to coercion is symptomatic
of a regime that is lacking moral legitimacy. Where force is widely used, it
can only be because the citizens are lacking virtue, which acts on their
consciences to prevent them from breaking the law in the first place. That
is why “Laws that speak constantly of punishing and never of rewarding

are more suited to restrain scoundrels than to train honourable men. As
long as Laws only concern actions and say nothing to the will, they will
always be badly observed” (PF, 31 [OC III, 495]). The purpose of The
Social Contract is to elaborate a political theory based on l’homme moral,
since “force is a physical power; I do not see how its effects could produce
morality. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an
act of prudence. In what sense can it be a moral duty?” (SC, 133 [OC III,
354]). In other words, Rousseau’s political theory is fundamentally a
theory of political morality in which laws, institutions, and practices set
normative standards of behavior that act on the consciences of their sub-
jects—on the inner self—rather than merely threatening force or appealing
to naked self-interest. “The law acts only externally and regulates only
actions. Morals alone penetrate internally and direct wills” (PF, 71 [OC
III, 552]). For the law to have real moral force there must be a structure of
relations within which our moral powers can develop and an ethos that
sustains and nurtures them. Addressing the Poles, Rousseau wrote that no
constitution “will ever be good and solid unless the law rules the citizens’
hearts. So long as the legislative force does not reach that deep, the laws
will invariably be evaded” (GP, 179 [OC III, 955]).
Rousseau’s conception of “statecraft as soulcraft” is perhaps most
apparent in his essay on The Government of Poland. One of the principal
duties of the state, as we have seen, is the cultivation of “sentiments of
sociability,” which is best achieved through the promotion of “that patri-
otic intoxication which alone is capable of raising men above themselves”
(GP, 239 [OC III, 1019]). The state must inculcate as strong a sense of
civic attachment and identification as possible, focusing on shaping the
hearts and the minds of its citizens rather than coercing their bodies into
compliance with an external sovereign will. “It is not enough,” Rousseau
insists, “to say to citizens, be good. It is necessary to teach them to be so,
and example itself, which is the first lesson in this regard, is not the only
means that must be used. Love of fatherland is the most effective, for as I
have already said, every man is virtuous when his private will conforms
on all matters to the general will” (DPE, 150–151 [OC III, 254]). In this
way, he writes, an attentive and well-intentioned government, “ceaselessly
careful to maintain or revive love of fatherland and good morals among
the people, prevents from afar the evils that sooner or later result from the
indifference of citizens concerning the fate of the republic, and confines
within narrow limits that personal interest that so isolates private individ-
uals that the state is weakened by their power and cannot hope to gain
anything from their goodwill. Wherever the people loves its country,
respects the laws, and lives simply, little else remains to do to make it
happy” (DPE, 157 [OC III, 262]).
The key to Rousseau’s patriotic program is what he referred to as a

“truly national education.” Unlike the “party of humanity,” he called for
education to be put entirely in the service of particular national communi-
ties in order to prevent the corrosive spread of universal ideas and beliefs.
He rejected the view put forth by the philosophes that the universal arts
and sciences are an adequate basis for political community. He advised the
Poles to follow the example of the ancient Jews and strictly curtail their
development since they are destructive of vigorous moeurs, distinctive
identity, and an exclusive national spirit. This view, which is repeated in
many of Rousseau’s writings, is based on what he believed to be the
homogenizing force and debilitating moral and social effects of the diffu-
sion of knowledge from the educated few above to the virtuous masses
below.
It is education that must give souls the national form, and so
direct their tastes and opinions that they will be patriotic by
inclination, passion, necessity. Upon opening its eyes, a child
should see the fatherland, and see only it until his dying day.
Every true republican drank love of fatherland, that is to say love
of the laws and of freedom, with his mother’s milk. This love
makes up his whole existence; he sees only his fatherland, he
lives only for it; when he is alone, he is nothing: when he no
longer has a fatherland, he no longer is, and if he is not dead, he
is worse than dead. (GP, 189 [OC III, 966])
Rousseau also advised would-be legislators to establish “exclusive
and national” religious ceremonies; games which “[keep] the Citizens fre-
quently assembled;” exercises that increase their national “pride and self-
esteem;” and spectacles which, by reminding citizens of their glorious
past, “stirred their hearts, fired them with a lively spirit of emulation, and
strongly attached them to the fatherland with which they were being kept
constantly occupied” (GP, 181–182 [OC III, 958]). The goal of such prac-
tices is to raise each citizen’s sense of patriotic identification to its “highest
possible pitch.”
It was the social and political experience of antiquity that provided
Rousseau with his ideal of an integrated national community, epitomized
by Sparta, a regime much despised by philosophes such as Voltaire, as
Rousseau well knew. “My adversaries’ discomfiture is evident whenever
they have to speak of Sparta,” he wrote (Final, 119 [OC III, 83]). Athens,
by contrast, did not appeal to him, as it did to many of the philosophes.
Sparta offered a stark alternative to the form of life that had, he thought,
come to dominate modern Europe, which Rousseau regarded as inimical
to virtue. This modern form of life was, essentially, French. As the
philosophe Charles Bordes (1711–1781) wrote, France had become “the
model and arbiter of Europe” in the eighteenth century.10 Rousseau reluc-

tantly agreed that it had—to the detriment of Europe. The “general
European tendency is to adopt the tastes and morals of the French,” he
wrote. All the more reason, he thought, that ancient practices “ought to
be preserved, restored, and suitable new ones introduced that are distinc-
tively the Poles’ own” (GP, 185 [OC III, 962]).
Rousseau believed that the contagion of French civilization had
already wiped out most of the distinctive national traditions and cultures of
Europe, so that there were “no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards,
even Englishmen nowadays; regardless of what people may say; there are
only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same
morals, because none has been given a national form by a distinctive insti-
tution. All will do the same things under the same circumstances” (GP, 184
[OC III, 960]). By fostering an intense spirit of patriotic identity and a
fierce independence, the Poles could protect themselves from this powerful
homogenizing force. Rousseau claimed that institutions and practices
should be matched to the particular circumstances, history and culture of
each nation, “[f]or each people has, or ought to have, a national character”
(CPC, 293 [OC III, 913]). Rousseau declares in his Letter to d’Alembert
that “[m]an is one; I admit it! But man modified by religions, governments,
laws, customs, prejudices, and climates becomes so different from himself
that one ought not to seek among us for what is good for men in general,
but only what is good for them in this or that country” (LA, 17 [OC V,
16]). Even freedom is not “the fruit of every Climate” he tells us in The
Social Contract, echoing Montesquieu. “The same laws cannot be suited to
such a variety of provinces, which have different morals, live in contrasting
climates, and cannot tolerate the same form of government. . . . The author
of The Spirit of Laws has given large numbers of examples of the art by
which the legislator directs the institutions toward each of these object”
(SC, 159, 163 [OC III, 387, 392–393]).11
Rousseau attacked the introduction of modern French theater in
Geneva for the same reasons he opposed the adoption of foreign tastes
and institutions in Poland. His most extensive discussion of this subject
occurs in his Letter to d’Alembert, which was written as a response to an
article that appeared in the Encyclopédie. In it, d’Alembert had defended
the salutary effects of modern theater, which would add urban “finesse”
and “delicacy” to the course, rustic tastes of the provincial Genevans. It
was partly for this reason that his friend Voltaire had been staging plays at
his home near Rousseau’s native city, which had once outlawed the theater
under sumptuary ordinances. The thought of Voltaire undermining the
simple decency of his compatriots with the sophisticated tastes of Paris
was more than Rousseau could bear. He denounced such “courtly enter-
tainments,” which only make men soft and effeminate, and “distracts
them, isolates them, makes them forget their fatherland and their duty”
(GP, 186 [OC III, 962]). The Protestant, republican Rousseau bristled
with indignation at the thought of his hardy, virtuous Genevans watching
the cynical comedies of Molière who, “for the sake of multiplying his
jokes, shakes the whole order of society; how scandalously he overturns
all the most sacred relations on which it is founded; how ridiculous he
makes the respectable rights of fathers over their children, of husbands
over their wives, of masters over their servants!” (LA, 35 [OC V, 32]). He
saw modern French theater as symptomatic of a general debasement he
attributed to the alleged “enlightenment” of his age. “But such is the taste
that must be flattered on the stage; such are the morals [manners] of an
educated age. Knowledge, wit, and courage alone have our admiration.
And thou, modest Virtue, thou remain’st ever unhonoured! Blind men that
we are, amidst so much enlightenment!” (LA, 29 [OC V, 27]). If anything,
Rousseau thought, the peoples of Europe should emulate the democratic
rusticity and virtue of the Swiss, whose isolation and simple, austere ways
had protected them from external threats to their morals. However, the
recent importation of foreign ideas and tastes by the city’s wealthy citizens
was causing them to become soft, degenerate, and increasingly indistin-
guishable from other Europeans. In a state as small as Geneva, Rousseau
warned, “all innovations are dangerous and . . . they ought never to be
made without urgent and grave motives” (LA, 123 [OC V, 113]). Not sur-
prisingly, as Maurice Cranston notes in his biography of Rousseau, the
Letter to d’Alembert was regarded by many encyclopédistes as “being
itself a contribution to the new wave of reaction and censorship in
France.”12
Rousseau’s “Manly” Republic
The Spartan “republic of virtue” that Rousseau advised the Corsicans, the
Poles and the Genevans to emulate was poor in money but rich in virtue.
He preferred a national economy based on bartered goods rather than
money, which is the social “bond” of modern cities, such as Paris, whereas
patriotism was the bond of genuinely virtuous societies such as Sparta.
For one thing, such a policy would help to isolate rare pockets of national
virtue such as Geneva from the international financial system, thereby
protecting their independence and distinctiveness. “With any movement of
trade and commerce,” he warned the Corsicans, “it is impossible to pre-
vent destructive vices from creeping into a nation” (CPC, 309 [OC III,
924–925]). Money may be good at creating wealth, Rousseau conceded,
but it cannot ensure freedom, which is infinitely more precious. That is
why, in a “free, peaceful and wise nation,” money will be both “con-
temptible” and “useless.” It creates inequality, which fans the flames of
amour-propre and works against the development of sentiments of socia-
bility. Better, Rousseau thought, to confine wealth “within the narrowest
possible limits; to give it a measure, a rule, a rein which will contain,
direct, and subjugate it, and keep it ever subordinate to the public good.
In short, I want the property of the state to be as large and strong, that of
the citizens as small and weak, as possible” (CPC, 316–317 [OC III,
930–931]). He believed that money also debases morals, since it fosters
wealth, which leads to higher taxes, forcing peasants to sell the produce of
their land and work as petty traders and salesmen. Their children are then
raised in “the debauching atmosphere of trade, grow attached to the cities
and lose all taste for their calling.” Before long, he says, “the country is
deserted, and the city teems with vagrants” (CPC, 303 [OC III, 920]).
Rousseau also favored sumptuary laws designed to minimize the cor-
rupting effects of luxury and to prevent the spread of “the clatter, the glit-
ter, and the luxurious decorations that are common at courts” (GP, 187
[OC III, 964]).13 In this he found himself on the side of Geneva’s austere,
Calvinist artisan class—his own class—against the city’s grand,
Francophile patriciate that had grown rich and corrupt from the trade in
luxury goods. An intellectual defense of the latter had been formulated by
theorists such Barbeyrac and Burlamaqui, who blended the language of
“doux commerce” with that of natural law theory in an effort to legiti-
mate oligarchic rule in Geneva. As a result, as Helena Rosenblatt writes,
in eighteenth-century Geneva “ ‘enlightened progress’ became the ally of
the oligarchical reaction while the opposition armed itself with both
Calvinist moral theology and the language of classical republicanism. This
goes a long way to explain Rousseau’s hostility toward French enlighten-
ment values, his ‘counter-cultural’ stand, and his seemingly ‘archaic’ devo-
tion to classical republican and Christian values.”14
Rousseau’s assault on luxury in his Letter to d’Alembert appears to
have been spurred by the situation in his native city, where he could see no
“public virtues” arising from the increasingly free reign of “private vices.”
He denounced the theater with puritanical fervor as a “monument of
luxury and softness being elevated on the ruins of our antique simplicity
and threatening from afar the public liberty” (LA, 96 [OC V, 88]). Nor
did he restrict this argument to Geneva. He also recommended the imple-
mentation of sumptuary laws in Corsica, which he declared must “reject
the idle arts, the arts of pleasure and luxury” if they are to become and
remain virtuous and united. This holds for Poland as well, where luxury
should be completely “extirpated from the depth of men’s hearts.” Given
the difficulty of doing this, Rousseau conceded that some forms of
luxury—“military luxury, the luxury of weapons and horses”—should be
tolerated while all “effeminate finery” should be held in utter contempt

(GP, 188–189 [OC III, 965]).
If your only wish is to become noisy, brilliant, fearsome, and to
influence the other peoples of Europe, you have their example,
seek to follow it. Cultivate the sciences, the arts, commerce,
industry, maintain regular troops, fortifications, Academies,
above all a good financial system which makes money circulate
well, which thereby multiplies it, which provides you with a lot
of it; strive to make it very necessary, in order to keep the people
in great dependence, and to that end foster material luxury as
well as the mental luxury which is inseparable from it. This way
you will form a people that is scheming, intense, greedy, servile,
and knavish like the others, forever at one of the two extremes of
misery and opulence, of license or slavery, without any middle
ground: but you will be reckoned among the great powers of
Europe, you will be a party to all political systems, you will be
sought out as an ally in all negotiations, you will be tied by
treaties: there will not be a single war in Europe into which you
will not have the honor of being dragged. (GP, 224 [OC III,
1003])
What Rousseau was anxious to cultivate and preserve in Geneva,
Poland, and Corsica was the lean, rustic, “masculine” hardness of ancient
Sparta (akin to his Emile) against the fat, urban, “feminine” softness of
modern Paris. This contrast pervades his writings.
I regard finance as the fat of the body politics, fat which, when
clogged up in certain muscular tissues, overburdens the body
with useless obesity, and makes it heavy rather than strong. I
want to nourish the state on a more salutary food, which will
add to its substance; food capable of turning into fibre and
muscle without clogging the vessels; which will give vigour
rather than grossness to the members, and strengthen the body
without making it heavy. (CPC, 316–317 [OC III, 930-931])
Rousseau hoped that, with the right education, practices, customs, morals,
and institutions, Poland could have the “solidity and vigor” of a small
republic, despite being a large kingdom. This would be possible if they
restored “simple morals, wholesome tastes, a warlike spirit free of ambi-
tion” (GP, 224–225 [OC III, 1003–1004]). The Genevans must do the
same, so that “everything in them breathes, along with a secret patriotic
charm, which makes them attractive, a certain martial spirit befitting free
men” (LA, 135–136 [OC V, 123–124]). The modern French theater
would have the opposite effect, turning citizens “into wits, housewives
into bluestockings, and daughters into sweethearts,” resulting in a “soft

disposition and a spirit of inaction” (LA, 64–65 [OC V, 59]). The
“harsh poverty” in which many Genevans had traditionally lived left
them happy and contented. It was only with the introduction of wealth,
luxury, and inequality that dissatisfaction and resentment spread. The
best ways to harden citizens was for them to engage in agriculture and
participate in the militia, where they would become strong and robust.
The regular armies and mercenary troops recruited by modern cities are
typically “flabby and mutinous; they cannot bear the fatigues of war;
they break down under the strain of marching; they are consumed by ill-
ness; they fight among themselves and fly before the enemy” (CPC, 283
[OC III, 905]).
Rousseau’s hostility to large cities, the centers of civilization, was as
intense as his enthusiasm for rural life and small city-states.15 They are full
of “scheming, idle people without religion or principle, whose imagina-
tion, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs,
engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes” (LA, 58–59 [OC V,
54]). The modern city is a Hobbesian state of war where men and women
converge in order to “devour each other, to make a frightful desert of the
rest of the world” (EOL, 310 [OC V, 401]). The worst cities, Rousseau
believed, were capital cities, and the worst of these was Paris, “an abyss in
which virtually the whole nation loses its morals, its laws, its courage and
its freedom” and breathes forth “a constant pestilence which finally saps
and destroys the nation” (CPC, 291–292 [OC III, 911–912]). The sheer
scale of large cities also precludes the formation of a general will, which
requires the intimacy of Sparta, Athens, or Geneva. And without a general
will, there can be no legitimate political order based on principles of right.
Conclusion
Rousseau shared none of the French Enlightenment’s faith in the self-sus-

taining capacity and “spontaneous order” of civil society. Indeed, he
thought that, given the divisiveness of amour-propre and the absence of
natural sociability, civil society would inevitably undermine itself in the
absence of active external support from a civil religion and a patriotic
state. In this Rousseau agreed with Hobbes, for whom there could be no
social order without political order. Rousseau’s pessimistic social assump-
tions made the prospects for a just and lasting political order very remote
indeed. He believed that a few great legislators had successfully estab-
lished such regimes by setting in place institutions, practices, and moeurs
that artificially manufactured “sentiments of sociability” not found in
human nature. These were the great political exemplars to whom we
should look for guidance, Rousseau thought. While most of them were
found in antiquity—when conditions were optimal for such regimes—
modernity boasted a few examples of its own. And the future held out
some prospect of such a regime in Corsica, where all of the necessary con-
ditions existed; all that the Corsicans needed was a legislator with the
wisdom to exploit this rare opportunity by adopting his constitution.16
According to Rousseau, the only model for such an order was that of
the classical “republic of virtue” in which individual amour-propre is
extended across the entire civic community, creating an intense spirit of
patriotic fellowship to counter the divisive power of individual selfishness.
He explicitly rejected the ideal of an enlightened and cosmopolitan com-
mercial civilization in favor of a severe Counter-Enlightenment regime of
virtue, equality, and rustic simplicity. The regimes he admired most were
small, isolated, autarkic city-states such as ancient Israel, Sparta, Geneva,
and Corsica, while he looked on the large nation-states and empires of
Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Greece under Alexander, Imperial Rome, and
modern Europe as antithetical to human happiness and virtue.
Chapter Five
On the Utility of Religion
Introduction
I n eighteenth-century France the spread of anti-Christian and anticlerical

ideas in intellectual circles occurred against a background of growing
secularization in the broader society. Roger Chartier has cataloged the
many indexes of this process in pre-Revolutionary France, such as a
decrease in the number of priests, falling memberships in Marian congre-
gations, and a decline in religious texts’ share of the book trade, which fell
precipitously between the early 1750s and 1780s, whereas the number of
books sold on secular topics doubled. This broad secularizing trend
became particularly strong after 1750, when the philosophes’ crusade
against organized religion really took off. Chartier writes of this period
that,
after 1750, and perhaps even before, a critical attitude came into
being among a large segment of the population of France . . . this
new attitude induced people to abandon their traditional actions,
reject inculcated obedience, and perceive sources of power for-
merly viewed as objects of awe and reverence in a more
detached, ironical, or suspicious manner. In this sense, it is legiti-
mate to recognize an erosion of authority in the decades preced-
ing the French Revolution.1
At first, both church and state in France were fairly relaxed in their
attitudes towards Enlightenment ideas. “Before the late 1750s,” D. W.
Smith writes in his study of Helvétius, “the Church was not afraid of the
thought of the Enlightenment and met new ideas with rational criticism
more often than with bigoted fury. Its treatment of the Encyclopédie in
the early stages was exemplary.”2 Given the quickening pace of secular-
ization in the decades prior to the Revolution, it is hardly surprising that
69
70 On the Utility of Religion
the attitude of both church and state in France cooled noticeably towards
those who actively promoted enlightenment. As the “floodwaters of impi-
ety” gradually rose in France in the second half of the century, and athe-
ism won increasing numbers of increasingly aggressive adherents among
free-thinking intellectuals, questions about where the limits to enlighten-
ment should be drawn, and what its social, political, and moral implica-
tions would be, acquired a practical urgency absent when Pierre Bayle
(1647–1706) made a case for the possibility of a society of atheists in the
late seventeenth century. Beginning with the publication of La Mettrie’s
controversial L’Homme machine in 1748, the deistic consensus of the
early Enlightenment was increasingly challenged by atheists such as
Helvétius, Naigeon, Diderot, and the Baron d’Holbach, who depicted reli-
gion as a form of pathological disorder in his La Contagion sacrée, ou
Histoire naturelle de la superstition (1768). Not surprisingly, Bayle’s work
became increasingly popular in France after 1750, aided by Marsy’s popu-
lar summary of his ideas in Analyse raisonnée de Bayle, which was pre-
dictably condemned by the Paris Parlement in 1756.3 By the time
Rousseau entered the fray of this debate Bayle’s reasoning, “which ran
wholly counter to all arguments on behalf of a social religion, [had]
entered the mainstream of enlightened speculation and caused some
debate.”4
Doctrinally, Rousseau had much in common with many moderate
philosophes. Like them, he rejected the doctrine of original sin, the exis-
tence of innate ideas, and the belief in miracles. He also regarded religion
as morally indispensable, a view he shared with both Voltaire and
d’Alembert and their orthodox opponents. Many moderate philosophes
welcomed his defense of natural religion in Emile, including Voltaire, who
was an avowed enemy of Rousseau’s by the time he read it. He also
thought that Rousseau’s defense of his faith in his letter to Christophe de
Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris (1763) was “very beautiful.”5 The fact
that Rousseau’s more orthodox religious opponents condemned Emile for
undermining revealed religion and for criticizing many aspects of tradi-
tional Christian dogma was counted in his favor by the philosophes. He
was condemned by the Church in France as “un ennemi de la réligion”
and Emile was banned for its religious heterodoxy in both Catholic Paris
and Calvinist Geneva. The Parlement of Paris interpreted Rousseau’s trea-
tise on education as a dangerous attempt to “destroy the truth of Holy
Scripture and the Prophecies, the certitude of the miracles enunciated in
the Holy Books, the infallibility of Revelation, the authority of the
Church.”6 The Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris and the
Archbishop of Paris published refutations of Emile, as did the Assemblée
du clergé and the Genevan authorities.7 The Small Council of Rousseau’s
native city denounced it as a book that “destroys the Christian religion
On the Utility of Religion 71
and all revelation”8 and ordered that it be destroyed with The Social
Contract as “reckless, scandalous, impious.” Rousseau was regarded by
the religious establishment at the time as a dangerous and subversive
figure, not as an ally.9
Even so, Rousseau’s republican defense of a civil religion in the final
chapter of The Social Contract separated him from the Enlightenment in a
very striking way. He believed that the inherent weakness and unreliability
of reason and the presence of intensely powerful antisocial forces such as
amour-propre made it socially and politically essential to reinforce the
institutions of the state by divinizing them. The philosophes were virtually
unanimous in rejecting this view, with some even seeing its author as a de
facto ally of the church. Diderot confided to his mistress that Rousseau
has “the devout party on his side. He owes their interest in him to the bad
things he says about philosophes. . . . They keep hoping that he will be
converted; they’re sure that a deserter from out camp must sooner or later
pass over into theirs.”10 The same thought occurred to Voltaire, who asked
if Rousseau had “become a priest of the church?”11 Voltaire wrote in the
margin of his copy of The Social Contract that “[a]ll dogma is ridiculous,
deadly. All coercion on dogma is abominable. To compel belief is absurd.
Confine yourself to compelling good living.”12 In his Philosophical
Dictionary he explicitly rejected coercion in matters of religion; persua-
sion, he argues, is the only legitimate means available to change minds.
For his part, Rousseau took to referring to the philosophes indiscrimi-
nately as “Ardent missionaries of Atheism” (RSW, 21 [OC I, 1014]) who
propagated their beliefs “with all the ardour of the most zealous mission-
aries” (RJJ, 239 [OC I, 968]).13
Atheists such as Helvétius, whom Rousseau had taken to task in Emile
for his materialism, had even more cause to be disturbed by The Social
Contract than deists.14 A decree of April 1757 in France sanctioned the
death penalty for authors convicted of attacking religion. Helvétius nar-
rowly escaped criminal prosecution when the Church successfully cam-
paigned to have his controversial De l’esprit (1758) suppressed. Yet in the
penultimate chapter of The Social Contract Rousseau claims that those who
publicly behave as though they do not believe in the civil religion—one
dogma of which is “the existence of an omnipotent, intelligent, benevolent
divinity that foresees and provides”—can legitimately be put to death.
Although the dogmas of his civil religion are deliberately few and general,
they go beyond what most of the leading philosophes writing in the second
half of the eighteenth century were prepared to accept, such as the exis-
tence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, and providential
Divinity, the afterlife, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the
wicked, and the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. Even a mod-
erate philosophe and deist such as Voltaire publicly questioned at least
some of the dogmas of Rousseau’s minimalistic civil religion. His decision

to publish the chapter on civil religion—with its public call for the banish-
ment of those who do not believe in its dogmas and the execution of those
who, having professed their belief, act as though they do not believe—may
be taken as indicative of the extent of his alienation from his erstwhile
philosophical colleagues by the 1760s.15
What most shocked and offended the philosophes, and alienated
Rousseau from atheists and deists alike, was his rejection of the
Enlightenment idea of a secular, rational state. For Rousseau, religion has
a crucial role to play not only in underwriting morality and sustaining the
fragile bonds of society but in political life as well. This is one of the prin-
cipal reasons for his intense admiration for the civic cults of antiquity, in
which religion and politics were united. The “religion of the citizen,” as
he called it, “combines the divine cult and love of the laws, and by making
the fatherland the object of the Citizens’ adoration, it teaches them that to
serve the State is to serve its tutelary God. It is a kind of Theocracy” (SC,
219–220 [OC III, 464–465]). Rousseau believed that society and politics
should not be separated from religion and morality, and that the charac-
teristically modern attempt to keep them apart lies at the heart of the
crisis that threatens it from within. If religion falls, he believed, so too
must morality, and with it society and politics; the fate of one is the fate of
all. He called for the wall between church and state that the philosophes
had fought to erect to be torn down in order to create a civil religion that
would foster a strong sense of identification with the polity and its laws
and promote religious conformity. This is hardly surprising given
Rousseau’s Calvinist background in Geneva, which had a strong tradition
of civil religion.16
The Religious Basis of Morality
At the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle argued in his Various
Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (1682) that there is no significant
difference in the behavior of Christians and atheists, since man “almost
never acts in accordance with his principles.”17 The springs of our actions,
he declared, are “temperament, the natural inclination toward pleasure,
the taste one contracts for certain objects, the desire to please someone, a
habit gained in the commerce with one’s friends, or some other disposition
that results from the ground of our nature, in whatever country one may
be born, and from whatever knowledge our mind may be filled with.”18
Therefore the religious beliefs that individuals hold are simply irrelevant
to their actual conduct, which is a function of their passions and tempera-
ment, not their professed convictions. From this Bayle drew the following
scandalous conclusion:
One sees by now how apparent it is that a society of atheists
would perform civil and moral actions as much as other societies
do, provided that it punish crimes severely and that it attach
honor and infamy to certain things. As the ignorance of a First
Being, a Creator and Preserver of the world, would not prevent
the members of this society from being sensitive to glory and
scorn, to reward and punishment, and to all the passions seen in
other men, and would not stifle all the lights [lumières] of
reason, people of good faith in commerce would be seen among
them who would help the poor, oppose injustice, be faithful to
friends. . . . There would be crimes of all kinds, I do not doubt it;
but there would not be more of them than in idolatrous societies
because all that caused the pagans to act, either for good or for
ill, would be found in a society of atheists, namely punishments
and rewards, glory and ignominy, temperament and education.19
Most philosophes admired “the immortal Bayle.”20 Voltaire in partic-
ular thought that he was “the greatest of the dialecticians who ever lived”
and deserved an “immortal reputation.”21 Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique
et critique (1697) was the most widely held book in private French
libraries in the eighteenth century.22 Voltaire described it as “the first work
of its kind in which one can learn how to think.”23 Yet he, in common not
only with most philosophes but with their orthodox opponents as well,
flatly rejected Bayle’s argument about the ethical irrelevance of faith. Most
believed that religion is essential to the maintenance of morality, for both
the unenlightened masses below and their rulers above. On this one point,
if on nothing else, the most conservative members of the University of
Paris’s Faculty of Theology concurred with anticlerics such as Voltaire,
who remarked that “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my
wife, to believe in God, and I fancy that as a result I shall suffer from less
theft and less cuckoldry.”24 Voltaire also thought that it would be best if
those in power believed in divine justice, for without that restraint, he
wrote, “I consider them like ferocious animals. . . . Atheism was very
common in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And what horri-
ble crimes at the court of Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X! The pontifi-
cal throne and the Church were beset with pillage, assassinations and
poisonings. Only fanaticism produced more crimes.”25 Montesquieu had
said as much in The Spirit of the Laws, where he claims that “religion,
even a false one, is the best warrant men can have of the integrity of
men.”26 He too attacked the “sophistry” of Bayle for arguing that no reli-
gion is better than a bad one.
Even if it were useless for subjects to have a religion, it would

not be useless for princes to have one and to whiten with foam
the only bridle that can hold those who fear no human laws. A
prince who loves and fears religion is a lion who yields to the
hand that caresses him or to the voice that pacifies him; the one
who fears and hates religion is like the wild beasts who gnaw the
chain that keeps them from throwing themselves on passers-by;
he who has no religion at all is that terrible animal that feels its
liberty only when it claws and devours.27
Even the skeptical d’Alembert thought that “nothing is more necessary

than a revealed religion, which may instruct us concerning so many
diverse objects. Designed to serve as a supplement to natural knowledge,
it shows us part of what was hidden, but it restricts itself to the things
which are absolutely necessary for us to know. The rest is closed for us
and apparently will be forever.”28 Voltaire agreed, fearing the anarchy that
would ensue in the absence of a popular belief in God and an afterlife. In
the entry on atheism in his Philosophical Dictionary his antipathy toward
Bayle’s idea of a society of atheists is palpable, although he also implies,
contrary to Rousseau, that atheists should be tolerated. “[A]theism,” he
writes, “is a monstrous evil in those who govern; that it is the same in
councillors, even though their lives be innocent, since they may influence
men who hold office; that even though it is less disastrous than fanaticism,
it is almost always as fatal to virtue.”29
For such philosophes, a benign—if remote—God was a necessary
condition for moral order, a view that aligned them with the critics of the
radical Enlightenment, and distinguished them from atheists such as La
Mettrie, Baron d’Holbach, Helvétius, Naigeon, and, eventually, Diderot,
for whom religion was a “buttress which always ends up bringing the
house down.”30 However, for the vast majority of philosophes, as for
Rousseau, no house could stand for long without it. At first Diderot
thought so too. In his Promenade du sceptique (1747) he tells a story of
an atheist who is robbed by a servant to whom he had imparted his disbe-
lief. However, he grew more skeptical with age, eventually turning against
religion in general, which he came to view as inimical to the humanistic
ethic he promoted. He wrote to Sophie Volland in 1765 that “[e]very-
where a God is admitted, there is a cult; wherever there is a cult, the natu-
ral order of duties is reversed and morals corrupted. Sooner or later, there
comes a moment when the notion that has prevented the stealing of an
ecu causes the slaughter of a hundred thousand men.”31 The most strident
nonbeliever was the Baron d’Holbach, who produced a large number of
anonymous atheist tracts. The deist Voltaire described him as an “[i]nsipid
writer”32 and complained of “the audacity with which [he] decides that
there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility. . . .

It [Holbach’s Système de la nature] is a pernicious work.”33 The
Encyclopédie article “Unitaires” by the Baron’s fellow atheist Jacques-
André Naigeon was privately denounced by Voltaire as “terrible.”34 Yet
even Voltaire was not entirely free of doubts, which he kept to himself. He
confessed to his private notebooks that religion “is not a brake, it is on
the contrary an encouragement to crime. All religion is founded on expia-
tion.” But only a few pages later, he notes that it is socially useful to have
a fear of the afterlife, although a bit later he again wonders: “Natural reli-
gion can suffice against solitary and secret crimes; but positive religion has
no brake for crimes committed together with others. . . . Religion even
encourages them; it blesses a hundred thousand men who are going to
slaughter each other.”35
No such doubts nagged at Rousseau, who believed that atheism is
simply incompatible with morality. In his Dialogues, he refers to it as a
“mutiny against conscience,” the key moral faculty that he called “the
very voice of the soul” linking us directly with God. This innate faculty
acts as an infallible moral guide, leading us to prefer good over evil. Those
who are deaf to the voice of conscience are deaf “to what God says to the
heart of man,” and are consequently no longer constrained by his will (E,
295 [OC IV, 608]). As a result, the Savoyard vicar in Emile declares, those
who deny the existence of the soul, such as atheists, deprive “the powerful
and the rich of the only break on their passions. They tear out from the
depths of our hearts remorse for crime and hope of virtue, and yet boast
that they are the benefactors of mankind” (E, 312 [OC IV, 632]). In other
words, we risk being plunged into an anarchical, amoral situation similar
to that which Hobbes erroneously attributed to the state of nature. This
connection between atheism and moral anarchy is expressed with even
greater force in Rousseau’s Dialogues:
Men nurtured from childhood by an intolerant impiety pushed

to fanaticism, by fearless and shameless libertinage; youth with-
out discipline, women without morals, peoples without faith,
Kings without law, without a Superior whom they fear and free
of any kind of limit, all the duties of conscience destroyed, patri-
otism and attachment to the Prince extinguished in all hearts,
and finally no social bond other than strength: it seems to me
one can easily foresee what must soon come of all that. Europe
prey to masters taught by their own teachers to have no other
guide than their interest nor any god besides their passions, at
times secretly starved, at times openly devastated, inundated
everywhere with soldiers, Actors, prostitutes, corrupting books
and destructive vices, seeing races unworthy to live be born and
perish in its bosom, will sooner or later feel that these calamities
are the fruit of the new teachings, and judging them by their
deadly effects, will view with the same horror the professors, the
disciples, and all those cruel doctrines which, conferring absolute
empire over man to his senses and limiting everything to the
enjoyment of this brief life, make the century in which they reign
as despicable as it is unhappy. (RJJ, 241–242 [OC I, 971–972])
Rousseau believed that the voice of conscience had been all but
silenced in modern civilization. One of the principal objectives of his work
is to prescribe ways in which it can be restored, since it is the sine qua non
of morality itself.36
The Union of Church and State
Rousseau’s general interest in the practical uses of religion and his con-
cerns about the growing appeal of atheism and religious skepticism are
very closely related to his belief in the essential precariousness of society
and his grave doubts about the effectiveness of reason as a basis for social
and political order. Given the divisive presence of amour-propre, the
inherent weakness of reason, and the absence of natural social bonds, he
believed that social and political life would be impossible without religion,
one practical function of which is to stimulate artificially the individual’s
emotional identification with his community and its laws and institutions.
This identification will diminish the strength of each particular will, which
is inversely related to the strength of the general will. Thus, in the first
version of The Social Contract, Rousseau begins the chapter on civil reli-
gion with the claim that, “[a]s soon as men live in society, they must have
a Religion that keeps them there. A people has never subsisted nor ever
will subsist without Religion, and if it were not given one, it would make
one itself or would soon be destroyed” (GMS, 117 [OC III, 336]). He
assigned to religion a role much the same as that which he gave to patriot-
ism: to cultivate “sentiments of sociability” that are naturally lacking in
humans. For most philosophes, the existence of natural sociability made
religion socially unnecessary. Some even viewed it as socially destructive.
Not surprisingly, this latter view was common among atheists such as the
Baron d’Holbach, for whom religion “was and always will be incompati-
ble with moderation, sweetness, justice, and humanity.”
The circumstances that eventually led to the inclusion of the chapter
on civil religion in The Social Contract are revealing in this regard.
Rousseau first broached the matter in a 1756 letter to Voltaire that ended
with the wish that every state adopt a “Catechism of the Citizen,” a “kind
of civil profession of faith, containing, positively, the social maxims every-
one would be bound to acknowledge, and, negatively, the fanatical
maxims one would be bound to reject, not as impious, but as seditious.
Thus every Religion that could conform to the code would be allowed;
every Religion that did not conform to it would be proscribed; and every-
one would be free to have no other Religion than the code itself” (LV
245–246 [CC IV, 49–50]). Rousseau then exhorts Voltaire—of all
people—to undertake this work and “adorn it with your Poetry.” Such a
work, he thought, would consummate an illustrious career. Needless to
say, Voltaire declined this odd invitation.
The version of The Social Contract that Rousseau sent to his pub-
lisher in December 1760 did not contain a chapter on civil religion,
although it had been prepared in rough draft as early as the composition
of the first version of the book. However, shortly after sending the manu-
script to his publisher, the Marquise de Créqui wrote to Rousseau about
his novel Julie, stating that “I find it very good, but men have need of a
greater restraint than reason if they are to repress their customs”
(Marquise de Créqui to Rousseau, 6 February 1761 [CC VIII, 65]). In
fact, Rousseau had said as much himself several years earlier in his
Discourse on Inequality, in which he linked religion directly with the
weakness of reason.
[T]he frightful dissensions, the infinite disorders that this danger-
ous power would necessarily entail demonstrate more than any-
thing else how much human Governments needed a basis more
solid than reason alone, and how necessary it was for public
repose that divine will intervened to give Sovereign authority a
sacred and inviolable character which took from the subjects the
fatal Right of disposing of it. If Religion had accomplished only
this good for men, it would be enough to oblige them all to cher-
ish and adopt it, even with its abuses, since it spares even more
blood than fanaticism causes to be shed. (DI, 60–61 [OC III,
186])
Both this passage and the subsequent addition of a separate chapter on civil
religion in the final version of The Social Contract at least partially in
response to Créqui’s advice strongly suggest that Rousseau intended reli-
gion partly to compensate for the deficiencies of reason, “that great vehicle
of all our stupidities” (Rousseau to Philopolis, in DI, 127 [OC III, 230]).
In Emile he also claims that religion serves to compensate for the absence
of natural social bonds. As we have already seen, he not only regarded
human beings as naturally asocial, but also considered modern society to
be a Hobbesian state of war. “Irreligion, and in general the reasoning and
philosophic spirit,” he writes, “concentrates all the passions in the base-

ness of private interest, in the abjectness of the human me, and thus
silently saps the true foundations of all society; for what private interests
have in common is so little that it will never balance what they have in
opposition to each other” (E, 312 [OC IV, 633]).
The published version of Rousseau’s “Catechism of the Citizen” in
the last book of The Social Contract opens with an affirmation of the
view, contra Pierre Bayle, that “a State has never been founded without
religion serving as its base.” However, its primary focus is on William
Warburton (1698–1779), against whom Rousseau argues at length that
“Christian law is fundamentally more harmful than useful to the strong
constitution of a State” (SC, 219 [OC III, 464]).37 He distinguishes
between the religious truth of Christianity, which he accepts in some form,
and its social and political utility, which he categorically denies. What he
calls “the religion of man” is that of the private person, a version of which
is outlined in the “Profession of Faith” in Emile. Although he describes
this essentially personal religion of the Gospels as the “saintly, sublime,
genuine Religion,” he also claims that it lacks a particular relation to the
body politic, thereby leaving the law “with only their intrinsic force, with-
out adding any other force to them; and because of this, one of the great
bonds of particular societies remains without effect” (SC, 220 [OC III,
465]). The “religion of man” is theologically true but socially and politi-
cally disastrous. “I know of nothing,” Rousseau concludes, “more con-
trary to the social spirit” (SC, 220 [OC III, 465]). Machiavelli—“an
honourable man and a good citizen”—was right that Christianity has
caused a debilitating and destructive separation of the City of God from
the City of Man, with the latter subordinate to the former. Christianity’s
refus du monde turns our attention away from earthly concerns, thereby
allowing tyranny to flourish. That is why true Christians are “made to be
slaves.” It also creates divisions within the state, dividing loyalties and
interests rather than unifying individuals into a cohesive body politic. This
prevents the emergence of a single “general will,” without which a just
polity is impossible. Although the civil religions of antiquity were based
on “errors and lies,” they were highly effective in strengthening the patri-
otic attachment of individuals to the community. Rousseau also argued
that this kind of civic bond so essential to generating a common political
will is impossible for Christians, whose first allegiance is to the other-
worldly City of God. That is why Christianity is incompatible with good
citizenship. Rousseau calls on his readers to embrace both the “religion of
man” as a minimal personal faith and the “religion of the citizen” as a
civil doctrine designed to cement the bonds of society and to sanctify the
laws of the state.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau argues that it is the exclusive

responsibility of the political sovereign to define and enforce the articles of
the civil religion. “Now it matters greatly to the State that each citizen
have a Religion that causes him to love his duties,” he writes. “There is,
therefore, a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which are for
the sovereign to establish, not exactly as Religious dogmas, but as senti-
ments of sociability without which it is impossible to be a good Citizen or
a faithful subject” (SC, 222 [OC III, 468]). It is the sovereign’s duty to
check the spread of social and political disruption by the “séditieux.”
Once again, it is Sparta that provides Rousseau with his political ideal.
The sovereign reign of the general will requires that society be so unified
that there is no room left for any kind of independent association that
might constitute a rival will with an interest of its own. Such dissensus is
fatal to political unity and inimical to the absolute sovereignty of the gen-
eral will. Hence Rousseau’s praise for Hobbes for calling for the union of
the “two heads of the eagle:” religion and the state. Rousseau wishes to
counteract the powerful disintegrative forces that constantly militate
against the formation of a general will by utilizing the integrative power
of religion. He therefore strongly disapproves of religious nonconformity,
which fosters division rather than unity. It was in deference to this princi-
ple that he justified his return to Protestantism during his visit to Geneva
in 1754, even though he had ceased to be a Calvinist.
[T]he Gospel was the same for all Christians, and the basis of
dogma was different only in the things one got mixed up in
explaining that one did not understand, in each country it was
up to the Sovereign alone to settle both the worship and this
unintelligible dogma, and that consequently it was part of the
Citizen’s duty to accept the dogma and to follow the worship
prescribed by the law. Far from shaking my faith, frequentation
of the Encyclopedists had strengthened it as a result of my natu-
ral aversion for disputations and for factions. . . . I also judged
that everything that is form and discipline in each country fell
within the competence of the laws. From this principle—which is
so sensible, so social, so pacific, and which has drawn such cruel
persecutions on me—it followed that, wanting to be a Citizen, I
ought to be a Protestant and return into the worship established
in my country. (C, 329 [OC I, 392])
Even in his defense of natural religion in the “Profession of Faith”
Rousseau states his belief that, beyond the most basic principles, actual
forms of worship may vary considerably from state to state, depending on
particular circumstances and prevailing customs. Subject to the constraint
imposed by the basic dogmas mentioned in the last chapter of The Social
Contract, Rousseau believes that the sovereign is at liberty to dictate the
forms of public worship appropriate to local circumstances, and that citi-
zens are obliged publicly to conform to these. “Let us not confuse the cer-
emony of religion with religion itself,” he warns in Emile. “The worship
God asks for is that of the heart. And that worship, when it is sincere, is
always uniform. . . . As to the external worship, if it must be uniform for
the sake of good order, that is purely a question of public policy; no reve-
lation is needed for that” (E, 296 [OC IV, 608]). Hence Rousseau’s reac-
tion to the appeals he received from François Ribotte regarding the
persecution of Protestants in France. He reminded Ribotte that Holy
Scripture is “explicitly about the duty of obeying the laws of princes” and
suggested that governments may rightfully prohibit religious assemblies.
“After all, such assemblies are not an essential part of Christianity and
one can dispense with them without renouncing one’s faith” (Rousseau to
Ribotte, 24 October 1761 [CC IX, 200]). To this Rousseau added that the
attempt to liberate a prisoner, even if unjustly arrested, amounts to rebel-
lion, which the state has a right to punish. This attitude is in striking con-
trast to the Voltaire of “l’affaire Calas.”
Although Rousseau’s ideal was the small, tightly integrated commu-
nity of the ancient Greek polis, he reluctantly conceded in The Social
Contract that it is impossible to restore such conditions in the modern
world, although he did favor minimizing the spread of dissenting religious
opinions where such conditions do not already prevail, as in Geneva.
Rousseau’s concern was to prevent pluralism from degenerating into
internecine social conflict of the kind he had once witnessed in Geneva.
He writes in his Confessions that this “horrible spectacle made such a
keen impression on me that I swore never to be a party to any civil war,
and never to uphold domestic freedom with arms, or my person, or my
assent if I ever returned to my rights as a citizen” (C, 181 [OC I, 216]).
His prohibition on religious intolerance is primarily based on a desire to
limit civil strife and disunity in already heterogeneous societies rather than
on the intrinsic value of either toleration or diversity, which is hardly sur-
prising in a man who admired Sparta.
Those who make a distinction between civil and theological
intolerance are mistaken, in my opinion. These two intolerances
are inseparable. It is impossible to live in peace with people who
one believes are damned. To love them would be to hate God
who punishes them. They must absolutely be either brought into
the faith or tormented. Wherever theological intolerance exists,
it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect; and as soon
as it does, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign, even over tem-
poral matter. From then on, Priests are the true masters; Kings
are merely their officers. Now that there is no longer and can
never again be an exclusive national Religion, one should toler-
ate all those religions that tolerate others insofar as their
dogmas are in no way contrary to the duties of the Citizen. But
whoever dares to say there is no Salvation outside of the Church
should be chased out of the State, unless the State is the Church,
and the Prince is the Pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a
Theocratic Government; in any other it is pernicious. (SC,
223–224 [OC III, 469]).
Rousseau interpreted France in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury as a society torn between two warring factions whose intransigent
beliefs made peace impossible. He saw himself as a moderate fighting a
two-front war against traditional religious beliefs and institutions on the
one hand, and atheism on the other. In his Confessions he writes that
“[a]theistic fanaticism and pious fanaticism—touching each other through
their shared intolerance—can even unite with each other, as they have
done in China, and as they have against me” (C, 474 [OC I, 567]).38
Given the emphasis that Rousseau put on the practical utility of reli-
gion, it is hardly surprising that so many of his interpreters have con-
cluded that his view of religion is “essentially social rather than
theological.”39 “On the Utility of Religion,” he wrote in his Dialogues, is
the title of “a fine book to be written, and a very necessary one” (RJJ, 242
[OC I, 972]). And in his Letters Written From the Mountain he states that
the purpose of the chapter on civil religion in The Social Contract is “not
to consider religion as true or false, nor even as good or bad in itself, but
exclusively in its relations to political bodies and as an aspect of lawgiv-
ing” (LWM, 147 [OC III, 703]). In light of this, Judith Shklar’s claim that
“every sentence [of Rousseau’s The Social Contract] makes it clear that he
was moved by emotional and social concerns, not by theology” seems
quite reasonable.40 She concludes that the “core of Rousseau’s own faith
never went beyond his sense of needing religion emotionally.”41
Even if this is true, it is important to recognize that Rousseau pro-
fessed his belief in God on several occasions, both publicly and pri-
vately.42 For example, he admitted to Paul-Claude Moultou in 1761 that
the “Profession of Faith” in Emile expressed his own religious beliefs,
adding that “I desire too much that there should be a God to be able to
doubt it . . . and I die with the firm conviction that I shall find in His
bosom the happiness and the peace that I have not enjoyed in this world”
(Rousseau to Moultou, 23 December 1761 [CC IX, 342]). He also pro-
fessed his faith publicly in his letter to the Archbishop of Paris, insisting
that he was “very convinced of the essential truths of Christianity which
serve as a foundation for all good morals” (OC IV, 960). And Emile,
Rousseau declared, “was written by a Christian in defense of religion”
(OC IV, 997). Thus, despite the pronounced utilitarianism of many of his
statements on religion, Rousseau’s faith appears to have been genuine.
Chapter Six
Dare to Be Ignorant!
Introduction
W e have seen that, for the philosophes, the acquisition and dissemina-
tion of “all useful knowledge of Benefit to Mankind in General”
was at the heart of their goal of dispelling ignorance and spreading
enlightenment. This was thought particularly true of scientific knowledge,
the application of which held the greatest promise of promoting human
well-being by helping to extend man’s control over the natural and human
worlds. Such popularization of knowledge, according to Condorcet, is
what distinguishes the eighteenth century from its predecessors. “Up to
this stage,” he wrote in 1794, “the sciences have been the birthright of
very few; they were now becoming common property and the time was at
hand when their elements, their principles, and their simpler methods
would become truly popular. For it was then, at last, that their application
to the arts and their influence on men’s judgement would become of truly
universal utility.”1 This mission of disseminating useful knowledge is epit-
omized by the Encyclopédie, to which virtually every philosophe con-
tributed and all supported, with greater or lesser enthusiasm.
Despite contributing to the Encyclopédie himself (almost exclusively
articles about music), Rousseau held that popularizing philosophy and sci-
ence is both a cause and an effect of the corruption of modern societies.
Their popularity is symptomatic of moral debasement, since “the Sciences
and Arts owe their birth to our vices” (DSA, 12 [OC III, 17]). At the same
time, their popularization is destructive of whatever lingering pockets of
morality and religion still remain in such decadent contexts and pose a
constant threat to the precious few cultures that are still basically healthy.
The presence of philosophy, letters, and science so characteristic of
“enlightened societies” only inflames amour-propre, further “loosen[ing]
in us all the bonds of esteem and benevolence that attach men to society”
83
84 Dare to Be Ignorant!
(PN, 192 [OC II, 967]). That is why Rousseau called for ignorance and
simplicity where the philosophes called for knowledge and sophistication.
His unequivocal preference was for the “happy ignorance” of Sparta over
Athens, that “fatherland of the Sciences and Arts” the philosophes so
much admired. He regarded virtue as much more important than knowl-
edge or cognitive ability; a good heart is worth inestimably more than the
possession of knowledge or a cultivated intellect, he thought.
Rousseau repudiated the rational “enlightenment” of the philosophes
—based on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and the culti-
vation of the intellect—in favor of a form of nonrational, spiritual
“enlightenment” centered on the “holy and beneficent” inner voice of
conscience engraved in our hearts by God. He believed that modern
philosophers, relying on the light of reason rather than this “inner light”
superior to reason, have allowed their empiricism to wipe away the “voice
of the soul.” It is this natural instinct that infallibly inclines us towards the
good, and it is of infinitely greater value than reason or knowledge, which
often divert us from our instinctive impulse to do the right thing. That is
why Rousseau concludes that, relying on reason—as philosophers do—
“far from delivering me from my useless doubts, would only cause those
which tormented me to multiply and would resolve none of them.
Therefore, I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the
inner light’” (E, 269 [OC IV, 569]).
With this argument, Rousseau took a decisive step, both for himself
and for the history of thought generally, away from the Enlightenment’s
reliance on empiricism, reason, and knowledge towards a stress on the
active nature of the mind and the inner spiritual life of the individual,
something the philosophes tended either to denigrate or disregard. In
doing so, he helped to launch what would eventually develop into a full-
blown revolt against the rationalism and intellectualism of the eighteenth
century in the name of religion, emotion, imagination, and the heart,
themes central to the thought of the Romantic period that Rousseau
helped to inspire.
Messieurs de l’Encyclopédie 2
The Encyclopédie—“the greatest monument ever raised in honor of the

sciences,” as Voltaire described it, and an “immense and immortal
work”3—sought to provide a comprehensive repository of learning in the
natural and human sciences in a collection of articles written by virtually
all of the leading philosophes of the day in France, including d’Alembert,
Diderot, Duclos, Naigeon, Grimm, Buffon, Jaucourt, Raynal, Turgot,
Quesney, Holbach, Saint-Lambert, Marmontel, Morellet, and Voltaire, the
Dare to Be Ignorant! 85
latter of whom also wrote his own Philosophical Dictionary.4 This ambi-
tious project represented the Enlightenment “body and soul.”5 With it, we
reach the very core of the Enlightenment in France, to which Rousseau
was utterly opposed. The coeditor of the Encyclopédie, who believed that
“to keep useful knowledge secret is to be guilty of a theft from society,”6
summarized its aim as follows:
[T]o assemble knowledge scattered across the earth, to reveal its
overall structure to our contemporaries, and to pass it on to
those who will come after us; so that the achievements of past
ages do not become worthless for centuries to come, so that our
descendants, in becoming better informed, may at the same time
become more virtuous and content, and so that we do not leave
this earth without having earned the respect of the human race. 7
Diderot did not view the Encyclopédie as merely a passive warehouse of
knowledge. Rather, it was to be an active, even aggressive, tool of moral
improvement and reform. As Carol Blum writes, it “was not to lie still
and permit itself to be used, but it was supposed to collar the reader, to
lead or even drag him through its pages for his own moral improve-
ment.”8 The work had a missionary intention; in Diderot’s own words, it
was designed “to attack, shake up, and secretly reverse the ridiculous
opinions one would dare not insult directly. . . . This means of enlighten-
ing men works very promptly upon good minds; and it operates infallibly
and without harmful side effects, secretly and silently on all minds.”9
Omer Joly de Fleury, the avocat général of the Paris Parlement,
acknowledged the importance of the Encyclopédie as a machine de guerre
of the Enlightenment—the weapon of “a society organized to propagate
materialism, to destroy Religion, to inspire a spirit of independence, and
to nourish the corruption of morals”10—when he attacked it before the
Parlement in January 1759, just before its privilège was revoked. Diderot’s
machine infernale had already been declared “subversive” by the conseil
d’état in 1752, when it was briefly suspended. The Encyclopédie was also
condemned by the Pope in 1759.
A Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie was written by
d’Alembert, Diderot’s coeditor on the project. This work became cele-
brated in its own right as “the most perfect expression of the principles of
the encyclopedists and their sympathizers.”11 In the words of one of its
English translators, d’Alembert’s essay “is the Enlightenment insofar as
one can make such a claim for any work.”12 It is therefore significant that
he chose to devote part of it to a refutation of Rousseau’s Discourse on
the Sciences and the Arts. While the tone of d’Alembert’s remarks is polite
and restrained—a far cry from his later view of Rousseau as a
“madman”—he clearly perceived the Counter-Enlightenment thrust of
Rousseau’s work and took the trouble to rebut it directly. In answer to

Rousseau’s point that, on balance, the arts and sciences have done more
harm than good to morals and human well-being, he asks him “to exam-
ine whether the majority of the evils which he attributes to the sciences
and to the arts are not due to completely different causes . . . is it neces-
sary to abolish certain laws because in their name a few crimes are pro-
tected whose authors would be punished in a republic of savages?”13
Rousseau, at this early stage flattered by the attention of someone of
d’Alembert’s eminence, chose not to respond directly.14 This brief but
important exchange just as the philosophes were forming themselves into
a self-conscious movement promoting enlightenment was their first public
skirmish with Rousseau, and a hint of things to come.
The encyclopédistes not only wished to gather together as much
useful knowledge as they could, but to disseminate it as widely as possible
as well. For them, both were essential to enlightenment. In his Preliminary
Discourse, d’Alembert claims that, “thanks to the enlightenment it [the
Encyclopédie] has communicated to the world, the common people them-
selves are more solidly grounded and confident on a large number of ques-
tions of interest than the sects of the philosophers have been.”15 In his
Prospectus to the Encyclopédie, Diderot added that, “by multiplying the
number of true scholars, distinguished artisans, and enlightened amateurs,
it [would] contribute new advantages to society as a whole.”16
The hopes of the encyclopédistes were more than mere wishful think-
ing. A diluted and generalized enlightenment was slowly and unevenly
seeping through French society in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, even among the less well-educated. This process was facilitated by
the increase in literacy, the popularity of reading, the growth of scientific
academies and journals, and by the fact that the philosophes wrote in
French rather than Latin, the traditional language of scholarship. Also, the
number of institutions that enabled individuals to read books without
having to buy them multiplied significantly in the eighteenth century.
Literacy among men rose from 29 percent to 47 percent in the century
prior to the Revolution, and from 14 percent to 27 percent among
women.17 There was a quadrupling of book production in France between
the beginning of the century and the 1780s.18 At least 15,000 copies of the
Encyclopédie were in existence prior to the Revolution, excluding the
revised Yverdon edition and the Encyclopédie methodique, making it a
best-seller by the standards of the day, despite its considerable cost and
size. Although well beyond the means of most people, it had a fairly wide
circulation among an educated public of intellectuals, journalists, lawyers,
government officials, and local notables, the sort of men who were to lead
the Revolution.19 Thus, by 1770, the Encyclopédie had begun “to pass
through successive waves of popularization, reaching into every corner of

the French provinces and stirring up interest among groups located every-
where in the middle sectors of society.”20 At the same time, the number of
religious books published and read in French in the eighteenth century
declined dramatically, from 25 percent of titles published in the early
1750s to a mere 10 percent by the 1780s, a state of affairs that would
surely have warmed the hearts of the encyclopédistes, with the excep-
tion—as always—of Rousseau. Although he had contributed many articles
to the project and once looked on its editor as his closest friend, by the
early 1750s he was implacably opposed to its basic mission of accumulat-
ing and popularizing knowledge.
“A Sweet and Precious Ignorance”
Rousseau linked philosophy to amour-propre in his first major political

essay, The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. “Philosophy,” he
writes, “will always defy reason, truth, and even time, because it has its
source in human pride [l’orgueil humain], stronger than all those things”
(DSA, 46 [OC III, 46]). This is an argument that Rousseau thought
worth repeating in his final reply to critics of this early essay. “[S]tudy,
knowledge, learning, and Philosophy are only vain semblances con-
structed by human pride” (Final, 111 [OC III, 73]). He restated this con-
nection again towards the end of his life, when he wrote in his Dialogues
that the “proud despotism of modern philosophy has carried the egoism
of amour-propre to its furthest extent” (RJJ, 179 [OC I, 890]). Given
that Rousseau associates “proud philosophy” with amour-propre and
blames the latter for giving rise to a Hobbesian state of war in society,
philosophy is, by implication, fundamentally socially destructive. Hence
his description of the enervating effects of “the reasoning and philosophic
spirit” on society in Emile, which causes “attachment to life, makes souls
effeminate and degraded, concentrates all the passions in the baseness of
private interest, in the abjectness of the human I, and thus quietly saps
the true foundations of every society” (E, 312 [OC IV, 633]). Philosophy
and reflection draw our energy and attention away from our sense of
public spirit and identity as citizens towards our selfish identity as jealous
and competitive individuals. “The taste for letters, philosophy, and the
fine arts,” he wrote in the preface to the play Narcissus, “destroys love of
our primary duties and of genuine glory” (PN, 191 [OC II, 966]). He
adds that they also weaken the natural physical strength and vitality of
individuals, since most human beings are naturally ill-suited to sustained
reflection and study.
The taste for letters, philosophy, and the fine arts softens bodies
and souls. Work in the study renders men delicate, weakens their
temperament, and the soul retains its vigor with difficulty when
the body has lost its vigor. Study uses up the machine, consumes
spirits, destroys strength, enervates courage. . . . Study corrupts
his morals, impairs his health, destroys his temperament, and
often spoils his reason. (PN, 192–195 [OC II, 966–970])
Rousseau also implicates reason in the destructive strengthening of

amour-propre. In his second Discourse, for example, he writes that it
“engenders amour-propre and reflection fortifies it; reason turns man
back upon himself, it separates him from all that bothers and afflicts
him.” (DI, 37 [OC III, 155–156]). As with philosophy, in other words,
reason is socially destructive because of its tendency to inflame amour-
propre. Nothing could be further from the view that prevailed among
the philosophes. “The less men reason, the more wicked they are,”
wrote the Baron d’Holbach. “Savages, princes, nobles and the dregs of
the people, are commonly the worst of men, because they reason the
least.”21 For Rousseau, by contrast, the more men reason, the more
wicked they become because of the links between reason, amour-propre
and social atomization. Amour-propre arises from invidious compar-
isons that human beings make when in close and regular proximity to
each other, giving rise to social competition and eventually warfare.
Reflection arises from such comparison as well, “born of compared
ideas, and it is the multiplicity of ideas that leads to their comparison”
(EOL, 306 [OC V, 396]).
Rousseau thought of reason as a very weak and unreliable faculty
anyway, more often than not eclipsed by the much more powerful pas-
sions. In Emile, he writes that “[r]eason alone is not active; sometimes it
restrains, rarely it excites, and it never did anything noble. To reason all
the time is the mania of small minds” (E, 321 [OC IV, 645]). In a political
fragment, Rousseau explicitly states that the mistake of most moralists has
always been “to consider man as an essentially reasonable being. Man is a
sensitive being, who consults solely his passions in order to act, for whom
reason serves only to palliate the follies his passions lead him to commit”
(PF, 70 [OC III, 552–553]). In a letter from 1761, Rousseau wrote that
the “method of generalizing and abstracting is very suspect to me, because
it is too little proportioned to our faculties” (Rousseau to Dom Léger-
Marie Deschamps, 8 May 1761 [CC VIII, 320–321]). His preference was
for a more intuitive and subjective approach. While his estimation of the
cognitive capacities of ordinary men and women was unflattering to say
the least, “since the art of generalizing ideas in this way is one of the most
difficult and belated exercises of human understanding” (GMS, 161 [OC
III, 286–287]), this mattered little to him because he did not rate this
capacity very highly anyway.
While Rousseau’s hostility to the popular dissemination of knowledge
is a recurrent theme in his works, it is central to his first Discourse and the
replies that he wrote in its defense. This is a work that Rousseau came to
regard as “absolutely lacking in logic and order; of all the ones that have
come from my pen, it is the weakest in reasoning and the poorest in unity
and harmony” (C, 295 [OC I, 352]). This dim assessment is shared by
some Rousseau scholars today, such as Robert Wokler, for whom it is
“much the least elegant, least consistent, least profound, and—despite the
fuss that it stirred—least original of all his celebrated writings.” The
Discourse, on this view, is “conspicuously lacking in originality,” and
“does little more than reflect the sometimes disparate views already
advanced by its many precursors.”22 This assessment is supported by John
Hope Mason, for whom Rousseau’s first major work is marginal to his
most important ideas. “It was not the ideas [of the first Discourse], as
such, which gave Rousseau’s work its distinction,” he argues. “Rather, it
was the intensity with which they were expressed.”23
While it is true that Rousseau’s first Discourse is an immature, even
crude, work in many ways, not only did he not repudiate its central,
Counter-Enlightenment claims, but he restated them in later works and
affirmed their consistency with his other major writings. “[M]y first dis-
course on the arts and sciences; my second discourse on the origins of
inequality and my treatise on education,” he wrote to Malesherbes in
1762, “all three works are inseparable and form a single whole”
(Rousseau to Malesherbes, 12 January 1762 [CC X, 26]).
In his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Rousseau argues that
“our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our
Sciences and Arts to perfection” (DSA, 7 [OC III, 9]). This work is essen-
tially a praise of ignorance in the name of the uncorrupted rustic simplic-
ity of small cohesive communities such as Geneva and Sparta, who
maintained their virtue by expelling artists, scientists and men of letters.
This contrasts strikingly with the philosophes, for whom knowledge
promised to make individuals free and happy. For them, ignorance of nat-
ural laws was the main impediment to human well-being and progress.
That is why all of the philosophes spoke so contemptuously of ignorance
which, according to d’Alembert, is to be blamed for “the ravages of super-
stition” and “the condition of slavery into which all of Europe was
plunged” during the Middle Ages. “Men are unhappy,” Baron d’Holbach
wrote in a passage typical of Enlightenment opinion on the matter, “only
because they are ignorant; they are ignorant only because everything con-
spires to prevent their being enlightened.”24 For Diderot, the refusal to
dispel ignorance was a serious moral crime.25
For Rousseau, by contrast, ignorance “never did any harm . . . error

alone is fatal” (E, 167 [OC IV, 428]). That is why Emile’s tutor deliber-
ately ensures that his pupil “has little knowledge” (E, 207 [OC IV, 487]).
In his reply to the King of Poland’s criticisms of the first Discourse,
Rousseau offers this frank defense of such “happy ignorance:”
There is another, reasonable kind of ignorance, which consists in
confining one’s curiosity to the extent of the faculties which one
has received; a modest ignorance, which is born from a lively
love of virtue and inspires only indifference toward all things
that are not worthy of filling a man’s heart and do not contribute
to his betterment; a sweet and precious ignorance, the treasure of
a soul that is pure and content with itself, that finds all its felicity
in retreating into itself, in confirming itself in its innocence,
which places all its happiness in turning inward, bearing witness
to its innocence, and has no need to seek a false and vain happi-
ness in the opinion others may have of its enlightenment. That is
the ignorance I praised and the one request from Heaven as pun-
ishment for the scandal I caused the scholarly by my stated scorn
for the human Sciences. (Observations by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
of Geneva on the Reply Made to his Discourse, in DSA, 51–52
[OC III, 54])
It follows that the happiest societies are those that are the most igno-
rant of the arts and sciences. “[T]he beautiful time, the time of virtue for
each People was that of its ignorance,” Rousseau writes, summarizing the
principal thesis of his essay to a critic. “And to the extent to which it has
become learned, Artistic, and Philosophical, it has lost its morals and its
probity” (Final, 113 [OC III, 76]). The opposite of this golden age is
Rousseau’s own society, peopled by “happy slaves” who are entirely obliv-
ious to the fact that “the Sciences, Letters, and Arts . . . spread garlands
of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened” (DSA, 5
[OC III, 7]). The chain of causes that links the arts and sciences to moral
degeneration is traced by Rousseau in his reply to the King of Poland.
“The first source of evil is inequality. From inequality came wealth . . .
From wealth are born luxury and idleness. From luxury come the fine
Arts and from idleness the Sciences” (Observations by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau of Geneva on the Reply Made to His Discourse, in DSA, 48
[OC III, 49–50]). The effect of the popular dissemination of the arts and
sciences in virtuous societies is always to undermine the “good opinion”
of ordinary citizens. Enlightenment, understood as the popularization of
knowledge, is therefore antithetical to virtue and social harmony.
But when peoples began to be enlightened and to believe them-
selves to be philosophers also, they imperceptibly accustomed
themselves to the most peculiar propositions, and there was no

paradox so monstrous that the desire to distinguish oneself did
not cause to be maintained. Even virtue and divinity were put
into question, and since one must always think differently from
the people, philosophers were not needed to cast ridicule on the
things they venerated. (PF, 72–73 [OC III, 557])
That is why philosophers, the true “enemies of public opinion,” go every-
where “armed with their deadly paradoxes, undermining the foundations
of faith, and annihilating virtue. They smile disdainfully at the old-fash-
ioned words of Fatherland and Religion, and devote their talents and
Philosophy to destroying and debasing all that is sacred among men”
(DSA, 14 [OC III, 19]). Rousseau’s contempt for philosophers, the “philo-
sophic spirit” and the “prejudices of philosophy” is particularly pro-
nounced in the anti-intellectual Emile. In his own personal quest for the
truth, he admits that he began by consulting philosophers before quickly
moving on. “I leafed through their books. I examined their various opin-
ions,” Rousseau writes. Yet, he immediately adds, “I found them all to be
proud, assertive, dogmatic (even in their pretended scepticism), ignorant of
nothing, proving nothing, mocking one another” (E, 268 [OC IV, 568]). In
his Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau laments that he lives in an age “when
prejudices reign so proudly and error gives itself the name of philosophy”
(LA, 81 [OC V, 74]). By contrast, Voltaire advised d’Alembert to crusade
for philosophy with as much zeal as religious fanatics crusade for their
faith: “Missionaries run about the earth and over the seas; philosophers
must at least run about the streets. They must go and sow the good seed
from house to house. One is even more successful with preaching than with
the writings of the fathers. Discharge yourself of these two great duties, my
dear brother. Preach and write, fight, convert, make the fanatics so hateful
and so contemptible that the government will be ashamed to support
them.”26 Voltaire regarded philosophy as one of the glories of his age and
pinned what hope he had for progress on its advancement. “Philosophy is
bringing about a bright new day,” he wrote in a letter from 1766. “You
may be sure that it is doing mankind considerable good . . . Philosophy
causes virtue to be loved by making fanaticism detested, and if I dare say
so, it is avenging God for the insults of fanaticism.”27
Rousseau was opposed to the popularization of knowledge, not to
knowledge per se. In his final reply to critics of his first Discourse, he clar-
ifies his position by stressing this distinction between knowledge and its
dissemination. “[I]t is good for there to be Philosophers,” he writes, “pro-
vided that the People doesn’t get mixed up in being Philosophers” (Final,
115 [OC III, 78]).28 Also, Rousseau qualified his hostility to popular
enlightenment by arguing that, once a society had become corrupt, it may
be advisable to use philosophy and science to mitigate its effects, even
though they can never be used actually to promote virtue which, once lost,
can never be recovered (PF, 44–45 [OC III, 516]).
Given his hostility to popular enlightenment, it is hardly surprising
that Rousseau expressed such a strong preference for Sparta, which had
“chased the Arts and Artists, the Sciences and Scientists away from [its]
walls” (DSA, p. 9 [OC III, p. 12]), over Athens, “the abode of civility and
good taste, the country of Orators and Philosophers” which is “the pure
source from which we received the Enlightenment of which our century
boasts [les Lumières dont notre siècle se glorifie]” (DSA, 8 [OC III, 11]).
Athens, despite being larger and richer than Sparta, was defeated because
philosophy and letters had “brought corruption into the hearts of its
Inhabitants,” thereby enervating its public spiritedness and fatally weak-
ening its moral fortitude. Egypt, Greece, Imperial Rome, and
Constantinople met the same fate following the introduction of arts and
sciences, whereas the robust Persians, Scythians, Germans, and republican
Romans avoided it because they wisely did not (DSA, 7–9 [OC III,
10–12]).
Despite his admiration for the prototypical philosopher Socrates,
devoted above all else to the selfless pursuit of truth and the life of reason,
Rousseau preferred Cato, the “greatest of humans” and exemplar of the
patriotic citizen with an overriding devotion to his fatherland (LA, 29
[OC V, 27]). In the Discourse on Political Economy Cato—“a God
among mortals”—is held up as the highest model for the people, whereas
Socrates, who “had no fatherland other than the whole world,” is appro-
priate only for the few. For Rousseau, there was no higher status than that
of citizen.
The Light Within
Rousseau regarded ignorance as a necessary step on the road to the

restoration of our moral sense. He thought that knowledge, science, phi-
losophy, arts, and letters were just so many obstacles on this road. But
ignorance—the clearing of this path—was not enough. Conscience is the
key to moral life and our direct connection to God. The inner road to con-
science must also be rebuilt. However, it was not until the “Profession of
Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Emile that Rousseau spoke about con-
science at length and gave it a centrality absent in his earlier works, where
it makes an occasional, fleeting appearance. In his first Discourse, for
example, he writes:
O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls . . . Are not your prin-
ciples engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough in order to
learn your Laws to return into oneself and listen to the voice of
one’s conscience in the silence of the passions? That is true
Philosophy . . . those famous men who are immortalized in the
Republic of Letters, let us try to put between them and us that
glorious distinction noted between two great Peoples long ago:
that the one knew how to speak well, the other to act well.
(DSA, 22 [OC III, 30])
In his next work Rousseau repeats his injunction to “look deep into your
Hearts and consult the secret voice of your conscience” (DI, 7 [OC III,
116]), as he did in the first version of The Social Contract, where he con-
demns modern philosophers for denying its existence (GMS, 80-81 [OC
III, 287]). In 1758 he announced to Jacob Vernes that “I have abandoned
reason and consulted nature, that is, the inner feeling which directs my
belief independently of reason” (18 February 1758 [CC V, 32–33]).
However, it was the controversy stirred up by Helvétius’s materialistic De
l’esprit that spurred Rousseau to undertake a more vigorous and extended
defense of the “[d]ivine instinct, immortal and celestial voice, certain
guide” of conscience (E, 290–291 [OC IV, 600–601]).
Rousseau was profoundly disturbed by the general direction in which
the Enlightenment seemed to be evolving in France after 1750 and found
the “barbarous doctrines” of materialists such as Helvétius particularly
abhorrent. The moderate empiricism that dominated the early
Enlightenment, which Rousseau shared, was taken in a radically new
direction by some philosophes in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The very existence of a nonmaterial realm, and all metaphysical essences
associated with it such as God and the soul, were denied by writers like La
Mettrie, Helvétius, Naigeon, the Baron d’Holbach, and, eventually,
Diderot. The materialist philosophy to which increasing numbers sub-
scribed inevitably provoked a reaction in the form of a “cult of sensibil-
ity” that arose in the last three decades of the eighteenth century when a
view of the individual as an être sensible, emphasizing the centrality of
feeling and the “inner life,” emerged in opposition to that of the soulless
l’homme machine of the materialists.
Rousseau’s role in this clash was pivotal. It not only stirred him to
develop one of the earliest and most important critiques of materialism,
which he believed was based on a degrading and reductionistic doctrine
incompatible with spiritual and moral life, but also led him to sketch an
alternative model of man in which the active, nonrational element of the
mind, which brings to the experiences of the senses an innate and infalli-
ble moral sentiment that is linked directly to God, is central.
In their rejection of the abstract metaphysical systems of the seven-
teenth century, the philosophes were particularly critical of the rationalism
of René Descartes (1596–1650), which was based on a combination of

inner certainty and radical doubt about the external world as revealed by
the senses. According to Descartes, the true source of knowledge, includ-
ing knowledge of moral and religious truths, depends on reason and
innate ideas implanted by God.
That everything we conceive very clearly and very distinctly is
true, is assured only for the reasons that God is or exists, that he
is a perfect being, and that everything comes from him. . . . But if
we did not know that everything real and true within us comes
from a perfect and infinite being then, however clear and distinct
our ideas were, we would have no reason to be sure that they
had the perfection of being true.29
Although Descartes’ ideas were initially condemned by the Church in
France and his books were officially proscribed, the subsequent ascen-
dancy of empiricism among the philosophes led many religious tradition-
alists to alter their view of Cartesian rationalism. J. S. Spink writes of this
development as follows:
Cartesianism became the main ally of theology [in the eighteenth
century], after being accused of connivance with the enemy. But,
in the hour of its triumph, it . . . failed to win the approval of the
new generation of the French intelligentsia in the opening years
of the eighteenth century, the first generation of “philosophes.”
It became instead the philosophy of the bishops and finally the
Jesuits and was used to stem the spreading influence of sensa-
tionalism.30
R. R. Palmer’s study of religion in eighteenth-century France supports this
conclusion. “The intellectual conservatives, especially the defenders of
religion,” he writes, “were metaphysically rationalists—rationalism in this
sense being perfectly harmonious with belief in revelation.”31 A prominent
example of this rapprochement between religious orthodoxy and
Cartesianism in eighteenth-century France is to be found in the work of
the orthodox Abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1715–1790), whose
Examen du matérialisme, ou Réfutation du Système de la nature (1771) is
erected on a foundation of Cartesian dualism.
The philosophes rejected this view, arguing in favor of a conception
of the human mind as a basically passive and empty carte blanche, partic-
ularly as expounded by John Locke in his enormously influential Essay
Concerning Human Understanding.
One of the principal targets of Locke’s Essay is the Cartesian doctrine
of innate ideas, which was widely held in England when he wrote, and
was still closely associated with traditional religious and moral beliefs.
Indeed, his attack on innate ideas provoked considerable hostility among

orthodox theologians and philosophers precisely because such innate
knowledge was held to be the foundation of both religion and morality.
Not surprisingly, in the conflict between traditionalists and the new radi-
cal developments in science and philosophy in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, Locke was universally identified with the latter.32 The
principal source of knowledge, according to Lockean epistemology, is that
which derives from the senses. “I imagine,” he writes in the earliest draft
of his Essay, “that all knowledge is founded on and ultimately derives
itself from sense, or something analogous to it, which may be called sensa-
tion.”33 Locke likens the mind to a block of marble that is shaped by sen-
sory impressions, and speaks of memory as a box in which we store ideas
until they are needed.
Although Locke denied the existence of innate ideas, he did not claim
that the mind is completely reducible to sensory perceptions. He granted
that God’s existence can be established by rational proofs and stressed
reflection as a source of ideas apart from the senses. In fact, as Maurice
Cranston’s biography of Locke argues, there were two philosophical
strands which governed the development of his thought. “One was the
unformulated ad hoc empiricism of Newton and Boyle and the other
Royal Society virtuosi. The other was the systematic rationalism of
Descartes. The two currents met in Locke as they had met in Gassendi,
though in Locke the empirical stream was the stronger one.”34 It is impor-
tant to note both of these dimensions of Locke’s epistemology because, as
we shall see, the latter was rejected in the subsequent appropriation and
radicalization of his ideas in eighteenth-century France.
Locke’s Essay, which was translated into French very quickly and
reprinted numerous times in the eighteenth century,35 became a corner-
stone of the Enlightenment in France, which was in open revolt against
the rationalism of Descartes—the “bedrock of Catholic philosophy” in the
eighteenth century.36 The philosophes turned to British empiricism, partic-
ularly the works of Locke and Bacon, in their attempt to overthrow
Cartesian metaphysics. French-language journals such as the Bibliothèque
raisonnée and Bibliothèque britannique transmitted Locke’s empiricist
ideas to a receptive audience of French philosophes, as did writers such as
his disciple Claude Buffier in his La doctrine du sens commun ou traité
des premières vérités (1724). Voltaire, an admirer of Buffier’s treatise, was
a devoted adherent of “the modest and sage Locke,”37 who is frequently
invoked in the Encyclopédie and was regularly praised by its editor.
Locke’s leading disciple and popularizer in France was Condillac—the
“philosopher to the philosophes”38—whose Essai sur l’origine des connais-
sances humaines (1746) and Traité des sensations (1754) defend the view
that sensation is the exclusive source of knowledge. In presenting Locke’s
ideas to his French readers Condillac made a number of decisive modifica-

tions to the Englishman’s position. Locke claimed that some of our ideas
derive from the innate faculty of reflection. Condillac denied this. In his
Traité des sensations he writes:
Locke distinguishes two sources of our ideas, the senses and
reflections. It would be more exact to recognize only one, either
because reflection is in its origins only sensation itself, or because
it is less the source of ideas than the channel through which they
flow from the senses . . . he has not suspected that they can be
nothing other than acquired habits; he seems to have regarded
them as something innate and says only that they perfect them-
selves by use.39
According to Condillac, the human mind at birth is completely blank and
passive, without innate ideas or faculties, which only develop from our
sensations.40 On this view, all ideas are a reflection of objects perceived by
the senses. He denies Locke’s claims that the mind contains any independ-
ent principle of rationality that interprets the evidence of the senses. Many
philosophes regarded these changes to Locke’s position as entirely salu-
tary. In the Encyclopédie, for example, Diderot refers to Condillac’s first
work as “Mr. Locke’s system, but very much improved.”41
In the second half of the eighteenth century a number of philosophes
took Condillac’s modifications of Lockean empiricism in an even more
radical direction as part of an attempt to formulate a materialist concep-
tion of human beings. La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine, which appeared in
1747 (although published with the date 1748), marks the beginning of
what would become a complete break with metaphysical dualism. In this
work he denies that human beings are composed of two substances, only
one of which is material. “Let us then conclude boldly,” he writes, “that
man is a machine, and that there is in the whole universe only one
diversely modified substance.”42 The radical implications of this position
provoked a storm of controversy when they were presented by Helvétius a
decade later in De l’esprit, a materialistic work that epitomized the views
of the most radical philosophes. For Helvétius, our plastic nature is com-
pletely shaped by external influences. This view was further reinforced in
1770 with the publication of Baron d’Holbach’s Système de la nature,
which continues the attack on the idea of an immaterial realm. He writes:
The distinction that has so often been made between the physical
and moral man is clearly an abuse. Man is a being purely physi-
cal; the moral man is only this physical being considered from a
certain point of view; that is to say relative to some of his modes
of action owing to his particular organisation. . . . His visible
actions as well as the invisible motions internally excited, arising

from his will or his thoughts, are equally the natural effects and
necessary consequences of his particular mechanism, and the
impulse he receives from those beings by whom he is sur-
rounded.43
Epistemologically, Rousseau started out in the Enlightenment main-
stream. The first three books of Emile were composed according to
common empiricist assumptions broadly compatible with Condillac’s
Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. In fact, the two had been
acquaintances ever since Rousseau worked as a private tutor in Lyons for
Condillac’s brother. They met regularly in the 1740s in Paris, where
Rousseau introduced Condillac to Diderot, who helped to secure the pub-
lication of the latter’s work. Rousseau even boasts in his Confessions that,
were it not for him, “the great metaphysician” Condillac would not have
earned the hundred crowns he was paid for his Essai (C, 291 [OC I,
347]). At first, Emile’s education is deliberately restricted to the training of
his senses. It is by keeping him as isolated as possible from human contact
and ideas that his “innocence” from the debased culture around him is
preserved throughout the first stages of his education. The only path to
learning available to him is via the experience of his own senses. It is not
until “adult reason” develops in the teenage Emile that he is finally
exposed to moral concepts and eventually introduced into society.
Rousseau’s reading of Helvétius’s De l’esprit during the composition
of Emile disturbed him deeply. Notwithstanding his apparent respect and
sympathy for Helvétius personally, Rousseau felt compelled to add his
voice to the public condemnation of his ideas, which became part of the
“Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in the fourth book of Emile.44
He began working on Emile early in 1759, amid the furoré surrounding
Helvétius’s controversial book. The Church, scandalized by the materialist
and atheist claims of De l’esprit, successfully campaigned to have it sup-
pressed. It was withdrawn from publication in August of 1758, and
burned by the public executioner the following February. Although
Rousseau began working on Notes en réfutation de l’ouvrage de Helvétius
intitulé “De l’esprit”, he soon abandoned this project, apparently out of
pity for the harassed author.45 He professed his admiration for Helvétius
as a man, and sympathized with his plight as a persecuted proponent of
radical ideas like himself. Shortly before reading De l’esprit, Rousseau
wrote to Alexandre Deleyre of its author: “M. Helvétius has written a
dangerous book and made humiliating retractions, but he has quit his
office as a tax-farmer, married an honest girl and made her happy, and
often helped people in need. His actions are worth more than his writings.
My dear Deleyre, let us try to have as much said of ourselves” (Rousseau
to Alexandre Deleyre, 5 October 1758 [CC V, 160]). He also commented

to Jacob Vernes that “I like and esteem the author [of De l’esprit], but I
hear terrible things about the book” (Rousseau to Jacob Vernes, 22
October 1758 [CC, V, 185]). Yet he went ahead with his attack on
Helvétius’ ideas in Emile nonetheless. In his letter to Archbishop Beau-
mont of Paris, he wrote that the first and most important part of the
“Profession of Faith” was “intended to combat modern materialism” (LB,
75 [OC IV, 996]).46
Rousseau’s criticisms of materialism are based on an explicit assertion
of dualism. He distinguishes between the visible universe of matter, which
is “passive and dead,” and the “active and living substance” that moves it
(E, 283 [OC IV, 590]). Since the natural state of matter is rest, it is impos-
sible to account for movement without assuming the existence of an origi-
nal cause which is not itself material. In a letter to Moultou in 1769,
Rousseau wrote that if “you reject the First Cause and have everything
done through matter and motion, you take all morality from human life”
(14 February 1769 [CC XXXVII, 57]). Since the material universe is obvi-
ously not stationary and its motion is “regular, uniform, and subjected to
constant laws,” there must be “some cause of its motions external to it”
(E, 273 [OC IV, 576]). The first major conclusion that Rousseau’s distinc-
tion between material and immaterial substances leads him to is the exis-
tence of an immaterial will that governs the orderly movement of the
universe, which he identifies with God in typical deist fashion.
This dualism also applies to human beings, who are held to consist of
two distinct substances: one active and immaterial (“l’homme moral”), the
other passive, and sensate (“l’homme physique”). “I am not simply a sensi-
tive and passive being,” the Savoyard Vicar declares, “but an active and
intelligent being” (E, 272 [OC IV, 573]). For Rousseau, a denial of our
metaphysical nature is also a denial of free will, without which our actions
cannot be considered moral. We are “free” only if we are, to some extent
at least, independent of the contingency of the senses and the laws of
nature. According to the Vicar’s third article of faith, “there is no true will
without freedom. Man is therefore free in his actions and as such is ani-
mated by an immaterial substance. . . . If man is active and free, he acts on
his own. . . . Providence . . . has made him free in order that by choice he
do not evil but good” (E, 281–282 [OC IV, 586–587]). One of the princi-
pal concerns of Rousseau in his critique of radical empiricism is the disap-
pearance of the moral agent that he believes follows from our reduction to
purely material substances. He objected to materialism for denying the
active, nonmaterial will of man which morality necessarily presupposes.
The two-substance ontology of traditional metaphysics that he defends is a
necessary condition for freedom, moral action and religious belief.
There is in the depths of our souls, Rousseau writes in the

“Profession of Faith,” an “innate principle of justice and virtue according
to which, in spite of our own maxims, we judge our actions and those of
others as good or bad. It is to this principle that I give the name con-
science” (E, 289 [OC IV, 598]). While it is through reason that we come
to know what is morally right and wrong, conscience is the faculty that
makes us love the former and hate the latter; we have “conscience for
loving the good, reason for knowing it, and liberty for choosing it” (E,
294 [OC IV, 605]). Although Rousseau claims that, with conscience, “I
have only to consult myself about what I want to do. Everything I sense to
be good is good; everything I sense to be bad is bad” (E, 286 [OC IV,
594]), he is not arguing that we are entirely self-contained moral beings.
Reason, language, and society are still necessary for moral knowledge,
which is not innate. He is not according the individual the power to
abstract from everything external to itself, to “retreat to the inner citadel”
and isolate itself in moral self-certainty. Indeed, he claims in his Letter to
d’Alembert that “[t]he most vicious of men is he who isolates himself the
most, who most concentrates his heart in himself” (LA, 117 [OC V, 109]).
What he sought was an epistemological balance between acquired and
innate characteristics, between natural tempérament and social milieu.
This distinction is very significant because it distinguishes Rousseau’s posi-
tion from both the rationalist defenders of innate ideas and natural law on
the one hand, and materialists on the other. What his position does have
in common with the concept of innate ideas is its rejection of the epistemic
exclusivity of empiricism, which he linked not only to the impairment of
human moral faculties, but to a general depreciation of the inner spiritual
life of the species as well.
Although reason and conscience are distinct faculties, under the right
conditions they work together to enable us both to know the good and to
want to do it. Since “all our ideas come to us from outside,” Rousseau
believed, we need reason to comprehend them. But the sentiments that
evaluate them are within us and are independent of reason. Unfortunately,
such conditions hardly ever exist, so reason and conscience more often
than not work against one another. In the “Profession of Faith” Rousseau
complains that “[t]oo often reason deceives us. We have acquired only too
much right to challenge it. But conscience never deceives; it is man’s true
guide” (E, 286–287 [OC IV, 594–595]). This doubt is repeated in a 1769
letter to Laurent Aymon de Franquières, in which Rousseau denounces the
“sophisms of reason” that lead us astray:
I find in this internal judgment [of conscience] a natural safe-

guard against the sophisms of my reason . . . this even more
secret, more internal, dictamen which entreats and murmurs

against these self-interested decisions, and leads us back in spite
of ourselves onto the road of the truth. This interior sentiment is
that of nature itself; it is an appeal on its part against the
sophisms of reason, and what proves it is that it never speaks
more strongly than when our will yields the most obligingly to
judgments that this sentiment persist in rejecting. (LF, 263 [OC
IV, 1138–1139])
Later, in his Dialogues, Rousseau advises his readers to consult their con-
sciences to redress “the errors of their reason; and to heed . . . that interior
voice which all our philosophers have such a stake in stifling and which
they treat as a chimera because it no longer speaks to them” (RJJ, 22 [OC
I, 687]). And in questions of morality, he claims in his Reveries, “I have
always found myself better off answering them according to the dictamen
of my conscience than according to the insights of reason” (RSW, 31 [OC
I, 1028]).
In practice, reason, though indispensable to the acquisition of moral
knowledge, leads us away from morality more often than it leads us
towards it. This is partly because conscience is so timid, frightened by
“the world and noise” from which it flees in search of “refuge and peace.”
“Those innate feelings that nature has engraved in all hearts to console
man in his misery and encourage him to virtue can easily, by means of art,
intrigues, and sophisms, become stifled in individuals” (RJJ, 242 [OC I,
972]). Contemporary philosophers, by denying the existence of conscience
and exalting reason as the highest human faculty, have silenced the “voix
intérieur,” so that it “no longer speaks to us” (E, 290–291 [OC IV, 600–
601]). In his day, Rousseau thought, consciences have become “agitated,
uncertain, almost extinguished.” He believed that, by turning away from
the “terrifying apparatus of philosophy” towards God and nature, the
innate voice of conscience will once more “regain its strength and its
empire” (E, 283–284 [OC IV, 591]).47
For Rousseau conscience was an essentially religious principle, the
“voice of the soul” implanted by God in the hearts of all humans.48 That is
why he calls atheism a “mutiny against . . . conscience” (RJJ, 241 [OC I,
971]). His most thorough discussion of this faculty occurs within the
“Profession of Faith,” where he refers to it as “holy” and “divine.” It is
the infallible moral compass through which God points our souls towards
the good. Materialism, in denying the existence of the soul, denies our
connection with God. Reason, science, knowledge, and philosophy, by
obscuring the “voice of the soul,” stands between us and God. So does the
vice and corruption of the societies in which all but the most fortunate of
us are destined to live. That is why, in such surroundings, individuals
should turn inward and listen to the voice of conscience. By doing so we

are reaching up to God and out to nature.
Conclusion
Rousseau came to regard the belief that the path to human well-being lies
in the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of the intellect as a
fatal mistake, a one-way street leading to certain disaster. He believed that
the Enlightenment view that the head should rule the heart is an inversion
of the truth. It is not by reason, knowledge, philosophy or science that one
becomes truly enlightened. Rather, it is through virtue, faith, and the
strength of one’s innate, prerational conscience that true enlightenment is
to be found, which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of the
intellect only impede and distort. Virtually everything that Rousseau
wrote from the time of his first Discourse made this basic point. In works
such as The Social Contract, the Constitutional Project for Corsica, The
Government of Poland and the Letter to d’Alembert, he attempts to show
how the “well-constituted state” can only preserve its moral health and
vitality—particularly in a wider context of corruption—by cultivating
patriotic sentiments and actively retarding the advance of enlightenment,
at least as understood by the philosophes. In Emile, he takes his argument
a decisive step further with the claim that ignorance is not enough; we
must also re-establish our connection to the voice of conscience within us.
This led Rousseau to devalue the rational intellect, which he regarded as
more of an impediment than an aid to this goal.
Chapter Seven
The Worst of All Possible Worlds
The Cautious Optimism of the Philosophes
E ven if a belief in progress was, as is commonly assumed, the “out-

standing characteristic” of the Enlightenment in France,1 the views of
the philosophes on its precise nature and prospects covered a broad spec-
trum, from the resignation of Voltaire’s Candide to the defiant optimism
of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind.2 In virtually every case it was less a matter of the straight-
forward triumph of pure light over complete darkness than of shades of
gray and degrees of progress. All agreed that progress is at least possible;
most thought that it was probable; virtually no one believed that it was
inevitable. Not many philosophes seriously doubted that progress had
been made and that the broad trajectory of historical development was
likely to continue gradually to improve. Many took the view that theirs
was “the most enlightened century there has ever been,”3 as Voltaire put it
in one of his more optimistic moods. Not long after finishing Candide, a
parody of facile optimism, he confessed his astonishment at the advances
that had been made in France, conceding that the “intellect of Europe has
made greater progress in the last hundred years than the whole world has
made since the days of Brahma, Fohi, Zoroaster and Thart of the
Egyptians,” although he also wondered why laws and institutions had not
kept pace.4 Before Candide, Voltaire had written to Diderot that “[o]ur
age is still quite barbaric.”5 After it, he conceded that “I see the progress
which the mind, eloquence and philosophy have made in this century. . . .
Philosophy is bringing about a bright new day”6 and he wrote to
d’Alembert that the “church of wisdom is beginning to spread in our
wards where a dozen years ago the darkest fanaticism prevailed. The
provinces are becoming enlightened; young magistrates are thinking
loftily.”7 Diderot was inclined to agree, writing that “whatever Jean-
103
104 The Worst of All Possible Worlds
Jacques Rousseau and the fanatical enemies of the progress of the human
spirit may say, it is difficult to read the history of the century of barbarism
in the life of any people without congratulating oneself upon being born
in an enlightened century and in a civilized nation.”8 Even so, he readily
acknowledged that civilization could still be plunged back into darkness.
Nonetheless, writing in his play Le Fils Naturel, he has a character
exclaim optimistically that the “time of barbarism is past. The century has
become enlightened. Reason has grown refined, and the nation’s books
are filled with its precepts.”9
One reason for this general—if very cautious and heavily qualified—
optimism was the philosophes’ rejection of the Christian belief in original
sin in favor of a belief in human perfectibility. Not only were human
beings not tainted with an indelible corruption that always limits progress
but, given the empiricism of the French Enlightenment, they were also
seen as malleable, and therefore improvable. For Condorcet, this meant
that an enlightened society is not only possible, but necessary:
Nature has set no limits to the perfection of human faculties;
that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the
progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of
any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the
duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us. This
progress will doubtless vary in speed, but it will never be
reversed as long as the earth occupies its present place in the
system of the universe, and as long as the general laws of this
system produce neither a general cataclysm nor such changes as
will deprive the human race of its present faculties and its pres-
ent resources.10
Very few philosophes were prepared to go this far.11 Most, while
impressed by the achievements that had already been made towards this
end in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and cautiously optimistic
about the general prospects for enlightenment in the future, did not regard
progress or the perfection of the species as in any way necessary. The
common portrait painted of the philosophes as naïve Panglossian opti-
mists is a caricature attributed to them by their opponents. In his
Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert laments that “[b]arbarism lasts for
centuries; it seems that it is our natural element; reason and good taste are
only passing.”12 Even Condorcet reluctantly accepted that progress is slow
and uneven and admitted that “thick darkness still covers an immense
stretch of the horizon.”13 In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind, he writes that, “if we survey in a single
sweep the universal history of peoples, we see them sometimes making
The Worst of All Possible Worlds 105
fresh progress, sometimes plunging back into ignorance, sometimes sur-

viving somewhere between these extremes or halted at a certain point,
sometimes disappearing from the earth under the conqueror’s heel . . . or
sometimes receiving knowledge from some more enlightened people in
order to transmit it in their turn to other nations.”14 Yet, conscious though
he was of the many obstacles that have always stood—and still stand—on
the road to progress, Condorcet was confident in the ability of humans to
overcome them eventually. “Each century will add new enlightenment to
that of the century preceding it,” he concluded. “[A]nd this progress,
which nothing from now on can stop or suspend, will have no other limits
than those of the duration of the universe.”15
Whatever their differences, there was a broad consensus among the
philosophes that history had seen the essentially progressive, if often slow
and uneven, expansion of human freedom, reason, and happiness and the
unleashing of human powers through the overcoming of various natural
and metaphysical obstacles, largely through expanding scientific discovery
and application and the slowly diminishing influence and power of organ-
ized religion, prejudice, and superstition. This view is compatible with the
belief that during any specific period civilization may advance slowly, stop
or even temporarily regress, which most conceded was an all-too-common
occurrence. Such a concession was necessary to account for periods such
as the “Dark Ages,” for example. However, on the belief that the general
course of historical development was in a desirable direction there was
broad agreement. Turgot spoke for most philosophes when he wrote:
[T]he whole human species . . . seems in the eyes of the philoso-
pher, an immense whole which has itself, like each individual, its
infancy and its progress . . . yet amidst their ravages, customs
and behaviour soften, the human mind becomes enlightened, iso-
lated nations draw closer together; finally trade and politics unite
the whole globe, and the totality of humanity, fluctuating
between calm and agitation, good times and bad, moves steadily
though slowly towards a greater perfection.16
Even Voltaire at his most despondent, after the calamitous Lisbon
earthquake of 1755,17 stopped well short of Rousseau’s Discourse on
Inequality, in which human perfectibility is held to have led in practice to
the “decrepitude of the species” after the golden age of “nascent society”
which immediately followed the state of nature. If Voltaire was haunted
by doubts about the record of human progress, Rousseau was not: for him
it had been one long, tragic descent. Even an expansive and complex con-
ception of the French Enlightenment view of progress could not come
close to embracing what, in the case of Rousseau, was among the darkest
accounts of human history ever sketched. At his most mordantly pes-

simistic, Voltaire savagely mocked the idea that “tout est bien.” Rousseau
went a giant step further, and argued that “tout est mal.”
Rousseau’s Optimism about the Past
Rousseau claims in his second Discourse that, beyond a small number of

rather vague natural attributes (conscience, free will, perfectibility), our
nature is virtually indistinguishable from that of other animals. Indeed, his
portrait of the solitary homme sauvage seems to have more in common
with lesser hominid species than with fully socialized human beings. In a
note in his Discourse, he speculates on the possibility that the orangutan is
in fact man in his presocial state, stripped of those traits that have been
acquired since leaving the state of nature (DI, 80–86 [OC III, 208–214]).18
We have already seen that the creature he depicts in the state of nature is a
“stupid, limited animal” possessing only a small core of innate faculties
and attributes, some of which he shares with other animals, others of
which are little more than “facultés virtuelles” that are totally undevel-
oped. Rousseau’s natural man, like other animals in the state of nature, is
dominated by biological drives and appetites. In fact, “physical man” and
man “in his metaphysical and moral aspects” are actually said to corre-
spond to natural and social man respectively. “Savage man, by Nature
committed to instinct alone . . . will therefore begin with purely animal
functions. . . . His desires do not exceed his Physical needs, the only goods
he knows in the Universe are nourishment, a female, and repose; the only
evils he fears are pain and hunger” (DI, 27 [OC III, 142–143]).
Rousseau’s homme sauvage is merely a “sensitive and passive being,”
lacking the active, rational intellect needed for moral agency. Man in the
state of nature is an animal limited to “pure sensations,” leading an essen-
tially physical, amoral existence. This is one reason his needs are limited,
since they are purely physical and consequently usually fairly easily satis-
fied, unlike “needs” based on the imagination, which are potentially
boundless.
According to Rousseau, it is only when, quite by accident, humans
start to cooperate and cohabit and the evolution away from the state of
nature begins that reason becomes active and the species can properly be
said to be “human.” He also argues in Emile that the faculty of conscience
is dormant among those in society who have not yet reached the “age of
reason.” Prior to this, the child is, like Rousseau’s homme sauvage,
amoral and asocial, acting entirely in accordance with natural amour de
soi. “Before the age of reason,” he writes, “we do good and bad without
knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions” (E, 67 [OC IV, 288]).
According to the account outlined in the Discourse on Inequality, our

social existence develops in stages, the first of which Rousseau calls “nas-
cent society.” During this period, the self-absorption and isolation of the
homme sauvage gives way to an expanding awareness of others with
whom he is forced to live and cooperate owing to changed external cir-
cumstances. This broadening of our awareness and the development of
social relationships results in a radical reshaping of our interests and iden-
tity. The cognitive and moral life of the species dates from this period, as
once-latent natural faculties gradually begin to develop. Reason and imag-
ination emerge, and our naturally passive and essentially benign self-
absorption (amour de soi) is gradually transformed into an increasingly
aggressive and destructive form of selfishness (amour-propre). While these
changes would eventually lead to the “decrepitude of the species” in
modern civilization, according to Rousseau, their negative consequences
are still far from dominant in nascent society. Nor is man any longer the
“stupid, limited animal” of the state of nature. As such, Rousseau
explains in the Discourse that “this period of the development of human
faculties, maintaining a golden mean between the indolence of the primi-
tive state and the petulant activity of our amour-propre, must have been
the happiest and most durable epoch” (DI, 48 [OC III, 171]). Nascent
society is the optimal point between the amoral, proto-human state of
nature and the immorality of modern civilization.
The more one thinks about it, the more one finds that this state
[nascent society] was the least subject to revolutions, the best for
man, and that he [man] must have come out of it only by some
fatal accident, which for the common utility ought never to have
happened. The example of Savages, who have almost all been
found at this point, seems to confirm that the human Race was
made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth
of the World; and that all subsequent progress has been in
appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individ-
ual, and in fact toward the decrepitude of the species. (DI, 48–49
[OC III, 171])
Beyond this fleeting stage the ideal balance found in nascent society is
upset and the negative aspects of our developing faculties come to out-
weigh the positive, eventually eclipsing them entirely. According to
Rousseau, this advanced stage in human development is worse than both
nascent society and the state of nature. It is this view that has led so many
to interpret Rousseau as the champion of the “noble savage” and an
advocate of the view that we could desire nothing better than to resemble
him. His point is rather that the history of the species has gone awry since
nascent society, and not since the state of nature. The Discourse on
Inequality is Rousseau’s conjectural account of how this actual descent

into our current misery might have happened. His hypothetical portrait of
the state of nature as idyllic serves to remind us that, while the social state
is, at its best, a morally superior state, it is one that entails enormous sac-
rifice and loss on the part of the natural individual. This is made clear in
The Social Contract which, like the second Discourse, contains an unam-
biguous statement of Rousseau’s view that, even with the many losses that
it involves, society marks a definite, if necessarily brief, improvement over
the state of nature for the species:
This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a
remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in
his behaviour and giving his actions the morality they previously
lacked. Only then, when the voice of duty replaces physical
impulse and right replaces appetite, does man, who until that
time only considered himself, find himself forced to act upon
other principles and to consult his reason before heeding his
inclinations. Although in this state he deprived himself of several
advantages given him by nature, he gains such great ones, his
faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas broadened, his
feelings ennobled, and his whole soul elevated to such a point
that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade
him beneath the condition he left, he ought ceaselessly to bless
the happy moment that tore him away from it forever, and that
changed him from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent
being and a man. Let us reduce the pros and cons to easily com-
pared terms. What man loses by the social contract is his natural
freedom and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him
and that he can get; what he gains is civil freedom and the pro-
prietorship of everything he possesses. (SC, 141 [OC III, 364])
Towards the end of his life, Rousseau was still protesting in vain that
his critics falsely and persistently accused him of “wanting to overturn the
entire order of society” with his indictment of modern civilization. Even if
the state of nature were preferable to social life, he claims in his
Dialogues, the question is moot, since “[h]uman nature cannot turn back.
Once man has left the time of innocence and equality, he can never return
to it” (RJJ, 176 [OC I, 887]).
Human beings have a history, according to Rousseau, because they
are open to change, unlike any other animals. Although he introduced the
term “perfectibility” into the language of the Enlightenment, where it was
taken up by the philosophes who made it central to their conception of
human progress, Rousseau regarded it as almost wholly negative in its
actual consequences, even if neutral in itself.19 For him, the capacity for
self-perfection is one of the few attributes that distinguishes human beings
from other animals, reflecting the unique plasticity of our nature. This
malleability opens the door to both improvement and degeneration. That
is why human beings have at various times risen above the animals and at
others fallen far below them.20 While for the philosophes this faculty of
self-improvement was the key to human progress, for Rousseau it was the
key to explaining the decline of the species. Perfectibility acts “with the
aid of circumstances” to develop, improve, and refine our other faculties,
such as reason, “without which he [man] would have remained eternally
in his primitive constitution” (DI, 42 [OC III, 162]). But such “improve-
ment” in our faculties—while making possible the advancement of civi-
lization—is deleterious to human well-being, according to Rousseau. To
the amazement of the philosophes, he raised the possibility that per-
fectibility has simultaneously enabled us to “perfect human reason while
deteriorating the species, make a being evil while making him sociable”
(DI, 42 [OC III, 162]). It was taken for granted by most philosophes that
the improvement of our faculties would increase human happiness.
“Experience also proves,” Condorcet wrote, “that in all countries where
the physical sciences have been cultivated, barbarism in the moral sciences
has been more or less dissipated and at least error and prejudice have dis-
appeared.”21 Rousseau did not deny that such attainments may follow
from perfectibility, but he disputed that humans are really better off as a
result of them.
Why is man alone subject to becoming imbecile? Is it not that he
thereby returns to his primitive state; and that—while the Beast,
which has acquired nothing and which has, moreover, nothing to
lose, always retains its instinct—man, losing again by old age or
other accidents all that his perfectibility had made him acquire,
thus falls back lower than the Beast itself? It would be sad for us
to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited
faculty is the source of all man’s misfortunes; that it is the faculty
which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition
in which he would pass tranquil and innocent days; that it is this
faculty which, bringing to flower over the centuries his enlighten-
ment and his errors, his vices and his virtues, in the long run
makes him the tyrant of himself and of Nature. It would be hor-
rible to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being the one who
first suggested to the inhabitant of the banks of the Orinoco the
use of those Pieces of wood which he binds on the temple of his
Children, and which assure them at least a part of their imbecil-
ity and original happiness. (DI, 26–27 [OC III, 142])
Rousseau’s account of the origin and development of language mir-

rors his pessimistic view of history and is entirely consistent with the dark
portrait that he paints of it in his Discourse on Inequality. He appears to
have begun working on his Essay on the Origin of Languages in conjunc-
tion with the second Discourse, and may even have originally intended
them to be part of a single work, although it was not published until
shortly after his death (1781). In it, he argues that the first languages
arose in nascent society from our passions, which “spoke before reason”
(EOL, 318 [OC V, 410]). These early languages were figurative, musical,
and poetic, relying on images and signs that appealed more to the eye and
to the emotions than to the ear and the brain. “At first,” Rousseau writes,
“only poetry was spoken. Only long afterward did anyone take it into his
head to reason” (EOL, 294 [OC V, 381]). Over time, as our reason devel-
oped and human civilization became increasingly sophisticated and
remote from nature, languages became colorless, abstract and lost their
original expressiveness and vitality while gaining in clarity and precision.
They became like civilization as a whole, at once perfected and sympto-
matic of human misery. According to Rousseau, these later “lettered lan-
guages” have become so cold, monotonous, and logical that he
sarcastically concluded that it would be necessary to establish academies
in order for ordinary people to understand them. “In proportion as needs
increase, as affairs become entangled, as enlightenment extends,” he
writes, “language changes character; it becomes more precise and less pas-
sionate; it substitutes ideas for feelings, it no longer speaks to the heart
but to reason. As a result, accent is extinguished, articulation extends, lan-
guage becomes more exact and clearer, but more drawn out, more muted,
and colder” (EOL, 296 [OC V, 384]). In other words, the rise of enlight-
ened civilization is directly reflected in the degeneration of language, and
the three “manners of writing” correspond to the three different stages of
social development, which Rousseau labels “savage,” “barbaric,” and
“civilized,” the last of which he associates with “commercial peoples”
(EOL, 297 [OC V, 385]).22 In his own day, Rousseau thought that the lan-
guages of the most civilized northern countries—“muted, crude, articu-
lated, shrill, monotonous, clear”—had moved much further away from
earlier poetic languages than those of the less sophisticated south, which
were still relatively “lively, sonorous, accented, eloquent, and often
obscure by dint of their energy” (EOL, 316–317 [OC V, 409]). Earlier
passionate languages were also “favorable to liberty,” unlike their degen-
erate modern descendants, which are only made for “murmuring in sul-
tans’ Council-chambers” (EOL, 332 [OC V, 428]). Rousseau’s theory of
the evolution of language was an important part of his general critique of
civilization and progress.
According to Rousseau, the main culprit in the tendency of societies

to degenerate into a Hobbesian war of all against all is amour-propre.
Once human beings begin to associate they start to compare themselves,
and this leads to the emergence of powerful new social desires and pas-
sions, such as competition, ambition, and jealousy, which are insatiable
and eventually eclipse our benign natural desires. Nascent society is
merely that brief, happy moment in the movement from the state of
nature, where amour-propre does not exist, to the state of civilization,
where it dominates. Nothing can stop the inexorable progression from
one stage to the next, although the movement can be retarded in excep-
tional circumstances.
Rousseau’s Pessimism about the Future
While the present compared very unfavorably with the past for Rousseau,
the future looked darker still.23 Indeed, such was his pessimism that he
repeatedly argued against even minor change in those few isolated pockets
of virtue that still remained in Europe for fear that they too would go the
way of the rest of modern civilization, thereby making the eclipse of virtue
total. Given the overwhelming power of amour-propre, which tends to
colonize all aspects of life and cause endemic social conflict leading to des-
potism, it is extremely rare for virtue to establish itself in human affairs
even at the best of times, according to Rousseau. An exceptional and
highly fortuitous combination of circumstances must exist before this is
possible. That is why a “thousand nations that have flourished on earth
could never have tolerated good laws, and even those that could were only
so disposed for a very short time during their entire existence” (SC, 157
[OC III, 384]). Modern France, certainly, was long past the point of
return; Rousseau viewed it as a civilization in every respect ill-suited to the
cultivation of virtue.
Rousseau spells out these rare conditions in many of his works, par-
ticularly The Social Contract, the Constitutional Project for Corsica, and
The Government of Poland. Foremost among them are that the society be
young, simple, small, equal, poor, homogeneous, and isolated. Even where
these demanding conditions exist, the intervention of a charismatic legisla-
tor is necessary to introduce laws that will bring about the reign of virtue,
which never emerges spontaneously. As John Hope Mason writes, “The
republican forma was only suitable to certain material, one which was still
pliable.”24 It is little wonder, therefore, that Rousseau believed that there
was only one place in modern Europe where such a regime could yet be
established, Corsica, which he regarded as an ascendant nation—a

“people being born.”
What people, then, is suited for legislation? One that, though
already bound by some union of origin, interest, or convention,
has not yet borne the true yoke of laws. One that has neither
customs nor superstitions that are deeply entrenched. One that
does not fear being crushed by a sudden invasion and can, with-
out becoming involved in its neighbours’ quarrels, resist each of
them by itself or use the help of one to drive away another. One
where each member can be known to all, and where it is not nec-
essary to impose on any man a greater burden than a man can
bear. One that does not depend on other peoples, and on whom
no other people depends. One that is neither rich nor poor, and
can be self-sufficient. Finally, one that combines the stability of
an ancient people with the docility of a new people. What makes
the work of legislation difficult is not so much what must be
established as what must be destroyed. And what makes success
so rare is the impossibility of finding the simplicity of nature
together with the needs of society. All these conditions, it is true,
are hard to find together. Hence one sees few well-constituted
States. In Europe there is still one country capable of legislation;
it is the Island of Corsica. The valour and perseverance with
which this courageous people was able to recover and defend its
freedom would well deserve that some wise man should teach
them how to preserve it. I have a feeling that some day this little
Island will astound Europe. (SC, 162 [OC III, 390–391])
Rousseau was just as pessimistic about the likelihood of maintaining
such a regime as he was about the chances of setting it up in the first
place. He compared the body politic to a human body that follows a natu-
ral cycle from birth to death. A society “begins to die at the moment of its
birth, and carries within itself the causes of its destruction” (SC, 188 [OC
III, 424]). This is even true of the very best societies enjoying the most
favorable circumstances. “If Sparta and Rome perished,” Rousseau
inquired with unflinching pessimism, “what State can hope to endure for-
ever? If we want to form a lasting establishment, let us therefore not hope
to make it eternal” (SC, 188 [OC III, 424]). In his Constitutional Project
for Corsica, he writes darkly that the abuse of political institutions “fol-
lows so closely upon their establishment that it is hardly worth while to
set them up, only to see them degenerate so rapidly” (CPC, 277 [OC III,
901]). Rousseau was certain that Corsica could no more avoid such
degeneration over the long term than any other society. However, he
thought that, as a young and undeveloped nation, it was uniquely well
placed to “begin at the beginning, and take steps to prevent degeneration”

(CPC, 278 [OC III, 902]). He regarded the circumstances of eighteenth-
century Europe as among the least conducive to the establishment and
maintenance of virtue.
Given the “natural” tendency of societies to degenerate, Rousseau
thought that change for the better was a violation of the natural course of
social evolution. Hence his warning to free peoples that “Freedom can be
acquired, but it can never be recovered” (SC, 158 [OC III, 385]). The most
that could be hoped for was to retard the inevitable onset of decline. Since
change is, almost without exception, change for the worse, everything must
be done to prevent it, although Rousseau admitted that it could not be
arrested indefinitely anywhere. The only variable that he believed was
amenable to human control, if only slightly, was the rate of decline. While
all regimes are fated to die, “each can have a constitution that is more or
less robust and suited to preserve it for a longer or shorter time. . . . Even
the best constituted State will come to an end, but later than another” (SC,
188 [OC III, 424]). That is why Rousseau cautioned against even modest
change in eighteenth-century Geneva, where traces of virtue could still be
found. “The smallest change in customs,” he wrote with his native city in
mind, “always turns to the disadvantage of morals . . . it is a treasure that
must be preserved, but that is no longer recovered once it has been lost”
(PN, 195 [OC II, 970–971]). The Genevans should follow the example of
the authoritarian Spartans rather than the democratic Athenians, who were
ruined by their failure to stop the many “dangerous innovations” proposed
by ordinary citizens (DI, 5 [OC III, 114]). Rousseau thought that Geneva
had been spared the fate of other European societies because the right to
propose new laws was wisely restricted to a small group of magistrates
who used it cautiously and that “the People, on its side, was so hesitant in
giving its consent to these Laws, and that their promulgation could only be
done with so much solemnity, that before the constitution was shaken one
had time to be convinced that it is above all the great antiquity of Laws
which makes them holy and venerable; that the People soon scorns those
laws it sees change daily; and that in growing accustomed to neglect old
usages on the pretext of making improvements, great evils are often intro-
duced to correct lesser ones” (DI, 5–6 [OC III, 114]).
Rousseau’s pessimistic conservatism is obvious on virtually every
page of his Letter to d’Alembert, in which he argues against the introduc-
tion of modern theater in Geneva. Following a visit to Ferney, the home of
his friend and ally Voltaire a short distance from Geneva, d’Alembert
wrote in support of the introduction of theater in Rousseau’s native city in
an article for the Encyclopédie (1757). While there, he watched and was
impressed by the French plays that Voltaire had been staging. Rousseau
was outraged; he feared that the theater would debase the morals of his
innocent compatriots and that Voltaire “would cause a revolution there

[Geneva], and I would find again in my fatherland the tone, the appear-
ance, the morals that were driving me from Paris” (C, 333 [OC I, 396]).
In a letter to Voltaire in 1760, Rousseau accused him of “ruining” his
beloved Geneva25—the “anti-Paris”26—incontrovertible proof of which
came shortly afterward when his native city banned and burned both The
Social Contract and Emile.27 The Procurator-General of Geneva, Jean-
Robert Tronchin, defended the Council’s actions in his Letters Written
From the Country (1763), to which Rousseau replied with Letters Written
From the Mountain. Predictably, the Genevan authorities condemned the
latter as well. As a consequence of these events, Rousseau renounced his
Genevan citizenship “forever,” having come to the conclusion that the city
had gone the way of the rest of Europe, in large part because of the intro-
duction of enlightened ideas and values by his arch-enemy Voltaire.28 In
his Letter to d’Alembert, he claims that in a state as small as Geneva “all
innovations are dangerous and that they ought never to be made without
urgent and grave motives” (LA, 123 [OC III, 113]). This Letter is as pure
a Counter-Enlightenment text as one can find anywhere, every bit as hos-
tile to the spirit of the philosophes as anything written by their orthodox
opponents. Even so, he would soon write of this work that it did not go
far enough. “I was deceived in my Lettre à d’Alembert. I did not think
that progress was so great or that our moeurs had gone so far. Our ills are
now irredeemable” (Rousseau to Paul-Claude Moultou, 29 January 1760
[CC VII, 24]).
This profoundly disillusioning experience late in his life seems to have
pushed Rousseau over the brink to total pessimism about the prospects
for the establishment of a republic of virtue in modern Europe. His alien-
ation from the “enlightened” civilization that surrounded him appears to
have become complete in the last decade of his life, as he sought to escape
from the company of men entirely in an apparent effort to preserve his
own integrity and virtue in an age of utter corruption. As Robert Wokler
has written, Rousseau finally offered three solutions to the problem he
presents in his Discourse on Inequality: “the first [The Social Contract]
was directed to politics, the second [Emile] to education, and the third
[Reveries of a Solitary Walker] solitude.”29 Each successive solution is
more pessimistic than its predecessor, mirroring Rousseau’s own mounting
despair. In his Final Reply, he writes that “learned and Philosophical
Peoples finally come to ridicule and scorn it [virtue]. It is when a nation
has once reached this point that corruption can be said to be at its peak
and there is no hope for remedies” (Final, 114 [OC III, 76]). In Emile,
Rousseau claims that “[p]ublic instruction no longer exists and can no
longer exist, because where there is no longer fatherland, there can no
longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizen, should be
effaced from modern languages” (E, 40 [OC IV, 250]). Given that he
thought that the enlightened civilization of Europe was irredeemably cor-
rupt (except for Corsica and, possibly, Geneva and Poland), he must have
ended his days in resignation. The chronology of his works supports this
interpretation. His more political essays were written between 1758 and
1771. His last work, the unfinished Reveries of a Solitary Walker, was
written between 1776 and 1778, and suggests that he may have come to
the final conclusion that escape from civilization into rustic isolation is the
only real option for the man of virtue. It appears as though the pessimism
of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality only deepened in the years that fol-
lowed its appearance, culminating in his own personal and intellectual
withdrawal from society, which he came to view as beyond reform.
Conclusion
For Rousseau, eighteenth-century Europe was a tired, old, degenerate civi-

lization, made immeasurably worse by the efforts of the philosophes to
“enlighten” it. Given his belief that the optimal balance of social condi-
tions occurs in the youth of any society and that the subsequent history of
such societies is necessarily one of irreversible decline, he came to the con-
clusion that European civilization was irretrievably debased. The reign of
virtue was simply not possible on a civilizational scale except, perhaps,
outside of Europe or on some of its more remote peripheries. For a time,
Rousseau conceded that it remained possible (if not likely) within Europe
in one or two far-flung pockets that had not yet been completely over-
whelmed by “civilized” values, such as Poland and Corsica, where a pru-
dent policy of republican, Counter-Enlightenment austerity and autarkic
isolation was still worthwhile. Eventually he concluded that it was only
possible for a few rare individuals to be virtuous, provided they were suf-
ficiently isolated from the mainstream of European civilization, as Emile
was to be until his maturity. Rousseau imagined himself to be in such a
position, and interpreted his persecution at the hands of both the
philosophes and their orthodox opponents in such terms. His strong iden-
tification with Socrates is best understood in terms of his own self-concep-
tion as a good man in a wicked age, attacked and vilified because his
contemporaries were blind to his goodness by their own vice.
Conclusion
Q uestions about consistency have always dogged Rousseau’s writings,

and not unreasonably. The Social Contract and Emile were written
and published more or less contemporaneously,1 yet the former prescribes
a severe “republic of virtue” stressing collective discipline, the subordina-
tion of the individual to the group, and the active promotion of “senti-
ments of sociability,” whereas the latter prescribes a form of life and
education intended to cultivate the highest possible degree of individual
integrity, authenticity, and independence. If Rousseau intended these two
prescriptions to be in some way reconcilable, then he nowhere makes it
clear exactly how.2 We have already seen that, in his Discourse on Political
Economy, he praises both Socrates, the solitary gadfly in a corrupt city,
and Cato, the model citizen of a virtuous republic. Both of these ideals,
the Socratic and the Catonic, won Rousseau’s admiration. Such apparent
inconsistencies abound in his works. It is little wonder, therefore, that
many of his interpreters have concluded that, “[o]n the score of consis-
tency,” as C. E. Vaughan put it, “he is hardly to be acquitted.”3
Rousseau consistently prescribed both ideals because he believed that
they apply to utterly different situations. He offered no single prescription
for all circumstances. “If you are a Philosopher, live like Socrates,” he
advised. “If you are only a Statesman, live like Cato” (“Comparison of
Socrates and Cato,” in SC, 15).4 He admired Montesquieu’s pragmatism
and took from him the lesson that prescriptions must take into account
the varied contexts to which they apply. In ancient Athens Socrates had no
fatherland since his native city was by then “already lost.” The same is
true of modern Europe, where a few rare individuals on the fringes of
society might follow the Socratic path of personal integrity to preserve
their virtue and authenticity in the vast ocean of vice that surrounds them.
That is the best that can be hoped for under such disastrous conditions.
Rousseau imagined himself to be in such a position, and interpreted his
117
118 Conclusion
persecution at the hands of both the philosophes and their orthodox

opponents in such terms.5
Yet in his essay on The Government of Poland—published a decade
after Emile—Rousseau holds up the Catonic ideal to the Poles, as he had
done to the Genevans and the Corsicans, since he judged that virtue had
some hope of success on a national scale on those fringes of Europe not
yet wholly corrupted by “civilized” values. But they were rare exceptions.
We know that Rousseau was profoundly and increasingly pessimistic
about the prospects for virtue on such a scale. That is why the Socratic
ideal of personal integrity and individual virtue are central to his last
works—the Confessions, the Dialogues and the Reveries. They are best
read as applying to uncorrupted individuals who live in conditions of gen-
eralized vice, like Socrates among the Athenians. Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, Rousseau’s favorite novel and the model for the young Emile,
eventually became his own personal model in the last years of his life, as
his pessimisism and social estrangement became as complete as the cor-
ruption he perceived around him. He later looked back on the rustic isola-
tion of the Isle de Saint-Pierre, where he lived in 1765, as among the
happiest days of his life, confirmation of his claim in Emile that a “truly
happy being is a solitary being” (E, 22 [OC IV, 503]).6 The tragic sequel
to Emile that Rousseau began in 1762 was subtitled “Les Solitaires,”7 and
his last work, begun two years before his death, was Reveries of a Solitary
Walker, in which he recounts the pain of his social life and the pleasures
and solace of solitude.
Both the Socratic and Catonic ideals that Rousseau prescribed were
incompatible with the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is quite clear in the
Catonic works such as The Social Contract, the Letter to d’Alembert, the
Discourse on Political Economy, The Government of Poland, and the
Constitutional Project for Corsica. One thing that makes Rousseau distinc-
tive within the classical republican tradition is the intensity of his opposi-
tion to the Enlightenment.8 These days, we are used to republicanism being
contrasted with liberalism, not “enlightenment,” and the most common
criticisms of the latter have very rarely come from a republican direction.
Of course there are many forms of republicanism, ranging from the soli-
daristic anti-pluralism of classical republicanism to the rational-discursive
liberal republicanism favored by many contemporary writers.9 The empha-
sis that Rousseau put on the need for the active cultivation of patriotic sen-
timents, normative consensus, and social and religious homogeneity place
him squarely in the former camp.10 It is from there that the first major—
and arguably most powerful—attack on the Enlightenment “republic of
letters” originated with Rousseau’s republican assault on the philosophes.
Yet a Counter-Enlightenment thrust is evident—if somewhat less
obvious—in Rousseau’s other works too. They are based on the Socratic
Conclusion 119
ideal of individual integrity, conscience, and autonomy, and are therefore

less obviously hostile to the emancipatory goals of the Enlightenment.
However, Rousseau believed that, contrary to both Socrates and the ency-
clopédistes, the cultivation of the intellect and the acquisition of knowl-
edge were inimical to this personal ideal of integrity.11 What is needed
instead is the “negative education” of Emile, emphasizing the instincts
more than reason, the development of which always risks inflaming
amour-propre and exacerbating the precarious social order. Such an edu-
cation would also ensure a “healthy ignorance,” without which it would
be impossible to hear the faint inner voice of conscience. Socrates was a
model for Rousseau for his personal integrity and courage, for the
admirable way in which he actually lived his life, not for his fidelity to
knowledge, the contemplative life or reason. It was the mystical Socratic
dictamen, not Socratic reason, which was the foundation of his integrity
and the model for Rousseauian conscience, a faculty that operates inde-
pendently of both reason and knowledge.12
Rousseau stood at the beginning of what would eventually develop

into a full-scale rebellion against the Enlightenment that did not really take
off in France until the violent revolutionary overthrow of traditional insti-
tutions during the last decade of the eighteenth century and the rapid
growth of industrialization, secularization, and urbanization in the nine-
teenth century. These epochal events produced massive social dislocation
and moral upheaval in Europe, giving questions of social order, cohesion,
atomism, and alienation an urgency lacking in the pre-Revolutionary, pre-
industrial “Age of Enlightenment.” These questions became something of
an obsession in the chaotic world of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary
France, which helps to explain why Rousseau’s darkly pessimistic vision of
society as beset by deep tensions and centrifugal forces continued to res-
onate to a much greater extent than that of most of his more sanguine
Enlightenment adversaries. Many have traced the revolutionary excesses of
the 1790s back to the Enlightenment. Little wonder that there was an erup-
tion of hostility to the latter in the aftermath of 1789, beginning with
Edmund Burke’s influential Reflections on the Revolution in France. Only
the second half of the twentieth century has seen a comparable explosion
of Counter-Enlightenment thought. In the years immediately following
World War Two “enlightenment” emerged as a key organizing concept in
social and political theory, with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
leading the charge in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Even though there
are clear echoes of Rousseau’s earlier denunciation of the Enlightenment of
his age in recent intellectual movements such as critical theory, hermeneu-
tics, pragmatism, feminism, postmodernism, and communitarianism—all
of which contain some version of the charge that the pathologies of our
120 Conclusion
civilization have their origins in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—

his name is rarely invoked in this context.13 Yet he was the first enemy of
the Enlightenment, a status that both Rousseau and the philosophes
would have thought self-evident.14
Notes
Preface
1. Nietzsche (1968): 75. Nietzsche’s thinking on the problem of civi-

lization and the way he construes it in terms of an opposition between the
spirit of Voltaire and that of Rousseau was influenced by Ferdinand
Brunetière’s Etudes critiques sur l’histoire de la littérature française. For a
discussion of this, see Kuhn (1989).
2. Nietzsche dedicated the first edition of Human, All Too Human to
Voltaire, “one of the greatest liberators of the human spirit.”
3. Nietzsche (1968): 62–64.
4. Nietzsche (1968): 62–64.
5. Nietzsche (1996): 169. Also, see Ansell-Pearson (1991).
6. Nietzsche’s reading of Rousseau clearly owes much to Voltaire,
whose quip about the Discourse on Inequality was the first of many
depicting him as an antisocial primitivist. “I have just received your book
against the human race,” Voltaire wrote to Rousseau. “Never has so much
wit been used in an attempt to make us like animals. The desire to walk
on all fours seizes one when one reads your work” (Voltaire to Rousseau,
30 August 1755 [CWV C, 259]).
7. In his essay “The Word Civilization,” Jean Starobinski distin-
guishes between an earlier, juridical meaning of the word and its later,
modern sense. He notes that the Marquis de Mirabeau (1675–1760) was
the first person in France to use it in the latter sense, in his L’Ami des
hommes ou Traité de la population (1756). The first French dictionary to
use “civilization” in this sense referred its readers back to Mirabeau’s
work: “The Ami des hommes used this word for sociabilité. See that
word. Religion is undeniably the first and most useful brake on humanity;
it is the first source of civilization. It preaches to us and continually recalls
us to confraternity, to soften our hearts” (Dictionnaire universel [1771],
121
122 Notes to Introduction
quoted in Starobinski [1993]: 2). By the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, civilization had became closely associated with the Enlightenment
values actively promoted by the philosophes, such as “improvements in
comfort, advances in education, politer manners, cultivation of the arts
and sciences, growth of commerce and industry, and acquisition of mate-
rial goods and luxuries” (3). This is essentially how Rousseau saw it too.
As N. J. H. Dent writes, he identified civilization with the very things that
he associated with the philosophes, such as “the growth of arts and let-
ters; the introduction of refined manners and dress and elaborate social
customs; the development of large cities” (Dent [1992]: 46–47).
8. See Mazlish (1989).
9. It is worth noting that G. D. H. Cole translates Rousseau’s
“politesse” (OC III, 193) as “civilization” (Cole [1973]: 104), while
Maurice Cranston renders it as “civility” (Cranston [1984]: 136). A recent
translation by Victor Gourevitch is more cautious, preferring “politeness”
(Gourevitch [1997]: 187). Roger Masters translates the French “police”
(OC III, 170) as “civilization” (DI, 48).
Introduction
1. Berlin believes that Hamann not only “struck the most violent
blow against the Enlightenment” but was also “the first person to declare
war upon the Enlightenment in the most open, violent and complete fash-
ion” (Berlin [1994]: 1). Rousseau’s role in the Counter-Enlightenment, by
contrast, has been “exaggerated.” Although he acknowledges that the
“influence of Rousseau, particularly of his early writings, on this move-
ment in Germany, which came to be called Stürm und Drang, was pro-
found,” Berlin adds that “even Rousseau did not seem to them to go far
enough” to rank among the Enlightenment’s enemies (Berlin [1981]: 9). In
principle, he writes, “what Rousseau and the other Encyclopaedists
wished to do was the same” (Berlin [1999]: 40, 46, 52–54). However in
an essay on Georges Sorel Berlin writes that there is “an anti-intellectual
and anti-Enlightenment stream in the European radical tradition, at times
allied with populism, or nationalism, or neo-medievalism, that goes back
to Rousseau and Herder and Fichte and enters agrarian, anarchist, anti-
Semitic and other anti-liberal movements, creating anomalous combina-
tions” (Berlin [1981]: 316). Berlin’s most comprehensive account of
Rousseau appears in a 1952 BBC radio broadcast, published in Berlin
(2002).
2. Johann Georg Hamann to Christian Jacob Kraus, 18 December
1784, in Schmidt (1996): 147.
Notes to Introduction 123
3. Virtually all of Rousseau’s contributions to the Encyclopédie

were on music. His only explicitly political article appeared in volume five
(1755), published as a separate “Discourse on Political Economy” three
years later.
4. Taylor (1963): 1573.
5. Voltaire to d’Alembert, 19 March 1761 (CWV CVII, 107).
6. Voltaire to E. N. Damilaville, 16 August 1765 (CWV CXIII,
346).
7. Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et Néron (OCD III, 96–97).
8. Gay (1966): 25.
9. J. H. Brumfitt argues that there are many good reasons why
Rousseau should not be included among the philosophes, and acknowl-
edges that Rousseau himself would have objected to his inclusion in their
ranks. “Yet,” he concludes, “in many ways he remains a man of the
Enlightenment” (Brumfitt [1972]: 7–8). Terence Marshall’s more recent
study of this issue refers to “Rousseau’s paradoxical attack on the
Enlightenment,” noting the irony that his celebrity in eighteenth-century
France “followed the brilliance of his attack on the Enlightenment”
(Marshall [1978]: 425, 421). Peter Gay writes unhelpfully in the second
volume of his study of the Enlightenment that “Rousseau was not wholly
in the Enlightenment, but he was of it. The course of his life was one long
estrangement from his fellow philosophes. . . . Yet in some sense Rousseau
always remained a member of the family” (Gay [1969]: 529). Hans-Georg
Gadamer alludes to Rousseau’s importance to the critique of the
Enlightenment as well: “To a large extent Kant’s famous essay [Was ist
Aufklärung?] . . . belongs already to that critique of enlightenment which
Rousseau inaugurated and which is directed against the expectation that
the progress of the sciences will lead to a moral perfection of human-
ity”(Gadamer [1997]: 287).
10. Hampson (1968): 9. Hampson traces the origin of the entire
Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment to the publication of Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, a claim that, unfortunately, he
does not pursue.
11. Cassirer (1951): 273.
12. Wokler (1995): ix.
13. Saisselin (1991): 396.
14. Melzer (1996): 351. In his book on Rousseau, Melzer opens his
account of this relationship with the observation that “[t]he
Enlightenment and the new Party of Reason had plenty of enemies;
Rousseau was its first defector, its first ‘dialectical’ opponent. His defec-
tion, moreover, turned out to be the founding event of a since unbroken
tradition of modern self-hatred, of protest against modernity arising from
within the modern camp” (Melzer [1990]: xii).
124 Notes to Introduction
15. Tallis (1998): 2.

16. Artz (1968): 130.
17. Cranston (1960): 160.
18. Cranston (1991): 108.
19. Hulliung (1994): 242.
20. Hulliung (1994): 6.
21. Hulliung (1994): 4.
22. In an exchange with Hans Aarsleff in the London Review of
Books (5–18 November 1981), Berlin writes that Herder, unlike Hamann,
“was not an enemy but a critic of the French Enlightenment” (8). There is
a further exchange between Berlin and Aarsleff in the letters column of the
London Review of Books, 3–16 June 1982.
23. Hulliung (1994): 213.
24. Hulliung (1994): 157.
25. To my knowledge, the first explicit identification of Rousseau as
“founder of the Counter-Enlightenment” appears in William Everdell’s
study of Christian apologetics in eighteenth-century France. His principal
interest is in Rousseau as the originator of a new religious epistemology,
particularly as presented in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard
Vicar” in Emile, which “was and would become the strongest and most
influential argument for religion in the later eighteenth century” (Everdell
[1987]: 92). Everdell argues that the new defense of religion that
Rousseau developed in this work, based on the inner voice of sentiment
rather than sensory perception, decisively set him apart from the
philosophes and inspired later generations of religious thinkers sympa-
thetic to Romanticism: “France had Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a one-man
evangelical movement and the founder of the Counter-enlightenment in
France. He is the French representative of the neglected other side of the
century, the evangelical, ‘enthusiastic,’ utopian, ascetic and believing side,
always bubbling under the calm and witty surface of elite encyclopedism
and salon wit. Rousseau is not a Benjamin Franklin; he is a Jonathan
Edwards. This is what is meant by counter-enlightenment” (89). I am in
substantial agreement with Everdell on this point, which I explore in
detail in chapter 6, although the present study deals with Rousseau’s
broader social and political agenda and the wider implications of his “rev-
olution” than Everdell does. In 1984, Timothy Luke drew parallels
between the twentieth-century critique of enlightenment by critical theo-
rists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and Rousseau’s
“project,” which he depicts as “arguably the first systematic critique of
the cultural domination of the scientific worldview, of the false conscious-
ness engendered by commodity fetishism, and of the one-dimensionality of
everyday life implicit in the then rising, but now dominant,
‘Enlightenment schema’” (Luke [1984]: 211). I make a case for Rousseau
Notes to Chapter 1 125
as the father of Counter-Enlightenment thought in Garrard (1994). Arthur

Melzer’s “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the
New Religion of Sincerity” argues that the “counter-Enlightenment begins
with Rousseau” (344), although this is qualified by the claim—echoing
Hulliung—that his critique was “less a rejection of the Enlightenment
than a more self-consistent expression of it” (351).
26. The most prominent recent critics of the Enlightenment who
have stressed its atomizing social effects are MacIntyre (1981) and Gray
(1995).
27. In a footnote to this remark Rousseau adds that “I hold it to be
impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to last. All
have shined, and every state which shines is on the decline. I have reasons
more particular than this maxim for my opinion, but it is unseasonable to
tell them, and everyone sees them only too well.” In The Social Contract,
he writes: “The Russian empire would like to subjugate Europe and will
itself be subjugated. The Tartars, its subjects or its neighbors, will become
its masters and ours. This revolution appears inevitable to me. All the kings
of Europe are working together to hasten it” (SC, 158 [OC III, 386]).
Finally, Rousseau wrote in his The Government of Poland that “I see all
the other States of Europe rushing to their ruin . . . soon to die” (GP, 178
[OC III, 954]). It is easy to imagine him agreeing with those who would
later blame the Revolution on the Enlightenment. See Kelly (1991).
Chapter 1. The Enlightenment Republic of Letters
1. Condorcet (1970): 193.

2. Lough (1985): 1–15. Lough’s claim that Jack Lively’s anthology
The Enlightenment was the first book published in Britain using the term
on its own in the title is surprising, given that John Grier Hibben’s The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment appeared in the United States over half a
century earlier (1910). On the use of the expression “the
Enlightenment”in English, see Schmidt (2001). On the word “lumières,”
see Delon (1997): 659-662.
3. My own view on this issue is expressed very well by Robert
Wokler: “I have a great deal of sympathy for such exasperation [with con-
ventional uses of the term ‘the Enlightenment’], but I am not so unhappy
as are some other historians of eighteenth-century thought with the idea
of an Enlightenment Project. The literary salons and academies of that
age, the moral weeklies and journals, the association of philosophy with
kingship which in the period was already termed enlightened despotism,
all lend warrant to the notion of shared principles, a campaign, an inter-
national society of the republic of letters, a party of humanity” (Wokler
126 Notes to Chapter 1
[1997]: 18-19). Elsewhere, Wokler writes—I think correctly—that “I

doubt whether they [the philosophes] would have objected themselves to
our describing it as their project” (Wokler [1998]: 303).
4. Brewer (1993): 13.
5. Diderot, “Encyclopédie” (1755), in Diderot (1992): 22.
6. Robert Shackleton writes: “At the beginning of 1750 one could
not yet speak of a party of the philosophes; by 1753 there was an
undoubted party . . . they had come to be welded together into a party by
the early 1750s” (Shackleton [1988]: 459–460).
7. Alembert (1763): 410.
8. Goodman (1994): 23.
9. Alembert, “Reflections on the Present State of the Republic of
Letters.” quoted in Kramnick (1995): 16–17.
10. Condorcet (1955): 136–137.
11. Many philosophes liked to compare themselves to Socrates and,
as they saw it, his heroic mission to champion truth against the opinions
of his city. Condorcet writes in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind that the death of Socrates was “the first
crime announcing the war between philosophy and superstition which still
continues today” (Condorcet [1847–1849, vol. 6]: 66). Diderot in particu-
lar was fascinated with Socrates. P. N. Furbank writes of him: “It
[Diderot’s translation of The Apology of Socrates] marks the beginning of
a self-identification with the imprisoned and martyred Socrates, which
later became a cult with him” (Furbank [1992]: 53). Voltaire wrote a play
Socrate (1759) defending the philosopher and, in 1762, Sauvigny com-
posed Mort de Socrate, which originally included allusions to the contro-
versy over Palissot’s play Les Philosophes, which the censor forced him to
remove.
12. Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Diderot (1992): 26.
13. Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Diderot (1992): 23.
14. La Mettrie (1996): 38.
15. Holbach, Le bon sens (1772), in Lively (1966): 61–62.
16. “As for the canaille,” Voltaire wrote to d’Alembert, “I don’t con-
cern myself with it; it will always remain canaille” (4 June 1767 [VC
LXVI, 6]). According to Peter Gay, Voltaire’s opinion of “the blind and
fanatic multitude” evolved from “unqualified contempt” to “grudging
respect” (Gay [1988]: 259).
17. Voltaire, A l’auteur du livre des trios imposteurs (1769) (OCV X,
403). Voltaire comments on this remark in his Discours de Me. Belleguier
(1773) (OCV XXXIX, 10), and in a letter to Frederick-William of Prussia,
28 November 1770 (VC LXXVII, 120). Peter Gay writes about it that it is
“not a cynical injunction to rulers to invent a divine policeman for their
ignorant subjects. Rather, it is part of a vehement diatribe against an athe-
ist, written in the midst of Voltaire’s dialogue with d’Holbach” (Gay

[1988]: 265).
18. Diderot, Observations sur le Nakaz, in Diderot (1992): 83.
Diderot completed this work in 1774 after his return from Russia,
although it was not published until 1920, in the Revue d’histoire
économique et sociale.
19. Hankins (1985): 170.
20. Richard Schwab, Introduction to the Preliminary Discourse to
the Encyclopedia of Diderot, xi.
21. Lough (1971): 97.
22. Alembert (1963): 121–122.
23. It seems very unlikely that Rousseau was being ironic here, since
this remark is made in the context of an attack on books and their preser-
vation: “Go, famous writings of which the ignorance and simplicity of our
Forefathers would have been incapable; escort to our descendants those
even more dangerous works which reek of the corruption of morals in our
century, and together carry to coming centuries a faithful history of the
progress and advantages of ours sciences and arts. If they read you, you
will not leave them any doubt about the question we discuss today; and
unless they be more foolish than we, they will raise their hands to Heaven
and say with bitterness of heart: ‘Almighty God, thou who holds all
Spirits in they hands, deliver us from the enlightenment and fatal arts of
our forefathers, and give back to us ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the
only goods that can give us happiness and are precious in thy sight’”
(DSA, 20–22 [OC III, 28–29]).
24. Dorinda Outram issues the following well-taken warning about
the use of the word science when referring to eighteenth-century France:
“In using this word ‘science’ at all, we are in fact committing the sin of
anachronism. The words ‘science’ and ‘scientist’ were not invented until
the 1830s in England. Before that ‘natural philosophy’ was probably the
term most in use. In French ‘science,’ like the German Wissenschaft,
meant ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing,’ and was not necessarily connected with
knowledge of nature. The term ‘scientifique’ to label specifically those
involved in such investigation was a coinage of the late nineteenth century.
Thus, in two major languages there was no word specifically to describe
enquiry into nature, or its practitioners. This should alert us to the extent
to which ‘science’ was not yet separated out from other intellectual areas,
nor were its practitioners readily distinguished from practitioners of other
forms of intellectual enquiry. . . . The linguistic point also reveals the
extent to which ‘science’ was not yet a defined body of knowledge, not yet
a ‘discipline,’ a body of knowledge separate from other bodies of knowl-
edge, with its own subject matter, let alone divided into sub-disciplines
such as ‘physiology’ or ‘geology.’ The study of what we now call ‘science’
still took place in the eighteenth century within other disciplines, linked
together under the heading of ‘natural philosophy’” (Outram [1995]:
48–49). In light of this, I think that it would be best to use the term “nat-
ural science” when referring to what was then called “natural philoso-
phy”and is now simply called “science” in English.
25. Condorcet, quoted in Baker (1975): 75.
26. Alembert (1963): 91.
27. Voltaire (1980): 59.
28. See White (1963): 1849–1869.
29. Alembert (1963): 74.
30. Voltaire (1980): 58.
31. Berthier’s accusation appears in an article attacking the
Encyclopédie, published in the January 1751 edition of the conservative
journal Mémoire de Trévoux (later called the Journal de Trévoux), begin-
ning his campaign against the Encyclopédie. Also, see Diderot’s letters to
Berthier, January and February 1751, in Diderot (1955): 103–110.
32. Darnton (1979): 540.
33. Alembert (1963): 31.
34. Alembert (1963): 51.
35. Alembert (1963): 70.
36. Alembert (1963): 91.
37. Gough (1936): 191. Peter Gay writes: “While philosophes con-
tinued to profess that they saw eternal standards independent of positive
legislation, they dismissed the essential fictions intimately associated with
that position, notably the state of nature or the social contract, with con-
tempt or silence” (Gay [1969]: 458).
38. Gordon (1994): 56.
39. Taylor (1985): 98–99. Taylor associates the notion of society as a
community of shared ends with “thinkers of the civic humanist tradition,”
specifically mentioning Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
Tocqueville, Arendt, and Habermas (96).
40. Montesquieu (1989): 5.
41. Condorcet (1955): 112.
42. Hume’s essay “Of the Original Contract” was first published in
Three Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh, 1748). For a more recent
edition, see Hume (1994): 186–201. For conflicting interpretations of
Hume’s views on contractarianism, see Buckle and Castiglione (1991):
457–480 and Gauthier (1979): 3–38.
43. Hume (1978): 549.
44. Mauzi (1960): 590.
45. Montesquieu (1973): 175.

46. Diderot, “Société” (OCD XVII, 131–132). Diderot is quoting
here from Seneca’s De Beneficii, book 4, chapter 8.
47. Diderot, Histoire des Deux Indes (1772), in Diderot (1992): 205.
48. Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, 15 October 1737 (CWV
LXXXVIII, 383).
49. Holbach (1776): 105.
50. Holbach (1776): 1, 4-5. Daniel Gordon writes that this work
was “a kind of lexical apotheosis” in which the word sociabilité “occurs
thirty times, social 148 times, and société over 300 times in the work”
(Gordon [1994]: 65,n. 73).
51. Gordon (1994): 59,n. 55.
52. Grotius (1984): 11. This translation was first published in
Oxford by Clarendon Press in 1925. Barbeyrac translated Grotius’s work
into French in 1724.
53. Pufendorf, Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, in Pufendorf
(1994): 81.
54. Pufendorf, Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, in Pufendorf
(1994): 80.
55. Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and of Nations, in Pufendorf
(1994): 152.
56. Pufendorf (1991): 35.
57. Pufendorf, Le Droit de la nature et des gens ou système général
des principes les plus importants de la morale, de la jurisprudence, et de la
politique, trans. Jean Barbeyrac (Amsterdam, 1707). Barbeyrac’s transla-
tion ran through five editions between 1707 and 1734.
58. Gordon (1994): 62.
59. Rousseau’s father introduced him to the work of Grotius when
he was just a boy, and we know from his Confessions that he read
Pufendorf as a young man in Chambéry (C, 92 [OC I, 110]). Robert
Wokler argues that it was with Pufendorf’s work that Rousseau was pre-
occupied “as much as, if not more than, any other political thinker”
(Wokler [1994]: 374), even though there are only five specific references
to Pufendorf in the entire corpus of Rousseau’s work and he is not men-
tioned in The Social Contract or in his voluminous correspondence.
60. See Rosenblatt (1997): 90–101.
61. Hont (1987): 267, 273.
62. The term “doux commerce” is from Hirschmann (1977).
63. Gordon (1994): 72–73.
64. See the first chapter of Sekora (1977), on “Necessity and
Hierarchy: The Classical Attack Upon Luxury.”
65. Voltaire (1961): 39. Voltaire was in possession of a copy of

Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees by at least 1736 (Ross [1976]: 1909).
On Le Mondain, the Défense du Mondain and Voltaire’s treatment of
antiquity in the context of the debate over “le luxe,” see Morize (1980).
66. Goldsmith (1987): 248.
67. Voltaire (1962): 368.
68. Diderot, “Luxe” (1765) (OCD XVI, 5). On attitudes toward
Athens during this period, see Roberts (1994): 169.
69. Ross (1976): 1903.
70. Hume, “Of Commerce” (1752), in Hume (1994): 101, 100.
71. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts” (1752), in Hume (1994):
106, 107.
72. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Hume (1994): 109.
73. Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and of Nations, in Pufendorf
(1994): 154.
74. Goodman (1994): 4–5.
75. Diderot, Refutation de l’ouvrage d’Helvetius intitule L’Homme
(1774) (OCD II, 382).
76. Saint-Pierre (1804): 29.
77. Diderot, “Philosophe” (1765) (OCD XVI): 276–277.
78. Goodman (1994): 53.
79. Kafker (1996): 25.
80. Baker (1975): 18.
81. Goodman (1994): 81.
82. Buffier, Traité de la société civile et du moyen de se render
heureux, en contribuant au bonheur des personnes avec qui l’on vit,
quoted in Gordon (1994): 79.
83. France (1992): 4.
84. Condorcet, Discours lu a l’Académie des Sciences (1782), in
Condorcet (1847–1849, vol. 1): 419.
85. Keith Baker makes a useful distinction between four different but
overlapping groups of philosophes. The first two were “men of letters,”
divided between moderates such as Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet,
and radicals like Baron d’Holbach and Diderot. The third group were
“enlightened and reforming administrators” such as Turgot, and the
fourth were Physiocrats, such as Mercier de la Rivière and Quesnay
(Baker [1975]: 18).
86. Holbach (1990): 38.
87. Baker (1975): 23.
88. Voltaire to Grimm, 10 October 1770 (VC LXXVII, 15–16).
89. Voltaire to d’Alembert, 24 November 1770 (VC LXXVII, 67-68).
Chapter 2. Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God
1. Diderot, Fils naturel (OCD VII, 66). For an analysis of the

debate between Rousseau and Diderot on this subject, see Cassirer (1945):
7–9.
2. Hume’s account of this experience was published in Paris in
1766 under the joint editorship of d’Alembert and Jean-Baptiste Suard as
Exposé succinct de la contestation qui s’est élévée entre M. Hume et M.
Rousseau, avec les pièces justicatives, to which d’Alembert added a signed
postscript. An English translation appeared later the same year in London
under the title A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between
Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau.
3. The chapter on Rousseau in Paul Johnson’s anti-intellectual
Intellectuals is a recent restatement of the view that he was, at best, an
“interesting madman,” as his sometime lover Sophie d’Houdetot once
described him. Johnson’s chapter is an entirely ad hominem attack on
Rousseau’s “madness” which says virtually nothing about the validity of
his ideas.
4. The most thorough account of Rousseau’s life in English is
Maurice Cranston’s three volume biography: Cranston (1983), (1991),
(1997).
5. Durvernoy (1973): 3.
6. Barber (1985): 477.
7. Addressing the citizens of Geneva in his Letters Written From the
Mountain, Rousseau writes as follows of his The Social Contract: “there is
the history of the Government of Geneva. That is what all those who are
acquainted with your constitution say upon reading the same Work . . .
isn’t this stroke for stroke the image of your Republic, since its birth up to
this day? Thus I took your Constitution, which I found to be beautiful, as
the model of political institutions, and proposing you as an example to
Europe, far from seeking to destroy you I set out the means of preserving
you. . . . This Constitution, completely as good as it is, is not faultless; one
could have prevented the alterations it has suffered, protected it from the
danger it is running today. I foresaw this danger, I caused it to be under-
stood, I indicated preservatives” (LWM, 233 [OC III, 809]).
8. By the mid-eighteenth century, Geneva was far from Rousseau’s
nostalgic ideal of a democratic republic, as he came to realize only too
well. It was dominated by a small clique of families who ruled through the
Small Council (Council of 25), which Rousseau referred to as the
“twenty-five tyrants” (OC III, 835). He eventually resigned his Genevan
citizenship, after the city government ordered his books banned and
burned. For a very thorough account of Rousseau’s relationship to his

native city, see Rosenblatt (1997).
9. See Leigh (1978).
10. In Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau writes that Plutarch
“is the one who grips and benefits me most. He was the first I read in my
childhood, and he will be the last I read in my old age” (28 [OC I, 1024]).
Also, see Oltramare (1920). On Oltramare’s thesis that “all the important
themes embodied in Rousseau’s ‘system’ derive, not from the famous ‘con-
version’ on the road to Vincennes, but from Plutarch,” F. C. Green writes:
“This is a very attractive and plausible theory, but it does not explain why
a whole generation of eighteenth century schoolboys whose staple pabu-
lum was the Greek and Roman classics produced only one Jean-Jacques
Rousseau” (Green [1955]: 5).
11. The population of Geneva at the time was approximately
18,500, of whom only about 1,500 (8%) were citizens (Rosenblatt
[1997]: 18). Maurice Cranston writes: “Although Rousseau grew up in an
‘educated artisan’ milieu and could say of himself, as he sometimes did,
‘the status of the artisans is my own,’ he was recognized in Geneva as a
man of superior birth, and, indeed, almost everyone he names in the
Confessions as friends were made while he was in Geneva that summer [of
1754] belonged to the same academic elite as his maternal grandfather,
and his correspondence of the period names other people of similar dis-
tinction” (Cranston [1983]: 334).
12. Cranston (1983): 257. Rousseau regularly spurned offers of
financial support from wealthy patrons, including Louis XV of France and
George III of Great Britain, in order to continue leading the life of simple
poverty he evidently preferred. (See Cranston [1983]: 261–262, 266 and
Cranston [1997]: 163, 170).
13. Palissot published a defense of his play, Lettre de l’auteur de la
Comédie des Philosophes en public (1769), and engaged Voltaire in an
increasingly acrimonious correspondence about it in 1760. Voltaire com-
plained to Palissot that his parody of the philosophes was unprovoked
(Voltaire to Charles Palissot, 4 June 1760 [VC XLII, 89–93]), even though
it was Voltaire’s caricature of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality that led
to Palissot’s depiction of him in the play, in which the character Crispin
(Rousseau, played by the actor Préville) crawls around on all fours.
Voltaire had written to Rousseau about the latter’s Discourse: “I have
received your new book against the human race. . . . Never has so much
wit been used in an attempt to make us like animals. The desire to walk
on all fours seizes one when one reads your work. However, as I lost that
habit more than sixty years ago, I unfortunately sense the impossibility of
going back to it, and I abandon that natural gait to those who are wor-
thier of it than you and I” (Voltaire to Rousseau, 30 August 1755 [VC
XXVII, 230]). Voltaire defended this parody of Rousseau in a letter to
Madame d’Epinay on the flimsy grounds that Rousseau’s “bizarreness”

and “affectation” made him fair game (Voltaire to d’Epinay, 25 April
1760 [VC XLI, 232]). A pamphlet war raged over Palissot’s play, to which
the philosophe abbé Morellet contributed a Préface de la comédie des
Philosophes. Of the 1782 performance of Les Philosophes, Arthur Wilson
writes: “When Palissot’s Les Philosophes was revived by the Comédie
française on 20 June 1782—on orders from high authority, it was
rumored—at the point where Jean-Jacques is represented on all fours
eating a lettuce the curtain had to be lowered to prevent a riot” (Wilson
[1972]: 705). Carol Blum writes that Rousseau got his posthumous
revenge during the Revolution, when Palissot “was unable to obtain a cer-
tificat de civisme, without which he was subject to arrest as a suspect,
because he had insulted Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his play of 1760, Les
Philosophes. He wrote several letters to the Conseil général denying that
he had ever put Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the stage, and declaring that
the valet in Les Philosophes was no more Rousseau than a monkey is a
man” (Blum [1986]: 221). For other detailed accounts of this controversy,
see Gordon (1994):182–189 and Freud (1967). Also, see note 7 in chapter
3 below.
14. Taylor (1963): 1573.
15. The philosophe J.-F. Marmontel, an opponent of Rousseau’s,
claimed that his “revelation” prior to the writing of his first Discourse
was actually prompted by Diderot during their meeting later that day. See
Marmontel (1972): 203–204 and Morellet (1822): 119–120.
16. Cranston (1983): 236.
17. See Havens (1933). Maurice Cranston writes: “Voltaire plainly
detested Rousseau’s discourse, and his marginal notes on his copy of the
text in Leningrad betray even more antipathy than does his letter to the
author, where polite compliments moderate the barbed wit. Forty of his
forty-one marginal notes are hostile to Rousseau” (Cranston [1983]:
306–307).
18. Kirk (1994): 290.
19. Voltaire to d’Alembert, 2 September 1758 (CWV CIII, 137).
Voltaire later wrote in very similar terms about Rousseau to d’Alembert:
“The philosophes are disunited. The little flock is eating one another while
the wolves come and devour it. Your Jean-Jacques is the one I am most
angry with. This stark madman, who could have amounted to something if
he had let you be his guide, has taken it into his head to go on his own. He
writes against the theater after producing a bad comedy; he writes against
the France that feeds him. He finds four or five rotten staves from
Diogenes’s tub and gets inside to bark. He abandons his friends; he writes
me the most impertinent letters ever scribbled by a fanatic. . . . As if I were
concerned with relaxing Geneva’s morals; as if I needed asylum; as if I had
taken asylum in this city of Socinian preachers; as if I had some obligation
to this city . . . his miserable novel. If Rousseau had been a reasonable

man who could only be scolded for a bad book, he would not have been
treated this way” (Voltaire to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 19 March 1761
[VC XLVI, 216]). He later wrote: “Excessive pride and envy have
destroyed Jean-Jacques, my illustrious philosopher. That monster dares
speak of education! A man who refused to raise any of his sons and put
them all in foundling homes! He abandoned his children and the tramp
with whom he made them. He has only failed to write against his tramp
as he has written against his friends. I will pity him if they hang him, but
out of pure humanity, for personally I only consider him like Diogenes’s
dog or rather like a dog descended from a bastard of that done . . . who-
ever abandons the philosophes will come to an unhappy end. . . . All of
you, crush the infamous without allowing it to prick you at the heels. If
that monster Rousseau had wanted to, he would have given useful service
to the forces of light” (Voltaire to d’Alembert, 17 June 1762 [VC XLIX,
34]).
20. Voltaire to Helvétius, 27 October 1766 (VC LXIII, 42).
21. Voltaire to d’Alembert, 17 June 1762 (VC XLIX, 34).
22. Voltaire to Thieriot, 17 September 1758 (CWV CIII, 160).
23. Referring to Berthier, Voltaire wrote to d’Alembert that “the
fanatics united to crush the philosophes while the divided philosophes
calmly let themselves be slaughtered one after another. It is really too bad
that Jean-Jacques got into Diogenes’s tub completely nude. That is a sure
way to be eaten by the flies” (Voltaire to d’Alembert, 25 April 1760 [VC
XLI, 228]).
24. Voltaire to Louis-François-Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu,
22 June 1762 (VC XLIX, 40).
25. See note 13 in chapter 5.
26. Wilson (1972): chapters 21–22, 25, and 35.
27. Diderot (1961): 317.
28. Diderot to Sophie Volland, 2 June 1759, in Diderot (1955–
1970), vol. 2: 144.
29. Diderot to Sophie Volland, 2 June 1759, in Diderot (1955–
1970), vol. 2: 145.
30. Diderot (1961): 317. Also, see Torrey (1943): 163–182.
31. Voltaire to Mme d’Epinay, 14 July 1760 [CWV CV, 467]). In a
letter written a decade later, Voltaire refers to Rousseau as “a dangerous
madman” (4 August 1770 [CWV CXX, 366–367]).
32. Voltaire to Théodore Tronchin, 30 June 1764 (CWV CXI, 458).
33. Alembert, quoted in Grimsley (1963): 146.
34. Hume to Turgot, 22 May 1767, in Hume (1932): 139.
35. Trousson (1971): 66.
36. Blum (1989): 1660.
37. Miller (1984): 137.

38. Hampson (1968): 187.
39. Miller (1984): 137.
40. Mornet (1910).
41. McNeil (1953): 808.
42. Miller (1984): 143.
43. See McNeil (1953).
44. Rousseau advised the Poles, as he had earlier advised the
Genevans, to avoid “all sharp and abrupt change and the danger of revo-
lutions” (GP, 247 [OC III, 1028]).
45. Blum (1986): 13.
46. Miller (1984): 138.
47. Only two writers from the preceding two centuries were elected
to the Panthéon during the Revolution: Rousseau and Voltaire. Proposals
to elect Descartes, Fénelon, Buffon, and Mably were all rejected, and
Robespierre had Mirabeau removed from the Panthéon (Chartier [1991]:
88). On Voltaire’s “pantheonization” in July 1791, see Carlson (1998)
and Leith (1979).
48. Blum (1986): 280. On Rousseau and the French Revolution, see
Champion (1909), Williams (1933), MacNeil (1945), Peyre (1949),
MacNeil (1953), Talmon (1955), Soboul (1964), McDonald (1965),
Cobban (1934); Sozzi (1968), Blum (1979), Hampson (1983), Knobloch
(1990), Swenson (2000).
49. Robespierre (1958). Robespierre wrote a “Dedication to Jean-
Jacques Rousseau” praising his hero. “Divine man,” he wrote, “you
taught me to know myself; while I was still young you made me appreci-
ate the dignity of my nature and reflect upon the great principles of the
social order” (“Dedication to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” quoted in Blum
[1986]: 156–157). What is less well appreciated is that Robespierre was
quite critical of the philosophes, particularly for their persecution of
Rousseau. On this subject, see Blum (1986): 233–246. On the relationship
between Rousseau’s thought and Robespierre, see MacNeil (1965), Levine
(1978), O’Brien (1988), and Bouled-Ayoub (1991).
50. Bonaparte (1955): 67.
51. McNeil (1953): 808. Also, see Beik (1951), McDonald (1965),
Cobban (1934), Barny (1991).
52. Church (1964) gives a good overview of this debate. Also, see
Vercruysse (1963) and Pomeau (1985): 415–425.
53. Burke (1968): 284.
54. Burke (1878): 25–33.
55. Burke (1878): 25–33. On Rousseau’s political theory, Burke
wrote the following in a letter in 1790: “With regard to the other writers
you speak of, I do believe the directors of the present system to be influ-
enced by them. Such masters, such scholars. Who ever dreamt of Voltaire
and Rousseau as legislators? The first has the merit of writing agreeably;
and nobody has every united blasphemy and obscenity so happily
together. The other was not a little deranged in his intellects, to my almost
certain knowledge. But he saw things in bold and uncommon lights, and
he was very eloquent—But as to the rest!—I have read long since the
Contrat Social. It has left very few traces upon my mind. I thought it a
performance of little or no merit; and little did I conceive, that it could
ever make revolutions, and give law to nations. But so it is. I see some
people here are willing that we should become their scholars too, and
reform our state on the French model” (Burke to Unknown, January
1790, in Burke [1967]: 81).
56. See Swenson (2000) for a thorough overview and assessment of
the relationship between Rousseau, the Enlightenment and the
Revolution.
57. Maistre, On the Sovereignty of the People, in Maistre (1996):
112.
105–106.
59. McDonald (1965): 6
60. McDonald (1965): 151, 105. James Miller argues against
McDonald that the influence of Rousseau on the French Revolution was
indeed significant, and that even The Social Contract, which he admits
was “the least read of Rousseau’s books among the prerevolutionary gen-
eration in France,” had a wider appeal than those such as McDonald and
McNeil believe (Miller [1984]: 134). R. A. Leigh’s review of McDonald’s
book in The Historical Journal 12 (1969), 549-565 is also critical. He
claims that “[b]etween 1762 and 1783, a period of twenty-one years, we
can enumerate twenty-eight separately available texts of the Contrat
social, at a conservative estimate, plus at least twelve reprints in collective
editions, forty in all. Not bad for an unread book” (Leigh [1990]: 77).
61. Roger Chartier writes that the reading habits of the French aris-
tocracy prior to and in the early stages of the Revolution were “not funda-
mentally different from the reading matter of the most deeply committed
revolutionaries” (Chartier [1991]: 85). Chartier also points out that Louis
XVI read Voltaire and Montesquieu while he was imprisoned during the
Revolution.
62. McMahon (1998): 108–110.
63. See Julliard (1985).
106.
65. Duffy (1979): 2.
66. Duffy (1979): 70.
67. Duffy (1979): 71. Also, see McFarland (1995).

68. Engels (1985): 34.
69. Heine (1985): 202.
70. Crocker (1959): 402. The lowest point to which this line of inter-
pretation has sunk is Bertrand Russell’s comment that Rousseau was “the
father of the romantic movement . . . and the inventor of the political phi-
losophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships as opposed to traditional
absolute monarchies. Ever since his time those who considered themselves
reformers have been divided into two groups, those who followed him
and those who followed Locke . . . the incompatibility has become
increasingly evident. At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of
Rousseau, Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke” (Russell [1979]: 660).
Chapter 3. Unsociable Man
The title of this chapter is from an expression applied to Rousseau by an

enemy, the philosophe Morellet (Morellet [1988]: 143–144).
1. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (1756) (OC XI, 20).
2. Steven Seidman argues that social holism is one of the central
“intellectual bonds [that] exist between the Enlightenment and its critics”
(Seidman [1983]: 43).
3. This theme of opposition to the enormous demands of the
ancient model of public life was given its most famous expression by
Benjamin Constant in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In his 1819
speech, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the
Moderns,” he charges that Rousseau, “by transposing into our modern
age an extent of social power, of collective sovereignty, which belonged to
other centuries . . . has nevertheless furnished deadly pretexts for more
than one kind of tyranny” (Constant [1988]: 317–318).
4. I have borrowed this expression from Dallmayr (1978). Charles
Taylor’s comment on the relationship between classical republicanism and
social atomism in his essay “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian
Debate,” is relevant to Rousseau: “[T]he very definition of a republican
regime as classically understood requires an ontology different from atom-
ism, and which falls outside atomism-infected common sense. It requires
that we probe the relations of identity and community, and distinguish the
different possibilities, in particular, the possible place of we-identities as
against merely convergent I-identities” (Taylor [1989]: 170).
5. See CWV CIX, 47; CWV CXIV, 30, 60; CWV CXV, 74.
6. Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et Néron (OCD III, 95).
7. Voltaire wrote to Palissot to reproach him for satirizing the
philosophes in his play, except Rousseau: “I even imagine that the philoso-
pher Crispin [Rousseau] walking on all fours must have created consider-
able merriment, and I believe that my friend Jean-Jacques will be the first
to laugh. This is gay, not at all malicious, and besides since the citizen of
Geneva is guilty of treason against the theater, it is quite natural for the
theater to give him his just desserts. The same is not true for the citizens of
Paris whom you have placed on the stage. Certainly there is nothing to
laugh about there” (Voltaire to Charles Palissot, 4 June 1760 [VC XLII,
88–89]). Also, see note 13 in chapter 2 above.
8. Dunning (1920): 8–9. Also, see Cobban (1934): 7–8 and Sée
(1925): 146.
9. Hegel (1991): 277. Also, see the section “Absolute Freedom and
Terror” in Hegel (1977): 355–363, in which he alludes to the relationship
between Rousseau and the French Revolution (particularly the Terror).
For an analysis of the latter, see Schmidt (1998) and Wokler (1998c).
10. Marx (1977): 346. Also, see Wokler (1983) and J.-L. Lecercle
(1982).
11. A good example of this view of Rousseau’s writings as “the last
and greatest of the works of the individualistic school of politics” which
“start[s] with the individual and end[s] with the individual” can be found
in Cobban (1934): 7–8. Another version was also developed by Emile
Faguet, for whom “the antisocial idea” in Rousseau is central (Faguet
[1894]: 384–385). Faguet deals with the illiberalism of The Social
Contract by arguing that it “seems an isolated part of Rousseau’s work”
that “contradicts his general ideas” (400). Henri Sée concurs, writing of
Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality that it “is inspired by an individualist,
indeed almost anarchist, conception” (Sée [1925]: 146). Leo Strauss
claims that “Rousseau suggested the return to the state of nature, the
return to nature, from a world of artificiality and conventionality.
Throughout his entire career, he never was content merely to appeal from
the modern state to the classical city. He appealed almost in the same
breath from the classical city itself to ‘the man of nature,’ the prepolitical
savage” (Strauss [1971]: 254). Werner Stark’s study of the social bond
ranks “Rousseauism” with those ideologies “which plead for, and seem to
justify, the reduction of social control and the maximization of individual
freedom” (Stark [1976]: 201). In his perceptive essay on Rousseau, Emile
Durkheim offers a powerful rebuttal to this anti-social reading: “[I]f soci-
ety as such is an evil, our sole concern with it should be an endeavour to
reduce its development to a minimum, and we are at a loss to understand
all Rousseau’s efforts to provide it with a positive organisation.
Particularly the importance he attaches to collective discipline and his sub-
ordination, in certain respects, of the individual become quite inexplica-
ble” (Durkheim [1973]: 89).
12. This point becomes abundantly clear when comparing the impor-
tance that Rousseau attributed to the cultivation of moral habits with
Kant’s views on this subject. In his essay “Anthropology from a Pragmatic

Point of View” (1800), Kant writes: “Habit [assuetudo] . . . deprives even
good actions of their moral value because it detracts from our freedom of
mind; moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetition of the same action . . .
and so becomes ridiculous. . . . As a rule, all habits are objectionable”
(Kant [1974]: 28–29).
13. The work that made Hobbes notorious in Europe was De Cive
(1642), not Leviathan (1651), no complete translation of which was avail-
able in eighteenth-century France. Ian Wilson’s study of the influence of
Hobbes and Locke on eighteenth century French thought concludes that,
although there is no solid evidence that Rousseau actually read any of the
works of Hobbes, he would have had access to versions of De Cive and
parts of Leviathan in French translation even though they were difficult to
obtain, and adds that “the frequency of his references to Hobbes is such
that he was almost certainly familiar with him through primary reading.”
Even though Rousseau’s acquaintance with Hobbes “almost certainly
involved reading of him in the original,” according to Wilson, it “never
appears to have gone especially deep” (Wilson [1973]: 227, 247). Maurice
Cranston is more skeptical: “It is doubtful whether Rousseau had more
than a scanty knowledge of Hobbes’s work, impressed as he was by what
he did know. He may have acquired some of his ideas about Hobbes from
Diderot, who knew English as well as Latin” (Cranston [1984]: 176–177,
n. 3). On the relationship between the thought of Hobbes and Rousseau,
also see Jouvenal (1947), Derathé (1950), Davy (1953), Taylor (1965).
Richard Tuck describes Rousseau’s views on sociability in his second
Discourse as “a conflation of Grotius and Hobbes” (Tuck [1999]: 198).
14. Diderot, “Natural Right” (1755), in Diderot (1992): 21.
15. There is no consensus on the English translation of the term
amour-propre. Judith Masters renders it as “vanity” (Masters [1964]:
221–122). Judith Bush, Christopher Kelly, Terence Marshall, and Roger
D. Masters leave it untranslated in their Collected Writings version of The
Discourse on Inequality, in order to distinguish it from the English trans-
lation of the French vanité (181, n. 32). They have done the same in the
text of their translation of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (9), although
they have translated it as “pride” in a note (261, n. 8). Roger Masters uses
“self-love” in his study The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Masters
[1968]: 39). In their translation of Julie, or the New Heloise, Philip
Stewart and Jean Vaché write that, while amour-propre has been left
untranslated in the other volumes of Rousseau’s Collected Writings, stylis-
tic reasons make it inappropriate to do so in a novel. So they have vari-
ously rendered it as “vanity,” “self-love,” “egoism,” and “pride” (JNH,
631). Maurice Cranston renders amour-propre as “pride” in his transla-
tion of The Discourse on Inequality (Cranston [1984]: 167), while Victor
Gourevitch prefers “vanity” (Gourevitch [1997]: 218). Frederick Watkins
(1953), by contrast, quotes Rousseau’s Constitutional Project for Corsica

as describing vanity (vanité) as “only one of the two branches of self-
esteem [l’amour-propre],” the other being pride (l’orgueil). Allan Bloom
has left the term untranslated (E, 214–215). Given this lack of consensus,
I have decided to follow Bloom. See his discussion of this question in
Emile, 483–484, n. 17, as well as that of N. J. H. Dent (1989): 37–86 and
(1992): 33–36, and Cooper (1999): 115–181.
16. Voltaire (1962): 80.
17. Althusser (1972): 136. Richard Tuck describes Rousseau and
Kant as the eighteenth century’s “two most perceptive and interesting
readers of Hobbes, both of them able to see past the vulgar denunciations
of his views found in most modern writers and willing to incorporate
important elements of his own theories in their own” (Tuck [1999]: 197).
18. See chapter seven below.
19. According to Peter France, Rousseau worked on his Reveries
intermittently between 1776 and his death two years later, leaving it
unfinished (France [1979]: 10).
Chapter 4. Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Republic of Virtue
1. Aguesseau (1819): 230.

2. It is hardly surprising that Rousseau has so often been identified
with modern nationalism, the origins of which are usually traced to the
second half of the eighteenth century when his works were written (Alter
[1989]: 17). According to E. H. Carr, he was the “founder of modern
nationalism as it began to take shape in the nineteenth century” (Carr
[1945]: 7). Alfred Cobban claims that “the fact that he [Rousseau] is per-
haps its [nationalism’s] first theorist is undeniable,” describing him as “a
prophet of the national movement” whose ideas “lead straight to the nine-
teenth-century theory of national self-determination” (Cobban [1934]:
152, 176). J. R. Llobera argues that it “would be difficult to find an influ-
ence more decisive than that of Rousseau in the shaping of the modern
meaning of words like patrie and nation” (Llobera [1994]: 154). Others
have denied that Rousseau was a nationalist. Kenneth Minogue claims
that he looked backwards to the ancient polis rather than forward to the
modern nation-state. “Rousseau,” he writes, “far from being a harbinger
of the future, was in fact dominated by an overpowering nostalgia for the
past. . . . Rousseau used the word ‘nation’ but is far from being a nation-
alist” (Minogue [1967]: 42). Maurizio Viroli has recently written that
Rousseau “continued to speak of patrie as an old republican, not as a
nationalist” (Viroli [1995]: 94). I agree with Minogue and Viroli that it is
anachronistic to refer to Rousseau’s “nationalism,” even if his influence
on its origins and development were considerable and undeniable.

Rousseau was a republican patriot, not a nationalist. The earliest mention
of the term “nationalism” is to be found in a 1774 work by Johann
Gottfried Herder, the “German Rousseau” (Alter [1989]: 7), and the con-
cept was not widely used until after 1789 (Eatwell and Wright [1993]:
148). The meaning and value of patriotism were much debated following
the appearance in 1754 of Abbé Coyer’s pamphlet Dissertation sur le
vieux mot de Patrie, written in response to the cosmopolitanism of the
philosophes, particularly Voltaire. Rousseau’s use of the word patrie has
been translated in a variety of ways. It appears as “fatherland” in Bloom
(E, 40) and as both “country” and “fatherland” in Kendall ([1972]: 7, 8).
Judith Masters renders it as “homeland” in On the Social Contract
(Masters [1978]: 55), and “country” in The First and Second Discourses
(Masters [1964]: 38). Judith R. Bush, Roger Masters and Christopher
Kelly have translated it as ‘fatherland’ in the Collected Writings of
Rousseau editions of the DSA (6) and SC (141). G. D. H. Cole translates
l’amour de la patrie as “patriotism” (Cole [1973]: 7).
3. It is noteworthy that, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages,
Rousseau writes as follows of the first, gestural languages: “Instead of
arguments it would have aphorisms; it would persuade without convinc-
ing, and depict without reasoning” (EOL, 296 [OC V, 383]).
4. Wisner (1997): 36.
5. Voltaire (1965): 245–246.
6. I have taken the title of this section from George F. Will’s
Statecraft as Soulcraft, in which he writes: “By the legislation of morality,
I mean the enactment of laws and implementation of policies that pro-
scribe, mandate, regulate, or subsidize behavior that will, over time, have
the predictable effect of nurturing, bolstering, or altering habits, disposi-
tions, and values on a broad scale” (19–20).
7. With respect to Rousseau, Benjamin Barber makes a useful dis-
tinction between the “physical-mechanistic” (l’homme physique) and the
“psychological-intentionalist” (l’homme moral) (Barber [1971]).
8. See Siedentop (1979).
9. Rempel (1976): 31–32.
10. Bordes, “Discours,” in Mercure de France (December 1751),
quoted in Rosenblatt (1997): 61.
11. See Rousseau’s favorable comments on Montesquieu, in his letter
to Pastor Perriau, 20 February 1755 (CC III, 98–99).
12. Cranston (1991): 140.
13. Rousseau’s republican critique of luxury was anything but origi-
nal in the eighteenth century. In book seven of The Spirit of the Laws, for
example, Montesquieu argues that luxury is incompatible with republics.
The “less luxury there is in a republic, the more perfect it. . . . So far as
luxury is established in a republic, so far does the spirit turn to the inter-
ests of the individual” (Montesquieu [1989]: 98).
14. Rosenblatt (1997): 66.
15. See Grimsley (1973), Ellison (1985), Ellison (1990), Ellison
(1991): 253–261.
16. In 1764 Rousseau was asked by a representative of Pasquale
Paoli—“father of the nation” and leader of the Corsican rebels against
their Genoese rulers—to prepare a new constitution for the island, thereby
giving him an opportunity to become the “Lycurgus of Corsica.”
However, events prevented him from completing this project, which was
published posthumously as the Projet de Constitution pour la Corse
(1861). French troops crushed the Corsican resistance in 1769, making it
a dependency of the Crown. Not surprisingly, Rousseau condemned
France’s “ignominious role” in these events.
Chapter 5. On the Utility of Religion
In his Dialogues Rousseau writes that “On the Utility of Religion” is the
title “of a fine book to be written, and a very necessary one.” (RJJ, 242
[OC I, 972]).
1. Chartier (1991): 187.
2. Smith (1965): 95–96.
3. See O’Keefe (1974).
4. Gay (1969): 524.
5. Havens (1933): 60.
6. “Extrait des registres du Parlement du 9 juin 1762,” quoted in
Rosenblatt (1997): 271.
7. See Censure de la faculté de théologie de Paris, contre le Livre
qui a pour titre, Emile, ou de l’éducation (1762); Mandement de mon-
seigneur l’archevêque de Paris, portant condamnation d’un livre qui a
pour titre: Emile (1762); and Lettres écrites de la compagne (1763).
8. “Notes d’un membre . . . ,” quoted in Rosenblatt (1997): 271.
9. Pierre-Maurice Masson’s comprehensive study of Rousseau’s reli-
gious beliefs makes the case that they are essentially compatible with
Catholic doctrine, at least in spirit (Masson [1916]). Henri Guillemin
argues that Rousseau’s thought is consistent with Thomism (Guillemin
[1963]: 33–34). Ian Boss resolves the issue of Rousseau’s religious views
by labeling him a “philosophe-dévot” (Boss [1971]: 185).
10. Diderot to Sophie Volland, 18 July 1762, in Diderot (1958): 55.
11. Voltaire to Thieriot, 17 September 1758 (CWV CIII, 160).
12. Havens (1933): 68.
13. In his Letters Written From the Mountain Rousseau mocks
Voltaire by putting a speech in his mouth that outraged him because it
made Voltaire admit that he was the author of anonymous works such as
the Sermon des cinquante, which had been published in 1762, although he
wrote it in Potsdam ten years earlier. Voltaire himself had been attributing
the pamphlet to the deceased La Mettrie; it was, in fact, his own “declara-
tion of war” on Christianity (Gay [1988]: 244). Rousseau denounced it as
“a horrible thing.” He also criticized the Genevans for allowing the publi-
cation of Voltaire’s anti-Christian writings while banning his own. “[T]hey
keep their tolerance for atheists and burn anyone who dares to believe in
God” (Rousseau to Keith, 18 August 1763 [CC XII, 2086]). In retaliation
Voltaire anonymously published a violent attack on Rousseau called
Sentiments des citoyens (1764), denouncing him as a police informer and
calling for his execution at a time when Rousseau was being actively per-
secuted by the authorities in Geneva and Paris (OCV XXV, 309–314).
Also see Besterman (1976): 500 and Voltaire’s letter to Etienne Noël
Damilaville, 31 December 1764 (CWV XII, 281–283).
14. On the “Profession of Faith” as a refutation of Helvetius’s mate-
rialism in De l’esprit, see Rousseau’s Letters Written From the Mountain
(OC III, 693). For Rousseau’s annotated notes on De l’esprit, see OC IV,
1119–1130. Also, see Schinz (1910): 225–261.
15. In light of this, Maurice Cranston’s conclusion that, although
Rousseau “had broken with the atheists of the Encyclopédie, he did not
wish to see them go on being persecuted as they had been in the years
when he was working on his novel” is hard to swallow whole (Cranston
[1991]: 24).
16. See the first chapter of Rosenblatt (1991).
17. Bayle (2000): 168.
18. Bayle (2000): 169.
19. Bayle (2000): 172.
20. Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (OCV XX, 197).
21. Voltaire, Préface du poem sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756)
(OCV IX, 468); Voltaire to Nicolas Claude Thieriot, 30 April 1756 (VC
XXIX, 188).
22. Mornet (1910): 463.
23. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV (OCV XIV, 546).
24. Voltaire, The A B C, or Dialogues between A B C (1768), in
Voltaire (1994): 190. Peter Gay interprets this remark as follows: “This is
the declaration of a believer who has previously declared his own cer-
tainty that God exists, not the disillusioned observation of a worldling
who distrusts mankind” (Gay [1988]: 265). Voltaire wrote that the doc-
trine of immortality is useful “to keep the peasants from stealing wheat
and wine” (Voltaire [1962]: 605).
25. Voltaire to Jean-François Dufour, Seigneur de Villevieille, 26
August 1768 (VC LXX, 30–32).
26. Montesquieu (1989): 465. Also, see 460–461 and 463–464.

27. Montesquieu (1989): 460. Although Montesquieu and Rousseau
were in agreement on this point, the former rejected the republican belief
that Christianity is antithetical to political society, unlike Rousseau:
“Bayle, after insulting all religion, stigmatizes the Christian religion; he
dares propose that a state formed by true Christians would not continue
to exist. Why not? They would be citizens infinitely enlightened about
their duties and having a great zeal to perform them; they would sense the
rights of natural defense; the more they believed they owed to the religion,
the more they would think they owed to the homeland. The principles of
Christianity, engraved in their hearts, would be infinitely stronger than the
false honor of monarchies, the human virtues of republics, or that servile
fear of despotic states” (463–464).
28. Alembert (1963): 26. According to Thomas Hankins, there is a
good chance that d’Alembert was an atheist too: “His religious position
was one of extreme scepticism” (Hankins [1970]: 102).
29. Voltaire (1962): 104. In a letter to Jean-François Dufour, Seigneur
de Villevieille in 1768, Voltaire vigorously attacks atheism: “One can be a
very good philosopher and still believe in God. Atheists have never
responded to the objection that a clock proves the existence of a clock-
maker, and Spinoza himself admits an intelligence presiding over the uni-
verse. . . . My dear marquis, there is nothing good in atheism. That is a
very bad system both physically and morally. An upright man may very
well rebel against superstition and fanaticism; he may detest superstition;
he does mankind a service if he spreads the humane principles of tolerance.
But what service can he render if he spreads atheism? Will men be any
more virtuous for not recognizing a God who prescribes virtue?
Doubtlessly not” (Voltaire to Jean-François Dufour, Seigneur de Villevieille,
26 August 1768, [VC LXX, 30–32]). However, Besterman adds the follow-
ing in a note to this page: “[I]t is the present editor’s opinion that Voltaire
was himself for all practical purposes an atheist. . . . Whether or not
Voltaire actually believed in God, he was definitely not a Christian.”
30. Diderot (1992): 83.
31. Diderot to Sophie Volland, 6 October 1765, in Diderot (1930):
298–299. For a particularly bitter denunciation of Christianity, see
Diderot’s Entretien d’un philosophe avec la Marechale de **** (1776)
(OCD II, 517–518).
32. Voltaire, Epître à l’auteur du livre des trois imposteurs (OCV X,
402–403).
33. Voltaire, Epître à l’auteur du livre des trois imposteurs (OCV X,
402–403).
34. Voltaire to Damilaville, 12 March 1766 (CWV CXIV, 133).
35. Voltaire (VN II, 313, 321, 375, 390). Peter Gay interprets
Voltaire’s use of “religion” here as referring only to “supernatural reli-
gion, rather than Voltaire’s [religion], which was not based on expia-
tions.” As such, it should not be taken as evidence that he was tempted by
atheism (Gay [1988]: 267, n. 74).
36. The link between moral virtue and religious beliefs is also
stressed in Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert: “I do not mean by this that
one can be virtuous without religion; I held this erroneous opinion for a
long time, but now I am only too disabused” (LA, 97 [OC V, 89]). And in
his Letters Written From the Mountain Rousseau tells us that The Social
Contract relates “our duties toward men to our duties toward God; the
only principle upon which morality can be founded” (LWM, 191 [OC III,
758]).
37. Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (London, 1741) was
translated into French by Léonard Des Malpeines in 1744. Warburton
responded to some of Rousseau’s criticisms in later editions of The
Alliance Between Church and State, which was first published in 1736.
38. In his Dialogues, Rousseau writes of his religious position as fol-
lows: “While appearing to disagree with the Jesuits, they [atheists] aimed
for the same goal nonetheless using roundabout routes by making them-
selves leaders of factions as they do. The Jesuits became all-powerful by
exercising divine authority over consciences and in the name of God
making themselves the arbiters of good and evil. The philosophers, unable
to usurp the same authority, worked hard to destroy it, and then while
appearing to explain nature to their docile sectaries and making them-
selves its supreme interpreters, they established themselves in its name as
an authority no less absolute than that of their enemies, although it
appears to be free and to govern wills through reason alone. This mutual
hatred was at bottom a power struggle like that between Carthage and
Rome. Those two bodies, both imperious, both intolerant, were conse-
quently incompatible, since the fundamental system of each was to rule
despotically. Each one wishing to rule alone, they could not share the
empire and rule together; they were mutually exclusive” (RJJ, 238–239
[OC I, 967–968]). Interestingly, Rousseau’s nemesis Voltaire understood
himself in exactly the same way: “Yes, my friends, atheism and fanaticism
are the two poles of a universe of confusion and horror. The narrow zone
of virtue is between those two poles” (Histoire de Jenni [1775] [OCV
XXI, 574]).
39. Willhoite (1965): 501.
40. Shklar (1969): 113–114.
41. Shklar (1969): 120–121.
42. See C, 329 (OC I, 392) and LA, 97 (OC V, 89). Rousseau pri-
vately wrote that he believed in God, the duality of substances, and the
immortality of the soul before he was persecuted for writing the

“Profession of Faith” (Rousseau to Jacob Vernes, 18 February 1758 [CC
V, 32–33]). Also, see RSW, 55 (OC I, 1018); letter to M. de Franquières,
15 January 1769 (CC XXXVII, 13–24); and Lettres écrites de la mon-
tagne (OC III, 694).
Chapter 6. Dare to Be Ignorant!
The title of this chapter was inspired by Dennis Porter’s expression noli
audere sapere (dare to remain ignorant) in his Rousseau’s Legacy (1995):
36.
1. Condorcet (1955): 164.
2. Diderot to Berthier, 2 February 1751, in Diderot (1955): 108.
3. Voltaire to Palissot, 4 June 1760 (CWV CV, 351) and Siècle de
Louis XIV (1751) (OCV XIV, 153). In this letter to Palissot, Voltaire
objected that he was left out of the satirist’s parody of the “poor
philosophes” and defended the Encyclopédie and its contributors. Voltaire
wrote over forty articles for the project, mostly on literary subjects.
Privately, he occasionally made some derogatory remarks about the qual-
ity of some of its entries and referred to it as a “tour de Babel.” But pub-
licly he was stalwart. He wrote to Palissot of the “admirable articles not
only by M. d’Alembert, M. Diderot, and the Chevalier de Jaucourt, but by
several other persons who have enjoyed working on these volumes with
no incentive of glory or self-interest,” although he conceded that there are
some “pitiful articles, no doubt, and mine could be included among that
number.” Voltaire pleaded with d’Alembert not to abandon “this great
work” the Encyclopédie (Voltaire to d’Alembert, 8 January 1758 [VC
XXXIII, p. 22). To Diderot he wrote as follows about the encyclopedic
project: “You do not suspect my honor and pleasure in occasionally plac-
ing one or two brinks in your great pyramid. . . . The articles that ought
to enlighten men the most are precisely those in which the mistaken opin-
ions and ignorance of the public are increased. We are forced to lie, and
still we are persecuted for not having lied enough” (Voltaire to Denis
Diderot, 26 June 1758 [VC XXXIII, 278). And to the Count d’Argental,
Voltaire described himself as “the most outspoken supporter of the
Encyclopédie” and claimed that “no one has taken a keener interest than I
in M. Diderot and his enterprise” (Voltaire to Charles-Augustin Feriol,
Count d’Argental, 26 February 1758 [VC XXXIII, 147]). On Voltaire and
the Encyclopédie, see Naves (1938).
4. The names of over 140 contributors to the Encyclopédie are
listed in the prefaces to its various volumes. For a detailed study of them,
see Lough (1973), and Kafker (1996). A conservative estimate of the
number of copies of the Encyclopédie in circulation between 1751 and

1789 has been put at 15,000 to 20,000 (Lough [1963]: 1071–1083). For
an account of the members of the “côterie holbachique,” see Kors (1976).
5. Darnton (1979): 522.
6. Diderot, “Art” (1751), in Diderot (1992): 5.
7. Diderot, “Encyclopédie” (1755), in Diderot (1992): 21–22. Also,
see Gordon and Torrey (1947).
8. Blum (1974): 36.
9. Diderot, “Encyclopédie” (OCD XIV, 462–463).
10. Omer Joly de Fleury, Arrests de la Cour de Parlement . . . (1759),
quoted in Wilson (1957): 333.
11. Schwab (1963): xiii.
12. Schwab (1963): ix.
13. Alembert (1963): 103–104.
14. Schwab (1963): 104, n. 61.
15. Alembert (1963): 26.
16. Diderot, Prospectus to the Encyclopédie (1750) (OCD XIII,
145).
17. Chartier (1991): 69.
18. Chartier (1991): 90.
19. See Robert Darnton’s study of the commercial success of the
Encyclopédie, The Business of Enlightenment. The first folio edition of
the Encyclopédie cost 1,140 livres, the equivalent of 2,450 loaves of
bread, putting it well beyond the means of both skilled and unskilled
laborers in eighteenth-century France.
20. Darnton (1979): 530.
21. Holbach, Common Sense (1772), quoted in Kramnick (1995):
150.
22. Wokler (1980b): 251, 256.
23. Mason (1987): 253.
24. Holbach, Common Sense (1772), quoted in Kramnick (1995):
145.
25. Diderot, “Art,” in Diderot (1992): 5.
26. Voltaire to d’Alembert, 26 June 1766 (VC LXI, 167).
27. Voltaire to Joseph-Michel Antoine Servan, 13 April 1766 (VC
LXI, 30). In his Siècle de Louis XIV, Voltaire writes in favor of both
philosopher-kings and kingdoms of philosophers: “It has been said that
the people would be happy had they philosophers for their kings; it is
equally true that kings are the more happy when many of their subjects
are philosophers” (OCV XIV, 538–539).
28. In his essay on “Rousseau and Enlightenment,” Terence Marshall
argues that at the core of Rousseau’s thinking about politics is a distinc-
tion between l’homme de génie and l’homme vulgaire that the philosophes
failed to appreciate when they sought to popularize knowledge, particu-

larly of science. The practical consequences of this failure have been
morally and socially disastrous, since such enlightenment “liberates the
cleverest and most daring human beings from any sense of moral restraint
in their oppressive designs over the weak” and has “an enfeebling effect
on the human and social sentiments” of ordinary citizens (Marshall
[1978]: 427, 428). According to Marshall, Rousseau defended ignorance
against enlightenment and advocated a form of “noble lie.” Happiness
ultimately trumps truth for Rousseau, so political leaders have a duty to
dissimulate and mislead their populations with inspiring myths and fables
so that common opinion and morality are not undermined by the popular
dissemination of the unvarnished truth.
29. Descartes (1985): 130.
30. Spink (1960): 239.
31. Palmer (1939): 204.
32. Yolton (1991): 181.
33. Locke, quoted in Cranston (1985b): 264.
34. Cranston (1985b): 264–265.
35. The fourth edition of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding was translated into French by Pierre Coste, with the title
Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain (Amsterdam,
1700).
36. Palmer (1939): 136.
37. Voltaire, “Poème sur la loi naturelle” (1756) (OCV IX, 454, n.
2). Also, see Voltaire’s Traité de métaphysique, the third chapter of which
provides a summary of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. For a general discussion of Voltaire’s views on Locke, see
Yolton (1991): 201–205, and James (1985).
38. Knight (1968): 1.
39. Condillac (1821): 10–11.
40. See Yolton (1991): 73.
41. Diderot, “Logique” (1765) (OCD XV, 531).
42. La Mettrie (1996): 39.
43. Holbach (1990): 38.
44. Like Rousseau, Voltaire was repelled by Helvétius’ book, which
he labeled “ostentatious,” “outrageous,” “puerile,” “confusing,”
“affected,” and “revolting” in places, as well as being “full of excellent
passages,” particularly on “the abominations of intolerance, freedom,
arbitrary power, and the misfortune of mankind.” But Voltaire was even
more outraged by the “hateful persecution” of Helvétius, which he com-
pared to the Inquisition’s condemnation of Galileo. The official persecu-
tion of both Helvétius and Diderot, he said, “make them infinitely dear to
me” (Voltaire to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, 7 February 1759 [VC XXXV,
76]). Also, see Voltaire’s letter to Prince Dmitry Alekseevich Gallitzin, 19

June 1773 (VC LXXXV, 138–139).
45. F. C. Green claims that Rousseau abandoned this work out of
sympathy for its persecuted author (Green [1955]: 170). However, it is
worth noting that, while Rousseau did express some sympathy for the per-
secuted Helvétius, in the notorious penultimate chapter of The Social
Contract he includes a belief in “[t]he existence of a powerful, intelligent,
beneficent, foresighted and providential divinity” among the dogmas of
his civil religion, the public denial of which, he claims, should be punish-
able by expulsion or death (SC, 223 [OC III, 468]). This appeared shortly
after the publication of Helvétius’s De l’esprit (1758), which suggests that,
at best, he was ambivalent about the matter of Helvétius’s persecution. See
Masson (1911).
46. In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau writes: “But
in this century, when every effort is made to materialize all the operation
of the soul and to deprive human feelings of all morality, I am mistaken if
the new philosophy does not become as fatal to good taste as to virtue”
(324–325 [OC V, 419]).
47. It is not at all surprising that Rousseau’s ideas, particularly as set
forth in the “Profession of Faith,” made such a profound impression on
Kant, and have so often been associated with him. His strong dualism, his
association of the moral law with the inner principle of conscience, and
his emphasis on the active, pre-experiential nature of the mind inspired
Kant’s own moral epistemology, by his own admission. “Rousseau set me
straight,” he wrote. “I learned to honor mankind” (Kant [1965]: 44). For
a very good discussion of Rousseau’s influence on Kant, see Shell (1980):
20–32. Manfred Kuehn thinks that Rousseau’s influence on Kant was not
very significant (Kuehn [2001]: 131–132). The classic “Kantian” reading
of Rousseau is Ernst Cassirer’s The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays. More recently, Andrew Levine
has presented a “neo-Kantian” reading of Rousseau in The Politics of
Autonomy, albeit with important modifications.
48. In his essay “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment:
Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” Arthur Melzer argues that
Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith” in Emile is “the paradigm for post-
Enlightenment religion. It continued and ‘fulfilled’ the Enlightenment cri-
tique of Christianity by solving the problems set forth in that critique, as
well as in the parallel critique of Enlightenment rationalism” (359). He
attributes a “dialectical” character to Rousseau’s critique of the
Enlightenment. On the one hand, there is “Rousseau’s ‘Enlightenment
side,’ elaborating his political critique of Christianity” (344). On the other
hand, we find Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment “‘revivalist side’ . . . the
new religion of sincerity” (344). Melzer argues that Rousseau’s novel,
dialectical combination of these two sides—Enlightenment and Counter-

Enlightenment—is “less a rejection of the Enlightenment than a more self-
consistent expression of it” (351), in which we are enlightened about the
way in which “the Enlightenment’s humanistic ends, which he [Rousseau]
never questions, are ultimately subverted by its rationalistic means” (351).
Thus, the Enlightenment’s own humanitarian intention, which Rousseau is
held to accept, is shown to require “the rejection of secular rationalism
and the return to religion” (351).
Chapter 7. The Worst of All Possible Worlds
1. Besterman (1969): 361.

2. Charles Vereker divides the evolution of Enlightenment optimism
into three phases, which he labels metaphysical optimism, empiricist opti-
mism and redemptive optimism (Vereker [1967]).
3. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) (OCV XIV, 155).
4. Voltaire, “Lois,” in Dictionnaire philosophique (OCV XIX,
614–615). He also claimed that “enlightenment [lumière] is gradually
being spread to such a point that at the first chance there will be a great
outburst, and then there will be a fine to-do. Our young people are very
fortunate, they will see great things” (Voltaire to Chauvelin, 2 April 1764,
[VC LIV, 231). Later, Voltaire wrote that enlightenment “is spreading on
all sides. . . . In the past fifteen years or so a revolution has occurred in the
peoples’ minds that will mark a great epoch” (Voltaire to Prince Golitsuin,
14 August 1767 [VC LXVI, 181]). Against this, Voltaire had earlier stated
that “history in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes,
among which we have now and then with a few virtues; and some happy
times; as we sometimes see a few scattered huts in a barren desert”
(Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations [1756] [OCV XIII,
177]).
5. Voltaire to Diderot, 28 February 1757 (VC XXXI, 72).
6. Voltaire to Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan, 13 April 1766 (VC
LXI, 29–30).
7. Voltaire to d’Alembert, 26 June 1766 (VC LXI, 167).
8. Diderot, review of Lomonosov’s Histoire de la Russie, first pub-
lished in Grimm’s Correspondence littéraire (1769) (OCD XVII,
495–496).
9. Diderot, Le Fils Naturel (OCD VII, 68).
10. Condorcet (1955): 4–5.
11. As Keith Baker notes, “Condorcet’s faith in human progress was
immense but it was not entirely sanguine” (Baker [1975]: 367).
12. Alembert (1963): 103.

13. Condorcet (1955): 169.
14. Condorcet (1955): 8.
15. Condorcet, in Discours prononcé dans l’Académie française, de
jeudi 21 février 1782, à la réception de M. le marquis de Condorcet, in
Condorcet (1847–1849), vol. 1: 390–391.
16. Turgot, Discours en Sorbonne (1750), in Turgot (1844): 598.
17. In Voltaire’s Politics, Peter Gay claims that Voltaire’s pessimism
antedates the Lisbon earthquake. He finds evidence of his doubts that
ours really is the “best of all possible worlds” in a letter to the marquise
du Deffand from 18 March 1736 (VC V, 97–98).
18. On this subject, see Lovejoy (1955), Wokler (1978), and Wokler
and Frayling (1982).
19. The first known use of the word perfectibilité in print occurred
in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, published in 1755 (Wokler
[1998b]: 67, n. 5).
20. See Roger Master’s account of this, particularly his excellent
graph (105), in Masters (1980).
21. Condorcet, quoted in Baker (1975): 75.
22. Rousseau’s threefold distinction derives from the eighteenth book
of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws: 290–293.
23. Bertrand de Jouvenal’s essay “Rousseau the Pessimistic
Evolutionist” is rare for not understating the darkness of his view of his-
tory.
24. Mason (1989): 98.
25. Rousseau to Voltaire, 17 June 1760 (VC XLII, 132–134).
26. France (1979): 17.
27. Voltaire was dismissive of Rousseau’s The Social Contract. “This
social or unsocial contract,” he wrote in 1762, “is remarkable only for a
few coarse insults to kings from the citizens of the town of Geneva”
(Voltaire to Damilaville, 25 June 1762 [VC XLIX, 46]).
28. Notwithstanding his disillusionment with his native city in the
1760s, Rousseau went on to praise it in his last work, Reveries of a
Solitary Walker: “But in Geneva and in Switzerland, where laughter is not
constantly wasted on foolish acts of malice, everything in the celebrations
exudes contentment and gaiety; abject poverty does not bring its hideous
face to them, nor does ostentation show its insolence. Well-being, brother-
hood, and concord dispose hearts to expand and often, in the raptures of
innocent joy strangers greet each other, embrace, and invite one another to
enjoy the pleasures of the day” (RSW, 85 [OC I, 1093]).
29. Wokler (1980a): 88.
152 Notes to Conclusion
Conclusion
1. The Social Contract and Emile were published within a month of

each other, in 1762.
2. In the fifth book of Emile there is a sketch of some of the main
points of The Social Contract. Although Emile is supposed to study both
the principles of political right and political science, Rousseau does not
elaborate on the connection between the two books (E, 458–467 [OC, IV,
836–850]).
3. Vaughan (1962), p. 112. Vaughan writes: “The fact is that two
lines of thought meet and cross in the politics of Rousseau. He is the
champion of individual liberty. He is the champion of the sovereignty of
the State. He is the heir of Locke. He is the disciple also of Plato and, in
this point though in no other, of Hobbes. . . . Such are the two strands
which run through the political thought of Rousseau. . . . In Rousseau
himself they are apt to be entangled, rather than interwoven, with each
other. . . . When all is said, the two rival elements, the individual and the
community, are left not so much reconciled, as in ill-veiled hostility, to
each other. In his earlier writings he asserts the freedom of the individual,
but of an individual divorced from all communion—it is hardly too much
to say, from all connection—with his kind. In his later work he reverses
the process, and exalts the claims of the community to the utter ‘annihila-
tion’ of individual interests and rights” (4–5).
4. Also, see Pichois and Pintard (1972).
5. Rousseau opens his last work, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, as
follows: “I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neigh-
bor, friend or society other than myself” (RSW, 3 [OC I, 995]).
6. Rousseau describes his happiness on the Isle de Saint-Pierre in
the fifth walk of his Reveries (41-48 [OC I, 1040-1049]).
7. As Judith Shklar notes: “Even Rousseau’s two imaginary
accounts of isolated family bliss end in failure. Emile, brought up so care-
fully to be a man, leaves his rural abode, and he and his wife destroy their
marriage in Paris. [Emile et Sophie, Hachette, I, 1–22.] Julie recognizes as
she dies that her perfect family life had not made her happy, since she
could not bear to renounce Saint-Preux’s love [NH, Part 6, letter 12]”
(Shklar [1966]: 42).
8. Rousseau’s republican critique of the Enlightenment was distinc-
tive, but not unique. His contemporary, the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de
Mably (1709–1785), was also very hostile to commercial society, pre-
ferred Sparta to Athens, condemned the evils of luxury, praised the virtue
of austerity, attacked the concentration of power in the hands of the rich,
regarded wealth as a greater threat to virtue than poverty, despised
Notes to Conclusion 153
Voltaire and was generally at odds with the basic values and outlook of
the philosophes. See Wright (1997).
9. Recent discussion about republicanism has usually been set
within the context of the so-called “liberal-communitarian debate.” See
Herzog (1986), Issac (1988), Skinner (1990), Patten (1996), Terchek
(1997), Pettit (1997), Dagger (1997), and Skinner (1998). For an overview
and defense of republican thought, see Oldfield (1990).
10. Richard Dagger argues that “Rousseau’s political thought pro-
vides an example, albeit an imperfect one, of republican liberalism”
because he combined the language and ideas of classical republicanism
with those of social contract theory, the latter being a “device usually
associated with liberalism” (Dagger [1997]: 8–84).
11. Arthur Melzer writes: “Forming part of the two antithetical solu-
tions, moreover, are also certain other, derivative antitheses that are found
in Rousseau’s writings: the praise of solitude and also the praise of com-
munity. . . . The individualistic solution aims at what Rousseau will call
‘natural freedom,’, the collectivist, political solution, at a very different
‘civil and moral freedom’” (Melzer [1990], pp. 90–91). Timothy O’Hagan
sees three strategies in Rousseau’s work: identification with society, identi-
fication with the natural order, and identification with the divine order
(O’Hagan [1999], pp. 19–20). Robert Wokler has written that Rousseau
finally offered three solutions to the problem he presents in his Discourse
on Inequality: “the first [The Social Contract] was directed to politics, the
second [Emile] to education, and the third [Reveries of a Solitary Walker]
solitude” (Wokler [1980a]: 88).
12. In his Reveries, Rousseau writes: “I have always found myself
answering them [questions of morality] according to the dictamen of my
conscience than according to the insights of reason” (RSW, 31 [OC I,
1028]). Compare to Socrates’ comments on his own inner voice in The
Apology in Plato (1975): 34. On the antagonistic relationship between
reason and conscience, see Edward Andrew (2001). Andrew argues that
“modernity is the product of tensions between Protestant conscience and
Enlightenment reason, not a harmonious conjunction of the two” (9).
13. My next book, Counter-Enlightenments, will chronicle the his-
tory of Enlightenment criticism from the French Revolution to the present.
14. Rousseau may have been the first formidable enemy of the
Enlightenment, but he was by no means alone in mid-eighteenth-century
France, which abounded with critics of the philosophes. See McMahon,
(2001).
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Index
Aarsleff, Hans, 124n22 philosophy, science and letters, 83, 87;

A Concise and Genuine Account … and reason, 88, 119; translation of,
(Hume), 131n2 139–40n15
Adorno, Theodor, 119, 124n25 Analyse raisonnée de Bayle (Marsy), 70
Affaire Calas, l’, 80 Andrew, Edward, 153n12
Age of Crisis, An (Crocker), 40 Anti-clericalism, 13–15, 16, 69–71, 74–75
Aguesseau, Henri d’, 57 Antiquity, x, 32, 58, 62–63, 68, 72, 78, 80,
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’: alleged atheism 130n65
of, 144n28; on Bacon, 18; criticizes Antraigues, Emmanuel-Louis-Henri de
Rousseau’s first Discourse, 85–86; on Launay, Comte d’, 38
the Encyclopédie, 17, 18, 84, 86, 146n3; Apology of Socrates (Plato), 126n11,
“Geneva” article, 63; on Holbach, 27; 153n12
on ignorance, 89; and the philosophes, Arabia, 68
12–13, 130n85; on philosophy, 91; Arendt, Hannah, 128n39
Preliminary Discourse to the Aristocracy, reading habits of the French,
Encyclopédie, 16, 85–86, 104; on 136n61
progress, 103, 104; on reason, 18–19; Aristotle, 128n39
relations with Rousseau, 33–34; on reli- Arnaud, Abbé Antoine, 24
gion, 70, 74; on Rousseau’s sanity, 35, Arts and sciences, 8, 13, 16, 33, 52, 58, 62,
131n2; as salonnière, 24; and the the- 66, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 92, 127n23
ater, 29, 63, 113 Assemblée du clergé, 70
Alexander the Great, 68 Atheism/atheists, 9, 15, 26, 27, 29, 39, 70,
Alexander VI, 73 71–76, 81, 97, 100, 143n13, 143n15,
Alexandria, Library of, 17 144n28, 144n29, 145n35, 145n38
Alienation, Rousseau’s, 33, 114 Athens, 22, 23, 32, 62, 67, 84, 92, 113,
Alliance Between Church and State, The 117, 130n68, 152n8
(Warburton), 145n37 Atomism/atomization, social, x, 6, 19, 44,
Althusser, Louis, 53 45, 125n26, 137n4
Ami des hommes ou traité de la population Aufklärer/Aufklärung, 15
(Mirabeau), 121n7 Autarky, 58, 68
Amour de la patrie, 56–57, 141n2 Authenticity, 117
Amour de soi, 7, 44, 45, 48, 49, 52, 56, Autocritique of Enlightenment, The
106, 107 (Hulliung), 3–5
“Amour de la patrie” (Aguesseau), 57 Autonomy, 119
Amour-propre, x, 7, 8, 9, 42, 45, 46, 47,
48–53, 67, 76, 111; and salons, 25; and Bacon, Francis, 13, 16, 17, 18, 95
pity, 44; extending, 56–57, 68; and Barber, Benjamin, 31, 141n7
patriotism, 57; and inequality, 65; and Baker, Keith, 130n85, 150n11
179
180 Index
Barbeyrac, Jean, 21, 65, 129n52 Church, The, 14, 15, 97

Bastille, the, 36 Church and state, 69, 76, 82
Bayle, Pierre, 69, 72–74, 78, 144n27 Churchill, Winston, 137n70
Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris Christophe Cities, 31, 50, 64, 65, 67
de, 70, 81, 98 City of God, 78
Bergier, Abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre, 94 City of man, 78
Berlin, Isaiah, 1, 5, 122n1, 124n22 City-state(s), 31, 57, 67, 68
Berthier, Guillaume-François, 18, 34, Civic humanism, 128n39
128n31, 134n23 Civilization, 6, 8, 42, 48, 53, 67, 108, 110,
Besterman, Theodore, 144n29 115, 120, 121–22n7; Rousseau and, ix;
Bibliothèque britannique, 95 Voltaire and, ix; Paris and, x, 31; and
Bibliothèque raisonnée, 95 enlightenment, x, 114; and polite socia-
Bloom, Allan, 140n15, 141n2 bility, 24; French, 63; and conscience,
Blum, Carol, 36, 85, 133n13 76; progress, 104–5, 109; and regres-
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 37, 39 sion, 107; and amour-propre, 111
Book trade in pre-Revolutionary France, 69 Civil religion, 67, 71–72, 76–81
Bordes, Charles, 62 Civil society, 8, 23, 24, 52, 67
Boss, Ian, 142n9 Cobban, Alfred, 138n11, 140n2
Boyle, Robert, 95 Cold War, 40
Brahma, 103 Cole, G. D. H., 122n9, 141n2
Brumfitt, J. H., 123n9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 39
Brunetière, Ferdinand, 121n1 Comédie française, 33, 133n13
Buffier, Abbé Claude, 25, 95 Commerce, 22, 23, 24, 52, 64, 65, 66, 72,
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 129n62
84, 135n47 Commercial civilization/society, 8, 22, 23,
Burke, Edmund, 37, 38, 39, 119, 47, 68, 152n8
135–36n55 Communitarianism, 119, 153n9
Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques, 21, 65 Community, 31, 42, 43, 56, 57, 62, 68, 76,
Bush, Judith, 139n15 78, 80, 128n39, 137n4
Business of Enlightenment, The (Darnton), Condillac, Abbé Etienne Bonnot de, 1, 24,
147n19 33, 95, 96
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat,
Calas, l’affaire, 80 Marquis de, 13, 16, 17, 19, 26, 83, 103,
Caliph Omar, 17 104, 105, 109, 126n11, 130n85,
Calvinism, 1, 2, 31, 34, 65, 70, 72, 79 150n11
Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques, 37 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 32, 33, 35,
Canaille, le, 15, 126n16 80, 81, 97, 118, 129n59, 132n11
Candide (Voltaire), 33, 103 Conscience, 7, 8, 9, 44, 45, 60, 75–76, 84,
Carr, E. H., 140n2 92–93, 99–101, 106, 119, 145n38,
Carthage, 145n38 153n12
Cassirer, Ernst, 2, 131n1, 149n47 Conseil d’état, 85
Catholic Church/Catholicism, 2, 14–16, 34, Considerations on the Government of
38, 70, 95, 142n9 Poland (Rousseau). See Government of
Cato, 92, 117–18 Poland, The
Censorship, 15, 64 Consistency, Rousseau’s, 117–18, 152n3
Censure de la faculté de théologie, 142n7 Constant, Benjamin, 137n3
Cercles of Geneva, 25 Constantinople, 4, 92
Chambéry, 31, 129n59 Constitutional Project for Corsica (Rous-
Chartier, Roger, 69, 136n61 seau), 50, 53, 101, 111, 112, 118,
Chastellux, François Jean, Marquis de, 24 140n15, 142n16
Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 37 Contract, social/contractualism, 7, 20,
Christian(ity), 14–16, 69–70, 72–75, 78, 80, 19–20, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 71, 108,
143n13, 144n27, 149n48 128n37, 128n42, 151n27
Index 181
Correspondence littéraire (Grimm), 150n8 incarceration of, 15, 148n44; on luxury,

Corsica/Corsicans, 52, 53, 58, 64, 65, 66, 23; materialism of, 93; “Natural Right”
68, 112, 115, 118, 142n16 article, 47; on progress, 103–4; radical-
Cosmopolitan(ism), 12, 34, 68, 141n2 ization of, 9, 27, 130n85; and Rousseau,
Coste, Pierre, 148n35 29, 32, 34, 35, 131n1; on Rousseau as a
“Cotérie holbachique,” 24, 29, 147n4 theist, 71; and Rousseau’s first Discourse,
Coyer, Abbé Gabriel François, 141n2 2, 42; on Rousseau’s “illumination,” 33,
Cranston, Maurice, 3, 33, 64, 95, 122n9, 133n15; on Socrates, 126n11; on socia-
131n4, 132n11, 133n17, 139n13, bility, 20, 21
139n15, 143n15 Dijon, Academy of, 33
Créqui, Renée Caroline, Marquise de, 77 Diogenes, 26, 34, 133–34n19, 134n23
Critical theory, 119 Directorate, The, 39
Crocker, Lester, 40 Disasters, natural, 49
“Cross-Purposes” (Taylor), 137n4 Discours en Sorbonne (Turgot), 151n16
Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau), 4, 7,
Dagger, Richard, 153n10 19, 31, 33, 41, 43–45, 46–47, 49–50,
Dark Ages, the, 105 51, 60, 77, 87, 88, 89, 105–6, 107, 108,
Darnton, Robert, 18, 147n19 110, 114, 115, 121n6, 132n13, 133n17,
De Beneficiis (Seneca), 20, 21, 129n46 138n11, 139n15, 151n19, 153n11
De Cive (Hobbes), 139n13 Discourse on Political Economy (Rousseau),
“Dedication to Jean-Jacques Rousseau” 56, 92, 117, 118, 123n3
(Robespierre), 135n49 Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts
Défense du Mondain (Voltaire), 130n65 (Rousseau), 1, 3, 17, 33, 51, 85, 87, 89,
Defoe, Daniel, 118 90–92, 123n10, 133n15
Degeneration of societies, “natural,” 113 Dissertation sur le vieux mot de patrie
Deism/deist(s), 15–16, 26, 27, 70, 71, 72, (Coyer), 141n2
74–75, 98, 144n28 Divine Legation of Moses, The
De Jean-Jacques Rousseau considéré (Warburton), 145n37
comme… (Mercier), 38 “Doux commerce,” 22–23, 129n62
Delamare, Nicolas, 20 Dualism, 60–61, 96–101, 141n7, 145n42
De la Rivière, Mercier, 130n85 Duclos, Charles-Pineau, 1, 24, 34, 84
De l’esprit (Helvétius), 71, 93, 96–97, Duffy, Edward, 39
143n14, 149n45 Durkheim, Emile, 138n11
Deleyre, Alexandre, 97, 98
Demosthenes, 23 Education, 15, 32, 51, 62, 66, 70, 73, 89,
Dent, N. J. H., 122n7, 140n15 97, 114, 119
Descartes, René, 16, 94, 95, 135n47 Edwards, Jonathan, 124n25
Des Malpeines, Léonard, 145n37 Egoism, 87, 139n15
Dialectic of Enlightenment Egypt/Egytpians, 68, 92
(Horkheimer/Adorno), 119 Elements of Universal Jurisprudence
“Dialogues” (Rousseau). See Rousseau, (Pufendorf), 21
Judge of Jean-Jacques Emile (Rousseau), 2, 35, 36, 42, 45, 48, 50,
“Dictamen,” Rousseau’s, 100, 119, 153n12 51, 52, 55, 56, 70, 71, 75, 77–78, 80, 81,
Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle), 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 97–98, 101, 106, 114,
73, 78 117, 118, 149n48, 152n1, 152n2, 153n11
Dictionnaire universelle, 121–22n7 Emile et Sophie (Rousseau), 118, 152n7
Diderot, Denis, 1; anti-clericalism of, 16, 74; Emotion, 84, 110
atheism of, 70; on Bacon, 18; on Berthier, Empiricism, 18, 19, 26, 84, 93, 94–97, 98,
128n31; on Christianity, 144n31; on civil 99, 104
society, 24; and Condillac, 96, 97; and Encyclopédie, 1, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18,
Encyclopédie, 12, 84, 85, 86, 146n3; on 20, 21, 24, 27, 29, 32, 35, 47, 56, 59,
enlightenment, 13; on a general will, 47; 63, 69, 75, 83–86, 95, 96, 113, 128n31,
and Hobbes, 139n13; on ignorance, 89; 143n15, 146n3, 146–47n4, 147n19
182 Index
Encyclopédie méthodique, 86 Final Reply (Rousseau), 91, 114

Encyclopédistes, 18, 30, 31, 33, 64, 79, 86, Fine arts, 18, 87, 88, 90
87, 119 Fleury, Omer Joly de, 85
Engels, Friedrich, 39 Fohi, 103
England/English(men), 22, 63 Force, 59, 60–61, 78, 108
Enlightenment, The (Lively, ed.), 125n2 France/French, ix, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
Enlightenment, the/enlightenment, 2, 3, 4, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30,
5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 50,
22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 37, 39, 62, 62–63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73,
40, 41, 42, 45, 49, 53, 55, 64, 65, 67, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 93, 94, 95, 103, 104,
69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 105, 111, 113, 119, 127n24, 133n19,
90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 101, 103, 104, 136n60, 139n13, 142n16, 147n19
105, 108, 109, 110, 122n1, 122n7, France, Peter, 140n19
123n9, 123n10, 123n14, 124n22, Franklin, Benjamin, 124n25
124n25, 125n25, 125n26, 125n27, Frederick the Great, 59
125n2, 125n3, 127n23, 136n56, 137n2, Freedom, 6, 13, 14, 45, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63,
147n19, 147–48n28, 149–50n48, 64, 67, 80, 98, 105, 108, 112, 113,
150n2, 150n4, 152n8, 153n14 138n11, 139n12, 148n44
Epinay, Louise de La Live d’, 35 Free will, 19, 44, 45, 98, 106
Epistemology, 9, 18–19, 93–101, 124n25 French Revolution, 6, 16, 36–40, 135n47,
Equality, 6, 37, 52, 68, 108 135n48, 135n49, 136n56
Erastian(ism), 16
Essai politique sur le commerce (Melon), 22 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 123n9
Essai sur l’origine des connaissances Galielo Galilei, 17, 148n44
humaine (Condillac), 95–96, 97 Gallican Church, 14
Essay on Human Understanding (Locke), Garrard, Graeme, 125n25
18, 94–95, 148n35, 148n37 Gassendi, Pierre, 95
Essay on the Origin of Languages Gay, Peter, 2, 123n9, 126n16, 126n17,
(Rousseau), 45, 110, 141n3, 149n46 128n37, 143n24, 145n35, 151n17
Essay on the Reign of Claudius and Nero General will, 42, 47, 57, 60, 61, 67, 76, 78, 79
(Diderot), 2, 137n6 Geneva/Genevans, 2, 9, 11, 21, 25, 29, 31,
Etat primitif, 42 32, 34, 37, 50, 53, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 68,
Etudes critiques sur l’histoire de la littéra- 70, 72, 79, 80, 89, 113, 114, 115, 118,
ture française (Brunetière), 121n1 131n7, 131n8, 132n11, 133n19, 135n44,
Europe, ix, x, 8, 11, 12, 16, 19, 24, 53, 62, 137–38n7, 143n13, 151n27, 151n28
63, 64, 66, 68, 75, 89, 103, 111, 113, “Geneva” (d’Alembert), 63
114, 115, 117, 118, 125n27, 131n7, “Geneva Manuscript” of The Social
139n13 Contract (Rousseau), 47
Everdell, William, 124n25 George III, 132n12
Examen du materialisme (Bergier), 94 Germany/Germans, 63, 92, 122n1
Exposé succinct de la contestation … God, 9, 45, 72, 75, 78, 80, 91, 98, 127n23,
(Hume), 131n2 143n13, 145n38; deist view of, 15, 26;
Voltaire on the utility of belief in, 16,
Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 22, 74, 143n24; Diderot abandons his belief
130n65 in, 20; and civil society, 24; and con-
Faculty of Theology, University of Paris, 70, science, 44, 84, 92, 93, 100, 101; and
73 the legislator, 59; and moral order, 74;
Faguet, Emile, 138n11 Diderot on, 74; Rousseau’s belief in,
Feminine, 25, 50, 66, 119 81–82, 145n42; and innate ideas, 94;
Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe, Locke and, 95; Voltaire on, 144n29
135n47 Golden age, 8, 33, 48, 90, 105
Ferney, 113 Goodman, Dena, 12, 25
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 122n1 Goodness, natural, 53
Index 183
Gordon, Daniel, 22, 129n50 “Illumination” on the road to Vincennes,

Gospels, the, 17, 78, 79 Rousseau’s, 33, 133n15
Gough, J. W., 19 Imagination, 18, 31, 35, 38, 43, 67, 84,
Gourevitch, Victor, 122n9, 139n15 106, 107
Government of Poland, The (Rousseau), 53, Immortality, 143n24, 146n42
57, 61, 101, 111, 118, 125n27 Independence, 117
Greece/Greeks, 22, 32, 68, 92, 132n10 Index of Forbidden Books, 15
Green, F. C., 132n10, 149n45 Industrialization, 119
Grimm, Friedrich-Melchior, 1, 24, 27, 29, Inequality, x, 51–52, 49, 65, 67, 90
33, 34, 84 Innate ideas, 70, 94–95, 96, 99
Grotius, Hugo, 20–21, 129n59, 139n13 “Institutions politiques” (Rousseau), 32
Grundrisse (Marx), 43 Integrity, 117, 119
Guillemin, Henri, 142n9 Intellectuals (Johnson), 131n3
Intolerance, 13, 15, 55, 80, 81, 148n44
Habermas, Jürgen, 128n39 “Invisible hand,” 47
Habit, 57, 58, 96, 139n12 Isle de Sainte-Pierre, 118, 152n6
Hamann, Johann Georg, 1, 5, 122n1, 124n22 Israel, Ancient, 58, 68
Hampson, Norman, 2, 123n10
Hankins, Thomas, 144n28 Jaucourt, Louis, Chevalier de, 20, 84,
Hegel, G. W. F., 43, 138n9 146n3
Heine, Heinrich, 39 Jesuits, 94, 145n38
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 9, 15, 16, 69, 70, Jews, Ancient, 58, 62
71, 74, 93, 96, 97–98, 143n14, Johnson, Paul, 131n3
148–49n44, 149n45 Journal de Trévoux, 34, 128n31
Herder, J. G., 122n1, 124n22, 141n2 Jouvenal, Bertrand de, 151n23
Hermeneutics, 119 Julie, or the New Heloise (Rousseau), 25,
Hibben, John Grier, 125n2 35, 36, 50, 77, 139n15
History, 18, 22, 25, 33, 47, 63, 84, 104, Julius II, 73
105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 115, 127n23,
131n7, 150n4, 151n23, 153n13 Kant, Immanuel, 138–39n12, 140n17,
History of England, The (Hume), 23 149n47
Hitler, Adolph, 137n70 Kelly, Christopher, 139n15
Hobbes, Thomas, 19, 21, 41, 42, 44, 45, Kendall, Willmore, 141n2
46–47, 48, 53, 59, 60, 67, 74, 75, 79, King of Poland, 51, 90
139n13, 140n17, 152n3 Knowledge, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23,
Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiery, Baron d’, 2, 9, 25, 62, 64, 72, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89,
14, 20, 24, 26–27, 70, 74, 75, 76, 84, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 105,
88, 89, 93, 96, 127n17, 130n85 119, 127n24, 136n55, 148n28
Homme machine, L’ (La Mettrie), 70, 96 Kuehn, Manfred, 149n47
“Homme moral,” 60, 61, 98
“Homme physique,” 60, 98 La contagion sacrée (Holbach), 70
“Homme sauvage,” 43, 44, 46, 106, 107 La doctrine du sens commun ou …
Hont, Istvan, 22, 129n61 (Buffier), 95
Horkheimer, Max, 119, 124n25 La Harpe, Jean-François de, 24
Houdetot, Sophie, Comtesse d’, 131n3 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 9, 14, 15, 70,
Hulliung, Mark, 3–5, 125n25 74, 93, 96, 143n13
Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche), 121n2 L’Ami des hommes (Mirabeau), 121n7
Hume, David, 19, 20, 22, 23, 29, 35, La Morale universelle (Holbach), 20
128n42, 131n2 Language, 99, 110, 115
Laws, 26, 43, 52, 57, 59–61, 62, 63, 65,
Ignorance, x, 7, 13, 14, 23, 33, 73, 83, 84, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81,
87–92, 101, 105, 119, 127n23, 146n3, 86, 93, 103, 111, 112, 113, 136n55,
147–48n28 141n6, 149n47
184 Index
Law(s), natural, 16, 17, 20, 21, 26, 65, 89, Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 135n47, 152n8
98, 99, 104 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 78, 128n39
Le Cercle (Palissot), 33 Maistre, Joseph de, 38
Le Devin du village (Rousseau), 36 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de
Le Fils Naturel (Diderot), 29, 104 Lamoigne de, 1, 24, 33, 89
Legislator, x, 8, 57–59, 67, 111 Mandément de monseigneur … , 142n7
Le Mondain, (Voltaire), 22, 130n65 Mandeville, Bernard, 22, 47, 130n65
Leo X, 73 “Manliness,” 25, 64–67
Les Philosophes (Palissot), 2, 33, 42, Marmontel, Jean-François, 24, 84,
126n11, 132–33n13, 133n13, 137n7, 133n15
146n3 Marshall, Terence, 123n9, 139n15,
Lespinasse, Julie de, 24 147–48n28
Letter to Christophe de Beaumont Marsy, François Marie de, 70
(Rousseau), 70, 98 Marx, Karl, 43
Letter to d’Alembert (Rousseau), 25, 31, Masculine, 31, 64–67
34, 35, 50, 53, 63–64, 65, 91, 99, 101, Mason, John Hope, 89, 111
113–14, 118, 145n36 Masson, Pierre-Maurice, 142n9
Letter to Voltaire on Providence (Rous- Masters, Judith, 139n15
seau), 114 Masters, Roger, 122n9, 139n15, 151n20
Letters Written From the Mountain Materialism, 9, 29, 70, 71, 85, 93, 96–101,
(Rousseau), 81, 114, 131n7, 142n7, 143n14, 149n46
142–43n13, 143n14, 145n36, Mauzi, Robert, 20
146n42 McDonald, Joan, 136n60
Lettre au docteur Jean-Jacques Pansophe McNeil, George, 136n60
(Voltaire), 35 Melon, Jean-François, 22
Lettre de l’auteur de la comédie (Palissot), Melzer, Arthur, 3, 123n14, 125n25,
132n13 149–50n48, 153n11
Lettres écrites de la compagne (Tronchin), Mémoire de Trévoux. See Journal de
114, 142n7 Trévoux
Leviathan (Hobbes), 139n13 Memory, 18, 95
Levine, Andrew, 135n49 Men of letters, 12, 34, 89
Liberalism, 118, 153n9, 153n10 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 38
“The Liberty of the Ancients…” (Constant), Middle Ages, the, 89
137n3 Miller, James, 136n60
Libraries in pre-Revolutionary France, pri- Mind, 13, 14, 18, 19, 25, 45, 49, 50, 61,
vate, 36 71, 72, 84, 85, 93–96, 103, 105
Library of Alexandria, 17 Minogue, Kenneth, 140n2
Lisbon earthquake (1755), 105, 151n17 Mirabeau, Victor Riquetti, Marquis de,
Literacy, 86–87 121n7, 135n47
Lively, Jack, 125n2 Miracles, 57, 70
Llobera, J. R., 140n2 “Moeurs,” 57, 62, 67, 114
Locke, John, 16, 18, 19, 44, 59, 94, 95, 96, Molière, 64
137n70, 139n13, 148n35, 148n37, Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,
152n3 Baron de, 19, 20, 63, 73, 117, 128n39,
Lough, John, 16, 96, 125n2 136n61, 141n11, 141–42n13, 144n27,
Louis XV, 15, 132n12 151n22
Louis XVI, 136n61 Moral habits, 138–39n12
Luke, Timothy, 124n25 Morals/Morality, 60, 61, 106, 145n36
“Lumières,” 11, 125n2 Morellet, Abbé André, 24, 84, 133n13, 137
Luxury, 22–23, 31, 52, 65–66, 67, 90, Morney, Daniel, 36
141–42n13 Mort de Socrate (Sauvigny), 126n11
Lycurgus, 57–58 Moses, 57, 58
Lyon, 97 Moultou, Paul-Claude, 34, 81, 98, 114
Index 185
Naigeon, Jacques-André, 9, 16, 70, 74, 75, Paoli, Pasquale, 142n16

84, 93 Paris, 2, 11, 16, 25, 33, 34, 73, 97, 143n13;
Napoleon Bonaparte. See Bonaparte civilization and, x; Rousseau in, 1, 32;
Nascent society, 8, 33, 48, 52, 105, 107, salons of, 24; Rousseau criticizes, 29,
111 67; versus Geneva, 31, 50, 63, 114,
National Assembly, 36 138n7; and money, 64; as “feminine,”
Nationalism, 140n2 66; Parlement of, 70, 85; Archbishop of,
Natural goodness of man, 53 81, 98
Natural law(s), 16, 17, 20, 21, 26, 65, 89, Parlement of Paris, 70, 85
98, 99, 104 Parme, Duc de, 37
“Natural Right” (Diderot), 47 “Party of Humanity,” 11, 12–13, 62, 125n3
Needs, 19, 47, 52, 53, 67, 106, 110, 112 Patrie, 56–57, 140–41n2
Newton, Isaac, 17, 95 Patriotism, 8, 63
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix–x, 40, 121n1, Perfectibility (perfectibilité), 8, 44, 45, 104,
121n2, 121n6 106, 107, 108–9, 151n19
“Notes en réfutation de l’ouvrage de Persia/Persians, 68, 92
Helvétius” (Rousseau), 97 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 20
Novum Organum (Bacon), 18 Pessimism, 8, 33, 53, 105–6, 111–15, 118
Numa, 57 Peter the Great, 59
Phidias, 23
Observations sur Mm Jean Law …. Philosopher-kings, 59, 147n27
(Voltaire), 22 Philosophes: parodied, 2, 146n3; as naive,
“Of Commerce” (Hume), 23 6; and republic of letters, 8; and natural
“Of Refinement in the Arts” (Hume), 23 sociability, 8, 41; on progress, 9; and
“Of the Original Contract” (Hume), 20, enlightenment, 14; attacked for being
128n42 atheists and materialists, 27; divisions
O’Hagan, Timothy, 153n11 among, 27, 130n85; Rousseau versus,
Oltramare, A., 132n10 27, 30, 35–40; and Rousseau’s letter to
Omar, Caliph, 17 d’Alembert, 29; and Hume, 29; religious
On the Duty of Man and Citizen According views of, 70; criticize Rousseau’s views
to Natural Law (Pufendorf), 21 on relationship between church and
On the Law of Nature and Nations state, 71–72; project of, 126n3; and
(Pufendorf), 21 social contract, 128n37; Robespierre
On the Law of War and Peace (Grotius), 21 criticizes, 135n49; Voltaire on divisions
On the Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), between, 133n19; Voltaire on Palissot’s
73, 141–42n13, 151n22 parody of, 146n3
Optimism/optimistic, 22, 47, 55, 103–6, Philosophical Dictionary (Voltaire), 22, 48,
150n2 71, 74, 85
Orangutan, 106 Philosophy, 18, 83, 87–88, 91, 92, 93, 100,
Order, natural, 26, 67 101
Orgueil (“pride”), 49, 50, 139n15 Philosophy of History, The (Voltaire), 59
Original sin, 70, 104 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, The
“The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment” (Hibben), 125n2
(Melzer), 125n25, 149–50n48 Physiocrats, 130n85
Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, The Pity (pitié), 44, 47, 52, 97
(Talmon), 40 Plato, 19, 152n3
Outram, Dorinda, 127n24 Plutarch, 32, 132n10
Poland/Poles, 51, 53, 61–62, 63, 64, 65, 66,
Palissot de Montenoy, Charles, 2, 33, 42, 115, 118, 135n44
126n11, 132–33n13, 137–38n7, 146n3 Polis, Ancient Greek, 32, 57
Palmer, R. R., 94 “Politesse,” 122n9
Panthéon, 37, 38, 135n47 “Political Economy” (Rousseau). See
“Panthéonization,” 36–37, 40, 135n47 Discourse on Political Economy
186 Index
“Political Fragment” (Rousseau), 88 Reflections on the Revolution in France

Political Philosophy of Rousseau, The (Burke), 38, 119
(Masters), 139n15 Reign of Terror, 39
Pope, The, 14, 17, 85 Religion, 15, 16, 142n9, 144n27, 144n28,
Porter, Dennis, 146 145n38, 149–50n48; utility of, 69–82;
Postmodernism, 119 and sentiments of sociability, 8; attacked
Poverty, 23, 67, 127n23, 132n12, 151n28 for impeding knowledge, 13–14; Paris
Pragmatism, 119 and, 31; and antiquity, 32; and legisla-
Préface de la comédie des Philosophes tor, 58–59; and cities, 67; decline of,
(Morellet), 133n13 69–70; and Romanticism, 84;
Preface to Narcissus (Rousseau), 47, 52, 87 philosophes accused of destroying, 85;
Prejudice(s), 12, 13, 14, 17, 31, 34, 37, 58, and innate ideas, 95; and dualism, 98;
63, 91, 105, 109 and conscience, 100; and epistemology,
Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie 124n25; Voltaire and, 145n35; and
(d’Alembert), 16, 85–86, 104 moral virtue, 145n36
Pride (orgueil), 49, 50, 62, 87, 134n19, Religion, civil, 67, 71–72, 76–81
139–40n15 Religion, natural, 70, 75
Privilège, 85 Religion of man, 78
“Profession of Faith” (Rousseau), 78, Religion of the Citizen, 72
79–80, 81, 92, 98–100, 124n25, Rempel, Henry, 60
143n14, 149n47, 149n48 Republican(ism), 8, 25, 31, 32, 42, 50, 57,
Progress, 9, 14, 18, 49, 65, 89, 91, 103–6, 62, 64, 65, 71, 92, 111, 115, 118,
107, 109, 110, 111, 114, 127n23, 137n4, 140n2, 141–42n3, 144n27,
150n11 152n8, 153n9, 153n10
Proménade du sceptique (Diderot), 74 Republic of Letters, x, 12, 93, 125n3
Property, private, 51–52, 65 Republic of Virtue, 42, 53, 55, 64, 68, 101,
Prospectus to the Encyclopedie (Diderot), 117, 118
86 Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau),
Protestant(ism), 14, 31, 64, 79 35, 53, 100, 114, 115, 118, 132n10,
Providence/Providentialism, 26, 98 140n19, 151n28, 152n5, 152n6,
Pufendorf, Samuel, 21, 22, 23, 129n59 153n11, 153n12
Revolution, 8, 15, 17, 23, 36, 58, 107, 114,
Quesney, François, 84, 130n85 125n27, 135n44, 136n55, 150n4
Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Revolution(aries), French, 16, 30, 32,
(Cassirer), 149n47 35–40, 69, 86, 133n13, 135n27,
135n47, 135n48, 136n56, 136n60,
Rationalism, 93–95 136n61, 137n3, 138n9, 153n13
Raynal, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François, Revolution, scientific, 17
15, 24, 84 Ribotte, François, 80
Reading habits of pre-Revolutionary Richelieu, Louis François Armand de
French, 136n61 Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de, 34
Reason, x, 7, 8, 13, 101, 104, 107, 108, Robespierre, Maximilien, 37, 39, 135n47,
110, 119; d’Alembert on, 18; and pity, 135n49
44; religion and, 59, 71, 77; and legisla- Robinson Crusoe (DeFoe), 118
tor, 59; weakness of, 71, 88–89; Bayle Roman(s)/Rome, 32, 50, 68, 92, 112,
on, 73; versus conscience, 84, 99–100, 132n10, 145n38
153n12; and amour-propre, 88; Romanticism, 1, 84, 123n10, 124n25,
Rousseau abandons, 93, 99–100; in 137n70
adults, 97, 106; and morality, 100; and Roosevelt, F. D., 137n70
progress, 105 Rosenblatt, Helena, 65
“Reason, Age of,” 106 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: and d’Alembert,
Reflection, faculty of, 88, 96, 97 29, 33, 34, 35, 63–64, 70, 85–86,
“Reflections on the Present State of the 113–14; on amour de soi, 44, 45, 48,
Republic of Letters” (Alembert), 12 49, 52, 107; on amour-propre, 7, 8, 9,
Index 187
25, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–53, 56–59, 58, 62; and Kant, 138–39n12, 149n47;
65, 67, 68, 71, 87, 107, 111, 119, on knowledge, 84, 89–92, 99, 100, 119,
139–40n15; on antiquity, x, 32, 132n10; 147–48n28; on language, 99, 110, 115;
as anti-social, ix, 41, 42–43, 132–33n13, on legislators, x, 8, 57–59, 67; and
138n11; Antraigues on, 38–39; on arts Locke, 44; on luxury, 31, 52, 65–66, 90,
and sciences, 52, 58, 62, 86, 89–92, 141–42n13; on Lycurgus, 57, 58; and
127n23; on atheism, 9, 29, 75, 76, 97, Machiavelli, 78; “madness” of, 2, 35,
98–101, 117, 143n15; on Athens, 32, 131n3, 134n31; Maistre on, 38; and
58, 67, 84, 92; and austerity, 64–65, Malesherbes, 33; Marx on, 43; on the
66–67; and Beaumont, 70; Burke on, masculine, 31, 66; on materialism, 9, 29,
37–38, 135–36n55; on Cato, 92, 98–101, 143n14, 149n46; and
117–18; on Cercles of Geneva, 25; and Montesquieu, 141n11, 151n22; on
Christianity, 78, 81–82; on church and Moses, 57, 58; and Napoleon, 37; on
state, 76–81; on cities, 67; and civiliza- nascent society, 48, 52, 107, 111; and
tion, ix–x, 110, 122n7; civil religion, 71, nationalism, 140–41n2; Nietzsche on,
72, 76–81; Coleridge on, 39; and ix–x, 40, 121n1, 121n6; on Numa, 57;
Condillac, 33, 97; on conscience, 8, 44, Palissot parodies, 33, 42, 137–38n7;
45, 60, 75, 76, 84, 93, 99–101, 106, “Pantheonization” of, 36–37, 38, 40,
119, 153n12; consistency of, 117–18, 135n47; and Paris, x, 25, 29, 31, 34, 50,
152n3; on Corsica, 53, 58, 64, 65, 66, 64, 66, 67, 70; on patriotism, 8, 56–57,
68, 112, 115, 118, 142n16; and 63–64; on perfectibility, 106, 108–9,
Counter-Enlightenment, x, 1, 2, 5, 6, 151n19; pessimism of, x, 33, 55,
34–35, 118–19, 120, 121n1, 111–15, 118; on philosophers, 91,
124–25n25; Crocker on, 40; and “dicta- 145n38; on the philosophes, x, 6, 8–9,
men,” 100, 119, 153n12; and Diderot, 27, 29, 30–35, 41, 70, 71–72; on philos-
29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 47, 71, 103–4; ophy, 87–88, 100, 101; on pity, 44, 47;
and Diogenes, 26, 34, 134n19, 134n23; as plebeian, ix; and Plutarch, 32,
on dualism, 60, 98–99; on education, 132n10; and Poland, 53, 61, 62, 63, 64,
51, 62, 97, 119; on the Encyclopédie, 65, 66, 115, 118; on pride, 49, 87; and
123n3, 143n15; on the encyclopédistes, progress, 9, 105–6; provincialism of, 31;
79; Engels on, 39; and enlightenment, and Pufendorf, 129n59; on reason, 44,
1–6, 27, 84, 90, 109, 123n9, 123n14, 59, 77, 84, 88–89, 99–100, 101, 106,
127n23; as pro-Enlightenment, 1–2, 107, 108, 110, 119, 153n12; reform of,
32–33; on Europe, x, 53, 58, 62–63, 68, 1, 34; and religion, 8, 35, 59, 67, 70–72,
75, 111, 115, 117, 118, 125n27; on the 75–82, 124n25, 142n9, 142–43n13,
feminine, 66; on force, 60–61, 78; on 145n36, 145n38, 145–46n42,
“forced to be free,” 60; on free will, 45, 149–50n48; on “republic of virtue,” 42,
98, 106; and the French Revolution, 30, 57, 64, 68, 114, 117; and revolution, 8,
35–40, 135n48, 136n56, 136n60, 36, 125n27, 135n44; and Robespierre,
138n9; on general will, 42, 47, 57, 60, 37, 39, 135n49; and romanticism, 39,
61, 67, 76, 78, 79; and Geneva, 25, 29, 84, 123n10, 137n70; and Rome, x, 32,
31, 34, 50, 53, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 50, 68, 92, 112, 132n10; Russell on,
70, 72, 79, 89, 113, 115, 131n7, 137n70; on salons, 25–26; Shelley on,
131–32n8, 151n28; as “a god,” 35; and 39; on sociability, 7–8, 41, 42, 47, 76,
Grimm, 29, 34; and Grotius, 129n59; 117; on social contract, 7, 41, 45, 108;
Hegel on, 43; Heine on, 39; and social status of, 32, 132n11; on society,
Helvétius, 71, 93, 97–98, 149n45; and 6–8, 41–53, 75–76; on Socrates, 92,
Hobbes, 41, 42, 46–48, 53, 60, 67, 79, 115, 117–18, 119, 153n12; on Sparta,
134n13; Hulliung on, 3–5; and Hume, x, 25, 32, 50, 53, 56, 62, 66, 67, 68, 79,
29, 35, 44, 131n2; on ignorance, 87–92, 84, 89, 92, 112; on state of nature, ix,
101, 119, 127n23; “illumination” on 44–45, 46, 106; Talmon on, 40; on the-
road to Vincennes, 33, 133n15; on ater, 9, 31, 34, 63–64, 65, 66–67,
inequality, 49, 51–52, 65, 90; on Israel 113–14; on toleration, 80–81; as totali-
(ancient), 58, 68; on the Jews (ancient), tarian, 40; on vanity, 50; and Venice, 32;
188 Index
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques(continued) 145n38; Social Contract, The, 2, 32, 36,

and Voltaire, ix–x, 2, 9, 29, 33, 34–35, 38, 46, 53, 57, 60, 61, 63, 71, 76, 77,
41, 42, 62, 63–64, 70, 71, 77, 80, 78, 79, 80, 81, 93, 101, 108, 111, 114,
113–14, 132–33n13, 133–34n19, 117, 118, 125n27, 129n59, 131n7,
142–43n13, 151n27; on wealth, 64–65, 136n55, 136n60, 138n11, 145n36,
67, 90; on women, 25, 50; Wordsworth 149n45, 151n27, 152n1, 152n2, 153n11;
on, 39 “State of War”, 46, 47
Works: Confessions, 32, 33, 35, 80, 81, 97, “Rousseau and Enlightenment” (Marshall),
118, 129n59, 132n11; Constitutional 147–48n28
Project for Corsica, 50, 53, 101, 111, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (“Dia-
112, 118, 140n15, 142n16; Discourse on logues”) (Rousseau), 35, 48–49, 51, 53,
Inequality (“Second Discourse”), 4, 7, 19, 75, 81, 87, 100, 108, 114, 118, 142,
31, 33, 41, 43–45, 46–47, 49–50, 51, 60, 139n15, 145n38
77, 87, 88, 105–6, 107, 108, 110, 114, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe (Cassirer), 149n47
115, 121n6, 132n13, 138n11, 139n15, Rousseau’s Legacy (Porter), 146
151n19, 153n11; Discourse on Political “Rousseau the Pessimistic Evolutionist”
Economy (“Political Economy”), 56, 92, (Jouvenal), 151n23
117, 118, 123n3; Discourse on the Royal Society, 95
Sciences and Arts (“First Discourse”), 1, Russell, Bertrand, 137n70
3, 17, 33, 51, 85, 87, 89, 90–91, 92, Russia, 127n18
123n10, 133n15; Emile, 2, 35, 36, 42, Russian Empire, 125n27
45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 70, 71, 75,
77–78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 97–98, Saint-Lambert, Jean-François, Marquis de,
101, 106, 114, 117, 118, 149n48, 152n1, 24, 59, 84
152n2, 153n11; Emile et Sophie, 118, Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 24
152n7; Essay on the Origin of Saisselin, R. G., 2
Languages, 45, 110, 141n3, 149n46; Salons, 1, 24–25
Final Reply, 91, 114; “Geneva Sauvigny, Abbé de, 126n11
Manuscript” to The Social Contract, 47; Science(s), 5, 7, 66, 95, 100, 101, 109;
Government of Poland, The, 53, 57, 61, translation of, 127–28n24; as obstacle to
101, 111, 118, 125n27; “Institutions moral sense, 92; as good for corrupt
politiques,” 32; Julie, ou la Nouvelle societies, 91; and idleness, 90; under-
Heloise, 25, 35, 36, 50, 77, 139n15; Le mines happiness, 90; and d’Alembert,
Devin du village, 36; Letter to Christophe 86; arts and, 13, 16, 33, 52, 58, 62, 84,
de Beaumont, 70, 98; Letter to 86, 89, 90, 127n23; Holbach on, 14;
d’Alembert, 25, 31, 34, 35, 50, 53, Voltaire on, 15; and Encyclopédie, 16;
63–64, 65, 91, 99, 101, 113–14, 118, and philosophes, 17–18; vanity and, 52;
145n36; Letter to Voltaire on Providence, Jews proscribe, 58; Condorcet on, 83,
114; Letters Written From the Mountain, 109; popularization of, 83; and amour-
81, 114, 131n7, 142n7, 142–43n13, propre, 83; in ancient Athens, 84; and
143n14, 145n36, 146n42; “Notes en corruption of souls, 89; in Sparta, 92
refutation de l’ouvrage de Helvétius,” 97; Scythians, 92
“Political Fragment,” 88; Preface to Secularization, 15, 69, 119
Narcissus, 47, 52, 87; “Profession of Sée, Henri, 138n11
Faith” (In Emile), 78, 79, 80, 81, 92, Seidman, Steven, 137n2
98–100, 124n25, 143n14, 149n47, Selfishness, 21, 22, 45, 48, 49, 56, 68, 107
149n48; Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Self-love, 44, 45, 52, 139n15
35, 53, 100, 114, 115, 118, 132n10, Self-sufficiency, 58
140n19, 151n28, 152n5, 152n6, 153n11, Seneca, 20, 21, 129n46
153n12; Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques Senses, the, 96
(“Dialogues”), 35, 48–49, 51, 53, 75, 81, Sentiments d’un citoyen (Voltaire), 35,
87, 100, 108, 114, 118, 139n15, 142, 143n13
Index 189
Sermon des cinquante (Voltaire), 143n13 Stewart, Philip, 139n15

Shackleton, Robert, 126n6 St. Gervais, Genevan district of, 32
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 39 Stoics, 21
Shklar, Judith, 81, 152n7 St. Petersburg, 15
Siècle de Louis XIV, Le (Voltaire), 147n27 Strauss, Leo, 138n11
Simplicity, 31, 43, 58, 65, 68, 84, 89, 112, Sturm und drang, 122n1
127n23 Suard, Jean-Baptiste, 24, 131n2
Sin, original, 70, 103, 104 Sumptuary laws, 63, 65
Sketch for a History of the Progress of the Superstition, 13
Human Mind (Condorcet), 13, 104, Swiss/Switzerland, 31, 64, 151n28
108, 126n11 Système de la nature (Holbach), 26, 27, 75,
Small Council of Geneva (“Council of 25”), 96
70, 131n8
Smith, Adam, 23 Tabula rasa, 18
Smith, D. W., 69 Tallis, Raymond, 3
“Sociabilité” (Jaucourt), 20 Talmon, Jacob L, 40, 135n48
Sociability (“sociabilité”), x, 7, 8, 19–25, Taylor, Charles, 128n39, 137n4
26, 41, 42, 47, 55, 61, 67, 76, 117, Taylor, Samuel, 2
129n50, 139n13 Thart, 103
Social atomism. See atomism Theater, 9, 24, 25, 29, 31, 34, 63–64, 65,
Social contract. See contract, social 66, 113–14, 133n19, 138n7
Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 2, 32, 36, Thomism, 142n9
38, 46, 53, 57, 60, 61, 63, 71, 76, 77, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 128n39
78, 79, 80, 81, 93, 101, 108, 111, 114, Traité de la société civile (Buffier), 25
117, 118, 125n27, 129n59, 131n7, Traité de métaphysique (Voltaire), 148n37
136n55, 136n60, 138n11, 145n36, Traité de police (Delamare), 20
149n45, 151n27, 152n1, 152n2, Traité des sensations (Condillac), 95, 96
153n11 Tronchin, Jean-Robert, 114
Social holism, 137n2 Trousson, Raymond, 35
Socianism, 133n19 Tuck, Richard, 139n13, 140n17
“Société” (Diderot), 20 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, Baron de, 24,
Socrate (Voltaire), 126n11 84, 105, 130n85
Socrates, 37, 92, 115, 117, 118, 119, “Twenty-five tyrants.” See Small Council of
126n11, 153n12 Geneva
Sophocles, 23
Sorel, Georges, 122n1 “Unitaires” (Naigeon), 75
Soul, the, 44, 45, 50, 60, 61, 62, 75, 84, 87, University of Paris, 70, 73
89, 90, 92, 93, 99, 100, 143n24, Urbanization, 119, 152n3
146n42, 149n46
Spaniards, 63 Vaché, Jean, 139n15
Sparta, x, 22, 23, 25, 31, 50, 53, 56, 58, Vanity (vanité), 50, 139–40n15
60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 79, 80, 84, 89, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a
92, 112, 113 Comet (Bayle), 72–73
Speech, 44, 45 Vaughan, C. E., 117
Spink, J. S., 94 Venice, 32
Spinoza, Baruch, 144n29 Vereker, Charles, 150n2
Stark, Werner, 138n11 Viroli, Maurizio, 140n2
Starobinski, Jean, 121–22n7 Virtue, 9, 19, 23, 31, 35, 38, 42, 47, 50, 53,
Statecraft as Soulcraft (Will), 141n6 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64, 65, 68, 74, 75,
State of nature, ix, 43, 44–45, 46, 106 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 109,
State of war, 7, 9, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 52, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 144n27,
53, 67, 77, 87, 88, 111 144n29, 145n36, 145n38, 149n46,
“State of War” (Rousseau), 46, 47 150n4, 152n8
190 Index
Volland, Sophie, 35, 74 enemy, 2, 29, 34–35, 132–33n13;

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet: on l’affaire 133–34n19; on Rousseau as an “enemy
Calas, 80; on amour-propre, 48; anti- of society,” 42; on Rousseau as mad, 35,
clericalism of, 14, 142–43n13; and athe- 134n31; on Rousseau as a primitivist,
ism, 144n29; on Bacon, 18; on Bayle, 41, 121n6; on Rousseau’s first
73; Burke on, 135–36n55; on “le Discourse, 33; on Rousseau’s second
canaille,” 15; Candide, 33, 103; and Discourse, 33, 121n6, 133n17; on
“Catechism of the Citizen,” 77; and civi- Rousseau’s The Social Contract, 71,
lization, ix–x, 121n1, 121n2; on civil 151n27; Sentiments d’un citoyen, 35,
religion, 71; cosmopolitanism of, 141n2; 143n13; Sermon des cinquante, 143n13;
on Encyclopédie, 84, 146n3; on enlight- Socrate, 126n11; on sociability, 20, 41;
enment, 150n4; erastianism of, 16; and on Socrates, 126n11; on Sparta, 62; on
French Revolution, 37–38, 39; on God, the theater in Geneva, 9, 63, 113, 114;
26; on Helvetius, 148n44; on Holbach’s on toleration, 71, 80; Traité de méta-
Système de la nature, 27; on legislators, physique, 148n37
59; Le Mondain, 22, 130n65; Lettre au Voltaire’s Politics (Gay), 151n17
docteur Jean-Jacques Pansophe, 35;
“Luxe” (in Philosophical Dictionary), Warburton, William, 78, 145n37
22; on luxury, 22, 130n65; Mably on, Was ist Aufklärung? (Kant), 123n9
152–53n8; on Mandeville, 130n65; on Watkins, Frederick, 139–40n15
Naigeon’s “Unitaires,” 75; Nietzsche on, Wealth, 22, 51, 64, 65, 67, 90
ix–x, 121n1, 121n2; on optimism, 103, Will, free, 19, 44, 45, 98, 106
105–6; Observations sur Mm Jean Law, Will, George, 141n6
…., 22; “Pantheonization” of, 37, Will to Power (Nietzsche), ix
135n47; Philosophical Dictionary, 22, Wilson, Arthur, 133n13
48, 71, 74, 84; The Philosophy of Wilson, Ian, 139n13
History, 59; and Palissot, 132n13, Wokler, Robert, 2, 89, 114, 125–26n3,
137–38n7, 146n3; on pessimism, 153n11
151n17; on philosopher-kings, 147n27; Women, 25, 50
and the philosophes, 91, 130n85, “The Word Civilization” (Starobinski),
133n19, 134n23, 137n7; on philosophy, 121n7
91; and progress, 103, 105–6, 150n4, Wordsworth, William, 39
151n17; and religion, 70, 73, 74, 75, World War Two, 119
126–27n17, 143n24, 145n35, 145n38;
read by Louis XVI, 136n61; Rousseau’s Zoroaster, 103

Garrard, G (2003) - Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment. A Republican Critque of The Philosophes

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ROUSSEAU’S COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

SUNY series in Social and Political Thought

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

© 2003 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced

Cover illustration: Anonymous print of Rousseau and Voltaire boxing,

For information, address State University of New York Press,

Production by Cathleen Collins

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Garrard, Graeme, 1965–

5. On the Utility of Religion 69

I n his posthumously published notes The Will to Power, Friedrich

thought. It was in mid-eighteenth-century Paris that the modern concept

T his book began as a doctoral thesis at Oxford University, where it

My interest in the history of political thought was first aroused while

C Confessions. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 5. Edited

DPE Discourse on Political Economy. In The Collected Writings of

LWM Letters Written From the Mountain. In The Collected Writings of

Other works frequently cited

CWV Complete Works of Voltaire. Edited by T. Besterman. Banbury,

OCV Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. Edited by Louis Moland. Paris:

philosophes, the atheist Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789). Also, the appear-

to Arthur Melzer, Rousseau’s criticisms of the Enlightenment are

At the heart of Rousseau’s critique of Enlightenment civilization is his

closely connected. Rousseau therefore set himself foursquare against the

The Enlightenment Republic of Letters

The Party of Humanity

R ousseau’s Enlightenment was the “high Enlightenment” of the

convenient to dismiss one simplistic caricature than to deal with a com-

which they are. This way of thinking is for many people an

The “great Bacon” had himself urged the creation of an ambitious

natural sciences. The application of this methodology beyond the natural

The Virtue of Selfish Sociability

Social contract theory was already in decline by the time Rousseau’s

optimistic conception of human nature, stressing our natural sociability

Did it ever have Demosthenes, Sophocles, Apelles, and Phidias?

Diderot increasingly gravitated toward the Baron’s circle, while his

Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God

The Many Faces of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I t is not now generally disputed that Rousseau gradually became

presented in his works, or indicated a more profound alienation, a funda-

Rousseau and the Philosophes

Rousseau saw his “defection” from the camp of the philosophes as a

imagined when they branded him a lunatic. When he arrived in Paris in

most intimate friends, and he counted Condillac, Grimm, and d’Alembert

citoyen (1764) and Lettre au docteur Jean-Jacques Pansophe (1766) pub-

The Invention of the “Revolutionary” Rousseau

It was these later confessional writings, along with Rousseau’s best-sell-

The following May Robespierre, referring to this event, claimed of

[T]hey [the Revolutionary leaders] erect statues to a wild, fero-

Ironically, Burke’s comments on Rousseau here echo those of Voltaire,

in the Panthéon as “fathers of the French Revolution,” a proximity that

of the Revolution but from those of the Revolutionaries themselves.”60

Rousseau’s Critique of Enlightenment Social Thought

V oltaire spoke for virtually all of the philosophes when, in a direct

beings, new, socially divisive passions emerge. Foremost among these is

From Contract to Community4

gives the species its openness to change. In the state of nature, it is an

Natural Order, Social Disorder

While Rousseau and the philosophes agreed that society is indispensable

rank as a species, he prepared himself from afar to claim first rank as an