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TOM FURNISS: ROUSSEAU: ENLIGHTENED CRITIC OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT?

(This is a more extended version of an essay that appears in The Enlightenment World, edited by Martin Fitzpatrick, et al (Routledge, 2004), pp.596-609)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a key figure in the problematisation of any single view of the Enlightenment. He is sometimes seen as a central player in the Enlightenment and sometimes as an anti-Enlightenment figure who paved the way for Romanticism. Rousseau scholars have been strangely reluctant to consider his relationship to the Enlightenment (Hulliung 1994: 2), and some of the most influential twentieth century formulations of the Enlightenment clearly had difficulty with Rousseau. Isaiah Berlin's anthology The Age of Enlightenment is based on the assumption that the Enlightenment was defined by Newtonian empiricism and finds no place for Rousseau (Berlin 1956). Peter Gay's two-volume study of The Enlightenment (Gay 1967 and 1972) homogenises the philosophes as a single, admittedly quarrelsome, family and represents their 'persecution' of Rousseau as simply an extreme family quarrel; as a consequence, Gay fails to register the radical challenge that Rousseau's writings posed for the French Enlightenment (Gay 1967: 4-7). Norman Hampson's The Enlightenment begins by noting that 'It may be argued with equal plausibility that Rousseau was either one of the greatest writers of the Enlightenment or its most eloquent and effective opponent' (Hampson 1968: 9). Such equivocation persists in more recent constructions. Although Isaac Kramnick's The Portable Enlightenment Reader does include selections of Rousseau's writings, they come with labels that warn us that Rousseau was 'Always somewhat at odds with his fellow philosophes' (Kramnick 1995: 134).

Rousseau's paradoxical relationship to the Enlightenment is exemplified in his highly influential Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), in which he articulates a powerful critique of what he calls 'the fatal enlightenment of Civil man' and seems to endorse primitivism as an alternative. This provoked Voltaire (1694-1778), one of the primary figures of the French Enlightenment, into writing scathing marginal notes on his copy of the text and a politely sarcastic letter to Rousseau in which he says that 'One acquires the desire to walk on all fours when one reads your work' (Rousseau 1755: 48; Voltaire 1755). At the same time, however, Maurice Cranston describes the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality as 'Rousseau's most distinctly scientific work, the one closest to the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking' (Cranston 1984: 46-7). In the Second Discourse, as Cranston points out, 'Rousseau outlined a theory of the evolution of the human race which prefigured the discoveries of Darwin; he revolutionized the study of anthropology and linguistics, and he made a seminal contribution to political and social thought' (Cranston 1984: 29). It is possible, then, to see Rousseau as both a key voice in the dialogue that was the Enlightenment and as a figure who entered into one of the most searching critical dialogues with the Enlightenment.

I don't have time in this chapter to explore the full complexities of the Enlightenment as a prelude to measuring Rousseau's reaction against it. Nor do I have the space to examine Rousseau's entire oeuvre -- most of which would be relevant to the task in hand. Instead, I will begin by sketching out the defining assumptions of the Encyclopédie on the supposition that the massive project undertaken by Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) can be taken to epitomise the French Enlightenment. I will then focus on Rousseau's 'First Discourse' -- the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (published in January 1751) -- and on his polemical contributions to the critical controversy that the First Discourse provoked in the following three years. I will suggest that these writings allowed Rousseau to develop a critique of the Enlightenment and that they help us to understand the alternative (to the) Enlightenment that he would work out in later major writings such as Emile and Julie. At the same time, as we will see, Rousseau's writings are complex and sometimes self-contradictory and cannot be comprehended as pursuing a single project -- whether that be to mount a uniform critique of, or to proffer a single alternative to, the Enlightenment.

The Encyclopédie

In the late 1740s and early 1750s, Diderot and Rousseau shared 'remarkably similar intellectual interests' and were constant companions (Wokler 1975: 63). Rousseau was, indeed, one of the key contributors to the early volumes of the Encyclopédie. In 1749, on Diderot's request, Rousseau wrote a number of short articles on various aspects of music that were included in the first five volumes of the Encyclopédie (see Scott 1998: 198-221). The scope of, and impetus behind, the Encyclopédie, which eventually extended to seventeen folio volumes of text published between 1751 and 1765, together with eleven supplementary volumes of plates, can be glimpsed in its full title: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Diderot: 1751-1765). In its attempt to be a systematic compendium of all knowledge, the Encyclopédie included entries that self-referentially defined its own aims and assumptions. In his entry on 'Encyclopédie' (Volume 5, 1755), for example, Diderot explains that the purpose of an Encyclopédie is

to collect all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth, to present its general outlines and structure to the men with whom we live, and to transmit this to those who will come after us, so that the work of past centuries may be useful to the following centuries, that our children, by becoming more educated, may at the same time become more virtuous and happier (in Kramnick 1995: 18).

The Encyclopédie, then, was premised on the supposition that knowledge of the sciences, the arts, and the crafts was compatible with, and indeed led to, virtue and happiness, and that such knowledge ought to be disseminated as widely as possible to 'the men with whom we live'. The assumption that education would enable future generations to become more virtuous and happier entailed a further assumption about the possibility of human progress and perfectibility -- an assumption that Kramnick calls 'a leitmotiv of the Enlightenment' (Kramnick 1995: xiii).

For Diderot, human progress would be promoted through an unflinching rational analysis of the cherished ideas and authorities of the past:

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard to anyone's feelings. ... We must ride roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and sciences the liberty that is so precious to them. ... We have for quite some time needed a reasoning age when men would no longer seek the rules in classical authors but in nature (in Kramnick 1995: 18).

The commitment to rational and empirical enquiry is underlined in d'Alembert's 'Discours préliminaire', which prefaced the first volume in 1751 and served as an introduction to the Encyclopédie as a whole. In it, d'Alembert celebrates the achievements of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and John Locke (1632-1704) as the major pioneers of the Enlightenment. Although he was 'born in the depths of dark night', Bacon's insistence on 'the necessity of scientific experimentation' made him the first 'to prepare the light of reason which gradually and by imperceptible degrees was to illuminate the world' (in Kramnick 1995: 8). Descartes' most important contribution was that he 'dared ... to teach good minds how to shake of the yoke of scholasticism, public opinion, and authority' (in Kramnick 1995: 11). Newton 'gave to philosophy a method it seems obliged to retain' and thereby allowed Locke to reduce 'metaphysics to what it must as a matter of fact be, the experimental science of the mind' (in Kramnick 1995: 13-14). The Enlightenment project that the Encyclopédie defined, then, was based on the assumption of human progress and perfectibility through applying scientific rationality and empirical observation to all aspects of human life, and it was committed to the idea that human progress could only occur if the arts and sciences were liberated from all constraints.

Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and Arts

In his Confessions Rousseau represents his decision to write the Discours sur les sciences et les arts as a moment of revelation that changed the course of his life. On his way to visit Diderot in prison in the summer of 1749, Rousseau saw the announcement of the Academy of Dijon's prize essay question in the Mercurie de France: 'Has the Restoration of the Sciences and the Arts Contributed to the Purification of Morals?' He claims that 'At the moment of that reading I saw another universe and I became another man' (Rousseau 1798: 294). Rousseau tells us that Diderot 'exhorted me to give vent to my ideas and to compete for the prize. I did so, and from that instant I was lost. All the rest of my life and misfortunes was the inevitable effect of that instant of aberration' (Rousseau 1798: 295). Rousseau is referring here, in melodramatic fashion, to the fact that the essay he wrote for the competition set him on a course that ran against the grain of the Enlightenment and provoked, so he believed, the philosophes to engage in a relentless conspiracy against him.

The standard Enlightenment answer to the Dijon Academy's question ought, of course, to have been 'yes'. Voltaire's Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) had, after all, recently celebrated the progress of the arts, sciences and letters in the 'century' of Louis XIV. Yet in the essay that he wrote for the Dijon Academy, which won the competition and was published the following year, Rousseau recasts the question: 'Has the restoration of the Sciences and Arts contributed to the purification of Morals, or to their corruption?' (Rousseau 1751a: 5). By arguing that the restoration of the sciences and arts had contributed to the corruption of morals, Rousseau produced his first major critique of the founding assumptions of the Encyclopédie.

Rousseau begins the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts by acknowledging the impressive achievements of the Enlightenment, especially its revelations about the universe and human nature. But he also figures the arts and sciences as a means of maintaining and sweetening the political repression of despotic government:

While the Government and the Laws see to the safety and the well-being of men assembled, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery, and fashion them into what is called civilized Peoples. Need raised up Thrones; the Sciences and Arts have made them strong. (Rousseau 1751a: 6)

While there are paradoxes and ambiguities in this passage, Rousseau can nonetheless be read as implying that his critique of the arts and sciences is actually a critique of the effects of Enlightenment under absolutist political systems such as the ancien régime in France. The arts and sciences 'throttle' human beings' inborn 'sentiment of original freedom' and make civilization under monarchical government a form of slavery. The text's republican sentiments are, indeed, flagged on the title page, which announces that the text was written 'Par un Citoyen de Genève' (Geneva was then an independent republic and Rousseau, at this stage, tended to idealise it as a free and virtuous state that was the polar opposite of Bourbon France).

The above passage implicitly associates the arts and sciences with civilized luxury. In doing so, Rousseau invokes the assumption of Enlightenment writers on both sides of the English Channel that luxury necessarily leads to physical, moral and political corruption (see Sekora 1977). As Rousseau suggests in the 'Preface to Narcissus' of 1753, his last major reply to critics of the First Discourse, 'A taste for letters, philosophy, and the fine arts softens bodies and souls' (Rousseau 1753: 98). In the First Discourse, Rousseau asserts that 'our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced towards perfection [and] Virtue has been seen fleeing in proportion as their light rose on our horizon' (Rousseau 1751a: 9). Like other republican and/or nationalist writers of the eighteenth century, Rousseau presents a series of historical examples to show that the luxury represented or generated by the arts and sciences enervates the bodies of men and the body politic and so enables both to be enslaved (Rousseau 1751a: 8-10). He also offers a set of positive examples of republics, such as Sparta, that remained free and vigorous by repudiating the arts and sciences (Rousseau 1751a: 11). For Rousseau, the rustic and manly example of Sparta ought to have been emulated by all modern nations: 'Peoples, know, then, once and for all, that nature wanted to preserve you from science as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hand of her child' (Rousseau 1751a: 14). Rousseau would thus appear to be suggesting that modern nations ought to have remained in a state of childhood -- a proposition that runs completely counter to the Enlightenment's clarion call for humanity to awaken from its barbarous childhood through the acquisition of rational knowledge.

In the second part of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts Rousseau explicitly attacks some of 'the best-known' Enlightenment philosophers (such as George Berkeley (1685-1753), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Diderot), accusing them of having concocted their theories not as 'lovers of wisdom' but in the manner of 'a troop of charlatans, each hawking from his own stand on a public square' (Rousseau 1751a: 25). He also attacks a 'host of obscure Writers and idle Literati' -- presumably including the philosophes -- who, in the name of philosophy and enlightenment, are currently infecting minds and threatening the state itself:

these vain and futile declaimers go off in all directions, armed with their deadly paradoxes; undermining the foundations of faith, and annihilating virtue. They smile disdainfully at such old-fashioned words as Fatherland and Religion, and dedicate their talents and their Philosophy to destroying and degrading all that is sacred among men. (Rousseau 1751a: 17-18)

The First Discourse thus becomes a modern Jeremiad, warning readers about the dangers of a false Enlightenment that is systematically undermining a trinity of interlocking values -- virtue, faith, and patriotism -- that would become the basis of Rousseau's alternative (to the) Enlightenment.

Rousseau's 'Preface to Narcissus' makes it clear that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the Enlightenment's attempt to inculcate a taste for the arts and sciences in the people and the political duties required of citizens in a well-constituted state (i.e., a republic):

A taste for letters always heralds the beginning of corruption in a people, and very rapidly accelerates it. For, in an entire nation, this taste can only arise from two sources, both of them bad, and both of them perpetuated and increased by study, namely idleness and a craving for distinction. In a well-constituted State, every citizen has duties to fulfill; and he holds these important cares too dear to find leisure for frivolous speculations. In a well-constituted State all citizens are so thoroughly equal that no one may enjoy precedence over others as being the most learned or even the most skilled, but at most for being the best: though this last distinction is often dangerous; for it makes for scoundrels and hypocrites. (Rousseau 1753: 97)

By insisting that the equality of all citizens is the mark of a well-constituted state, Rousseau is decisively rejecting the compromise between philosophical Enlightenment and political absolutism that occasionally marked the thought of major Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and the Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789). Yet Rousseau's critique of the Enlightenment goes further than this, suggesting that political virtue and enlightenment, citizenship and philosophy, are fundamentally incompatible with one other: 'A taste for philosophy loosens all the bonds of esteem and benevolence that tie men to society, and this is perhaps the most dangerous of the evils it engenders' (Rousseau 1753: 99). In place of love of country and civic virtue as bonds of society, the philosophers of the Enlightenment have substituted self-interest:

All our Writers regard the crowning achievement of our century's politics to be the sciences, the arts, luxury, commerce, laws, and all the other bonds which, by tightening the social ties among men through self-interest, place them all in a position of mutual dependence, impose upon them mutual needs and common interests, and oblige everyone to contribute to everyone else's happiness in order to secure his own. (Rousseau 1753: 100)

But while Rousseau points out the philosophes' dangerous paradoxes, he was himself, as his detractors regularly pointed out, given to paradox. Having begun the First Discourse by arguing that the arts and sciences reinforce the ancien régime, he goes on to claim that they undermine the state (and then argues in the 'Preface to Narcissus' that they reinforce the social bonds of mutual interest). Although he begins by arguing that the sciences and arts are evil supplements to nature, he goes on to suggest that modern society's corruption can be measured not by its passion for the arts but by its false taste in art. And no sooner has he laid the foundations for a republican critique of absolutist France, than he suddenly sings the praises of Louis XIV for establishing academies for the arts and sciences:

Nevertheless, I admit that the evil is not as great as it might have become. Eternal foresight, by placing medicinal herbs next to various noxious plants, and the remedy against their injuries into the substance of a number of harmful animals, has taught Sovereigns who are its ministers to imitate its wisdom. By following its example, the great Monarch whose glory will only acquire renewed luster with every succeeding age drew, from the very bosom of the sciences and arts, the sources of a thousand aberrations, those famous societies that are charged both with the dangerous trust of human knowledge and the sacred trust of morals, [a charge which these societies are expected to fulfill] by the care they take to preserve knowledge and morals in all their purity in their own midst, and to require that the members they admit do so as well. (Rousseau 1751a: 24)

Despite the fact that the academies were key institutions of the French Enlightenment that he is attacking, Rousseau claims that they make possible a reconciliation between enlightenment and virtue and that their effect will be to preserve rather than destroy knowledge and morals. While the arts and sciences are a deadly poison to the body politic, they also provide, for the wise physician of the state, an antidote that reverses their effect. The poisonous Enlightenment can therefore be counteracted, or at least contained, by what Rousseau calls 'agreeable enlightenment' (Rousseau 1751a: 24). The relationship between bad and agreeable enlightenment thus exhibits some of the strange double effects of the supplement that Jacques Derrida has traced throughout Rousseau's writings (see Derrida 1967). If enlightenment works as a dangerous supplement to nature, to the people's rustic innocence, the only available treatment is to supplement the supplement -- to prescribe agreeable enlightenment as an antidote to the irreversible effects of poisonous enlightenment.

The notion of Enlightenment, then, has multiple, sometimes incompatible, meanings in the First Discourse and in Rousseau's defences of it. As well as poisonous and agreeable enlightenment, Rousseau recognises what might be called authentic Enlightenment. While the best philosophers are like Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.), who knew his own ignorance and warned of the dangers of false enlightenment, there are also original, independent thinkers who nature intended to be philosophers (such as Bacon, Descartes and Newton) and who produce genuine Enlightenment. In the 'Preface to Narcissus' Rousseau says that

I acknowledge that there are a few sublime geniuses capable of piercing the veils in which truth wraps itself, a few privileged souls able to resist the folly of vanity, base jealousy, and the other passions aroused by a taste for letters. The small number who have the good fortune of combining these qualities are the beacon and the honour of mankind; only they may properly engage in study for the good of all, and this very exception confirms the rule; for if all men were Socrates, science would do them no harm, but neither would they need it. (Rousseau 1753: 102)

Although the First Discourse has been seen as an attack on Baconian ideas about science and enlightened absolutism (Cranston 1984: 25), Rousseau's recognition here that there are a few genuine philosophers who engage in the study of science for the good of all leads him to endorse the alliance between monarchy and science proposed by Bacon and taken up by Voltaire and d'Holbach. Rousseau reminds us that 'The Prince of Eloquence [Cicero] was Consul of Rome, and the greatest, perhaps, of Philosophers [Bacon], Lord Chancellor of England'. Under absolutist political systems, only such an alliance of power and wisdom can produce good enlightenment:

Let learned men of the first rank find honourable asylum in courts. Let them there receive the only reward worthy of them; by the credit they enjoy, to contribute to the happiness of the Peoples to whom they will have taught wisdom. Only then will it be possible to see what virtue, science and authority, animated by a noble emulation and working in concert for the felicity of Mankind can do. But as long as power remains by itself on one side; enlightenment and wisdom by themselves on the other; the learned will rarely think great things, Princes will more rarely perform fine ones, and Peoples will continue to be base, corrupt, and wretched. (Rousseau 1751a: 27)

Rousseau does not, then, advocate banishing the arts and sciences from the ancien régime but recommends a reorganisation of the relation between them and political power. Instead of allowing the arts and sciences to flourish in an unregulated manner outside government control, Rousseau suggests, in a manner that recalls Plato's Republic and the traditional genre of advice to princes, that philosophy and political power should mutually restrain one another.

As for the rest of the population, the 'vulgar' (among whom Rousseau includes himself), they ought to be encouraged to avoid aspiring to become men of letters because it would involve seeking 'our happiness in someone else's opinion' rather than in being virtuous (Rousseau 1751a: 27). Rousseau therefore attacks the modern tendency, characteristic of the French Enlightenment, of encouraging more and more writers and readers to believe that they might participate in the dissemination of enlightenment:

But if the progress of the sciences and the arts has added nothing to our genuine felicity; if it has corrupted our morals, and if the corruption of morals has injured purity of taste, what are we to think of that crowd of Popularizers who have removed the difficulties which have guarded the access to the Temple of the Muses, and which nature had placed there as a trial of the strength of those who might be tempted to know? What are we to think of those Anthologizers of works which have indiscreetly broken down the gate of the Sciences and introduced into their Sanctuary a populace unworthy of coming near it; whereas what would have been desirable is to have had all those who could not go far in a career in Letters deterred from the outset, and become involved in Arts useful to society? (Rousseau 1751a: 26)

Rousseau thus seems to condemn projects such as the forthcoming Encyclopédie that he had himself contributed to. And while he promotes political equality, he strongly recommends that the study of the arts and sciences be restricted to those 'few men' who are capable of pursuing them without being corrupted by them. The 'Republic of Letters' and political republics are thus founded on different, seemingly incompatible, principles. Yet if the people are to be denied easy access to the sciences and arts, Rousseau does offer them a different kind of enlightenment in which virtue becomes a sublime 'science', and introspection on its innate principles 'genuine Philosophy':

O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are so many efforts and so much equipment really required to know you? Are not your principles engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough in order to learn your Laws to return into oneself and to listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? That is genuine Philosophy, let us know how to rest content with it; and without envying the glory of those famous men who render themselves immortal in the Republic of Letters, let us try to place between them and ourselves the glorious distinction formerly seen between two great Peoples; that one [the Athenians] knew how to speak well, and the other [the Spartans], to act well. (Rousseau 1751a: 28)

The Controversy over the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts

The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts is a short, apparently confused, and certainly derivative work (see Wokler 1995: 27-30). It is nonetheless important as 'the first major statement of the philosophy of history -- to the effect that our apparent cultural and social progress has led only to our real moral degradation -- which Rousseau was to develop as one of the most central themes of his work' (Wokler 1995: 25). In his 'Letter to Monsieur l'Abbé Raynal' (editor of the Mercurie de France), Rousseau anticipates the kinds of criticism he will receive and signals the watchwords of his alternative (to) enlightenment:

I know in advance with what great words I will be attacked. Enlightenment, knowledge, laws, morality, reason, propriety, considerateness, gentleness, amenity, politeness, education, etc. To all of this I will only answer with two other words which ring even more loudly in my ear. Virtue, truth! (Rousseau 1751b: 31).

The challenge was immediately recognised and responded to by the philosophes (see Masters and Kelly 1992: 23-198). One of the first of these responses was the anonymous 'Reply to the Discourse which was awarded the prize of the Academy of Dijon', which was written by King Stanislaus I of Poland (1677-1766) and appeared in the September 1751 issue of the Mercurie de France. Another important response was inserted by d'Alembert into the 'Preliminary Discourse' to the first volume of the Encyclopédie:

even assuming we were ready to concede the disadvantage of human knowledge, which is far from being our intention here, we are even farther from believing that anything would be gained from destroying it. We would be left the vices, and have ignorance in addition. (quoted by Gourevitch, 1997: xiii)

Rousseau replied to both critics in his 'Observations by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva On the Answer made to his Discourse', which appeared in the October 1751 edition of the Mercurie de France. Although he urges that all useless and dangerous things ought to be eliminated from the state, Rousseau insists that this does not mean that 'we should now burn all Libraries and destroy the Universities and the Academies. We would only plunge Europe back into Barbarism, and morals would gain nothing from it'. In a footnote he commends and agrees with d'Alembert's comments (Rousseau 1751c: 50). He also makes it clear that he is not advocating abandoning science and returning to ignorance:

Science in itself is very good, that is obvious; and one would have to have taken leave of good sense, to maintain the contrary. The Author of all things is the fountain of truth; to know everything is one of his divine attributes. To acquire knowledge and to extend one's enlightenment is, then, in a way to participate in the supreme intelligence. (Rousseau 1751c: 33)

But such enlightenment is restricted to 'a few privileged souls' who combine true learning with virtue (Rousseau 1751c: 35). Most of those who pursue science and philosophy do not use them to participate in the supreme intelligence but to produce impieties, heresies, errors, absurd systems, and obscene books (Rousseau 1751c: 33). Rousseau sketches an historical explanation of how this has come about. Science and philosophy began to be antithetical to true religion when scholasticism attempted to wrap religion 'in the authority of Philosophy' (Rousseau 1751c: 43). As a consequence, the Enlightenment critique of scholasticism resulted in scepticism about religion per se. But Jesus did not 'entrust his doctrine and ministry to scholars' but to 'twelve poor fishermen' (Rousseau 1751c: 41). Rousseau thus concludes that most people ought not to dabble in science and philosophy but ought rather to follow 'the sublime simplicity of the Gospel', which is 'the only book a Christian needs, and the most useful of all books even for those who might not be Christians' (Rousseau 1751c: 40, 44). Rousseau thus seems to be recommending that the peoples of Europe revert to the pre-Enlightenment state of the early Reformation, when the Gospel was often the only book they had access to and was thought to be an all-sufficient source of moral guidance. This allows Rousseau to point out that he is not recommending 'ferocious and brutal ignorance', as Stanislaus had suggested, but 'another, reasonable sort of ignorance, ... the treasure of a soul pure and satisfied with itself, ... [which] has no need to seek a false and vain happiness in the opinion others might have of its enlightenment' (Rousseau 1751c: 49). Reasonable ignorance thus fuses the religious virtue of the early Christians with the political virtue of Sparta.

But although such reasonable ignorance is to be commended, it cannot be recovered once people have been spoiled by luxury and vanity: 'their hearts, once spoiled, will be so forever; no remedy remains, short of some great revolution almost as much to be feared as the evil it might cure, and which it is blameworthy to desire and impossible to foresee' (Rousseau 1751c: 51). While a revolution might overturn political systems in which the arts and sciences are born of and generate luxury, Rousseau is not willing to prescribe such a dangerous remedy. The only possible course in such a case, once again, is to counterbalance the corrupting effects of enlightenment with an agreeable enlightenment that provides the people with distractions:

Let us therefore let the Sciences and the Arts in some measure temper the ferociousness of the men they have corrupted; let us strive wisely to divert them, and try to deceive their passions. Let us feed those Tigers something, to keep them from devouring our children. A wicked person's enlightenment is, on balance, less to be feared than is his brutal stupidity (Rousseau 1751c: 51).

Yet it needs to be borne in mind that Rousseau's prescription of the sciences and the arts for those people who have been poisoned by the sciences and the arts is a prescription for absolutist regimes such as France and for absolutely corrupt cities such as Paris. Later, in 1758, in his Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, a book that constituted his final break with the Encyclopedists, Rousseau attacked d'Alembert's entry on 'Geneva' in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie (1757) for suggesting that Geneva would benefit by establishing a theatre (see Rousseau 1758). By contrast, in the preface to his juvenile play Narcissus, he recommends that the people (of Paris) be offered theatrical entertainment in order to keep them from doing evil:

It is no longer a matter of getting people to do good, but only of distracting them from doing evil; they must be kept busy with trifles to divert them from evil deeds; they must be entertained rather than sermonized. ... When morals are no more, one has to think exclusively in terms of the polity; and it is well enough known that Music and Theatre are among its most important concerns. (Rousseau 1753: 104)

While a theatre would be a fatal poison for Geneva, the theatre is a necessary antidote for the French.

One of the striking things about Rousseau's contributions to the controversy over the First Discourse is that he repeatedly accuses his critics of failing to understand his argument and of failing to offer arguments in reply. As he puts it in the 'Preface to Narcissus', 'I will be attacked with witticisms, and I will defend myself with nothing but arguments: but provided that I convince my adversaries, I do not much care whether I persuade them' (Rousseau 1753: 92). Rousseau's famous distinction between convincing and persuading recalls the distinction between rational argument and persuasion that, for the Socrates of Plato's Phaedrus, marked the difference between philosophy and sophism. In other words, Rousseau assumes the discursive position of a philosopher accusing the philosophes of failing to produce rational argument -- which, as he points out, is 'the science that serves as the foundation of all the others' (Rousseau 1753: 93). By stressing that his adversaries have accused him of insincerity rather than engaging with his arguments, Rousseau claims that his adversaries have adopted a strategy that reveals the paucity of their own arguments and threatens rational argumentation itself: 'They contend that I do not believe a word of the truths I upheld; this is evidently a convenient new way of theirs to assail unassailable arguments, to refute even the proofs of Euclid, and all demonstrated truths in the universe' (Rousseau 1753: 93). Rousseau thus points to the inadequacy of his critics as apostles of enlightenment and, as the advocate of rational argument, assumes the burden of developing an authentic enlightenment. As we might expect, Rousseau does not rest content with simply asserting that rational argument is valuable regardless of whether its author is sincere or not. After all, sincerity -- which would become another of Rousseau's watchwords -- is precisely the measure of the alternative (to) enlightenment that Rousseau would devote his major writings to. Sincerity is the necessary reflex of virtue, which depends upon a motivated relation between inside and outside, being and appearance. By contrast, according to Rousseau, the milieu of Enlightenment Paris precisely entails a disjunction between being and appearance in a world in which a man's, or a woman's, value is measured solely by their reputation, by how they appear in the eyes of others.

Rousseau concludes the 'Preface to Narcissus' by reflecting on his own status as a writer, and now seems willing to consider that he might be among the few who are fit to pursue the arts and sciences. More clearly than in the First Discourse, the 'Preface to Narcissus' indicates that the vices of the Enlightenment arise through bad government and hence that enlightened corruption might be avoided in Europe through political, legal and moral transformations. Rousseau even implies that the rational analysis offered in his own writings might help bring about such transformations:

I know that sermonizers have said all this a hundred times; but they were delivering sermons, whereas I give reasons; they perceived the evil, and I lay bare its causes, and above all I point out something highly consoling and useful by showing that all these vices belong not so much to man, as to man badly governed. (Rousseau 1753: 101)

But while Rousseau claims that his writings might be useful, he also insists that they are written for a limited audience. In the 'Preface to Narcissus' he imagines that his writings might 'have edified a small number of good [people]', while in the 'Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes' he says that his writings thus far have been aimed at 'those capable of understanding' and that he 'never wanted to speak to the others' (Rousseau 1753: 104; Rousseau 1861: 110).

Rousseau announces that he will continue to 'write Books, compose Poems and Music, if I have the talent, the time, the strength and the will to do so: [and] I shall continue to state openly the bad opinion in which I hold letters and those who practice them'. In a footnote he insists that this is not to be self-contradictory but to act as a wise physician of the state who has diagnosed the condition of his patient and selected the appropriate remedy:

I am amazed at how confused most men of letters have been in this affair. When they saw the sciences and arts under attack, they took it personally, whereas all of them could, without any self-contradiction, hold the same view I do, that while these things have done society great harm, it is now essential to use them against the harm they have done, as one does a medication or those noxious insects that have to be crushed on the bite [they leave]. (Rousseau 1753: 105)

Rousseau thus presents his writings, past and to come, as contributions to an agreeable Enlightenment that will constitute a necessary antidote to the noxious Enlightenment of the philosophes. But while that might serve to justify presenting his play Narcissus to the public, it hardly characterises the writings that immediately followed the First Discourse, especially the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, the article on 'Political Economy' in volume five of the Encyclopédie (1755), and the Letter to M. d'Alembert, each of which developed and intensified Rousseau's critique of the Parisian Enlightenment. For Hulliung, this critical phase of Rousseau's writings constitutes an 'autocritique' of the Enlightenment that turns the Enlightenment against itself (Hulliung 1994: 3, 4, 27).

Rousseau's Novels

Despite his claims about his intended readership in the First Discourse, and his attack on the popularisation of the Enlightenment, Rousseau began to write texts aimed at a wider audience. In doing so, he was attempting to counteract the influence of the Parisian Enlightenment over the hearts and minds of the people. In the Letter to M. D'Alembert, Rousseau stresses that he is not writing for 'the few but ... the public' (Rousseau 1758: 6). In his two novels, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloïse (1761) and Émile, ou, De l'education (1762), Rousseau presented imagined versions of his alternative Enlightenment that reached a mass, European-wide readership. Both novels are set in rural locations. Emile consists of the gradual enlightenment of Emile by his tutor, who guides his pupil through an education based on a Lockean empiricist epistemology designed to allow him to become self-sufficient, relying on his own experience and practical reason rather than the authority of others or the prejudices of the fashionable world. In due course, Emile marries Sophie and they live in an isolated rural enclave, along with her family and his tutor (see Rousseau 1762).

Although the most exciting aspect of Julie for eighteenth-century readers was that it appears to celebrate the consummated love affair between St. Preux, a tutor, and his young pupil, Julie, the novel is primarily concerned with the characters' moral development, with Julie eventually rejecting St. Preux in favour of marrying the older and wiser M. de Wolmar, who she respects but does not love. The second half of the novel is devoted to a detailed account of the small imagined community of virtuous individuals that Julie and Wolmar gather round them at Clarens on the north-eastern shore of Lake Geneva. This community or extended family can be seen as fashioning an imagined alternative to the Parisian Enlightenment that is at once more faithful to the Enlightenment's original principles and reconciles them with piety, virtue, transparency, and republican values. Rousseau's alternative enlightened community includes philosophy and the arts and sciences but subsumes them to the useful arts (such as horticulture), the bonds of love, the need for transparency between people, and the heroine's achievement of virtuous piety. St. Preux is invited to join the community, and Julie's last request to her former lover is that he educate her children not to 'make scholars of them, [but to] make them into charitable and just men' (Rousseau 1761: 610).

Yet Emile and Julie are anti-novels in a double sense. While the former repeatedly morphs into a treatise on education, the latter includes two prefaces in which Rousseau refuses to commit himself as to whether the text is an epistolary novel or a collection of letters written by real people. The novel's subtitle claims that it consists of 'LETTERS OF TWO LOVERS Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, Collected and Published by Jean-Jacques Rousseau' (Rousseau 1761: 1). Despite this, the novel's prefaces meditate about the nature and effect of novels. If the theatre is both a source of and an antidote to corruption in great cities such as Paris, Rousseau suggests in the first preface that novels play a similar double role with regard to whole peoples: 'Great cities must have theatres; and corrupt peoples, Novels. I have seen the morals of my times, and I have published these letters. Would I had lived in an age when I should have thrown them into the fire!' (Rousseau 1761: 3). The claim that corrupt peoples must have novels is suggestively ambiguous: either their need for (corrupt) novels is a sign of their corruption, or they need good novels to counteract that corruption. As we will see, however, Rousseau goes on to make it clear that he is less concerned with reforming corrupt metropolitan readers than with preventing provincial readers from being corrupted by the novels emanating from Enlightenment Paris.

It is possible to see the second preface to Julie, which consists of a dialogue between two characters indicated by the letters 'N' and 'R', as an imaginary dialogue between Rousseau (posing as the editor 'R') and Diderot (see Jackson 1992). Rousseau had finally broken with Diderot in 1758, believing that he had joined the philosophes' 'plot' against him (see Rousseau 1798: 416-17). The dispute between Rousseau and the philosophes had arisen not only because Rousseau had written against the grain of the Parisian Enlightenment but also because he had acted on the consequences of his arguments by abandoning Paris, centre of the European Enlightenment, in favour of semi-rural retirement. Diderot's play Le fils naturel (The Natural Son) (1757) includes an attack on solitaries -- especially in the assertion that 'Only the wicked man is alone' (Act IV, scene 3) -- that Rousseau took personally (Rousseau 1798: 382). The dialogue between 'R' and 'N' -- and indeed Julie as a whole -- can be read as a response to this attack. 'R' and 'N' argue about the effects of living in Paris in comparison with a rural environment. 'R' comments that

Authors, Men of Letters, Philosophers never cease proclaiming that, to fulfill your duties as a citizen, to serve your fellow creatures, you have to live in the great cities; to them, to flee Paris is to hate the human race; the people of the countryside are naught in their eyes; to hear them, one would believe that men are found only where there are pensions, academies, and dinners. (Rousseau 1761: 14)

'N' complains earlier that Julie exhibits 'no grounded observation; no knowledge of the world. What does one learn in the small sphere of two or three Lovers or Friends constantly wrapped up in themselves?' 'R' replies: 'One learns to love mankind. In large circles one learns only to hate mankind' (Rousseau 1761: 9). Prior to this 'N' responds scathingly to 'R's' description of his characters as 'beautiful souls', and this leads 'R' to suggest that the philosophy of the so-called 'party of humanity' actually destroys the capacity for human sympathy: 'O Philosophy! what trouble thou dost take to shrink hearts, to make men little!' (Rousseau 1761: 8).

In the first preface Rousseau advises the reader that if '[he] is willing to undertake the reading of these letters ... he must tell himself in advance that their writers are not French, wits, academicians, philosophers; but provincials, foreigners, solitary youths, almost children, who in their romantic imaginations mistake the honest ravings of their brains for philosophy' (Rousseau 1761: 3). But while this series of oppositions might appear to distance Rousseau from the writers of the letters he has supposedly collected, the text itself, in line with Rousseau's system of thought in general, valorises these characters precisely because they are not French, wits, academicians or philosophers. In the second preface, 'R' implies that Julie offers a positive alternative to French Enlightenment philosophy:

Two or three simple but sensible youths discuss among themselves the interests of their hearts. ... Filled with the single sentiment that occupies them, they are in delirium, and think they are philosophizing. ... They talk about everything; they get everything wrong; they reveal nothing but themselves, they make themselves endearing. Their errors are more worthy than the knowledge of Sages. ... finding nowhere what they are feeling, they turn in on themselves; they detach themselves from the rest of Creation; and inventing among themselves a little world different from ours, there they create an authentically new spectacle. (Rousseau 1798: 11)

Although these childish letter writers may be mistaken about their 'philosophizing', their simple sincerity makes them endearing and the enclave they create for themselves at Clarens constitutes 'an authentically new spectacle'. Regardless of the editor's condescension in the prefaces, the second half of the novel makes it clear that this authentically new spectacle is presented as a model of human society that functions as a serious alternative to that of the Parisian Enlightenment.

'R' also stresses that Julie is not aimed at the worldly readers of great cities but at provincial readers:

When it comes to morality, no reading, in my view, will do worldly people any good. ... The further one gets from the bustle, from great cities, from large gatherings, the smaller the obstacles become. There is a point where these obstacles cease to be insurmountable, and that is where books can be of some use. When one lives in isolation, since there is no hurry to read to show off ones reading, it is less varied and more meditated upon ... Many more novels are read in the Provinces than in Paris, more are read in the country than in the cities, and they make a much greater impression there (Rousseau 1798: 13).

Given the susceptibility of provincial readers, it is all the more important that they read novels that encourage them to live their lives virtuously. But the majority of the novels produced in Paris corrupt provincial readers, luring them to Paris in order to imitate the corrupt characters they have read about. The exodus from countryside to capital cities is taking place all over Europe and 'propels Europe ... towards her ruin'. There is therefore a need for novels that inculcate good citizenship in provincial readers by promoting a love of rural life that allows them to see new meanings in their lives. 'R' imagines that Julie might be the novel to do this:

Why should I not dare suppose that, by some stroke of luck, this book, like so many others that are even worse, may fall into the hands of these Inhabitants of the fields, and that the image of the pleasures of an estate quite similar to theirs will make it seem more bearable? I like to picture a husband and wife reading this collection together, finding in it a source of renewed courage to bear their common labors, and perhaps new perspectives to make them useful. How could they behold this tableau of a happy couple without wanting to imitate such an attractive model? (Rousseau 1798: 16)

Julie, then, is not just a novel about an imagined rural community of beautiful souls that forms a positive alternative to the Parisian Enlightenment; it also attempts to constitute an imagined community of rural readers who will imitate the 'happy couple' they read about -- not Julie and St. Preux, but Julie and Wolmar.

Rousseau's Readers

In an essay on Rousseau's eighteenth century readers Robert Darnton reveals that Julie was indeed read by just such a husband and wife as Rousseau envisages in the second preface. Jean Ranson (1747-1823), a merchant from La Rochelle, became fascinated by Rousseau and his writings and shaped his life and opinions by what he read; he and his wife raised their children according to the principles outlined in Emile (Darnton 2001: 217, 235-42). As perhaps the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century, Julie spread its Rousseauan message throughout Europe, reaching areas and classes that the philosophes failed to reach:

At least seventy editions were published before 1800 -- probably more than for any other novel in the previous history of publishing. True, the most sophisticated men of letters, sticklers for correctness like Voltaire and Grimm, found the style overblown and the subject distasteful. But ordinary readers from all ranks of society were swept off their feet. (Darnton 2001: 242).

What is particularly interesting is the way readers responded to Julie: 'They wept, they suffocated, they raved, they looked deep into their lives and resolved to live better, then they poured their hearts out in more tears -- and in letters to Rousseau, who collected their testimonials in a huge bundle' (Darnton 2001: 242). Thus the novel's imagined community of letter writing characters brought into being an imagined community of letter-writing readers focussed on Rousseau himself. What their letters reveal is that Julie 'inspired [Rousseau's] readers with an overwhelming desire to make contact with the lives behind the printed page -- the lives of the characters and his own' (Darnton 2001: 244). This impulse demonstrates that readers 'believed and wanted to believe in the authenticity of the letters' (Darnton 2001: 233). Above all, what readers wanted to say to Rousseau was that 'his message had got across' (Darnton 2001: 244). The message they derived from Julie was not the virtue of love but the love of virtue: 'They wanted to tell him how they identified with his characters, how they, too, had loved, sinned, suffered, and resolved to be virtuous again in the midst of a wicked and uncomprehending world. They knew his novel was true because they had read its message in their lives' (Darnton 2001: 246). Reading Julie thus enabled readers to re-read their own lives: 'Again and again the readers returned to the same theme. Jean-Jacques had made them see deeper into the meaning of their lives' (Darnton 2001: 247). Based on the evidence of the letters that readers of Julie sent to Rousseau, Darnton suggests that Rousseau effected a general transformation in the way that readers responded to texts: 'Rousseau taught his readers to "digest" books so thoroughly that literature became absorbed in life' (Darnton 2001: 251). The example of Jean Ranson indicates how Rousseau 'could touch lives everywhere' (Darnton 2001: 252).

For Darnton, the response to Julie is a measure of how Rousseau fabricated 'romantic sensitivity' in a whole generation and hence paved the way for the Romantic rejection of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. For Hulliung, by contrast, Rousseau's later writings can be seen as fashioning 'a dazzling one-man alternative enlightenment that reached an exceptionally wide audience' (Hulliung 1994: 4). It seems to me that both these conclusions contain an element of truth. The rural community that is imagined in Julie, and that so touched the imaginations of its readers, does constitute an alternative (to the) Enlightenment. Yet this alternative, with its focus on authenticity, sincerity, virtue and sympathy, might, indeed, be called a 'Romantic Enlightenment', centred not in Paris or London but in the virtuous hearts of ordinary readers.

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For further information about the Poetry section of First Year English, please contact Dr Tom Furniss at t.furniss@strath.ac.uk

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