Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau

Abstract

Unless it was Immanuel Kant, who declined to believe it, practically no one who lived in the age of enlightenment ever took note of that fact.1 The term The Enlightenment made its inaugural appearance in only the late nineteenth century, The Scottish Enlightenment was first ushered into print in the early twentieth century, and the Enlightenment Project, about which virtually every contemporary social philosopher now speaks with authority, is an expression invented more than thirty-five years after the demise of the Manhattan Project, whose adherents, by contrast, at least knew its name. Throughout its relatively brief history, The Enlightenment has largely assumed the identity assigned to it by its inventors determined to denigrate its achievement. The Oxford English Dictionary still defines The Enlightenment as an age of “ superficial intellectualism,” marked by “insufficient respect for authority and tradition” adding, for good measure, that a philosophe is “one who philosophizes erroneously” In the French language, matters are, if anything, worse still, as no Frenchman has ever managed to coin a term for The Enlightenment at all. At least God, even if He never existed either, somehow managed to get Himself invented, as Voltaire famously remarked, but not, alas, The Enlightenment. Frances Hutcheson in Glasgow observed that he was called New Light there, but no sparkling luminary in Paris, so far as I know, ever noticed that he was one of les lumieres.