Rousseau: The Secular Hermit

Abstract

Locke, as we know, sought a secular state that would tolerate all religions—save Catholicism—so that humankind could get on with life’s more important issues, such as the acquisition of property and the pursuit of knowledge. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) reached Paris in the early 1740s, he had imbibed Locke’s sensationalist psychology and his social contract theory of government. But that hardly accounts for the French philosophe’s thought. Adorer of nature but spoiled by salons, fanatic of natural goodness who was convinced of a malevolent plot against him, friend of the Enlightenment who opined that the cultivation of the sciences and the arts corrupted humankind, champion of the Gospels whose own works were burned as heretical, advocate of dualism who is now described as a “materialist,” prophet of the people who hobnobbed with dukes and princes, and promiscuous defender of marital fidelity, he was a man whose confessions spoke honestly, yet he was ensnared by complexity—a secular hermit whose retreat spoke less of a love of nature than of an aversion for society.1