“The Masterpiece of Policy in our Century”: Rousseau on the Morality of the Enlightenment

Abstract

I N THE PREFACE to Narcisse, Rousseau redoubles the indictment against science and the arts for corrupting modern man put forth in his first Discourse and sketches some central themes for his second, On the Origins of Inequality. His major quarrel is with "the taste for letters and philosophy." In addition to the familiar charge that such pursuits "soften and enfeeble the body and the soul," Rousseau contends that philosophy makes virtue impossible, "snuffing out the love of our first duties and of true glory." The practice of philosophy isolates men from one another, "relaxing all the links of esteem and benevolence that attach men to society," ensuring that each practitioner "concentrates in his own person all the interest that virtuous men share with their fellows," so that "his self-love augments in the same proportion as his indifference to the remainder of the universe." Family and patrie are nothing to him; "he is neither kinsman, nor citizen, nor man: he is a philosopher."' These contentions disclose an aspect of the complex paradox of individuality and community in Rousseau's social thought quite different from the solitary walker constructing social systems from the lovely stuff of reveries. Here we have the notion that human ties of esteem, benevolence, and duty are in some sense social facts, threatened