Rousseau

A Protestant among Catholics, a proud citizen of the tiny republic of Geneva among cosmopolitan fellow travellers of monarchical imperialism, a critic of modernity at its most fashionable eighteenth-century shrine, Rousseau was spiritually estranged from the intellectual circles in Paris to which he had previously been drawn when, in 1750, he won the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon by responding in the negative to its question, ‘Has the restoration of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification of morals?’ With the publication of this work, his First Discourse, he immediately became a celebrity and thereby launched his literary career as chief critic of the age of Enlightenment. When, in 1755, in addressing the same academy’s question, for another prize competition, on ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law?’, he condemned both the loss of innocence and lack of virtue prevalent in refined society. Private property, he asserted in his Second Discourse, was the principal source of that form of unnatural inequality which gives rise to governments, rulers, and violence.

Rousseau here, as well as in his Essay on the Origin of Languages largely drafted some years later (and first published posthumously in 1781), sketches a theory of historical development according to which mankind must originally have lived in a purely animal and unsociable state of nature, driven by hunger and sexual appetite alone. In that condition man’s only inclinations would have been self-love and compassion, Rousseau argues, but as the human race multiplied, this simple form of life would have disappeared.