The political philosophers who spoke of social contracts defined by the right to property or the fear of premature death had tended to neglect the underprivileged. Contra Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau refused to believe that the obligations to civil society could be derived from self-interest, the preservation of life or the enjoyment of private property. For socialized human beings were prone to deceive and to exploit others while pretending to be public-spirited.
Rousseau was also the first to air the suspicion, amplified for two centuries since, that commercial society with its appurtenance of government and law was designed to keep the majority in servitude to a tiny minority with illegitimate authority: ‘All these grand words,’ he charged, ‘of society, of justice, of law, of mutual defence, of help for the weak, of philosophy and of the progress of reason are only lures invented by clever politicians or by base flatterers to impose themselves on the simple.’
As for individual merit and competition, both advocated by the Enlightenment philosophes, their rewards were few, and their psychic costs very high. They led to unceasing and exhausting mimetic rivalry and, eventually, enmity:
I would show how much this universal desire for reputation, honours, and preferment which consumes us all exercises and compares talents and strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions and, in making all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, how many reverses, how many successes, how many catastrophes of every kind it daily causes by leading so many Contenders to enter the same lists: I would show that it is to this ardour to be talked about, to this frenzy to achieve distinction which almost always keeps us outside ourselves, that we owe what is best and what is worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our Sciences and our errors, our Conquerors and our Philosophers; that is to say a multitude of bad things for a small number of good things.
Rousseau’s ideal society was Sparta, small, harsh, self-sufficient, fiercely patriotic and defiantly un-cosmopolitan and uncommercial. In this society at least, the corrupting urge to promote oneself over others, and the deceiving of the poor by the rich, could be counterpoised by the surrender of individuality to public service, and the desire to seek pride for community and country.
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By a fateful accident, Rousseau was a rare figure, a déclassé in the glamorously snobbish circles of eighteenth-century France. For someone like Voltaire, Parisian high society of this time was the apogee of social and cultural refinement. Its gracious sociability had erected a standard for civilization for other societies to follow and imitate (and many such as Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia eagerly did, with the help of obliging French thinkers).
In the aristocratic salon, the central institution of the emerging public sphere, a shared civility complemented high-minded intellectual speculation and debate. As opinion and argument cordially circulated, no one spoke of revolution or victimhood; any claims on behalf of class or nation, or confession of economic grievance, would have been regarded as signs of ill-breeding.
Rousseau, however, ranged himself against these sophisticated salons, where he lingered long enough to cultivate a suspicion of intellectuals, specialists, experts, and their rich aristocratic and despotic patrons. Here were the beginnings of the public sphere and civil society, two of the great spurs of modernity; but Rousseau saw them as centres of soul-destroying hypocrisy. ‘In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and civilization, and of such sublime codes of morality,’ he wrote, ‘we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.’
Choosing to represent the powerless, and to express the soul of the stranger, he became an outsider in the world that brought him fame and would have given him, had he wanted it, a comfortable and even luxurious existence. He rejected all opportunities to enhance his wealth and influence, turning down audiences with kings as well as academic sinecures. The only woman who ever loved him, his maman, wrote, ‘He was ugly enough to frighten me and life did not make him more attractive. But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness. He was an interesting madman.’
Two Views on Progress
Rousseau alienated his aristocratic patrons; he quarrelled with most of his friends and well-wishers, including Hume and Diderot, many of whom also ended up deriding him as a madman. But he disagreed most violently – and productively – with Voltaire.
The two men rarely disguised their feelings for each other. Voltaire denounced Rousseau as a ‘tramp who would like to see the rich robbed by the poor, the better to establish the fraternal unity of man’. He marked the margins of his copies of the political writing of Rousseau with such remarks as ‘ridiculous’, ‘depraved’, ‘pitiful’, ‘abominable’ and ‘false’. He secretly authored a pamphlet against Rousseau that revealed the exponent of children’s education as having given his own five children to a foundling home. Voltaire also accused Rousseau of wanting to turn human beings back into ‘brutes’: ‘To read your book,’ he said, ‘makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it.’ ‘I hate you,’ Rousseau wrote to Voltaire in 1760, and went on to assault nearly everything the elder writer wrote.
The Catholic monarchist Joseph de Maistre disliked both Voltaire, who ‘undermined the political structure by corrupting morals’, and Rousseau, who is driven by ‘a certain plebeian anger that excites him against every kind of superiority’. Nietzsche appeared to be building on this contrast when he claimed to identify in the battle between Voltaire and Rousseau the ‘unfinished problem of civilization’. On one side stood the ‘representative of the victorious, ruling classes and their valuations’; on the other, a vulgar plebeian, overcome by his primordial resentment of a superior civilization.
One doesn’t have to subscribe to Nietzsche’s dichotomies to see that the disagreements between Voltaire and Rousseau illuminate some of our perennial questions: how human beings define themselves, what holds societies together, and divides them, why the underprivileged majority erupts in revolt against the privileged few, and what roles intellectuals play in these conflicts. They argued particularly fiercely over the moral character of the human type we call the bourgeois: a figure still emerging in eighteenth-century Europe, empowered by a scientific temper and meritocratic spirit, and emboldened by thinkers who claimed that his instincts for self-preservation and self-interest could serve as the foundation of a new secular society.