by PANKAJ MISHRA
Philosopher/writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) IMAGE/Wikipedia
The Enlightenment philosopher’s attack on cosmopolitan élites now seems prophetic
“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump said during a victory speech in February, and he has repeatedly taken aim at America’s élites and their “false song of globalism.” Voters in Britain, heeding Brexit campaigners’ calls to “take back control” of a country ostensibly threatened by uncontrolled immigration, “unelected élites,” and “experts,” have reversed fifty years of European integration. Other countries across Western Europe, as well as Israel, Russia, Poland, and Hungary, seethe with demagogic assertions of ethnic, religious, and national identity. In India, Hindu supremacists have adopted Rush Limbaugh’s favorite epithet “libtard” to channel righteous fury against liberal and secular élites. The great eighteenth-century venture of a universal civilization harmonized by rational self-interest, commerce, luxury, arts, and science—the Enlightenment forged by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and others—seems to have reached a turbulent anticlimax in a worldwide revolt against cosmopolitan modernity.
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If Rousseau seems like the central protagonist in the anti-élitist revolt currently reconfiguring our politics, it is because he was present during the creation of the value system—the Enlightenment belief in what he called “the sciences, the arts, luxury, commerce, laws,” which changed the character of Western culture and eventually that of the world at large. The new dispensation generally benefitted men of letters. Rousseau, however, became one of its rare critics, at least partly because the Paris salon, the focal point of the French Enlightenment, was a milieu in which he had no real place.
Rousseau had little formal education, but he accumulated plenty of experience during a largely unsupervised childhood and adolescence. Born in Geneva in 1712, to a struggling watchmaker and a mother who died shortly after giving birth, he was only ten years old when his father deposited him with indifferent relatives and left town. At the age of fifteen, he ran away and found his way to Savoy, where he quickly became the boy toy of a Swiss-French noblewoman. She turned out to be the great love of his life, introducing him to books and music. Rousseau, always seeking substitutes for his mother, called her Maman.
By the time he arrived in Paris, he had already worked in various subordinate capacities throughout Europe: as an apprentice engraver in Geneva, a footman in Turin, a tutor in Lyons, a secretary in Venice. These experiences, Damrosch writes, “gave him the authority to analyze inequality as he did.” Soon after his move to Paris, he took up with a near-illiterate laundress, who bore him five children, and made his first tentative forays into salon society. One of his earliest acquaintances there was Denis Diderot, a fellow-provincial who was committed to making the most of that decade’s relatively free intellectual climate. In 1751, Diderot launched his “Encyclopédie,” which synthesized key insights of the French Enlightenment, such as those of Buffon’s “Natural History” (1749) and Montesquieu’s hugely influential “The Spirit of the Laws” (1748). The encyclopedia cemented the movement’s main claim: that knowledge of the human world, and the identification of its fundamental principles, would pave the path of progress. As a prolific contributor to the “Encyclopédie,” publishing nearly four hundred articles, many of them on politics and music, Rousseau appeared to have joined in a collective endeavor to establish the primacy of reason and, as Diderot wrote, to “give back to the arts and the sciences the liberty that is so precious to them.”
But his views were changing. One afternoon in October, 1749, Rousseau travelled to a fortress outside Paris, where Diderot, who had tested the limits of free expression with a tract that challenged the existence of God, was serving a few months in prison. Reading a newspaper on the way, Rousseau noticed an advertisement for an essay competition. The topic was “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?” In his “Confessions,” published in 1782, and arguably the first modern autobiography, Rousseau described how “the moment I read this I beheld another universe and became another man.” He claims that he sat down by the roadside and spent the next hour in a trance, drenching his coat in tears, overcome by the insight that progress, contrary to what Enlightenment philosophes said about its civilizing and liberating effects, was leading to new forms of enslavement.
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