The French-Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) is often dismissed by conservatives on account of the influence of his Social Contract in helping to inspire the French Revolution and its attendant horrors. But far from being an advocate of violent revolution (though he thought it inevitable), let alone anarchy or terror, Rousseau was a thoughtful critic of the excesses of the modern “Enlightenment,” and a defender of the sort of familial-based morality, non-doctrinaire religious piety, political freedom, and national patriotism that he believed essential to the happiness of most human beings. In short, Rousseau not only sought to uphold the qualities that sober conservatives aim to preserve today; he enables us better to understand some of the broad, cultural divisions that have informed America’s electoral politics of late.
Despite being highly learned and a friend of the philosophes who championed the project of popular enlightenment, Rousseau broke with his friends when he published his First Discourse (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences) in 1750, which challenged the assumption that intellectual progress, or the advancement and spread of scientific understanding, went hand-in-hand with moral progress. Like all of Rousseau’s writings, the Discourse must be read with care to be understood, given the paradoxes it contains.
In his preface, Rousseau acknowledges that his argument will contradict “everything that men admire today,” more precisely “the witty or the fashionable,” who are destined, like their counterparts in other times and places, “to be subjugated” by the dominant opinions of their time and place. Those who boast of being “free thinkers” (atheists) in Rousseau’s time would have been religious fanatics a couple of centuries earlier. Scorning such men’s approbation, Rousseau, as a seeker of truth, aspires to “live beyond” his century.
At the outset of the main text, Rousseau expresses admiration at the spectacle of mankind’s liberating itself from the chains of a condition that was “worse than ignorance,” that is, medieval Scholasticism, which with its jargon “had usurped the name of knowledge.” Yet after praising the “civility” and taste that result from “good education,” Rousseau devotes the rest of Part One of the Discourse to a series of arguments ostensibly demonstrating the moral and political harms that the advancement of the arts and sciences has caused throughout history. Learning and sophistication, by this account, foster insincerity and undermine true friendship by enabling sophisticates to conceal their real natures. As people become cosmopolitan, furthermore, patriotism is undermined. Simple piety is replaced by a “dangerous Pyrrhonism” (skepticism). And the arts contribute to “luxury” and voluptuousness, ultimately destroying a people’s political freedom and leading to its subjugation by less civilized nations.
These criticisms of learning must be taken with more than a grain of salt. That fact is indicated by the authority that Rousseau cites to support them: Socrates, the prototypical seeker of knowledge, whose speech in Plato’s Apology he twists into a eulogy of ignorance. But Rousseau’s real point emerges in Part Two, where his elaboration of the corrupting effects of learning on ordinary people’s lives culminates in a eulogy of three great modern thinkers/scientists (Bacon, Descartes, and Newton) as “preceptors of the human race,” of the sort that kings should welcome into their councils to promote the people’s happiness by teaching them “wisdom.” For rhetorical purposes, Rousseau represents himself, by contrast, as one of the “common men,” lacking “great talents” and the capacity for glory, who should remain contented with the practice of virtue, the “sublime science of simple souls,” whose principles are “engraved in all hearts.”
Only the attentive reader will notice the contradiction between Rousseau’s self-representation as a mere commoner and the aspiration he expressed in his preface of living beyond his time. As Leo Strauss observed in his pathbreaking essay “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Rousseau must understate his capacities in order to win the common people’s trust, and thereby deter them from pursuing the sort of intellectual sophistication that will only divert them from their moral, familial, and civic duties, without making any worthwhile contributions to science, art, or philosophy. Rousseau’s real aim is to oppose not those enterprises, but rather their popularization, which will only result in their vulgarization.
Rousseau took the opposite tack from the would-be political and cultural leaders, and a considerable body of largely college-educated individuals, whose sense of moral righteousness left them shocked by the results of the election.
Some 275 years after Rousseau wrote these words, nobody would seriously argue against universal public education, at least through high school, and the widespread availability of college education, for those who are suited for it. However, any objective survey of the development of American higher education outside the STEM fields over roughly the past 60 years or more will demonstrate that even as a greater percentage of the population has enrolled in it, standards of learning have declined. The serious study of great works of literature and philosophy, along with political, diplomatic, and military history, has increasingly been supplanted by politicized programs ending in “studies” (racial, environmental, gender, and so on), by history “from the bottom up,” and current fiction. And this decline has more recently extended downwards into the K-12 curriculum, through politicization and the lowering of standards. (Witness the recent abolition by the New York Board of Regents of the requirement that high school graduates pass statewide exams in standard fields of learning, and the simultaneous abolition by popular referendum in Massachusetts, thanks to heavy lobbying by the teachers’ union, of that state’s more stringent exams in mathematics and English.)
What has any of this had to do with the recent national election? As left-leaning discourse starting immediately after the election made clear, there is a clear strand of fashionable opinion that views Trump voters as bigoted, easily deceived hicks. Who but the unenlightened would fail to appreciate the urgency of banning fossil fuels? Who but a misogynist would favor any legal limits on abortion? What non-racist would oppose DEI? Who but a bigot would oppose having their children instructed at school in the fluidity of gender? And how could any humanitarian not sympathize with Hamas and its supporters, considering how prosperous Israel had oppressed the Palestinians ever since its founding?
Such dismissals of the outlooks of ordinary Americans didn’t begin with the 2024 campaign. Back in 2008, Presidential candidate Barack Obama dismissed opponents as people who “clung to their guns and religion” because they couldn’t stomach the idea of electing a black man to the nation’s highest office. In 2016, Hillary Clinton disdained her opponents as “deplorables,” while this year Joe Biden (in a hastily-deleted tweet) called them “garbage.” And Obama returned to scold black men who wouldn’t support Kamala Harris as “afraid” of being governed by a black woman.
These dismissals of ordinary folk by prominent liberals reflect precisely the outlook of the “witty and fashionable” from whom Rousseau distinguished himself. Shortly after the election, such celebrities as Sharon Stone, Ellen DeGeneres, and Barbra Streisand announced their imminent, or contemplated, departure for friendlier shores in countries like Canada and England. Their purported sophistication reflects only a half-education: typically lacking a serious background in philosophy, religion, classic literature, political history, or the fundamentals of American constitutionalism, they nonetheless “know” enough to lord it over the inhabitants of flyover country. But Rousseau had already exposed the motives that really impel the conduct of these purported benefactors of humanity and pioneers of intellectual advancement: their egotistical desires for power and status.
This emphasis on the dichotomy between the good of the few purported enlighteners and that of the many—in contrast to the claims of the best-known thinkers of the French (not the British) Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century—runs throughout Rousseau’s writings. In his 1758 book-length letter of response to the entry on his birthplace, Geneva, by his erstwhile friend Jean le Rond D’Alembert in the first French Encyclopedia (D’Alembert being a spokesman for the better-known Voltaire), Rousseau curiously took issue with one recommendation D’Alembert had made: that Geneva needed a theater to offer some nightlife.
Rhetorically misrepresenting his birthplace as an unsophisticated backwater (just as he would in the Dedication of his 1765 Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality), Rousseau stressed the ruinous effects that a theater would have on its ostensibly simple inhabitants. The notoriously immoral ways of actors and actresses, whose business it is to pretend to be what they aren’t, would necessarily extend to their audiences. Families would be broken up, as Genevan women suddenly sought to emulate the glamorous actresses, while men wanted to date them. The maintenance of a theater would be too great an expense for the small city of Geneva, while its frequent patronage diverted men from their work in favor of costly idleness. And the plots! What makes a play interesting to its audience but great passions, such as are aroused by extramarital love, treason, and other crimes?
But this was no hick speaking. On the contrary, the author shows himself to be intimately familiar with, and a thoughtful interpreter of, the works of the leading French playwrights of his time, especially Molière. How, then, can Rousseau justify depriving his less sophisticated fellows of the same pleasure? He answers this query by a distinction: while “corrupt” entertainments like the theater can do no harm in already corrupt, cosmopolitan cities like Paris, it would undermine the morals, and hence the happiness, of simpler peoples like the Genevans. While Rousseau’s critics would charge him with hypocrisy—condemning for others a pleasure he pursues without constraint himself—Rousseau would turn that very charge on his critics: selfishly assuming that simpler peoples must reconstitute their outlooks and institutions to accommodate the sophisticates.
In another of his writings, The Government of Poland (1782), Rousseau takes issue with “enlightened” opinion in another respect. Having been asked to devise a new constitution for the politically backward central European nation (destined soon to lose its independence, as he knew, to Russian conquest), Rousseau refrained from recommending a radical reconstruction on the basis of the egalitarian principles of legitimacy he espoused in the Social Contract. Instead, he focused on a plan of gradual reform, while aiming chiefly at resuscitating and fortifying the unique sorts of custom, festival, and dress that would preserve among the people a sense of their collective, inner independence that might enable them to survive as a unity even when deprived of their political independence. (In this he took his bearings from the Mosaic laws, which by limiting Jews’ intermingling with non-Jews, for instance through the laws of kashrut and of keeping the sabbath, had enabled them to survive as a people through the many centuries of the diaspora. Yet here again, far from wishing to live according to such “parochial” laws, Rousseau regarded himself as one of the few “great cosmopolitan souls” he portrays the philosophers as being in the Second Discourse).
In each of these respects—upholding what are nowadays called “family values,” defending rather than mocking the common-sensical beliefs and everyday occupations on which a large majority base their happiness, Rousseau took the opposite tack from the would-be political and cultural leaders, and a considerable body of largely college-educated individuals, whose sense of moral righteousness left them shocked by the results of the election. Some elite colleges even made class attendance optional on the day following the election, so students could take the time to mourn. This is in keeping with a vague “vibes” campaign that paid scant heed to the substantive issues on the minds of most voters such as substantive ones as mass illegal immigration, growing crime, the imposition of DEI by schools and employers, and inflation.
It must be acknowledged here that Rousseau, like some other great philosophers, was not himself a paragon of the morality he preached: he represents many of his lesser sins in his Confessions, and was guilty of greater ones (depositing his newborn children in an orphanage, which was equivalent to a death sentence); someone who despite his avowed sociability, alienated by his intemperate behavior even his affable host, the great David Hume; and someone who fled Geneva in youth, in favor of the life of “corrupt” Paris. But we turn to him not as a role model of how to live, but as a source of reflection to better understand our present-day political and social dilemmas and reflect on how to remedy them. In the works I’ve summarized, as well in his great educational novel-treatise Emile (a hypothetical, utopian work whose serious aim is to show how a young person of merely ordinary capacities should be educated so as to enable him to live by pursuits and pleasures that are naturally good, rather than be a slave to social fashion), Rousseau still has much to teach us, whichever party we support.
