to Rousseau’s discontent and systematically challenges the pretensions of the philosophes that they are the true aristocrats. In the essay, Rousseau makes three basic arguments. The first criticizes the philosophes on their own terms—that is, through an “Odyssean” or democratic category—by minimizing any possible social utility of the arts and sciences. Whatever social benefits that might be attributed to them are more than offset by the moral corruptions they induce. As he puts it in “Preface to Narcissus,” “A craving for distinction necessarily engenders evils infinitely more dangerous than all the good of letters is useful.”92 If it is possible to provide specific examples in which arts and sciences make genuine contributions to the well-being of society, and Rousseau plainly accepts that at least science is good at what it does,93 he nonetheless urges his audience to consider the disastrous cultural consequences of the Enlightenment. The old moral system, he insists, was fully discredited by the new arts and sciences. Religion and patriotism in particular suffered badly: “They [the men of letters] smile disdainfully at such old-fashioned words as Fatherland and religion.”94
Rousseau also attacks the most obvious benefit of the arts and sciences: their economic advantages. The Scottish theorists were particularly adept at identifying the processes by which this occurred. As David Hume observes in “On Commerce,” knowledge makes people more productive, which in turn leads to the creation of a manufacturing and luxury economy. Driven by the desire for new creature comforts, people work both harder and more shrewdly—they sweat and scheme to get their hands on the finer things in life, which leads to even more wealth and more production.95 Rousseau is unimpressed, however, arguing that this alleged virtue is really a vice that makes people more miserable. Luxury, he contends, sets in motion a perverse trinity of hypocrisy, effeminacy, and idleness.96 Appearance becomes all important, and people strive hard to remove labor as a condition of life and live in complete opulence. As a result, they become lazy and effete.97
In addition, Rousseau fires a warning shot over his fellow intellectuals that they would not fare so well in the commercial world. While Voltaire heaped praise on the English in his Philosophical Letters for financially rewarding the merit of its writers,98 Rousseau argues they are in a catch-22 situation. Either they are corrupted by the desire for success or they fail to profit from their endeavors. On the one hand, the desire for fame and glory encourages writers to dumb down their works and pander to public opinion.99 Truth does not easily find a home among these new intellectual aristocrats, as it takes a back seat to personal ambitions. When people work for themselves, they are apt to ignore inconvenient truths that get in the way of their own aggrandizement.100 The best thing that could happen to genius, Rousseau argues, is for it to be left alone to develop free from all the temptations of society. On the other hand, he accepts that most of the artists and scientists of his day are not financially thriving. Unlike the new class of bankers and financiers, they are anything but lazy and rich. For Rousseau, this only proves how inequitable the new economy actually is. The artists and scientists who create wealth have no share in it and wind up supporting the lavish lifestyles of the shrewd, slothful, and greedy.101 Lastly, Rousseau acknowledges that intellectual life is home to all sorts of unproductive rivalries and conflicts. In his “Letter to Beaumont,” he even claims that books themselves are the great cause of conflict; they “are sources of inexhaustible disputes.”102
The second and third arguments shift away from disutility to aristocratic categories of vanity, identity, and natural superiority. Rousseau denigrates intellectuals as driven by nothing more than glory and ambition—by a desire to be publicly celebrated and socially important. Their motives resemble those found in Ajax. Artists and scientists are creatures of ego, more concerned with their own glory than any social good that might result from their pursuits.103 At best, a few great scientists and philosophers can practice their trade without being corrupted by it: “Science is not suited to man in general.”104 His soon to be former friends, he believed, were nothing more than self-serving phonies who managed to create a mean-spirited culture that made Socrates’ treatment by Athens seem tame by comparison.
Rousseau’s third argument continues this theme but considers it from the opposite side of the social spectrum. Rather than focusing exclusively on the winners, as did the ancient Greeks, Rousseau contends that the social esteem accorded to intellectual talent and genius demeans the overwhelming mass of ordinary citizens. In this new world of the arts and sciences, the basis of individual identity is dramatically altered, as identities based on moral character and citizenship give way to ones based on talent. In one passage, he laments that “we have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens; or if we still have some left, dispersed in our abandoned rural areas.”105 In another, he complains that “people no longer ask about a man whether he has probity, but whether he has talents.”106 For the ordinary working-class and peasant citizens, Rousseau be lieves this shift is psychically catastrophic, as they can only be demeaned by this new value structure. Those “to whom Heaven has not vouchsafed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory” will find life frustrating and demoralizing because they will be encouraged to think they are valuable only if they are engaged in the arts and sciences.107 They will thus be judged by traits they lack: “Someone who all his whole life will be a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer, might perhaps have become a great clothier.”108 Or, again from “Preface to Narcissus,” “men are rewarded only for qualities which do not depend on them: for we are born with our talents, only our virtues belong to us.”109 And Rousseau worries that they could not help but feel bitter, resentful, and envious: “Let us know how to rest content … without envying the glory of those famous men who render themselves immortal in the Republic of Letters.”110 Outside the great urban intellectual centers, Rousseau argues, people are judged by their own good character and patriotism, which are things everyone can develop. In Paris and others cities in which talent replaces virtue as the standard for what it means to be an excellent human being, most people will come to loathe themselves and think they are of no value.111 Societies that overvalue intellectual talent thus contain within them a bizarre and existentially troublesome contradiction. They still require farmers, clothiers, watchmakers, and others but refuse them the social basis for self-respect.
Thus, Voltaire’s project to elevate the men of letters to an aristocratic station would result in a modern form of the Homeric honor culture. Rousseau was well aware of how the common person fares in such a world. He fought against it throughout his career and consistently warned his fellow Europeans against talent-based public identities. “In a well-constituted State,” he writes in “Preface to Narcissus,” “all citizens are so equal that no one is preferred to others as being neither the most learned nor even the most skillful.”112 In Emile, he directs his tutee to “desire mediocrity in everything, without excepting even beauty.”113 And, in unpublished notes, he approvingly cites the lack of stature of great writers in antiquity. Neither Homer nor Virgil, he claims, were considered great men despite their considerable ability. Agreeing with his ancient counterparts, he asserts that if “it is not impossible for an author to be a great man, it is not by writing books either in verse or in prose that he will become such.”114 On the other side of the coin, he also makes sure to hold up the working classes as the salt of the earth. He portrays them as the beacon of humanity and idealized their traits of simplicity, moderation, hard work, and authenticity as universal virtues to which everyone should aspire. In “Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater,” he praises “provincial men” as possessing “more original spirits, more inventive industry” and being “less imitative” than their Parisian counterparts. And, of course, rural genius “compares itself to no one.”115 His message to his Parisian colleagues is clear: do not take being an intellectual too seriously.
Rousseau and Adam Ferguson
Rousseau’s narrative shows up in a more economic form in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. In the Essay, Ferguson echoes Hume’s
