unique among the philosophes and cannot with certainty be attributed to Rousseau’s criticisms of their elitism. The issue was in the air before Rousseau penned his dissident discourse. For example, in his 1747 Man a Machine the provocateur Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who can hardly contain his pride in his talents as a scientist and doctor, encourages “those on whom nature has piled her most precious gifts” to “pity those to whom these gifts have been refused.”136 To avoid wounding the less talented, he counsels against false modesty, as it would only inflame their resentment. Still, given the developing tiff between Rousseau and Diderot, and others, it is sensible to interpret the aforementioned passages as attempts to assuage their friend’s fears of the Enlightenment.
Third, d’Alembert and Diderot’s defense of the mechanical arts includes concessions to Rousseau’s contentions that the arts and sciences could be corrupting and that intellectual achievement is motivated by a desire for glory and public esteem. In his Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert grants that “letters certainly contribute to making society more amiable; it would be difficult to prove that because of them men are better and virtue is more common.”137 And in a private letter to Rousseau, he accepts the argument that artists and scientists are driven by vanity: “Public esteem is the principal goal of every writer.”138 He knows intellectuals can be foolish, self-important, and prone to unproductive factious rivalries. Again from his Preliminary Discourse: “Men of letters ordinarily have nothing in common, except the lack of esteem in which they hold each other.”139 Poets, for example, think little of engineers, and vice versa. Diderot takes a similar tack in his Encyclopedia entry on encyclopedias from the fifth volume, entitled, appropriately enough, “Encyclopedia.” He too accepts that enlightenment and virtue are not perfectly compatible. The Encyclopedia should thus aim to teach humans to be virtuous as well as provide accessible knowledge, “because,” he writes, “it is at least as important to make men better as it is to make them less ignorant.”140 To that end, he encourages people to record all the great deeds of virtuous behavior and inscribe them on a publicly displayed marble column to inspire virtuous behavior. He proposes that as the old monarchs are immortalized through public effigies, statues, or busts, private individuals should be honored in a similar way if they perform extraordinary acts of virtue. If there is any lingering doubt as to whom Diderot is addressing, he makes clear his audience by naming names: “Oh, Rousseau, my dear and worthy friend! I have never been able to refuse the praise you have given me, and I feel that it has increased my devotion to truth as well as my love of virtue.”141
Furthermore, Diderot acknowledges that the scholars who populated France’s various intellectual academies and societies were driven by glory.142 Tellingly, he describes them in unmistakably Homeric terms. Authors, he claims, “should strive for immortality by writing books.”143 He even admits it is part of what drives him and d’Alembert: “And that posterity, while raising to immortality the names of those who will bring man’s knowledge to perfection in the future, will perhaps not disdain to remember our own names.”144 While he assures his readers that the editors and contributors are self-sacrificing humanists who want to better humankind, his frank acknowledgment of his own vain ambitions and his explicit reference to the Homeric honor culture seem designed to mollify Rousseau by conceding his criticisms.145
The Philosophes Strike Back
Nonetheless, no matter how heartfelt these concessions, there were limits to how far Diderot and d’Alembert would go in ameliorating Rousseau’s concerns.146 D’Alembert in particular refuses to concede Rousseau’s argument that knowledge undermines virtue, contending that vice is much more dangerous when combined with ignorance.147 Moreover, both d’Alembert and Diderot denigrate the mechanical arts in the very same essays in which they defend them. D’Alembert contends that the mechanical arts require little ability, as most have been simplified to a “routine” that most people can easily master.148 As a consequence, jobs in the mechanical arts usually attract individuals from impoverished backgrounds. For his part, Diderot argues that progress in the mechanical arts is hampered by an irrational, almost superstitious, obsession with guarding trade secrets, which hampers progress. The mechanical arts, he thinks, also need the assistance of the natural sciences if they are to progress and develop. So, even as they go out of their way to defend the mechanical arts, d’Alembert and Diderot cannot help but belittle them. In other writings, they can be downright contemptuous of provincials and the working classes. In defending Voltaire’s attempt to establish a theater in Geneva, d’Alembert condescendingly asks: “Why begrudge men, destined almost exclusively by nature for crying and dying, some recreational diversions that help them bear the bitterness or the insipidity of their existence?”149 Diderot likewise was not above making mean-spirited comments. In one of his nastier remarks, he wrote in a letter to his lover Sophie Volland that “mediocre men live and die like brutes.”150 “The sense of the inequality of men,” one commentator observes, “… was deeply rooted in him.”151 Even some of his sympathizers concede that when Diderot tries to be complimentary toward the peasants in his plays, his portrayals are less than compelling and betray “a wide gulf between observer and observed.”152
Beyond their deep-seated contempt for ordinary Europeans, the philosophes refused to back down from their insistence that they were the true aristocracy. Like the leading men of the Renaissance, they constructed a narrative in which they were the most important social class in modern Europe.153 As Darnton has established, they defined knowledge such that the whole of human history was a product only of great kings and great geniuses.154 Naturally, they had no doubt that they belonged in the latter category and believed that they alone were responsible for the progress of the species.155 Mere months before Rousseau wrote the Second Discourse, d’Alembert penned an essay, entitled “Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands,” that specifically tried to make this case. Early in the essay, he beseeches the courtly aristocracy to recognize the superiority of the men of letters and encourages his fellow intellectuals to assume their rightful place at the top of the social and cultural ladder (though he sternly advises them to avoid politics).156 At times, d’Alembert aggressively challenges the status of the courtly aristocracy. He was particularly incensed at the paternalistic relationship between the men of letters and the nobles, and followed his good friend Voltaire by reminding the aristocrats they were not superior to the men of letters but, indeed, were indebted to them. He writes: “The wise man does not forget that if there is an external respect which talents owe to titles, there is another and more real one which titles owe to talents.”157 Moreover, in the preface to volume three of the Encyclopedia, d’Alembert mockingly informs princes and nobles that they will find themselves included in the Encyclopedia only if they earn inclusion, “because the Encyclopedia owes everything to talents, nothing to titles, and that is the history of the human spirit and not the vanity of men.”158 The other philosophes fully embraced this project. Voltaire echoes d’Alembert’s call in a 1755 entry for the Encyclopedia, “Men of Letters,” in which he repeats the narrative from the Preliminary Discourse that the philosophes were anointed successors to the Renaissance and were charged with instructing and refining the species. Diderot, Rousseau’s best friend among them, also repeatedly calls for the elevation of the intellectuals in French society.159 Furthermore, in a famous passage of Le fils naturel, he links this glorification of the talented to civic virtue, arguing that the talented have a unique obligation to serve society. In the play, Constance tells Dorval: “You have received the rarest talents, and you must render them to society. Let the useless move about without object, embarrass society without serving it, and distance themselves from it. They can. But you, I dare say, cannot without it being a crime.”160 Notably, Dorval is instructed to serve society, not the government. His responsibility to humanity is much more important than formulating public policy and executing laws.
As with their view of the mechanical arts, however, the men of letters were of two minds in their aristocratic aspirations. If they wished to become a predominant
