Rousseau's Critique of the Enlightenment: The Science of Man

Robert Wokler was one of the world's leading experts on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but some of his best work was published in the form of widely scattered and difficult-to-find essays. This book collects for the first time a representative selection of his most important essays on Rousseau and the legacy of Enlightenment political thought. These essays concern many of the great themes of the age, including liberty, equality and the origins of revolution. But they also address a number of less prominent debates, including those over cosmopolitanism, the nature and social role of music and the origins of the human sciences in the Enlightenment controversy over the relationship between humans and the great apes. These essays also explore Rousseau's relationships to Rameau, Pufendorf, Voltaire and Marx; reflect on the work of important earlier scholars of the Enlightenment, including Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin; and examine the influence of the Enlightenment on the twentieth century. One of the central themes of the book is a defense of the Enlightenment against the common charge that it bears responsibility for the Terror of the French Revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century and the Holocaust. Foreword: Bryan Garsten Introduction: Christopher Brooke 1. Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau's Anthropology Revisited 2. Rites of Passage and the Grand Tour: Discovering, Imagining and Inventing European Civilization in the Age of Enlightenment 3. Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution 4. Vagabond Reverie 5. The Enlightenment Hostilities of Voltaire and Rousseau 6. Rousseau's Pufendorf: Natural Law and the Foundations of Commercial Society 7. Rousseau's Reading of the Book of Genesis and the Theology of Commercial Society 8. The Manuscript Authority of Political Thoughts 9. Preparing the Definitive Edition of the Correspondance de Rousseau 10. Rousseau's Two Concepts of Liberty 11. The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity 12. Rousseau and Marx 13. Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment: An Exchange with Bruce Mazlish 14. Isaiah Berlin's Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment 15. Projecting the Enlightenment Bibliography of the Published Work of Robert Wokler

European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 2013

The argument of the first Discours is governed by the antithesis between the ‘original’ nature of man on the one hand and the corruption of modern civilisation on the other; this antithesis is developed in terms of a contrast between the freedom implied by true being and the enslavement and estrangement which is the human condition in the modern world. Rousseau is concerned not so much with historical details as with the moral theme which allows him to separate the original elements of man’s being from the artificial elements added by the process of civilisation. By ‘original’ Rousseau means ‘what belongs incontestably to man’. Rousseau is therefore concerned to distinguish the essential and authentic as given by true original being from the accidental and artificial elements added by civilisation.

2023

Today it is unquestionable that power legitimately belongs to the people. No one doubts popular “sovereignty,” even if the expression seems ambiguous if not vague. The other claims to legitimacy–divine authority, the rule of the best or the sovereignty of princes (such as the ancient and medieval appeals to Divine Providence, wisdom of the rulers or the nature of man) – have long since been abandoned. Indeed, this abandonment goes back at least to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment or “Illustration” was a scientific, literary and artistic movement that dominated the European world of ideas during the 18th century and that was the result of an informal association of “men of letters” known as the French philosophes (among whom names like those of Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot and Montesquieu stand out). This association is publicly manifested in the project to gather a summary of all knowledge in the Encyclopedia, published between 1751 and 1772 in thirty-five thick volumes, with the collaboration of more than one hundred and fifty scientists and philosophers. However, the movement spread far beyond France, also flourishing in Scotland (with Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume and Thomas Reid), and in Germany (the Aufklärung that includes names as Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing and, in its descending phase, Immanuel Kant). The “Century of Enlightenment” or “of philosophy” is a period of euphoria and confidence in reason, progress and science, which roughly runs from 1715 until it dies at the turn of the century. Despite the enormous diversity of ideas and tendencies, loosely grouped around ideas such as Liberty or Progress, the Enlightenment is more profoundly defined by a fundamental conviction that is widely cherished, even today: the progress of knowledge and science will gradually lead to the moral progress of humanity, through a process of gradual diffusion that will eventually end all prejudices under the “magisterium” of philosophers, that is, thinkers, artists and scientists in general, and not merely philosophers in the current sense. All the people, duly educated, will be able to understand science and philosophy as well as possible, and it will suffice to apply this knowledge to social and political life. Rhetoric – a persuasion technique that mediated the relationship between philosophers and opinion among the ancients and was part of the medieval curriculum – becomes unnecessary and even a little suspicious (it is still devalued today as “merely rhetorical”). To ensure that the inevitable path of progress is cleared, it is enough to uproot the deep-rooted prejudices of obscurantism (and, in some versions, religion). Consequently, although provisionally new “enlightened” policies can be entrusted to a benevolent tyrant (the Enlightened despot), in the long run it is simply inconceivable that sovereignty does not belong to the people. Monarchical and aristocratic Europe, which was already on its knees at the end of the 18th century, disappears and there are great revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. The “Century of Philosophy” is therefore that of the victory of philosophy over the throne and the altar. This new era is populated by free and equal individuals, endowed with inalienable rights, who no longer recognize any authority other than their own reason. But if today we unhesitatingly subscribe to the idea of “popular sovereignty,” we do not fail to notice that any forms of government is not natural and involve a certain coercion or a more subtle use of power and violence that we deem suspicious. Government is something artificial and does not belong to the natural state of “man.” Due to asphyxiating conventions and the bourgeois ethos, man is not naturally free in any society. As Rousseau states, many before him (especially Hobbes and Locke) looked for man in his natural state, without actually finding him. But when Rousseau strips man of everything man acquires with effort, he discovers a being that is not only solitary, but non-rational, lacking language (which is only born with the first associations) and not even fully human. It appears to be a sub-human or pre-human being that seems to possess unlimited perfectibility or malleability. There is for us an obvious opposition between nature and government (or the “civil state”), but this opposition is closely linked to another, equally evident opposition, between nature and culture (or “the arts”). Nature, as portrayed by Rousseau and as we think of it today, can no longer serve as a standard for social and political behavior. How does this rupture occur?

1996

Krakowskie Studia MIędzynarodowe, 2013

The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. 1 Since Machiavelli, man and woman have become the center of political theory as the sole source and the ultimate sanction of political order. The theoretical ordercontemplated by classical Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition as the origin, the measure and the limit of political order -was rejected, at first as irrelevant and later on as non-existent. During the Enlightenment, theories of progress, the state of nature, and the social contract replaced the transcendent order. Man and woman were to lift themselves by their own bootstraps from misery and despotism, and usher humanity into a secularized paradise.

Against standard interpretations of Rousseau according to which he holds the view that humans are naturally self-sufficient, asocial beings, necessarily corrupted by societies, I argue that Rousseau holds the view that human beings are naturally social. This paper shows that "The Second Discourse" contains an argument that we can only account for basic human characteristics – such as language and reason – if we understand humans in this way, as inevitably social beings. It is true that Rousseau criticizes societies for being corrupt. But that should not be taken as a criticism of all societies. Only some societies are corrupt: those in which humans’ nature as free persons cannot develop. The asocial human being of Rousseau’s natural state is a theoretical device in a reductio argument that Rousseau aims at the Hobbesian view. A society’s corruption is not a function of its artificiality, of its departure from an asocial state of nature, but of its departure from a natural, uncorrupted society. This is a society that provides conditions in which humans’ nature as free persons can develop, such as the legitimate society of The Social Contract. This has the implication that Rousseau’s theory of freedom has an Aristotelian rather than a Kantian foundation.

The American Political Science Review, 1981