This idea, which comes from Locke’s work as one of the founders of empiricism, arguably did more to transform the world than anything he wrote on government and politics. As a matter of science, Locke was wrong. Obviously, experience informs and shapes how we see and understand the world, but we also come preloaded with all manner of genetic software that processes the data in various ways. But as a matter of politics and philosophy, Locke’s rejection of original sin, innate ideas, and the natural—i.e., divine—authority of kings moved politics from a God-centered universe to a man-centered universe. God was the only master of mankind, according to Locke, and no man could appropriate God’s power. This meant that, in this world, each man was the master of himself and just power had to be rooted in his consent.
As Steven Pinker notes, one of Locke’s targets was the then dominant medieval understanding of human nature. “Locke opposed dogmatic justifications for the political status quo, such as the authority of the church and the divine right of kings, which had been touted as self-evident truths,” Pinker writes. The blank slate “also undermined a hereditary royalty and aristocracy, whose members could claim no innate wisdom or merit if their minds had started out as blank as everyone else’s. It also spoke against the institution of slavery, because slaves could no longer be thought of as innately inferior or subservient.”21 Locke’s blank slate, in other words, was a part of a larger argument for pluralism, meritocracy, and tolerance.
Locke elevated reason above revelation. He believed that man could reason his way through this world and create political structures based upon universal equality and consent. Since every person is “furnished with like Faculties,” he wrote, and “shar[ed] all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours.”22 This idea was essentially a time bomb, placed at the foundations of hereditary aristocracy, slavery, and the divine right of kings. “Locke explicitly challenged the fixed hierarchical arrangements taken for granted almost everywhere seventeenth-century Europeans lived,” writes James T. Kloppenberg.23
Locke wanted the same rules applied to everyone: “promulgated, establish’d Laws, not to be varied in particular Cases, but to have one Rule for Rich and Poor, for the Favourite at Court, and the Country Man at Plough.”24 The rule of law that pays no heed to notions of inherited superiority was the ideal means to achieve “the Peace, Safety, and publick good of the People.”25 This idea is the whole ball game. We cannot police what is in the human heart, but only how people act on it. “But Freedom of Men under Government is having a standing Rule to live by, common to every one in the Society in question, and made by the legislative power erected in it….” Locke writes. “A Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another man…”26
Many historians once argued that Locke’s Second Treatise is less a stand-alone work of political philosophy and more a political document intended to justify the Glorious Revolution. But it’s clear that Locke wrote most of it well before the Glorious Revolution unfolded, and when doing so was an act of high treason. “In the 1680s, even entertaining the idea that sovereign power resided in the English people rather than the king-in-Parliament put dissidents’ lives in danger,” writes Kloppenberg.27 Again, the causality here is important. The facts on the ground changed before the idea that legitimized the facts. The debate over whether the Second Treatise was primarily a political document or a philosophical one misses the key point: It was a cultural document, reflecting an idea whose time had come.
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John Locke saw the past as a pit humanity must labor to escape from. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, believed it was a shame we built the ladder at all. Whereas Locke saw the emergence of modern society as a story of liberation, not just of people but of the mind, Rousseau saw modernity as a form of oppression.
Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, the only society that rivaled ancient Sparta in Rousseau’s mind as an ideal form of political organization. Rousseau’s mother died shortly after giving birth to him. His father, Isaac, a grandiose and overeducated watchmaker who had married above his station, raised Jean-Jacques in Geneva until trouble with the law prompted the father to abandon his son, leaving Jean-Jacques to be raised by relatives who treated him poorly.
At sixteen, the precocious Rousseau left for a life of adventure. In Savoy, Rousseau was taken in as steward to a rich, eccentric woman, the Baroness de Warens. The fairly young baroness had left her husband, taking much of his money with her, and became a kind of eccentric adventurer herself. One of her vocations was as a Catholic missionary of sorts, specializing in converting young Protestant men. She served as Rousseau’s patron and, eventually, his lover. By the time he left her employ, Rousseau—who had never been formally educated—was a full-blown man of letters and burgeoning philosopher. Eventually he set off for Paris to make his mark, expecting to be recognized as a unique talent.
When Rousseau arrived in Paris at the age of thirty, the city was the intellectual capital of the world. He met Denis Diderot, another ambitious young intellectual, who would go on to cofound and edit the Encyclopédie—the great compendium of the arts and sciences, and the most important publication of the French Enlightenment. The two were the most prominent of the philosophes, the radical, anticlerical, democratic intellectuals who laid much of the groundwork for the Age of Reason.
Rousseau would go on to become more famous than Diderot and all the other philosophes. He was a true celebrity intellectual, admired by the royal court (for a time) as much for his brilliant writing as for his musical compositions and operas. “Yet he never seemed at home in Paris and eventually succumbed to severe feelings of alienation and self-loathing,” writes Michael Locke McLendon.28
There’s a reason for that. Rousseau was, to put a fine point on it, a miserable bastard. Rousseau was a cad, a showman, and a staggering and often heartless hypocrite. If you’ve seen the film Amadeus, he was surely less of a fool than Tom Hulce’s Mozart, but he was just as contemptuous of social mores. He had numerous mistresses. In his own Confessions, he admits that he had multiple children with one of them, a former scullery maid named Thérèse Levasseur. The man who said “I know nothing which exercises a more powerful influence upon my heart than an act of courage, performed at an opportune moment, on behalf of the weak who are unjustly oppressed”29 nevertheless forced his mistress to give each of the children to an orphanage immediately upon birth. The man who wrote some of the most influential and famous work on how to raise children properly abandoned his own children.30
Rousseau seems a familiar type today. Indeed, he created the type: a celebrity intellectual who simultaneously yearned for ever more fame and controversy while heaping scorn on other intellectuals for their lack of integrity and concern with petty things. It should be no wonder that he was very much despised by many of the other leading thinkers of his age. “I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it,” Voltaire wrote to him about Rousseau’s Social Contract. “[N]o one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes,” he said. “To read your book makes one long to go on all fours.”31 Rousseau’s feud with the English philosopher David Hume became an international drama. (Hume had endeavored to help Rousseau find safety in exile in England; Rousseau repaid the kindness with bizarre accusations that Hume was the ringleader of some kind of elaborate plot against him.)32 In a letter to his friend Adam Smith, Hume wrote of Rousseau:
Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness….The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention
, form the whole of the Composition.33
Rousseau had such a gift for personal ingratitude and public score settling that his life was a kind of literary reality show. In fact, that was probably the point. Rousseau, not constrained by conventional notions of honesty or integrity, would simply invent scandals and conflicts to stay in the public eye, a fact Denis Diderot had warned Hume about. Meanwhile, Diderot never took Rousseau’s bait. In a letter to a friend seeking guidance about how to handle public scandal, Diderot wrote: “I am in control of my own happiness and I challenge all the ingrates, scandalmongers, slanderers, envy-ridden scoundrels of the world to try taking it away from me.”34 He was almost surely referring to Rousseau. In another letter, Diderot said of Rousseau:
I despise and I pity him. He is remorseful and shame pursues him. He is alone with himself….I am loved, esteemed, I’ll even say honored, by my fellow-citizens and by strangers….The benefits held out by the great empress extend far and wide her renown, the praise of her actions and of my own. The news come to the traitor’s ears: he bites his tongue with rage. His days are filled with sadness; his nights are restless. I sleep peacefully, while he grieves, perhaps he cries, tortures himself and wastes away.35
In the debates about Rousseau, it is somewhat standard to reply that this amounts to argumentum ad hominem, an attempt to discredit an argument by attacking the person making it. But that’s not my aim here. Rather, I think there is a deep connection between Rousseau’s immoral behavior and his philosophy. I am not saying that his philosophy is simply a rationalization of his morality (though there is much of that in his Confessions). Rather, I think Rousseau’s feelings of alienation from society—both fashionable and bourgeois—gave him a powerful visitor-from-Mars insight into the hypocrisies of the age.
They also opened a hole in his soul, a hunger of the spirit. He believed that a disordered society created disordered souls. This disorder required a new society that harmonized the inner life of the soul with all social arrangements. It’s as if Rousseau rejected the chastity and uprightness of his youthful Puritanism but retained many of its theological assumptions: The world as we know it is corrupt. All “middlemen” between the individual and God distract us from the truth and the divine.
Fittingly, Rousseau’s conversion story to the new faith rivals Paul’s story about finding God on the road to Damascus. At the age of thirty-seven, while walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot, in prison for criticizing the government—he couldn’t afford the fare for a carriage—Rousseau stumbled upon a flier for an essay competition sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The topic: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?”
“The moment I had read this,” he later recalled, “I seemed to behold another world and became another man.” The romantic spirit inhabited Rousseau. “I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights….I felt my head seized by a dizziness that resembled intoxication.” Rousseau claimed that he crumpled to the ground and fell into a kind of transcendent state. He awoke to find his coat drenched in tears.
“The reason for this effusion,” writes Tim Blanning, “was Rousseau’s sudden insight that the Dijon Academy’s question was not rhetorical.”36 I suspect the rectors of the academy would have disagreed. The question almost surely was intended to be rhetorical in the same way the organizers of an essay competition at Oberlin asking “Has diversity made us stronger?” would simply assume the contest was over who would most creatively—or loyally—answer “Yes.”
Rousseau’s essay, A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences—which won the contest!—is the keystone for the entire cathedral of his thought. Rousseau turned the story of civilization on its head. All progress was really decay. All refinement was just a pleasant coat of paint hiding the corruption underneath. Civilization didn’t liberate; it enslaved. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” as he would famously put it in The Social Contract.37 But the idea was already there in his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences:
So long as government and law provide for the security and well-being of men in their common life, the arts, literature and the sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilised people.38
The writings of Rousseau were all, in a sense, variations on the first sentence of his novel Emile, or On Education: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.”39 Emile, he insisted, was “nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of mankind.”40
Like Locke, Rousseau bases his entire political philosophy on a fictional origin story of mankind, grounded in his doctrine of the noble savage (even though he never used the term), which we’ve already discussed. Man is good. Man is solitary. (Rousseau makes little mention of women.) Man’s biggest mistake was leaving the world of solitary self-sufficiency (and selfishness) and forming a society, because society is corrupt and takes us away from nature and man’s natural state.
Locke had complicated views on original sin, rejecting the view that Adam’s fall carried to all mankind for all time. Like Rousseau, he believed that there was no sin in a state of nature. But that was because the state of nature was lawless in the broadest conception possible. First with the Jews and then Christians, man was blessed to receive moral laws from God, and thus defiance of those laws constituted sin. Rousseau sees it exactly the other way around. Recall what he wrote in Emile: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Locke sees man’s ability to apply reason and labor to create artificial things—i.e., wealth and property—with his own hands as the heart of human progress; Rousseau sees all artificiality as corrupting. Locke sees God’s moral instruction as a blessing; Rousseau sees it as a corrupting curse. Indeed, Rousseau held that the moment man started down this path, the process of corruption had begun. In the most famous passage from the Discourse on Equality, Rousseau writes:
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this imposter, you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”41
“All subsequent advances have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the individual,” Rousseau wrote, “but in reality so many steps towards the decrepitude of the species.”42 He brilliantly identifies that private property and the division of labor are among the chief drivers of civilizational and economic advance. He just hates them:
In a word, so long as [men] undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives, so long as their nature allowed, and as they continued to enjoy the pleasures of mutual and independent intercourse. But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops. Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and ruined humanity…43
I a
m quite hard on Rousseau here, but I must confess that I’ve grown to have a greater appreciation of his writings. His personal behavior was repugnant. His inconsistencies and conclusions are often infuriating. But his eye for the false pieties, hypocrisies, and corruptions of others was as remarkable as his skill at describing them. Long before neuroscience confirmed it, Rousseau recognized that we all crave social recognition as special, unique, or important. Rousseau calls this amour-propre—or self-love—which is often translated into English as “vanity” or “pride” or “esteem.” He contrasts it with amour de soi, which, annoyingly, also means self-love. Amour de soi, according to Rousseau, is the natural self-interestedness primitive man shared with the animals before he was corrupted by society. Amour de soi is always noble and good, because in Rousseau’s state of nature, man’s self-interest never came at the expense of another. This is, of course, nonsense. Animals, particularly predators, pursue their self-interest in ways that harm others—and primitive humans are certainly no exception.
Rousseau even recognized that amour-propre has its roots in sexual competition and status seeking in small tribes or bands. Rousseau believed that the social ills of modernity stemmed from an inflammation of amour-propre, in part because the market system enthrones wealth as the measure of social status. In other words, by Rousseau’s own often brilliant analysis, ideology is secondary to what he calls passions—and he’s right.
As the author of the first modern autobiography, Rousseau was honest about his quest to find his real self and stay true to it. He was more dishonest about his contempt for the concerns of polite society. He loved its attention. He may have believed that the desire for status and the respect of others—amore-propre—was the source of so much evil in the world, but he craved status and recognition himself. There was a Trumpian quality to Rousseau in that he seemed to believe it was better to be talked about negatively than not at all.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 16