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THE MAJOR POLITICAL WRITINGS of JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

IT IS A GRAND and beautiful spectacle to see man emerging, as it were, out of nothingness through his own efforts; dissipating by the light of his reason the shadows in which nature has enveloped him; rising above himself; soaring by his mind to the celestial regions; traversing with the steps of a giant, like the sun, the vast expanse of the universe; and, what is even grander and more difficult, returning into himself in order there to study man and to know his nature, his duties, and his end. All these marvels have been revived in the past few generations.

Europe had fallen back into the barbarism of the first ages. Just a few centuries ago the peoples of that part of the world today so enlightened lived in a condition worse than ignorance. I know not what scientific jargon, even more despicable than ignorance, had usurped the name of knowledge and opposed an almost invincible obstacle to its return. A revolution was needed to bring men back to common sense. It eventually came from the quarter from which it was least expected. It was the stupid Muslim, it was the eternal scourge of letters who brought about their rebirth among us. The fall of Constantine's throne carried into Italy the debris of ancient Greece. France in turn was enriched by those precious spoils. Soon the sciences followed letters, the art of writing joined the art of thinking, a sequence which appears strange and is perhaps only too natural, and people began to feel the principal advantage of communing with the Muses, that of making men more sociable by inspiring in them the desire to please one another with works worthy of their mutual approbation.

The mind has its needs, as does the body. The latter make up the foundations of society, the former make it pleasant. While government and laws provide for the security and well-being of assembled men, the sciences, the letters, and the arts—less despotic and perhaps more powerful—spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the feeling of that original freedom for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery and fashion them into what are called civilized peoples. Need raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. Earthly powers: love talents and protect those who cultivate them. Civilized peoples: cultivate them; happy slaves: you owe to them that delicate and refined taste on which you like to pride yourselves; that softness of character and urbanity of morals that make relations among you so affable and so easy; in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without having any of them.

This is the sort of civility, the more amiable as it affects to display itself less, that formerly distinguished Athens and Rome in the much lauded days of their magnificence and their splendor. It is through it, no doubt, that our age and our nation will surpass all times and all peoples. A philosophic tone without pedantry, natural and yet engaging manners, as far removed from Teutonic rusticity as from Italian pantomime: these are the fruits of the taste acquired through good education and perfected by moving in polite society.

How sweet it would be to live among us if outward appearances were always the image of the dispositions of the heart, if propriety were virtue, if our maxims served us as rules, if genuine philosophy were inseparable from the title of philosophy! But so many qualities are all too rarely found together, and virtue hardly proceeds with such pomp. Richness of attire may announce an opulent man, and his elegance a man of taste. The healthy and robust man is recognized by other signs: it is beneath the rustic clothes of a farmer and not beneath the gilt of a courtier that strength and vigor of body will be found. Finery is no less foreign to virtue, which is strength and vigor of soul. The good man is an athlete who enjoys competing in the nude. He spurns all those vile ornaments which would hinder the use of his strength, and most of which have been invented solely to hide some deformity.

Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak a borrowed language, our morals were rustic but natural, and differences in conduct announced those of character at first glance. Human nature, at bottom, was not better. But men found their security in the ease of seeing through one another, and that advantage, of which we no longer sense the value, spared them many vices.

Today, when more subtle study and a more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to a set of principles, a vile and deceitful uniformity reigns in our morals, and all minds seem to have been cast from the same mold. Incessantly civility requires, propriety demands; incessantly it is customs that are followed, never one's own genius. One no longer dares to appear to be what one is; and under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up that herd called society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things unless more powerful motives deter them from doing so. One will therefore never really be able to know those with whom one is dealing. To know one's friend, one will therefore have to wait for momentous occasions—that is, to wait until it is too late, because it is these very occasions for which it would have been essential to know him.

What a procession of vices must accompany this uncertainty! No more sincere friendships, no more real esteem, no more well-founded confidence. Suspicions, offenses, fears, coolness, reserve, hatred, betrayal continually conceal themselves behind that uniform and deceitful veil of civility, behind that much lauded urbanity we owe to the enlightenment of our age. The name of the master of the universe will no longer be profaned by swearing, but it will be insulted by blasphemies without our scrupulous ears being offended by them. People will not boast of their own merit, but they will belittle that of others. They will not coarsely insult their enemy, but they will artfully malign him. National hatreds will die out, but they will do so along with love of father land. Scorned ignorance will be replaced by a dangerous Pyrrhonism. There will be some forbidden excesses, some dishonored vices, but others will be dignified with the name of virtues; one will either have to have them or to affect them. Let those who so wish boast of the sobriety of the wise men of the age; as for me, I see in it merely a refinement of intemperance as unworthy of my praise as their artful simplicity.

Such is the purity our morals have acquired. This is how we have become affable men. It is for the letters, the sciences, and the arts to claim their share in such a salutary bit of work. I will only add one thought: that if an inhabitant of some far-off land sought to form an idea of European morals based on the state of the sciences among us, on the perfection of our arts, on the propriety of our theater, on the civility of our manners, on the affability of our discourse, on our perpetual professions of goodwill, and on that tumultuous competition of men of all ages and of all social conditions who seem anxious to oblige one another from the dawn of morn to the setting of the sun; that this stranger, I say, would guess our morals to be precisely the opposite of what they are.

Where there is no effect, there is no cause to seek: but here the effect is certain, the depravity real, and our souls have been corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection. Shall it be said that this is a misfortune particular to our age? No, Gentlemen: the evils caused by our vain curiosity are as old as the world. The daily rise and fall of the ocean's waters have not been more regularly subjected to the course of the star that gives us light during the night than has the fate of morals and integrity to the progress of the sciences and arts. Virtue has been seen to flee in proportion as their light dawned on our horizon, and the same phenomenon has been observed in all times and in all places.

Behold Egypt, that first school of the universe, that climate so very fertile beneath a brazen sky, that famous land from which Sesostris long ago set out to conquer the world. It becomes the mother of philosophy and the fine arts, and, soon thereafter, the conquest of Cambyses, then that of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Arabs, and finally of the Turks.

Behold Greece, formerly peopled by heroes who twice vanquished Asia, once in front of Troy and once at their very hearths. Nascent letters had not yet carried corruption into the hearts of its inhabitants, but the progress of the arts, the dissolution of morals, and the yoke of the Macedonian closely followed upon one another, and Greece—ever learned, ever voluptuous, and ever enslaved—no longer experienced anything but a change of masters in the course of its revolutions. All Demosthenes' eloquence could never revive a body that luxury and the arts had enervated.

It is in the time of the likes of Ennius and of Terence that Rome, founded by a shepherd and made illustrious by farmers, begins to degenerate. But after the likes of Ovid, of Catullus, of Martial, and that crowd of obscene authors whose names alone alarm modesty, Rome, formerly the temple of virtue, becomes the theater of crime, the disgrace of nations, and the plaything of barbarians. This capital of the world ultimately succumbs to the yoke it had imposed on so many peoples, and the day of its fall was the eve of the day on which the title of arbiter of good taste was given to was given to one of its citizens.

What shall I say about that metropolis of the Eastern Empire which, by its location, seemed destined to be the metropolis of the entire world, of that refuge of the sciences and arts banned from the rest of Europe, perhaps more out of wisdom than barbarism? All that is most shameful in debauchery and corruption; the blackest of betrayals, assassinations, and poisonings; a contest among all of the most atrocious crimes: this is what makes up the fabric of the history of Constantinople, this is the pure source from which we have received the enlightenment in which our time takes such great pride.

But why seek in remote times proofs of a truth for which we have enduring evidence before our eyes? In Asia there is an immense land where literary honors lead to the state's highest offices. If the sciences purified morals, if they taught men to shed their blood for the fatherland, if they animated courage, the peoples of China should be wise, free, and invincible. But if there is not a single vice that does not dominate them, not a single crime that is not familiar to them, if neither the enlightenment of government officials, nor the alleged wisdom of the laws, nor the large number of inhabitants of that vast empire have been able to protect it from the yoke of the ignorant and coarse Tartar, of what use have all these learned men been to them? What benefit have they derived from the honors bestowed on them? Is it to be populated by slaves and wicked men?

Let us contrast these scenes with that of the morals of the small number of peoples that, protected from that contagion of vain knowledge, have created their own happiness as well as an example for other nations by their virtues. Such were the first Persians, a singular nation in which virtue was learned as science is learned among us, which subjugated Asia with so much ease, and which alone has had the glory of having the history of its institutions mistaken for a philosophic novel. Such were the Scythians, of whom such magnificent praise has come down to us. Such were the Germans, whose simplicity, innocence, and virtues a pen—weary of depicting the crimes and foul deeds of an educated, opulent, and voluptuous people—took solace in portraying. Such was Rome itself in the times of its poverty and its ignorance. Such, finally, has that rustic nation—so lauded for its courage, which adversity has not been able to fell, and for its fidelity, which bad examples have not been able to corrupt—proven itself to be to this very day.

It is not owing to stupidity that they have preferred other forms of exercise to those of the mind. They were not unaware that in other lands idle men spent their lives arguing over the sovereign good, over vice and virtue, and that prideful reasoners, bestowing the greatest praise on themselves, lumped together other peoples under the contemptuous name of barbarians. But they considered their morals and learned to disdain their doctrine.

Could I forget that it was in the very bosom of Greece that a city was seen to arise which was as famous for its happy ignorance as for the wisdom of its laws, that republic of demigods rather than of men, so superior to humanity did their virtues seem? O Sparta! Eternal source of shame for a vain doctrine! While the vices carried by the fine arts were introduced together into Athens, while a tyrant was there assembling the works of the prince of poets with such care, you drove away from your walls the arts and the artists, the sciences and the learned.

The outcome marked the difference. Athens became the abode of politeness and good taste, the country of orators and philosophers. The elegance of the buildings there corresponded to that of the language. Marble and canvas, brought to life by the hands of the most skillful masters, were there seen all over. It is from Athens that those astonishing works that will serve as models in every corrupted age have come. The picture of Lacedaemon is less brilliant. There, said other peoples, men are born virtuous and the very air of the country seems to inspire virtue. Of its inhabitants the only thing that remains for us is the memory of their heroic actions. Are such monuments worth less to us than the curious marbles Athens has left us?

Some wise men, it is true, resisted the general torrent and protected themselves against vice while in the abode of the Muses. But listen to the verdict that the foremost and most unfortunate among them passed on the learned men and artists of his time.

"I examined," he says, "the poets, and I regard them as people whose talent impresses both themselves and others, who present themselves as wise men, who are taken to be such, and who are nothing of the sort.

"From the poets," continues Socrates, "I went on to the artists. No one is more ignorant about the arts than I am; no one was more convinced that the artists possessed some very fine secrets. Yet I perceived that their condition is no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same bias. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they regard themselves as the wisest of men. This presumption altogether tarnished their knowledge in my eyes. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself which I would prefer to be, what I am or what they are, knowing what they have learned or knowing that I know nothing, I answered myself and the god: I want to remain what I am.

"We do not know—neither the sophists, nor the poets, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I—what is the true, the good, and the beautiful. But there is this difference between us: that although these people know nothing, they all believe that they know something, whereas I, if I know nothing, am at least not in doubt about it. As a result, this entire superiority of wisdom that is accorded to me by the oracle amounts simply to being fully convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know."

Here, then, is the wisest of men in the judgment of the gods and the wisest of the Athenians according to the view of all Greece, Socrates, speaking in praise of ignorance! Is it credible that, if he were brought back to life among us, our learned and our artists would cause him to change his opinion? No, Gentlemen, that just man would continue to scorn our vain sciences, he would not help to enlarge that mass of books with which we are inundated from every direction, and he would leave behind—as he did before—as the sole precept to his disciples and to our posterity merely the example and the memory of his virtue. Now that is a fine way to teach men!

What Socrates had begun in Athens, Cato the Elder continued in Rome by loosing his fury upon those artificial and subtle Greeks who were seducing the virtue and softening the courage of his fellow-citizens. But the sciences, the arts, and dialectic still prevailed. Rome was filled with philosophers and orators. Military discipline was neglected, agriculture spurned, sects were embraced, and the fatherland forgotten. The sacred names of freedom, disinterestedness, obedience to the laws were replaced by the names of Epicurus, Zeno, Arcesilaus. Ever since learned men began to appear among us, said their own philosophers, good men have been eclipsed. Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE MAJOR POLITICAL WRITINGS of JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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