Rousseau against the Enlightenment: Another Look at Both

Abstract

This article examines the nuances in the philosophy of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It aims to refute the conception of Rousseau being either an Enlightenment philosopher or an autocritique of the Enlightenment, a concept proposed by a Rousseau scholar Mark Hulliung. Through close analysis of Rousseau's political and literary writings, as well as comparative studies between them and those of other Enlightenment philosophers, this article reveals several foundational assumptions that Rousseau held, which are so contradictory to the mainstream of the Enlightenment that Rousseau can be considered no less than an utter antithesis to the Enlightenment. The article starts by presenting and negating the two traditional conceptions of Rousseau, and it moves on to attributes the cause of such misconceptions to the provocative nature of Rousseau's writings. Then, the article lays out the essential characteristics of the Enlightenment, using leading figures such as Immanuel Kant and Dennis Diderot as examples, which reveal a conflict between the Enlightenment centrality of intellectual pursuit and Rousseau's assumption of intellectual distinctions. The second part of the article examines the difference of Rousseau's moral and political philosophy from that of the Enlightenment, which the article presents in a three-phase framework. It will show that Rousseau is against all three of the phases that led to and constituted the Enlightenment. The third part of the article focuses on contrasting Rousseau's ideal political body to that which the other philosophes favored, while also pointing out a possible cause for the mistaken inclusion of Rousseau into the Enlightenment. Overall this article mostly relies on primary sources of Rousseau's and other philosophes' writings, though it also takes into consideration recent scholars' comments on each of those figures.  To support the conclusion of Rousseau's exclusion from the Enlightenment, this article also employs inductive reasoning to generalize the essence of the Enlightenment thinking and contrasts it to Rousseau's political ideas.