Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment

Much of this crisis can be compared to the crisis of religion in the late 1700s. They also faced the same choice to either accept science for its facts and reason, or to double down, deny, and protect faith at all costs. Likewise, postmodernism would seem to be a response to the crisis of faith of the academic far Left. If we cannot win on this particular terrain, theoretical or practical, we need to change the terrain. The postmodern epistemology redeploys language as a rhetorical weapon rather than as a seeker of truth.

Before going further, let’s revisit another figure who predated Marx and was pivotal in developing the politics of the Counter-Enlightenment. This would be the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas appear quite anti-individualist and anti-liberal when compared to the ideas of John Locke’s liberalism. Rousseau, active in the 18th century, was a contemporary of Kant and later influenced the Jacobin leaders who would head the French Revolution, which transformed into what later became known as the Reign of Terror.

Rousseau was an admirer of Sparta’s militaristic and feudal communalism, in contrast to the classical Athens that defended commerce, diversity, and the high arts. Rousseau, as can be found in the first line of his popular work Émile, found that civilization and culture corrupts human beings from their nature. And what is the foundation of civilization? Not reason, rationality, rights, justice, or science, all of which are constructs of an artificial rather than natural way of life. They cause moral degradation, he argued in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

Rousseau believed that living without civilization, with only self-preservation as a goal, was the key to a peaceful and unselfish existence and best suited for the human race. Unfortunately, like Eve’s apple, Reason was awakened, and all the problems in the world were born. The creation of tools led to the idea of property rights, which led to wealth inequality and poverty. Abundance and luxuries led to gluttony, greed, and waste. Even marriage and monogamous relationships might be said to have ruined the idea of the village-family or tribe where wives and children are not owned by men. Rousseau urged that reasonis incompatible with compassion, for the winners in competitive civilization not only have a vested interest in preserving it, they have also acquired the power to keep it that way.

Most famously, and as can be seen as a precursor to postmodernism, Rousseau writes in Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts The sciences, letters, and arts spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.

Certainly, one can see elements here that will be later found in the arguments of postmodernists, such as Foucault as well as those of the Marxists.

Rousseau’s society was to be something between civilization and the primitive tribe. Against Aristotle who defined human being as the “rational animal,” Rousseau insisted that rationality could only be forced onto human

beings. Instead, we should allow the passions to be the natural, and morally good, guide. Religion was deeply important to wrap up the passions of the society into a “general will,” as he called it. This “will” was to be the public good, from which governments were to direct the people.

Rousseau was so adamant that he wrote in The Social Contract:“[W]hen the Prince says to him: ‘It is expedient for the State that you should die,’ he ought to die.” The basis of this was that reason causes disbelief in faith and religion, leads to disobedience, and finally results in anarchy. As Rousseau wrote, “the individual…is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body, and will.” In this moral society, the individual “coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.” To disobey the general will for an individual purpose should be seen as traitorous, and the punishment was severe. Nothing could be further from Locke’s ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, what later became the core tenets of the American revolution.

Much of Rousseau’s political ideas were put into practice in the 1789 French Revolution, particularly in the final phase, later termed the Reign of Terror. Much of the leadership of the Jacobin party, Jean-Paul Marat, Louis de SaintJust, and Maximilien Robespierre, all praised Rousseau as influential, the latter calling him the “teacher of mankind.” Not only were the French king and queen executed by guillotine, there were mass executions of nobles, priests, and anyone who questioned the goals of the Revolution. The carnage only ended with the arrest and execution of Robespierre. But the mass slaughter did not end there; instead the void caused by an exhausted France later incited France’s