Rousseau Against Civilization: The Two Discourses

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva in 1712, shocked fellow philosophes by questioning whether progress made people better. In 1750 he won a prize from the Academy of Dijon for his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, arguing that refinement and learning had corrupted morals and bred vanity. His Discourse on Inequality (1755) imagined humans in a state of nature as simple, independent and compassionate, and argued that inequality grew with private property, competition and the craving to be admired, which he called amour-propre.

'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine' was, he wrote, the true founder of civil society. Voltaire mocked the book, saying it made him want to walk on all fours. Yet Rousseau's critique, later developed in The Social Contract (1762), made him a central and contradictory figure: an Enlightenment thinker who doubted the Enlightenment's faith in civilization.