Smiling Enemies

What Rousseau Saw Coming: Bourgeois Morals and Five Political Archetypes

“Sometimes there’s a man—I won’t say a hero, ‘cause what’s a hero? But sometimes there’s a man . . . who, well, he’s the man for his time ‘n place.”
— The Cowboy, The Big Lebowski (1998)

Man of Our Time

"Ancient politicians talked constantly about morals and virtue,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau inveighs in his Discourse on the Science and the Arts (1750), but “those of our age talk only of business and money.”^[1] In this single sentence, he neatly sums up his entire critique of what in the following years came to be known as “liberalism.” Then to drive home the point, he concludes, “According to them a man is worth no more to the state then the value of his domestic consumption”—as if to say, the free market can produce everything except citizens.

One cannot understand the modern world (and thus, oneself) without having read this work: it’s the fount all competitors to liberalism—from socialism to anarchism, communism, fascism, and romanticism, even identity politics—have drawn from, and therefore the source of the current epoch’s great political drama. Progressive and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary, left, right, and center, the entire spectrum of contemporary politics is suffused with his critique. Thus today, as liberalism is being assaulted and challenged from all sides, a thoughtful re-engagement with Rousseau seems mandatory.

Now commonly referred to as the “First Discourse,” this brief but devastating essay was written in response to a contest held by the French Academy of Dijon on the question: “whether the renaissance of the sciences and arts has contributed to the improvement of morals and mores.” Formulated otherwise: Do the comforts of civilization make us better or worse at being human? Or again: Does moral progress necessarily accompany material progress? Rousseau, as he says, “running counter to everything men admire today,” answered in the negative, won the prize, and became an overnight celebrity.^[2]

His argument is easy to miss, but once seen impossible to deny. On the face of it, he appears to condemn civilization as such, dismissing the development of the sciences and arts as “garlands of flowers over iron chains.”^[3] But as he reassures his readers, this is to totally misunderstand his purpose: “I am not abusing science . . . I am defending virtue before virtuous men.”^[4] His concern is less the content of science—its various research queries and discoveries—than how it is integrated into society: specifically, will it be used to strengthen our natural abilities or to introduce needless luxury and ostentation? Indeed, his conclusions are a species of scientific knowledge, that of historical study; as he notes, like the moon’s effect upon the tide, it “has been observed in all times and all places” that the advancement of the sciences and arts has a negative effect upon the “fate of morals and integrity.”^[5] Despite what the etymology of progress implies (pro-gradi: “to walk forward”), it is not an absolute good, but instead seems to enhance certain of our faculties at the expense of others.

He was not, of course, the first person to hold such an opinion—the fact that this learned academy was even willing to ask the question shows they thought “no” might be a plausible answer. However, unlike his preachy predecessors who resisted the modern arts and sciences by appealing to divine revelation, Rousseau was a thorough child of the Enlightenment who resisted it on political grounds, having contributed over 400 articles to the revolutionary Encyclopedie. Yet by decade’s end, he would renounce all ties with his co-conspirators; and the First Discourse could be seen as the first shot in the “culture war” he would wage against their doctrines of laissez-faire individualism.

For the majority of his enlightened compatriots, the commercial republic of free inquiry, free enterprise, free trade, and equality under the law was the ideal social form to replace Europe’s teetering monarchies. Through a complex, nuanced, yet commonsensical argument, Rousseau demonstrates why the opulence and tranquility that invariably accompany such commerce would undermine all of their ideals. With this act, Rousseau split the still-emerging “left,” laying the foundation for our two political poles today. However, although many aspects of Rousseau’s thought presage marxist critiques of liberal capitalism—from his views on private property (“the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one!”)^[6] to coining the word “bourgeois” as a term of abuse^[7]—it is not so easy to pin down our protean subject.

Indeed, it is hard to say exactly what Rousseau was up to or what he wished his readers to do with his philosophical musings. Through a series of best-selling works of philosophy, fiction, autobiography, drama, and song, he offers many seemingly irreconcilable ideas and images that lead in entirely opposite directions. This is hardly surprising for someone who declares that he would “rather be a paradoxical man than a prejudiced one.”^[8] Yet, this question holds grave importance for us today because these very alternatives animate much of the rancor convulsing our society—our own Culture War between liberalism and its many challengers.

In fact, the different illiberal factions currently posing an existential threat to liberalism were each foreshadowed by five distinct core motifs in Rousseau’s writings. If “the beginning is half of the whole,” as an ancient Greek proverb advises, then it would seem wise to return to the origins of these ideologies to better understand what we are up against—which means returning to their source, Rousseau. Not only will this allow us to see them in a purer form, but through the luxury of distance, we may experience them detached from the political passions that such live questions naturally engender.

Hide Your Dagger Behind Your Smile

For somebody so concerned with preserving one’s humanity in the face of progress, Jean-Jacques was not a very good man. Infamously, he abandoned his five illegitimate children to foundling homes with apparently little remorse; not to mention insulting host after host who offered sanctuary when Rousseau was on the run from authorities. Rousseau was essentially the world’s first hipster, someone whose main motivation was not personal responsibility, but personal authenticity. As he opens his autobiography, The Confessions (1782-1789): “I feel my heart and I know man. I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different.”^[9] Yet despite his many failings, I believe we ought to take his philosophy seriously. For as has been often observed, most advice-givers are really talking to themselves.

Ultimately, Rousseau’s desire was to move the locus of control for human beings from outside to inside—from external authority to internal autonomy. Traditionally, this ambition has been seen in terms of the “expressive individualism” embodied in his lifestyle. Yet when one examines his philosophy as a whole, a much more elaborate and intriguing picture emerges. The autonomy, or “self-law,” of which he speaks is not bohemian abandon, but concerns our relationships with others, laws and mores, the desirable society of man, and whose responsibility it is to structure it. This alternative view of him is especially evidenced in the critique of his opponents’ liberal individualism and the new class of people it creates: the bourgeois.

The bourgeoisie is a by-product of the social mobility made possible by free markets. Because it is easier to seem than to actually be something, the rising nouveaux riche tend to express their newfound status through external signs and material metrics—what Rousseau calls amour-propre (externally validated self-love), we call “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” As he elaborates in his novelistic educational treatise Emile (1762), this incessant status-seeking causes the bourgeois man to be “in contradiction with himself, always floating between his [personal] inclinations and his duties.” While the bourgeois needs society in order to advance his interests, he remains uncommitted to it. Therefore, Rousseau concludes, the modern individual “will never be either man or citizen. . . He will be nothing.”^[10]

Early liberal thinkers hoped to reconstitute society by grounding a citizen’s loyalty in rational self-interest, rather than in impassioned commitment to one’s “tribe.” In this account, a just society could best be achieved if people simply kept to their own business. What this state would actually create, Rousseau counters, is “a society of smiling enemies” who shake with their right hand, and backstab with their left.^[11] As Milton Friedman liked to say, “the business of business is business”—which primarily means seeking to put your fellow citizens’ businesses out of business.^[12] What Thomas Hobbes and John Locke saw as the solution to man’s political problem, Rousseau contends only masks it, and moreover, deepens it by alienating the individual from any conception of a common good.

Throughout most of American history, the worst aspects of the bourgeois were held in check by the vestiges of certain pre-modern forms: Christianity most significantly, but also the township, the family, local clubs and associations, and sentimental attachment to nation and ethnicity. But at the end of the twentieth century, as neo-liberalism came to dominate the right economically and the left socially, all of Rousseau’s worst nightmares came to fruition. In reaction to the supposed “end of history”^[13] brought about by this liberal hegemony, an epidemic of radical ideologies has emerged to challenge it—all of which come directly out of Rousseau’s imagination.

Five Rousseauean Archetypes

In opposition to the bourgeois individual, Rousseau puts forth a series of images that, unlike this new man, are not “in contradiction with himself.” While not exhaustive, the following list shows the ones most prevalent in contemporary politics:

1. The natural, or pre-civilized man
2. The ancient citizen of Greece and Rome
3. An impossible pupil named Emile
4. The romantic family man
5. The indivisible individual

These seemingly contradictory figures span across Rousseau’s career, and their relation to one another is far from clear. However, each elaborates his criticism of the bourgeois; and each has been taken up by different contemporary political factions.

The Natural Man: The first of these images appears in his two discourses, but especially his Second Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755)—in the preface of which Rousseau tellingly declares, “Let us begin by setting aside all the facts.”^[14] Man is “naturally good,” he contends, whereas the process of civilization has made us the wicked beings we are today.^[15] To illustrate this point, he paints an exaggerated portrait of the purity and self-sufficiency of our hunter-gatherer ancestors living in direct contact with nature—what commentators have dubbed the “noble savage.” This figure would also fire the imaginations (i.e. corrupt the vision) of anthropologists who in their studies of other cultures projected this fantasy upon them.^[16]

The Ancient Citizen: In later works like The Social Contract (1762), though, Rousseau praises the “denatured”^[17] citizen of Sparta and early Rome wholly dedicated to the commonwealth—the types of people who historically superseded the natural man. Self-sufficiency was displaced by the “total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community,” what Rousseau termed the “General Will.”^[18] Whereas the noble savage is a unity unto himself, the citizen is an inextricable part of a higher unity of virtuous self-sacrifice. Many liberal critics have drawn a direct line from this kind of utopian vision to the communist and fascist movements of the twentieth century.

The Perfect Pupil: In contrast to both of these archetypes, Rousseau concocts in Emile an impossible educational regime that inoculates a child’s innate goodness against the vanities and pathologies inherent in society. As the opening line exclaims, “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”^[19] What would it look like, Rousseau muses, if the art of man and nature worked together toward the same end? Could an individual be created who lived in society, but was not of it? This work would become the inspiration for twentieth-century progressive experiments in childhood education, especially those focused on building self-esteem and cooperation over competition and achievement.

The Impassioned Family Man: In his best-selling epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), Rousseau once again portrays abandonment to something greater than oneself: romantic longing and commitment. Unlike the bourgeois tendency to contract with others only out of calculated self-interest, the lover forgets himself in the throes of erotic passion. Yet also unlike the older practice of marriage for the sake of necessity, this new type of lover remains true to himself rather than the expectations of society in his commitment to another person. But as the romantic spirit married according to his own principles, that marriage created a new type of person: the romantic family man (if sometimes complicated by the typical French love triangle). Julie was so popular in its day that publishers had to rent out copies by the hour to keep up with demand, and it continues to supply the theme of almost every rom-com ever produced.

The True Individual: However, in his final work, a second autobiography called The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776-1778), Rousseau once again celebrates the charms of singularity and self-sufficiency. “I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do,” he effuses; “that is the freedom I have always laid claim to, often preserved, and most scandalized my contemporaries about.”^[20] Drifting aimlessly upon a raft, lost in thought, eyes skyward, fingers dangling down in the water; one with nature and himself, Rousseau revels in the “sweet sentiment of existence,”^[21] basking in what we now call “mindfulness.”

When we look at our political landscape today, we find this same menagerie of fantastical motifs once again being put into practice (or at least being LARPed) by liberalism’s growing number of opponents. On the academic left, we hear calls for the elevation of “Indigenous Knowledge,” which is argued to contain wisdom forgotten by our fast-paced, materialistic society. On the online right, we see a proliferation of anonymous Twitter accounts portraying warrior iconography with explainer-threads celebrating ancient citizenship and manliness. In education, a growing number of alternative models—homeschooling, child-led, tactile, classical and more—have arisen to undermine the bourgeois education factory. Further, the recent “trad” trend of large families and well-defined gender roles—especially when paired with rustic living conditions—is straight out of Rousseau’s novels, but is also found in his most practical work, Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758). Even mainstream liberals have been infected. As astutely portrayed by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise (2000), bohemian counterculture has been co-opted, now repackaged and sold as a bourgeois “authentic experience.”^[22] It seems that Rousseau’s thought not only refuses to die, but haunts us still.

A Man for Our Time

As I have attempted to illustrate, these challenges to liberalism are both nothing new and potentially radically new. What has most changed, perhaps, is our expectations. The drama of the modern world was supposed to have been resolved: liberal capitalism had defeated fascism on the battlefield and communism in the marketplace. History came to an end, and with it, the struggle of ideas over what constitutes the Good Life. The “dream of the ’90s,”^[23] it was thought, was to be eternal. And yet in the matter of only one generation, this settlement has become unsettled.

I can’t say I am surprised. As Francis Fukuyama himself admitted, the prospect of the immortal Dude even had the pronouncer of these events practically going all Project Mayhem: “I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.”^[24] But how are we to prevent this latest rise of Rousseau from becoming just another tragic chapter in the drama of modernity? I think the answer to this question is both simple and impossible: we must try to understand Rousseau as he understood himself.

A passage from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is instructive here. Of all the Enlightenment thinkers, Burke held Rousseau most responsible for the excesses of the revolution (and as Hannah Arendt would later note, of each successive revolution that would parody it).^[25] In a revealing aside, Burke recounts an anecdote told to him by David Hume of a confession Rousseau made during his exile in England about the “secret of his principles of composition.” Rousseau, “that acute but eccentric observer,” Burke divulges, had discovered that to “strike and interest the public, the marvelous must be produced.” However, with the renaissance of scientific thinking in Europe, the public was no longer moved by gods from ancient myth or heroes from medieval romance. The only thing left to the creator, Rousseau contended, was to make reality marvelous: to show “the marvelous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations.” Through this exercise, Rousseau hoped to give rise to “new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals.”^[26] He innovated, in other words, a new way to shock and awe.

Thus, Rousseau’s critique of modernity in the First Discourse differed from previous ones because it was not made upon religious grounds, but liberty and equality. Like his liberal predecessors, he too held that humans are “born free.”^[27] He just opposed how, in light of this self-evident truth, these thinkers proposed that society ought to be structured. Against the soft despotism of Hobbes and the organized chaos of Locke, Rousseau seems to want to empower individuals to take responsibility for themselves by healing their inner bourgeois divide. The marvelous images he devised were meant to be dialectical in the ancient, not modern sense: the beginning of thought, not the ends of action.^[28]

Despite his antipathy, Burke goes on to admit that Rousseau would likely have been “shocked at the practical frenzy” of his followers.^[29] While I am sure Rousseau immensely enjoyed LARPing in Mindcraft as a Spartan hoplite, I do not believe he would have recommended anyone actually try to become one in the modern world. His various constructs were tools of the imagination, not blueprints for real-world construction projects. Ultimately, the task Rousseau sets before us is the cultivation of self-knowledge—a project that his unknowing contemporary followers (despite their worst intentions) aid us in. While we are right to be wary of them, we should also be grateful to them for having interrupted our dogmatic slumber.^[30]

With the rise of these competing ideologies, all the possibilities that neo-liberalism seems to foreclose have been put back on the table. We no longer have to resign ourselves to being merely bourgeois. And yet, I do not believe that any real American has truly disavowed his commitment to the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence. With Rousseau, then, we must ask: if liberty and equality remain our highest goods, how does this assumption limit and shape these newly awakened longings? To even begin to answer such a question will require much reflection and experimentation—especially in light of the immense challenges^[31] the revival of the sciences and arts have begotten since Rousseau first warned against them in 1750. And it seems to me that the best place to begin is . . . at the beginning. Let us then put away our daggers and our smiles and once again look seriously into Rousseau’s mirror in an attempt to see both our questions and ourselves anew.

Jeremy Sheeler is an alumnus of the St. John’s College Graduate Institute in Annapolis, MD. He is a documentary filmmaker at Palladium Pictures, as well as co-founder of the online educational platform, The Konois Project. His video production company, Awarehouse Productions, also produced “Continuing the Conversation,” a discussion series featuring St. John’s College tutors exploring the great books. His further explorations on the influence of Rousseau in the contemporary world are available on his Substack. He invites you to follow him on X.

Featured image: Statue of a young Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the village of Bossey in photo (29 June 2013) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.