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By Mark Hulliung
This article presents an research of the existence and works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a space usually neglected in bills of 18th-century history. Mark Hulliung restores Rousseau to his ancient context, the realm of the philosophes, and indicates how he hired the arsenal of Voltaire, Diderot and others to release a robust assault on their imaginative and prescient of the Enlightenment. With nice highbrow ability and rhetorical strength, Rousseau uncovered the inconsistencies and shortcomings that known as the complete programme of the Enlightenment into query: within the psychology of Locke, the style of philosophical and conjectural background, the most recent functions of technological know-how to the research of society and politics, and the transforming into curiosity in materialist modes of inspiration. because the century moved on, Hulliung argues, the main complicated philosophes came across themselves attracted to conclusions that paralleled Rousseau's - an contract that went unacknowledged within the acrimonious weather of the time. The Enlightenment that emerges here's richer, extra nuanced, and extra self-critical than the only mirrored in present interpretations. through extracting Rousseau from the private entanglements that stymied debate in his time and that misinform critics to today, this examine unearths the strength of his accomplishment.
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Additional resources for The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes
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157 Clearly the philosophes could never be done with Pascal. All the less, then, could they ever be done with Rousseau, who posed The Virtue of Selfishness · 37 an even greater threat. After reading him it was difficult to share Voltaire's complacent conclusion that Paris refuted Pascal. Could it be that Pascal had been correct all along, albeit for the wrong reasons, and that the correct reasons would come to light when one faced up to what was revealed by "the philosophy of the Enlightenment"?
Aren't all the exemptions reserved for them? A n d isn't public authority entirely in their favor? W h e n an esteemed man steals from his creditors or cheats in other ways, isn't he always sure of i m p u n i t y ? . If this same man is robbed, the forces of law and order go into action immediately, and woe to the innocents he suspects . . H o w different is the picture of the poor man! The more humanity owes him, the more society refuses him. 125 jo ' The Autocritique of Enlightenment Anyone foolish enough to do unto others as he would have them do unto him is, inevitably, a victim.
Even before the dawn of the eighteenth century, moreover, Fontenelle had written essays on the mind in early societies, as revealed by fables and oracles, and on the claims of the Moderns against the Ancients—essays suggesting those twin themes of a primitive mentality and the possibility of progress that were central to later contributions to the genre of philosophical history. Long in the making, philosophical history was also a long-lasting intel38 Philosophical History · 39 lectual enterprise, its final statement, Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain, written during the Revolution and in the shadow of the guillotine.