Rousseau's Critique of Modern Civilization

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of modern civilization is contained in two essays, "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" and "Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men".

The common argument we see, which is materialist in nature, in both of his essays is that the fundamental human nature of individuals can be altered by the kind of society they live in. As Marx would later write, "It is the social being of man that affects their consciousness and not the opposite".

Rousseau can be, as we shall see, seen as a precursor to Marx. He can also be seen as a precursor to the entire field of critical theory if we rely on the definition that "critical theory is *any* approach to social philosophy that focuses on the critique of society and culture".

Despite being a key enlightenment figure, Rousseau can, at the same time, be seen as a critic of many enlightenment thinkers who praised modern civilization (whereas Rousseau is criticizing it) and who valued reason, because, in some ways, Rousseau is also arguing against the notion of reason being the most powerful tool to improve society and individuals. 

In the first discourse, Rousseau puts forward his fundamental proposition that humans are good by nature, but the nature of the society in which individuals live, can change their fundamental human nature of being "good". In this particular case, it's modern civilization that corrupts this fundamental nature of an individual. As Rousseau once said, “Men are wicked, yes, but man is good”, in reply to a visitor’s comment, “Men are wicked”.

He argues that the development of the sciences and arts has alienated humans from their inherent nature of compassion, has corrupted people, and has led to a decline in our morals.

This was also his reason for preferring Sparta over Athens, as he believed that the artistic achievements of Athens were corrupting its people. It is, indeed, very surprising for a key enlightenment figure to be so critical of Athens, which was seen by most of the enlightenment thinkers as the peak of artistic and literary culture.

Perhaps it is possible to interpret the above argument of Rousseau in a slightly different way:

It is the degradation of morals that is the cause of the corrupting effect of the development of the arts and sciences. The degradation of morals is prior to the degrading effects of progress in the arts and sciences.

The second major argument in Rousseau's first discourse is that progress in the sciences and arts creates a false need for luxury. Although luxuries might make the lives of individuals easier, they don't make them good people. On the contrary, they corrupt the people.

"To misuse one's time is a great evil. But other even worse evils come with arts and letters. Luxury is such an evil, born, like them, from the idleness and vanity of men. Luxury rarely comes along without the arts and sciences, and they never develop without it."

In his second discourse, which was more controversial and a far more critical attack on modernity than the first one, Rousseau tries to imagine what it might be like for humans to live in a natural primitive state. From there, Rousseau tries to find out how inequality among individuals might have arisen.

Perhaps the following quote from his second discourse puts forward his main argument in this essay clearly:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”"

The above lines clearly lead us to believe that for Rousseau, like Marx, private property was the root of all evil (although Marx would not use the word "evil" or any moralist argument). We also see that Rousseau is not only the precursor to Marx's thought but also, to some extent, of Lenin's analysis of imperialism, as he is describing wars as the consequence of private property (of course, in Rousseau's time, wars were not strictly imperialist in nature, but the root was, nevertheless, private property).

The lines following the above excerpt give us insight into the historical materialist nature of Rousseau's analysis:

"But there is great probability that things had then already come to such a pitch, that they could no longer continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on many prior ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have been formed all at once in the human mind. Mankind must have made very considerable progress, and acquired considerable knowledge and industry which they must also have transmitted and increased from age to age, before they arrived at this last point of the state of nature."

Rousseau also gives an early description of the marxist concept of "ideology", which would only be later elaborated upon by Marx and especially the 20th century critical theorists. For example, Rousseau identified that the law gave the ruling class a tool to justify their class rule. Modern institutions, like the law, that exist now, have given rise to various forms of inequalities in society that were non-existent in a natural state.

Rousseau even anticipated Marx’s idea of alienation in his second discourse, by differentiating between the nature of the needs and desires of the "savage man" and the "modern citizen":

"The savage and the civilised man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of one would reduce the other to despair. The former breathes only peace and liberty; he desires only to live and be free from labour; even the ataraxia of the Stoic falls far short of his profound indifference to every other object. Civilised man, on the other hand, is always moving, sweating, toiling and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations: he goes on in drudgery to his last moment, and even seeks death to put himself in a position to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality. He pays his court to men in power, whom he hates, and to the wealthy, whom he despises; he stops at nothing to have the honour of serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on his own meanness and their protection; and, proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of those, who have not the honour of sharing it."

One can say that for Rousseau, the savage human is the embodiment of a being who, according to the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and contemporary Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, has learned to make "the use of the useless”.

From a shallow reading of his two essays, it would seem that Rousseau is advocating a return to a natural primitive state of human society, but, in actuality, he is just pointing out the problems of modernity, and these problems might create a desire in people to return to a more primitive society. Rousseau clarifies that it is not possible to return to a previous stage of human society and tries to find solutions to the problems (which he raises in his two essays) in "The Social Contract".

The discontents of modern civilization, which Rousseau identifies in his two discourses, are still relevant in many ways. Although he tried to answer the problems he raised in these essays, in "The Social Contract" (his magnum opus), which contributed to the occurrence of the French Revolution, our modern (or post-modern?) society still suffers from the problems Rousseau identified around 250 years ago.

Many philosophers, afterwards, have made similar and even more systematic critiques of the kind of society in which we find ourselves today; from Marx and Engels to Deleuze and Foucault, but there seems no way out of these "evils" of modern civilization, which only deteriorate with time.