Unmasking the Enlightenment : Rousseau’s critique of intellectualism
Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts predicts the rise of the public intellectual, and along with him, intellectual trends and scientism. It is therefore a treasure to anyone who has wondered about the cults of “authenticity” and “openness,” or slogans like “believe science.” To be more precise, his goal in the Discours is to expose the philosophes of the Enlightenment as hypocrites who laud the advancement of the sciences only to “distinguish” themselves and win power. In this way, the Discours parallels the City of God, where St. Augustine argues that self-love [amor sui] leads to the will to power [libido dominandi]. Rousseau’s Discours is unique however, since he considers the philosophes to be unconscious hypocrites. That is, he does not believe that they treat philosophy and science as “fashions” in order to directly acquire power, but rather because they are over-socialized. In this thesis, I will argue that Rousseau develops a unique method in the Discours for exposing the over-socialized hypocrite: unmasking. Although previous authors such as Molière, La Bruyère and Montaigne often invoked the rhetoric of the mask, I will show that Rousseau is the first to transform this rhetorical device into a method of social theory proper. Ultimately, when Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that Rousseau is the “founder of the sciences of man,” it is this method that he is describing. Of course, Rousseau could not have intended for this method, which sought to expose how institutions socialize people, to itself be institutionalized within the academies.
Rousseau Enlightenment Intellectualism Philosophes Unmasking