• The willful burning of a library is considered one of the most shocking, hateful, and infamous acts against human civilization.

• In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised Caliph Omar for ordering the burning of the Alexandria library in 650, seeing it as a step toward ignorance, innocence, and poverty.

• Rousseau argued in The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts that the search for knowledge was morally and socially destructive.

• He believed that cultural and material regression was necessary for society’s movement toward morality.

• The Enlightenment’s rational enterprise was under fierce attack by Rousseau, who challenged its core values.

• Eighteenth-century French intellectuals aimed to dismantle traditional society, questioning supernatural dogmas, monarchy, aristocracy, and Catholicism.

• They sought a rational society based on equality, freedom, and happiness, viewing life as an intellectual adventure.

• Rousseau was initially part of this culture, collaborating with figures like Voltaire, Rameau, Diderot, Marivaux, and Fontenelle in the world of salons.

• Despite his participation, Rousseau harbored bitterness and resentment due to personal failures and feelings of being undermined.

• He concluded that the Enlightenment world was superficial, corrupt, and cruel behind its splendid façade.

• Rousseau condemned the entire Enlightenment project as a lie and a symptom of moral decline.

• He saw its accomplishments as a veneer masking societal decay and inequality.

• The quest for knowledge had become a superficial luxury reinforcing self-indulgence and decay rather than serving society.

• Rousseau lamented the loss of citizenship virtues, noting people had become “happy slaves” who preferred high culture’s glitter over true freedom and happiness.

• He criticized society’s skepticism and vain inquiry as distractions from meaningful life and core values.

• Rousseau believed people lacked understanding of magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, courage, fatherland, and God.

• Society was overwhelmed by pretension, affectation, and deceit, eroding values like self-sacrifice, sincere friendships, and love of country.

• He argued that science and philosophy inherently conflicted with the needs of a vigorous, patriotic society.

• While science fosters doubt and undermines faith and virtue, society requires assent to foundational principles.

• Rousseau believed the intellectual’s role was to offer radical social and political overhaul and moral regeneration, not incremental reforms or fame.

• He envisioned a Spartan-like society valuing rules, discipline, sacrifice, strength, courage, and self-discipline over vain intellectual pursuits.

• Virtue, from the Latin vir meaning “man,” implied moral goodness coupled with strength and self-sacrifice.

• Rousseau did not literally call for burning libraries but saw sciences and arts as useful only in the hands of a few great geniuses like Bacon, Descartes, and Newton.

• In a corrupt society, such geniuses might guide humanity and bring some true enlightenment.

• Rousseau’s essay won first prize in the Dijon Academy’s 1750 contest on whether sciences and arts improved morality.

• The Discourse became a bestseller, shocking and fascinating readers with its contrarian viewpoint and revival of Spartan virtues.

• Earlier critics like La Rochefoucauld and Montesquieu had also criticized luxury and wealth for eroding civic and political virtue.

• Rousseau’s critique was more consistent, ambitious, and psychologically acute than other philosophes.

• His work planted the seeds for a world-historical Revolution challenging Western society’s foundations.

• The “paradoxes” of his discourse were described as exploding like a bombshell by John Stuart Mill.

• Lord Acton praised Rousseau’s influence as greater than that of Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, or Aquinas.

• Among Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau had the most profound and enduring impact on the French Revolution and modern democratic liberation movements.

• He was the most radical and utopian political theorist of his era.

• Paradoxically, Rousseau’s ideas also laid groundwork for 20th-century totalitarian states, one-party democracies, and excessive communitarianism.

Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality

• Three years after his First Discourse, Rousseau entered another intellectual competition by the Dijon Academy on the origins of inequality.

• His work, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind (1753), also called the Second Discourse, is pivotal to his thought.

• It connects the critique of eighteenth-century society’s decadence and corruption from his First Discourse with his future political ideas in The Social Contract.

• Rousseau questioned why inequality had become so deeply rooted and widely accepted across both poor and rich people.

• To analyze inequality, Rousseau acted as a theoretical anthropologist, imagining human life in a “state of nature” before society and social relations corrupted human behavior.

• Rousseau acknowledged that the state of nature might never have existed but considered it a necessary theoretical tool to evaluate the present.

• He imagined humans stripped of all social traits, language, habits, emotions, and values—revealing the “bare bones” of humanity.

• Unlike Hobbes, who saw the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, Rousseau depicted it as a dormant period where people were free, equal, mostly solitary, and neither cooperative nor in conflict.

• People lived in the present, driven by spontaneous needs and desires, experiencing harmony with nature as their needs were immediately met.

• These early humans had a natural instinct of pity and survival, but their moral and rational faculties were mostly dormant; no love, friendship, family, speech, or thought disturbed their solitude.

• Rousseau used the state of nature as a standard to compare and critique the corrupt and unequal present condition of society.

• This vision supported Rousseau’s belief in human perfectibility, arguing society, not human nature, causes corruption and inequality.

• Given humans’ rational and ethical potential, Rousseau believed it was possible to chart a better social, political, and moral future, not backward but forward toward a rational, social, moral Eden.

• Rousseau theorized that early humans began working and collaborating occasionally, forming family units with patriarchal authority, but without private property yet.

• Families were small, affectionate societies united by liberty and mutual love; this was a golden age marked by relative happiness and evolving social rituals and morality.

• The fall from this tranquil state began with the realization that humans could transform nature through rational effort and work.

• This unleashed new intellectual energy, disrupting the simplicity and harmony between needs and desires in the state of nature.

• The concept of division of labor emerged, ending self-sufficiency and introducing technological advances like agriculture and metallurgy.

• Alongside these, the idea of private property arose, leading to competition, accumulation of wealth, and the rise of ambition and greed.

• Production started exceeding needs, fueling a hunger for luxury goods and marking the defeat of equality by selfishness and desire.

• Economic inequality was worsened by a new form of psychological inequality as people acquired wealth and began comparing themselves to others.

• Rousseau saw the quest for esteem as essentially a desire for inequality and social distinction.

• The American theorist Thorstein Veblen later called this phenomenon “conspicuous consumption.”

• Rousseau noted that seeking prestige caused individuals to become alienated from themselves, valuing others’ opinions over their own authenticity.

• People began to live to appear rather than to be, sacrificing authenticity, equality, and compassion.

• The disappearance of equality, rise of social divisions, unequal property distribution, and isolation of the rich from the poor led to exploitation, violence, and disorder.

• Rousseau stated that avarice, wickedness, and ambition arose as natural compassion and justice were stifled.

• At this point, Rousseau’s view converges with Hobbes’: society degenerates into a war of all against all.

• A rich, powerful individual proposes a social contract offering order, security, peace, and justice in exchange for loss of freedom.

• The rich desire law and order to protect their possessions peacefully, while the weak accept inequality and chains.

• This social contract is founded on deception and exploitation, where might makes right.

• People become fully enslaved by obedience to rulers, personal ambition, vanity, and desires for luxury and admiration.

• Rousseau envisioned a collapse into political intrigue, factions, civil strife, and the disintegration of legitimate government.

• Leaders become hereditary rulers, social fabric dissolves, and natural pity is extinguished.

• The final stage of inequality is despotism, with a master-slave political relationship replacing that of powerful and weak.

• Society descends into complete human degradation and corruption, with people solitary and atomized as in the state of nature.

• Now, equality exists because people are all nothing, ruled only by the arbitrary will of the master.

• Life becomes nasty and brutish again, but unlike Hobbes, this degradation is at the end of social development, not the beginning.

• The Second Discourse ends with a violent vision of revolution, where force both upholds and overturns rulers.

• Rousseau believed revolution might bring radical change, but only with a profound rethinking of the social contract and social relations.

• He upheld the Enlightenment idea of human perfectibility, believing moral and rational faculties can be nurtured to allow human flourishing.

• Although society has made humans unequal, alienated, and enslaved, it is possible to restructure social and political institutions on a radically different basis.

• Rousseau’s next work, The Social Contract, aims to move away from the catastrophic vision toward a new utopian future.

• Rousseau’s project parallels Christian stages of Eden, Fall, and Redemption, where:

  • The Fall is the move from the benign state of nature to a period of corruption and degradation.

  • Redemption is not supernatural but achieved through rational and human political solutions.

• His Social Contract seeks to create a moral, consensual polity assuring freedom, equality, and fostering simple Spartan virtue.