Reading Discussion Overview

Matthew Shelley, Jennifer Shelley

ANTH 444, Dr. Fred Strange

The Social Life of Rousseau

Anthropology and the Loss of Innocence
By Robert Darnton
From Harper's, July 1985

Robert Darnton's article is an overview of not only the near mythical life of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, but the surrounding social climate which birthed him. While its main focus is on

Rousseau's early conceptualization of what would become anthropology, it doesn't shy away from

some of the seemingly more sordid elements of his character.

The article first focuses on Claude Levi-Strauss and his attempts to contact and interact with

the Tupi-Kawahib of the Amazon jungle in 1938. It presents this field study as a sort of puzzle, one

which the eminent Levi-Strauss could not solve at the time due to linguistic and cultural barriers he

could not overcome. Darnton posits here Rouseau's Discourses as helping Levi-Strauss to deal with

his failed expedition, saying “My answer would be that in Rousseau, Levi-Strauss recognized a

tribal ancestor” which in fact is calling Rousseau the ancestor of all anthropologists to come.

The author then uses this as a springboard to review the various ways Rousseau has been

interpreted and reinterpreted through the ages; a romantic, a progressive, a totalitarian, and a

neurotic. However, as Darnton states, a fresh eye and rereading of the works give an insight into

the contradictions of a culture to give greater understanding of the culture itself. By doing so, even

the field itself might overcome its own contradictions, the older divisions of sciences meld together.

Where one discipline sought to interpret culture, another would attempt to assign strict natural laws

to it. The “new humanist” school would attempt to understand symbolic systems and “think

themselves into alien ways of thought and to see how ways of thinking shape patterns of behavior.”
 The essay then goes on to relate the history of Rousseau, romanticizing his “eureka”

moment by directly comparing it to the traditional apochryphal occasions as Archimedes and his

bathtub, Newton and the apple, even the tale of Paul on the road to Damascus. This “eureka”

moment of Rousseaus however is a product of its own era and society, as Darnton will expand on.

While on his way to visit a friend in jail, he was passing by the very same “Foundling Hospital”

where his own progeny were kept, he read a question proposed for an essay contest. Hardly the

auspicious circumstance we would associate with the “eureka” moments listed by the author, yet

this brutal self honesty was apparently a hallmark of Rousseau and his work.

The question, “Has the revival of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification of morals?”

His response was to collapse beneath a tree and weep until his clothes were soaked.

Dramatic perhaps, but Darnton insists that rather than try to pry apart the reality of Rousseau from

his own rhetoric and self analysis, we should simply take him on his own account.

From here in the piece, he gives us a brief narrative of the strange odyssey of Rousseau's

life. While directly comparing it to the sort of journey that Twain or Voltaire might have written,

today we have a better term: a con-man. Jean Jacques Rousseau floated around Europe plying

tricks where he could, seeking sponsors and warm beds, outright lying at many opportunities,

although he was hardly alone in his roguish attempts at the time. On the occasions in which he

could land a steady sponsor, he would use it to attempt to springboard into higher society, including

the salons of Paris. It reminded me of the film Barry Lyndon, a member of a lower class who cons,

lies, and claws his way into genteel society, yet upon arrival, as in the case of Rousseau's dinner

with Madame Bezenval, slight inconsistencies in simple mannerisms revealed his true background.

In many ways, these efforts were an early sort of field work. He was studying up, as they say, and

was attempting to become a participant observer of this separate culture of which he was already a
part, albeit at a much lower echelon.

At this point, we move into the crux of his ideas, that culture corrupts, and absolutist culture

corrupts absolutely. He sees morality as a cultural code, “the unwritten rules of conduct,

knowledge, and taste,” that bind a society together. However, as man becomes more civilized, he

becomes more courrupted. He went on to espouse this view, attacking the salons of Paris and the

artists who haunted them, calling them out as a source of this coruption.

Ironically, this gave him literary notoriety and placed him in the company of those he

condemned. His further writings were fashionable, and the arcticle discribes he himself, as

becoming 'fashionable'. Just as before though, he was not truly a memeber of this society he was

'studying up' to, and he came to realize he was more of a capering jester or a 'dancing bear' to the

aristocracy, than a member of their class.

He renounced his finery and left Paris to begin writing La Nouvelle Heloise, Emile, and The

Social Contract over the next 6 years. These books developed part of Rousseau's startling

revelation, they were discourses on the topics of Literature, education and politics. Next he wrote a

lengthy indictment, 'Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater which effectively cut what ties

remained to his salon friends, by declaring theater, and especially the contributers to it, corrupt. His

concept that the more civilized a thing, the more wicked it becomes, is rather personified by the

theater. Furthermore, it's corruption is something like a contagion, and the presence of this

proposed theater in Geneva would pervert the populace.

He swings ambivilantly back and fourth between the need for culture, and the evils of it

throughout his writings. He lauds civic activities in La Nouvelle Heloise, and in The Social

Contract he talks about culture as an essential element of democracy. This work influenced French

revolutionaries, and was reflected in celabration of the civic virtues, and the author points out that

“sanctions mattered less than education and elections less than festivals.” This is reflected even

today, as we “mix flag-waving and football...”

 In conclusion, Rousseau, who lived a life that shifted from sub-culture to sub-culture, from

class to class, somehow struck upon a unique understanding. He had learned to recognize the

symbolic forms of power and was able to convey his thoughts through moral rhetoric. His ideas

and conclusions were before his time, and their worth can still be applied hundreds of years past his

death.

Questions:

“Patriots obeyed the General Will spontaneously. They wanted the common good because they

were united by a common culture, the source of all morality.”

Do we think that is true today?

When we vote, is it for the common good- or the good of our own segement of our society within

our broader culture?

Is our culture so diverse and large that there isn't any ONE common good?

Would it be different if our population was smaller and more homogenous?