of their own aggrandizement.100 The best thing that could happen to genius, Rousseau argues, is for it to be left alone to develop free from all the temptations of society. On the other hand, he accepts that most of the artists and scientists of his day are not financially thriving. Unlike the new class of bankers and financiers, they are anything but lazy and rich. For Rousseau, this only proves how inequitable the new economy actually is. The artists and scientists who create wealth have no share in it and wind up supporting the lavish lifestyles of the shrewd, slothful, and greedy.101 Lastly, Rousseau acknowledges that intellectual life is home to all sorts of unproductive rivalries and conflicts. In his “Letter to Beaumont,” he even claims that books themselves are the great cause of conflict; they “are sources of inexhaustible disputes.”102
The second and third arguments shift away from disutility to aristocratic categories of vanity, identity, and natural superiority. Rousseau denigrates intellectuals as driven by nothing more than glory and ambition—by a desire to be publicly celebrated and socially important. Their motives resemble those found in Ajax. Artists and scientists are creatures of ego, more concerned with their own glory than any social good that might result from their pursuits.103 At best, a few great scientists and philosophers can practice their trade without being corrupted by it: “Science is not suited to man in general.”104 His soon to be former friends, he believed, were nothing more than self-serving phonies who managed to create a mean-spirited culture that made Socrates’ treatment by Athens seem tame by comparison.
Rousseau’s third argument continues this theme but considers it from the opposite side of the social spectrum. Rather than focusing exclusively on the winners, as did the ancient Greeks, Rousseau contends that the social esteem accorded to intellectual talent and genius demeans the overwhelming mass of ordinary citizens. In this new world of the arts and sciences, the basis of individual identity is dramatically altered, as identities based on moral character and citizenship give way to ones based on talent. In one passage, he laments that “we have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens; or if we still have some left, dispersed in our abandoned rural areas.”105 In another, he complains that “people no longer ask about a man whether he has probity, but whether he has talents.”106 For the ordinary working-class and peasant citizens, Rousseau be lieves this shift is psychically catastrophic, as they can only be demeaned by this new value structure. Those “to whom Heaven has not vouchsafed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory” will find life frustrating and demoralizing because they will be encouraged to think they are valuable only if they are engaged in the arts and sciences.107 They will thus be judged by traits they lack: “Someone who all his whole life will be a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer, might perhaps have become a great clothier.”108 Or, again from “Preface to Narcissus,” “men are rewarded only for qualities which do not depend on them: for we are born with our talents, only our virtues belong to us.”109 And Rousseau worries that they could not help but feel bitter, resentful, and envious: “Let us know how to rest content … without envying the glory of those famous men who render themselves immortal in the Republic of Letters.”110 Outside the great urban intellectual centers, Rousseau argues, people are judged by their own good character and patriotism, which are things everyone can develop. In Paris and others cities in which talent replaces virtue as the standard for what it means to be an excellent human being, most people will come to loathe themselves and think they are of no value.111 Societies that overvalue intellectual talent thus contain within them a bizarre and existentially troublesome contradiction. They still require farmers, clothiers, watchmakers, and others but refuse them the social basis for self-respect.
Thus, Voltaire’s project to elevate the men of letters to an aristocratic station would result in a modern form of the Homeric honor culture. Rousseau was well aware of how the common person fares in such a world. He fought against it throughout his career and consistently warned his fellow Europeans against talent-based public identities. “In a well-constituted State,” he writes in “Preface to Narcissus,” “all citizens are so equal that no one is preferred to others as being neither the most learned nor even the most skillful.”112 In Emile, he directs his tutee to “desire mediocrity in everything, without excepting even beauty.”113 And, in unpublished notes, he approvingly cites the lack of stature of great writers in antiquity. Neither Homer nor Virgil, he claims, were considered great men despite their considerable ability. Agreeing with his ancient counterparts, he asserts that if “it is not impossible for an author to be a great man, it is not by writing books either in verse or in prose that he will become such.”114 On the other side of the coin, he also makes sure to hold up the working classes as the salt of the earth. He portrays them as the beacon of humanity and idealized their traits of simplicity, moderation, hard work, and authenticity as universal virtues to which everyone should aspire. In “Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater,” he praises “provincial men” as possessing “more original spirits, more inventive industry” and being “less imitative” than their Parisian counterparts. And, of course, rural genius “compares itself to no one.”115 His message to his Parisian colleagues is clear: do not take being an intellectual too seriously.
Rousseau and Adam Ferguson
Rousseau’s narrative shows up in a more economic form in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. In the Essay, Ferguson echoes Hume’s view that increased productivity fuels a luxury economy, which in turn gives rise to new and more cognitively challenging occupations in such fields as banking and law. He follows Rousseau, however, by contending that these economic developments lead to a psychically bruising preoccupation with talent-based identities. In the new luxury economy, the identity of a person is a function of his occupation: “Each individual is defined by his calling.”116 Naturally, those with more intellectually challenging jobs are able to garner more social esteem. Led by “applause as well as profit,”117 the so-called best and brightest flocked to careers in law and finance in order to occupy a social status as high as possible. By contrast, the vast majority of workers, who remain in the older professions, the mechanical arts or farming, occupy the lower rungs. There is, moreover, a new class of factory workers that have even less challenging jobs. Because of the division of labor and industrialization, these individuals spend all their days performing mindless repetitive tasks. Accordingly, they are deprived of any intellectual stimulation and likely become dullards. They are mere cogs in machines: “Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered an engine, the part of which are men.”118 Adam Smith observes this phenomenon before Ferguson and more bluntly calls such workers “stupid.” In Lectures on Jurisprudence, he proclaims: “It is remarkable that in every commercial nation the low people are exceedingly stupid.”119 He repeats the charge in The Wealth of Nations, asserting that the average worker “naturally loses … the habit of exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”120 Presumably, those on the assembly line become the dregs of society, invariably demoralized and ashamed of themselves. Individuals in more elevated professions—ones that require study and skill—look down on them and view them as men viewed slaves and women in earlier “rude” ages. As in Rousseau’s passage on the competition for esteem, the winners become vain and contemptuous of those below them, and the losers become envious and self-loathing. Ferguson’s conclusion is likewise Rousseauian: “In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of the few must depress the many.”121
Ferguson buttresses his case by contending that this problem is specific to modern commercial societies. The old aristocracies in “rude” civilizations, strangely enough, were far less enamored of talent and ability and maintained a general egalitarianism. Ferguson grants that during such ages some people might have been better warriors or had some special talents and that natural inequalities were ubiquitous. They were only recognized, however, during a hunt or whatever activity was taking place: “In times of relaxation,” which was most of the time, there was “no vestige of power or prerogative.”122