1750

1750 marks Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sudden emergence as a major figure in Parisian literary life and the beginning of the period in which he developed the ideas that culminated in The Social Contract and Emile. His prize-winning Discourse on the Arts and Sciences brought immediate fame, but the introduction treats it as an early, one-sided argument rather than a finished political theory.

The prize and publication

Rousseau’s political ambitions preceded the Discourse. He later recalled that, while attached to the Embassy at Venice in 1743, he had conceived a large work on political institutions intended to establish his reputation. He made little progress, however, until he encountered the Academy of Dijon’s 1749 prize question: whether the progress of the arts and sciences had purified or corrupted morality.

The question revived his earlier ideas. Disillusioned with the life he had been leading among the Parisian lumières, Rousseau composed a forceful attack on civilization. The Academy awarded it the prize, and he published it in 1750. The result was an abrupt reversal in his public standing: he became famous at once and a celebrated presence in Parisian literary circles. Responses came from a wide range of opponents, including professors, writers, theologians, and the King of Poland.

An early argument, not a settled system

The Discourse links the evils of modern nations—immorality and misery—to their departure from a natural state, then assigns the arts and sciences responsibility for that departure. Rousseau already treats nature as an ideal against which society can be judged. At this stage, though, he does not distinguish carefully between different kinds of departure from nature or weigh the limits of his argument. He presses a single idea with little qualification.

The introduction accordingly describes the work as an advocate’s speech: energetic, deliberately one-sided, and rhetorically powerful, but lacking the order and balance of a reasoned treatise. Rousseau himself later judged it weak in argument and harmony. Its force and warmth, in his account, had arrived before he had learned the craft of writing with control. The work’s historical importance therefore lies less in a complete doctrine than in the way its bold claim launched debate and marked the beginning of his intellectual development.

Fame and intellectual development

The prize-winning publication established Rousseau’s position as a writer, while the controversy that followed gave him an occasion to develop his thinking. He tried to answer the many refutations, and the effort of argument helped his ideas evolve. From 1750 until the publication of The Social Contract and Emile in 1762, he gradually formed the political views that the introduction regards as his distinctive contribution.

The introduction also records the Discourse’s unusually broad reception: even D’Alembert devoted the preface to the Encyclopédie to refuting it. Yet public notoriety and intellectual maturity remain distinct in this account. The Discourse made Rousseau’s name, but its value as a guide to his thought is chiefly developmental: it shows an early thinker deploying an uncompromising ideal of nature before learning to discriminate and qualify its implications.