To What Extent Can One Consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Represent Both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment Thought?

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To what extent can one consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau to represent both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thought? Jeans-Jacques Rousseau, although indisputably hailed as one of the most important philosophers in eighteenth century Europe, remains an elusive figure whose writings and ideologies cannot be neatly and clearly defined. The Genevan, arriving in France in the early 1740’s as a would-be Philosophe, rubbed shoulders with the most prominent thinkers of the French Enlightenment, such as Diderot, d’Alembert, Holbach and Voltaire, in the Parisian salons: the social base of the Republic of Letters. However, he may also be represented as an ex, or even anti-philosophe as Rousseau’s ideas grew further apart from his contemporaries during the 1750s. According to Hampson, ‘It may be argued with equal plausibility that Rousseau was either one of the greatest writers of the Enlightenment or it’s most eloquent and effective opponent’. In this essay I will compare Rousseau’s writings with his Enlightenment contemporaries, and examine to what extent he represents Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought. The main themes of comparison will include religion, knowledge and reason, systems of governance and nationalist sentiment. Max Weber’s appraisal of the Enlightenment as a “disenchantment of the world” is, perhaps, best exemplified in the philosophes dogged determination to banish superstititon, and rid society of the yoke of religious authority. The influence of philosophers such as Locke, Spinoza and Newton, resulted in a view of man as a quasi-divine entity,and the philosophes thus viewed religion as not only false, but superfluous. Christian ideologies, such as the belief in original sin, were rejected by Voltaire, with his opposing support of Amour de soi. For Dumarsais, the deity fell from heaven and civil society became a divinity upon earth. For

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