Nature and moral degradation in Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract

The pessimistic tone employed by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, as well as in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, draws the attention of the most careless reader. Indeed, when we observe the tone he adopts in these texts, it is no wonder that he dedicated a substantial part of his work to present what could be seen as a handful of attempts to solve the problems he first addressed in the texts presented to the Academy of Dijon.

On the other hand, the movements we observe on both Discourses seem to leave no doubt that Rousseau considered the decadence he observed in the society of his time as the inevitable result of a process which, once set in motion, would allow no escape. That would suffice to turn works such as The Social Contract into little more than tools to diagnose the woes that befall a society.

The tension between these two points of view, one concerning the desperate perception of our decadence and the other seeming to be the one of an author that aims at promoting change, shall be the guideline of this paper.