The Psychology of Inequality. Michael Locke McLendon

Their support for the average person is at best uneven and at worse insincere. Even if Rousseau had not read the letters and writings of his former friends (and he could not have read Rameau’s Nephew), he personally witnessed their contemptuous attitudes toward the masses and working classes. There is one particular experience, in fact, that perfectly sums up Rousseau’s criticisms of Paris and his defense of provincial life—one recorded by Baron d’Holbach himself. On Shrove Tuesday in 1754, Rousseau attended a reading on tragedy by the Abbé Petit, a provincial from Normandy, set up by Diderot at d’Holbach’s salon. The reading was a disaster from beginning to end, as the abbé began spouting out numerous absurdities on the nature of tragedy and quickly revealed he was utterly lacking in literary talent. Rather than politely allowing the abbé to finish and sending him on his way without any unnecessary encouragement, the attending members of the d’Holbach coterie were determined to humiliate him. They put “up a mock show of admiration for the wretched author’s tragedy.”¹⁷⁶ Rousseau was horrified by his friends’ puerile behavior, and he not so gently informed the author of the humiliating truth of the situation. Rather than thank Rousseau for his candor, however, the clueless abbé turned his anger on him, and the two had to be separated.

      Rousseau’s Anglo biographers, while intrigued by the story, usually fail to appreciate its significance. Typically, it is read in light of Rousseau’s fraying relationship with the philosophes.¹⁷⁷ The content of the dispute is far more revealing, however, and ties in with Rousseau’s arguments at the end of the First Discourse. The poor abbé becomes the object of ridicule for the sole reason that he lacks literary talent. The philosophes in the room affirm themselves based on their superior talent. And, worst of all, the value of the abbé’s personality would invariably decline in his own eyes if he understood and accepted the truth of the situation. If he would accept the truth, he would be led to erroneously conclude that his contributions to the world as a religious leader are meaningless and that his life has value only if he is a writer. For Rousseau, this must have been a cruel case in which life imitated art, and it probably reminded him of his worry that in a culture enamored of the arts and sciences a great clothier would be shamed into quitting his trade to become “a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer”¹⁷⁸—or, in this case, an awful literary theorist.

      Even if d’Alembert, Diderot, and the other philosophes were genuinely ambivalent about the mechanical arts, their occasional praise did nothing to soften the implications of judging people by their intellectual abilities. Rousseau’s position is that the philosophes could not simultaneously celebrate talent as the true measure of human worth and respect those without it, such as artisans and peasants. Moreover, their confidence that they had unique talents produced in the philosophes a subtle arrogance and contempt for the general mass of humanity. How much compassion can one expect, after all, from those who believe that the fate of the species rests on their shoulders? Rousseau asked the philosophes to repudiate themselves, and that they would not do. They would become who they were. Any concessions made to Rousseau masked their true intent: to double down on their original claims.

      In the years right after the publication of the First Discourse, then, Rousseau found himself in a debate not so much about the value of the arts and sciences as about the social value of the artists and scientists themselves. The philosophes, he realized, were promoting themselves as a social class as much as they were promoting the knowledge they sought to catalogue and began to adopt the attitudes of classical aristocrats. Included in this aristocratic glorification of the talented was a healthy, if not always publicly expressed, contempt for average people, who according to the new value system were encouraged to view themselves through the eyes of those who looked down on them. The psychological and existential consequences of this project, Rousseau well understood, were devastating to all but a small sliver of the population. As his dispute with the philosophes developed, the concept of amour-propre would increasingly become one of the most effective arrows in his quiver.

      Conclusion