Childhood and the Enlightenment

“On ne connait point l'enfance.” “People know nothing about childhood,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the preface to Emile, published in 1762 as an enlightened program of education and quickly acknowledged as the most important and influential study of children and childhood in the age of Enlightenment. “People always look for the man in the child,” Rousseau continued, “without thinking about what he was before becoming a man.” ¹ This prescription for learning about childhood by analytically distinguishing children from the adults they would eventually become contained within it the argument that historian Philippe Ariès would articulate two centuries later concerning the history of childhood in France: that the whole early modern revolution in thinking about children involved focusing on the childlike qualities of children rather than children as “small-scale adults.” ² The Enlightenment offered, on the one hand, a consummation of early modern historical development, looking back to the Renaissance, and at the same time, the eighteenth century marked the beginning of modern history, such that childhood in the age of the Enlightenment also pointed forward toward the social forms and concepts of modern and even contemporary childhood. Historian Lawrence Stone, considering early modern England, argued for the emergence of a “child-oriented, affectionate, and permissive mode” of family life in the eighteenth century, in the more general context of an early modern “affective individualism.” ³