ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment’s first two truly serious, formidable opponents were among its first defectors: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788). Like many of the Enlightenment’s early critics, both had once been sympathetic to it. After his arrival in Paris in 1743, Rousseau became an homme de salon, friend of the philosophes and regular contributor to the Encyclopédie. As a student in Prussia, Hamann had been ‘a typical young German of the Aufklärung’ and a ‘disciple of the French lumières’.2 However, the trajectory of their views changed dramatically following transformative personal experiences each had which ultimately led them to turn against the French and German Enlightenments respectively. According to his Confessions, this experience occurred for Rousseau in 1749 while he was on his way to see his imprisoned friend Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie. It was then that he had his famous ‘illumination’ on the road to Vincennes while reading about an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. ‘From the moment I read these words,’ he later recorded, ‘I saw another universe and I became another man.’3 The intellectual product of this epiphany was Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), the principal contention of which is that ‘our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our Sciences and Arts to perfection’.4 He continued to denounce the ‘fatal enlightenment of Civil man’ (des lumières funestes de l’homme civil) for the rest
of his life, and fought a long and increasingly bitter war with the leading philosophes.5
