Introduction

Enlightenment-bashing, whether from the standpoint of romanticism, existentialism, critical theory, structuralism, or deconstruction, continues to be a favorite activity of intellectuals, many of whom wish to call the entire tradition of "humanism" into question. In this chapter, the author aims to distinguish between two broad trends in the interpretive literature dealing with Rousseau and the Enlightenment. One is a persistent effort to remove Rousseau from the Enlightenment by treating him as a preromantic, a maneuver first effected by literary critics and revived in more recent times by historians of science. The second major interpretive trend, represented most ably by Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, places Rousseau within the eighteenth century but buries his powerful internal critique of the age of Enlightenment through the device of treating him as just one more philosophe. The chapter also presents some of the key concepts discussed in this book.