The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth

by J. B. Bury

In his first Discourse he begins by appreciating the specious splendour of modern enlightenment, the voyages of man's intellect among the stars, and then goes on to assever that in the first place men have lost, through their civilisation, the original liberty for which they were born, and that arts and science, flinging garlands of flowers on the iron chains which bind them, make them love their slavery; and secondly that there is a real depravity beneath the fair semblance and "our souls are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection." Nor is this only a modern phenomenon; "the evils due to our vain curiosity are as old as the world." For it is a law of history that morals fall and rise in correspondence with the progress and decline of the arts and sciences as regularly as the tides answer to the phases of the moon. This "law" is exemplified by the fortunes of Greece, Rome, and China, to whose civilisations the author opposes the comparative happiness of the ignorant Persians, Scythians, and ancient Germans. "Luxury, dissoluteness, and slavery have been always the chastisement of the ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in which the Eternal Wisdom had placed us." There is the theological doctrine of the tree of Eden in a new shape.

Rousseau's attempt to show that the cultivation of science produces specific moral evils is feeble, and has little ingenuity; it is a declamation rather than an argument; and in the end he makes concessions which undo the effect of his impeachment. The essay did not establish even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and suggestive, and attracted more attention than Turgot's thoughtful discourse in the Sorbonne. D'Alembert deemed it worthy of a courteous expression of dissent; [Footnote: In the Disc. Prel. to the Encyclopaedia.] and Voltaire satirised it in his Timon.

2.

In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau dealt more directly with the effect of civilisation on happiness. He proposed to explain how it came about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that the strong were induced to serve the weak, and the people to purchase a fancied tranquillity at the price of a real felicity. So he stated his problem; and to solve it he had to consider the "state of nature" which Hobbes had conceived as a state of war and Locke as a state of peace. Rousseau imagines our first savage ancestors living in isolation, wandering in the forests, occasionally co-operating, and differing from the animals only by the possession of a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte de se perfectionner). After a stage in which families lived alone in a more or less settled condition, came the formation of groups of families, living together in a definite territory, united by a common mode of life and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but without laws or government or any social organisation.

It is this state, which was reached only after a long period, not the original state of nature, that Rousseau considers to have been the happiest period of the human race.

This period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our self-love, must be the happiest and most durable epoch. The more we reflect on it, the more we find that this state was the least exposed to revolutions and the best for man; and that he can have left it only through some fatal chance which, for the common advantage, should never have occurred. The example of the savages who have almost all been found in this state seems to bear out the conclusion that humanity was made to remain in it for ever, that it was the true youth of the world, and that all further progresses have been so many steps, apparently towards the perfection of the individual, and really towards the decrepitude of the species.

He ascribes to metallurgy and agriculture the fatal resolution which brought this Arcadian existence to an end. Agriculture entailed the origin of property in land. Moral and social inequality were introduced by the man who first enclosed a piece of land and said, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him. He was the founder of civil society.

The general argument amounts to this: Man's faculty of improving himself is the source of his other faculties, including his sociability, and has been fatal to his happiness. The circumstances of his primeval life favoured the growth of this faculty, and in making man sociable they made him wicked; they developed the reason of the individual and thereby caused the species to deteriorate. If the process had stopped at a certain point, all would have been well; but man's capacities, stimulated by fortuitous circumstances, urged him onward, and leaving behind him the peaceful Arcadia where he should have remained safe and content, he set out on the fatal road which led to the calamities of civilisation. We need not follow Rousseau in his description of those calamities which he attributes to wealth and the artificial conditions of society. His indictment was too general and rhetorical to make much impression. In truth, a more powerful and comprehensive case against civilised society was drawn up about the same time, though with a very different motive, by one whose thought represented all that was opposed to Rousseau's teaching. Burke's early work, A Vindication of Natural Society, [Footnote: A.D. 1756.] was written to show that all the objections which Deists like Bolingbroke urged against artificial religion could be brought with greater force against artificial society, and he worked out in detail a historical picture of the evils of civilisation which is far more telling than Rousseau's generalities. [Footnote: In his admirable edition of The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1915), p. 89, Vaughan suggests that in Rousseau's later works we may possibly detect "the first faint beginnings" of a belief in Progress, and attributes this to the influence of Montesquieu.]

3.

If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction. This was the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole theory out of court. But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to destroy all the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to put to death or silence all the savants, to pull down the cities, and burn the ships. He was not a mere dreamer, and his Arcadia was no more than a Utopian ideal, by the light of which he conceived that the society of his own day might be corrected and transformed. He attached his hopes to equality, democracy, and a radical change in education.