Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

1750

An unknown Genevan watchmaker's son won the Dijon academy prize with a perverse argument - that civilization had corrupted virtue, that progress was a kind of fall. Rousseau's essay sold in Paris salons like a cold drink in summer and gave Enlightenment Europe its first great interior critic. His later works would push the argument further, inspiring both the French Revolution and the Romantic movement.