Arts Born of Vice
The arts and sciences do not arise from noble impulse. Astronomy was born of superstition, rhetoric of ambition, physics of idle curiosity. Every branch of learning traces its origin to some human vice. More damagingly, they require luxury for their maintenance: without courts, patrons, and wealthy consumers, the arts cannot flourish. Art and virtue occupy the same ecological niche and one drives out the other.
Their evil origin is, indeed, but too plainly reproduced in their objects. What would become of the arts, were they not cherished by luxury? If men were not unjust, of what use were jurisprudence? What would become of history, if there were no tyrants, wars, or conspiracies?
From Virtue to Slavery
Rousseau reconstructs a historical pattern repeated across Egypt, Greece, and Rome: a nation begins in simplicity and virtue, grows rich through conquest or commerce, cultivates arts and letters, loses its martial vigour, and is eventually conquered or enslaved. The arts do not cause this decline — they are its symptom and its accelerant. Greece was twice the conqueror of Asia when letters were in their infancy; it became the perpetual slave of others once philosophy had triumphed.
Thus it is that luxury, profligacy and slavery, have been, in all ages, the scourge of the efforts of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance, in which the wisdom of providence had placed us.
The Paradox of Civilisation
The conclusion Rousseau draws is not that nations should abolish the arts, but that they should recognise the trade-off they are making. Every advance in cultural refinement is purchased at the cost of some civic virtue. The question is whether the gain is worth the price — and Rousseau, writing his first major work, answers no.
Luxury and its consequences are discussed in Part II of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750). G.D.H. Cole translation, 1913.
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