Just thinking aloud here.... Jean Jacques Rousseau became famous as an advocate of a philosophy that sounded to his contemporaries like a primitivism. (There is a good deal of dispute among scholars as to whether primitivism in the usual sense is what Rousseau actually meant, but rightly or wrongly, it is the appearance of primitivism that made him an Enlightenment star.) His first successful philosophical work was his "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences." He wrote it in response to an essay contest inspired by the Academy of Dijon, which had asked the contestants, "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?" The wording of the question indicated that the Academy thought there were two possible answers -- (1), no, human moral character st...