Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

Original edition
Author	Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Original title	Discours sur les sciences et les arts
Country	France
Language	French
Publisher	Geneva, Barillot & fils [i. e. Paris, Noël-Jacques Pissot]
Publication date	1750
Published in English	London, W. Owen, 1751

A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (1750), also known as Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (French: Discours sur les sciences et les arts) and commonly referred to as The First Discourse, is an essay by Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau which argued that the arts and sciences corrupt human morality. It was Rousseau's first successful published philosophical work, and it was the first expression of his influential views about nature vs. society, to which he would dedicate the rest of his intellectual life. This work is considered one of his most important works.

Rousseau wrote Discourse in response to an advertisement that appeared in a 1749 issue of Mercure de France, in which the Academy of Dijon set a prize for an essay responding to the question: "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?" According to Rousseau, "Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man." Rousseau found the idea to which he would passionately dedicate the rest of his intellectual life: the destructive influence of civilization on human beings. Rousseau went on to win first prize in the contest in July 1750 and—in an otherwise mundane career as composer and playwright, among other things—he had newfound fame as a philosopher. Scholar Jeff J.S. Black points out that Rousseau is one of the first thinkers within the modern democratic tradition to question the political commitment to scientific progress found in most modern societies (especially liberal democracies) and examined the costs of such policies. In the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau "authored a scathing attack on scientific progress...an attack whose principles he never disavowed, and whose particulars he repeated, to some extent, in each of his subsequent writings."

Rousseau's account about his initial encounter with the question has become well known. Rousseau's friend Denis Diderot had been imprisoned at Vincennes for writing a work questioning the idea of a providential God. As he walked to the prison to visit him, Rousseau was perusing a copy of the Mercury of France, and when his eyes fell upon the question posed by the Academy of Dijon, he felt a sudden and overwhelming inspiration "that man is naturally good, and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked". Rousseau was able to retain only some of the thoughts, the "crowd of truths", that flowed from that idea—these eventually found their way into his Discourses and his novel Emile.