The world around Rousseau is growing ever more rational, scientific and technologically based. It is increasingly sensible, planned, sterile and bureaucratic. Against all of these, Rousseau emphasizes the child, the original rebel, the representative of everything that is pure, unschooled and outside of adult discipline.
For the first time in Western history, glamour is directed not at the attainment of reason and adult self-control but at the freedom from tradition and the natural innocence and the sweetness of the child.