Rousseau's 1758 essay responding to d'Alembert's suggestion that Geneva should establish a theatre — arguing that theatre corrupts republican virtue because it teaches spectators to enjoy other people's passions vicariously rather than engaging in civic life, and specifically that comedy corrupts by making vice entertaining.
Provides the Rousseauian critique of mimetic culture — theatre creates the audience as passive spectators of lives not their own, which habituates them to emotional responses without moral consequences — making the anti-theatrical argument a political rather than merely moralistic one.
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