The salons were literary institutions that relied on a new ethic of polite sociability based on hospitality, distinction, and the entertainment of the elite. The salons were open to intellectuals, who used them to find protectors and sponsors and to fashion themselves as 'hommes du monde.' In the salons after 1770 there emerged a radical critique of worldliness, inspired by Rousseau. These radicals denounced the mechanisms of polite sociability and called for a new model of the independent writer, who would address the public and the nation.