Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Pre-reading
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 1712-July 1778) was a Swissborn philosopher, author, political theorist, composer, and ranked one of the greatest figures of the French Enlightenment. At age 30, Rousseau moved to Paris where he joined Denis Diderot at the center of the philosophies. His first major work, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), argued that man is good by nature but has been corrupted by society and civilization. His light opera The Cunning Man (1752) was widely admired.
In Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1754), he argued against Thomas Hobbes that human life before the formation of societies was healthy, happy, and free and that vice arose as the result of social organization and especially the introduction of private property. Civil society, he held, comes into being only to ensure peace and to protect property, which not everyone has; it thus represents a fraudulent social contract that reinforces inequality.
In The Social Contract (1762), which begins with the memorable line, Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains. Rousseau argues that a civil society based on a genuine social contract rather than a fraudulent one would provide people with a better kind of freedom in exchange for their natural independence, namely, political liberty, which he understands as obedience to a self-imposed law created by the general will.
In 1762 the publication of Emile, a treatise on education, produced outrage, and Rousseau was forced to flee to Switzerland. He began showing signs of mental instability in 1767, and he died insane. Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1770), which he modeled on the work of the same title by St. Augustine, is among the most famous autobiographies.
Rousseau’s immense influence arises from his being the first true philosopher of Romanticism. In his many themes that came to dominate intellectual life of the next one hundred years are first found: the lost unity of humankind and nature; the elevation of feeling and innocence and the downgrading of the intellect; a dynamic conception of human history and its different stages; a faith in teleology and in the possibility of recapturing a vanished freedom.