Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer whose thought on politics, education, and human nature became central to the Enlightenment. [1] His 1762 treatise The Social Contract argued that legitimate government rests on the general will of the people, an idea that later influenced the French Revolution and modern democratic theory. [1] He was also an important novelist and autobiographer, remembered for Julie, or the New Heloise, Emile, and the posthumous Confessions. [2]
Early life and education
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva, a Calvinist city-state where his father worked as a watchmaker. [1] His mother died days after his birth, and his upbringing was irregular; he left Geneva at sixteen and spent years wandering through Savoy, Italy, and France, working by turns as an engraver's apprentice, servant, tutor, and music copyist. [1] Largely self-taught, he absorbed the ideas of his age through wide reading and, from the early 1740s, through the intellectual circles of Paris, where he befriended Denis Diderot and contributed articles on music to the Encyclopedie. [3]
Major works
Rousseau achieved sudden fame in 1750 with his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, which contended that progress in the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than improved human morals. [2] He extended this theme in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), contrasting a peaceful "natural" human being with the competitive individual produced by society and private property. [3] His most influential political work, The Social Contract (1762), opened with the celebrated claim that "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," and held that legitimate authority derives from the general will of the citizens rather than from force or inheritance. [1]
Education and the novel
In the same year he published Emile, or On Education, a work cast partly as a novel that argued children should be allowed to develop according to nature before being introduced to social convention. [2] His epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was among the best-selling books of the century and helped shape the era's sentimental and Romantic sensibility. [3] Rousseau also composed music; his opera Le Devin du village (1752) was performed before the French court. [1]
Later life and controversy
The religious and political ideas in Emile and The Social Contract provoked condemnation in both Paris and Geneva, and Rousseau fled into exile, living in Switzerland and, briefly, in England at the invitation of David Hume, with whom he later quarrelled. [1] Increasingly suspicious and isolated, he devoted his final years to autobiographical writing, most notably the Confessions, an unusually candid self-examination published after his death. [2] He died at Ermenonville, near Paris, on 2 July 1778. [1]
Legacy
Rousseau's emphasis on popular sovereignty and the general will influenced leaders of the French Revolution, and his writings left a lasting mark on democratic theory, educational thought, and the Romantic movement. [3] In 1794 his remains were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris. [1]
