Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78) French philosopher of the Age of Reason, whose ideas about society helped to shape the political events that resulted in the French Revolution. Rousseau was born a Protestant in Geneva, Switzerland, and became a Roman Catholic in the 1730s, but later in his life he reconverted to Protestantism in order to regain his citizenship rights in Geneva. In 1740, Rousseau moved to Paris and soon devoted himself to a career as a writer and composer. He contributed articles on music to the Encyclopédie of Diderot in the 1740s, and finally won fame for his essay, Discourses on Science and the Arts (1750). In The Social Contract (1762), he argued that man had been corrupted by civilization. His ideas on individual liberation from the constraints of society were developed in the novel Émile (1762). He described his early, wandering life in an autobiography, Confessions, published posthumously in 1782.