Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), was born at Geneva. He resided in Switzerland, France, and Italy, and (in 1766–7) in England. He maintained himself by a succession of clerical, secretarial, and tutorial posts and by teaching and copying music. His life-long interest in music and excursions into opera and drama, a voluminous correspondence, and important and influential contributions to social and political philosophy, the novel, autobiography, moral theology, and educational theory mark him out as one of the dominant writers and thinkers of the age.

Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) was the first of many works in which the natural man is preferred to his civilized counterpart; he argued that the development and spread of knowledge and culture, far from improving human behaviour, had corrupted it by promoting inequality, idleness, and luxury. The Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité (1755) contrasts the innocence and contentment of primitive man in a ‘state of nature’ with the dissatisfaction and perpetual agitation of modern social man.

A return to primitive innocence being impossible, these ills were only to be remedied, Rousseau held, by reducing the gap separating modern man from his natural archetype and by modifying existing institutions in the interest of equality and happiness. Émile (1762) lays down the principles for a new scheme of education in which the child is to be allowed full scope for individual development in natural surroundings, shielded from the harmful influences of civilization, in order to form an independent judgement and a stable character. Du contrat social (1762) is his theory of politics, in which he advocated universal justice through equality before the law, a more equitable distribution of wealth, and defined government as fundamentally a matter of contract providing for the exercise of power in accordance with the ‘general will’ and for the common good, by consent of the citizens as a whole, in whom sovereignty ultimately resides.

In the novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau's greatest popular success, a critical account of contemporary manners and ideas is interwoven with the story of the passionate love of the tutor St Preux and his pupil Julie, their separation, Julie's marriage to the Baron Wolmar and the dutiful, virtuous life shared by all three on the Baron's country estate.

The posthumously published autobiographical works Les Confessions (1781–8) and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782) were written as exercises in self-justification and self-analysis. Unexampled in their time for candour, detail, and subtlety, they remain landmarks of the literature of personal revelation and reminiscence.