Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Early life

Self-education

Early success

Early writings about society

Montmorency

Thoughts on childhood

The “Social Contract.”

Last years

WORKS BY ROUSSEAU

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

In most of his writings, not merely in the Contrat social, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was obsessed by the demands of life in society, by the relationships of dependence and subordination which it creates among men, and by the rivalries and enmities which it engenders. Society, which should bring men together, in fact sets them apart and makes them enemies to their fellow men. Rousseau first became aware of this paradox not in terms of clearly conceived ideas but of deeply felt experience. In the course of a tormented and eventful life, he felt poignantly the injustice of a social order founded on the inequality of status and the impossibility of achieving happiness in such a society. To an unusual extent it is necessary to know about Rousseau’s life in order to understand his work.

Early life

Rousseau was born in Geneva; although he spent the greater part of his life in France, he always felt himself to be a stranger there and made a great point of indicating his attachment for his “fatherland” by adding to his name the title “Citizen of Geneva.”

It was in Geneva and in the surrounding countryside that his childhood years were spent. He never knew his mother, who died shortly after his birth, and, as he often noted, the education he received from his father was an unusual one. Isaac Rousseau was a capable watchmaker but an odd and temperamental man, and he all too early inculcated in his son a taste for reading by having him read novels and Plutarch’s Lives. “When I was six,” Rousseau wrote in a letter to Malesherbes, dated January 12, 1762, “I happened upon Plutarch; at eight I knew him by heart. I had read all the available novels, which had made me shed buckets of tears before the age when the heart usually takes an interest in such works. From them was formed in me that heroic and romantic taste which up to the present time has continued to grow, and which made me disgusted with everything except what resembled my follies” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 1134 in the Gallimard edition). Alluding to this reading, as well as to his precocious sensibility and troubling sensuality, Rousseau later wrote in the Confessions: “My childhood was not that of a child; my feelings and thoughts were always those of a man” (ibid., p. 62).

At the age of 13, Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver, who punished him harshly for petty thefts and pranks. After three years, a chance event, in which later he was to see a sign of destiny, put an end to this apprenticeship and led to his departure from his native city. One Sunday in March 1728, he returned from a country walk too late to enter the city gates, and rather than return to Geneva the next morning, he chose to try his fortune. This adventure led him eventually to Turin, to the Hospice of the Holy Ghost, where, abjuring “the religion of my fathers,” he became a Roman Catholic, apparently without serious awareness of what such a conversion meant for him. “I became a Catholic,” he was to say at the end of his life, “but I always remained a Christian” (ibid., vol. 1, p. 1013).

Self-education

Unable to find a means of livelihood in Turin, Rousseau went in 1729 to Annecy in Savoy, to live with Mme. de Warens, “the good woman” who had received him hospitably when he first fled from Geneva. The time he spent in Savoy, from 1729 to 1742, was a decisive period for his formation as a writer.

About thirty years old, Mme. de Warens was herself a new convert to Catholicism and something of an adventuress. She encouraged Rousseau’s affection for her, and he lived with her until he finally resolved to seek his fortune in Paris. At first she treated him as a son, but after a time he became her lover. Rousseau’s life in Savoy was both happy and free; according to the Confessions, those 12 years were “the one short period of happiness of my entire life.”

The years he spent with Mme. de Warens, not only at Annecy but also at Chambery and Les Charmettes, were chiefly years of study. Whereas the other great writers of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and even Diderot, were formally educated, Rousseau taught himself. Everything he learned, as he said in the Confessions with all the pride of an autodidact, he learned by himself. At Les Charmettes, his passion for reading was reawakened, and he ranged over all domains of learning, carefully jotting down excerpts from his readings in notebooks that became veritable “storehouses of ideas.” When he began studying the sciences, he did geometry exercises, performed chemistry experiments, and even made astronomical observations. Finally he learned music. Although “born for this art,” he had received no musical instruction, and at the time of his arrival at Annecy, he could hardly read a musical score. Ten years later, he was to be able both to compose music and to direct an orchestra; by a “determined study of the obscure books of Rameau” and other scholarly works, he had acquired a profound knowledge of musical composition and theory.

It was with this baggage of knowledge that he left Savoy in 1742. Like his departure from Geneva in 1728, this was also a flight. Rousseau felt that he no longer occupied the same place in Mme. de Warens’ life. But this time he left with a specific goal—that of submitting to the Academy of Sciences the system of musical notation he had invented.

Early success

Rousseau arrived in Paris during the summer of 1742, equipped with only a few letters of recommendation and his system of musical notation. He had come to the city in quest of fame, but for ten years he was obliged, as Jean Guehenno put it, to “mark time in the crowd of men of letters” (1948–1952).

He succeeded in interesting various ladies of Parisian society in his fate, and one of them obtained employment for him as secretary to the new French ambassador in Venice. The stay in Venice was important because it was there that he first conceived the ideas that were fully developed in his Contrat social (1762a). His conflicts with the ambassador, however, were such that after a year he was dismissed. Naively, he expected that the ambassador would be blamed and the secretary vindicated, but he was quickly disillusioned. From then on, he was convinced that there was no reason to expect any kind of justice from a social order founded on inequality of status.

Upon his return to Paris, he began a liaison with an uneducated young domestic servant, Therese Levasseur, who became his lifetime companion and who served him both as housekeeper and as nurse. According to the Confessions, several children were born from this liaison; all of them were placed in the Foundlings’ Home. Although Rousseau later felt that it had been a “mistake” to abandon his children, he nevertheless did so, according to the Confessions, “without the slightest scruple.” He could not afford to rear a family on his earnings as a writer; besides, he was only following “local custom,” since in 1745 almost a third of all the infants born in Paris were abandoned to institutional care.

Two successes, one literary, the other musical, lifted Rousseau out of obscurity. In 1749, the Academy of Dijon, which was then one of the flourishing provincial academies, announced an essay contest dealing with the following question: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” Rousseau entered the contest and won the prize by replying “No.” In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) he first developed a theme to which he reverted constantly in his later work: the contrast between ancient and modern peoples. He found the former to be virtuous, by reason of their ignorance, their simplicity, and even their coarseness of manner, whereas the latter are too subtly refined not to be corrupt. Yet had historians paid closer attention to the Discours, they would have avoided the mistake of reducing Rousseau’s thought to a simple antithesis between man’s natural goodness and his corruption by society. This antithesis is doubtless of great importance, but it should not obscure his more basic premise that all peoples are precisely what their social institutions make them. Rousseau’s essay provoked various polemics, including a refutation by the Polish king Stanislas, and these polemics undoubtedly gave Rousseau very useful publicity.

A short time later, Rousseau the musician was to have the same success as Rousseau the writer. In 1752 he devin du village was played twice at Fontainebleau for Louis xv, and the following year several times at the Opéra. “Le devin du village,” Rousseau said in the Confessions, “added the finishing touch to my popularity, and I became the most sought after man in Paris” (Oeuvres completes, vol. 1, p. 369 in the Gallimard edition). Indeed, at this period he was known primarily as a musician, but he had the wisdom to give up music in order to devote himself entirely to literature.

Early writings about society

It was in the ten years of intense literary production from 1752 to 1762 that Rousseau composed his most important writings. The first of these was the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1755). It was a work of circumstance, since Rousseau was again answering a question proposed by the Academy of Dijon. However, the subject was so close to his own concerns that he could not have chosen a more appropriate one himself. For Rousseau, inequality is the original evil, the one that engenders all others. Thus, by opposing “the equality which nature established among men,” to “the inequality which men have instituted,” Rousseau, in this second Discours, made a case against life in society similar to the case against civilization that he had made in the first.

His article “Economie politique,” published in 1755 in the fifth volume of the Encyclope’die, was written in the same period as the second Discours. The article is a short political treatise in which the author expounded his ideas on government, public education, and state finances. While the second Discours is essentially a work of criticism, intended to underline all the evils created for man by life in society, by private property, and by social inequality, “ficonomie politique” shows the positive, constructive side of Rousseau’s thought.

Montmorency

Rousseau had completed the writing of the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité in 1754 and had it printed in Holland in 1755. He dedicated it to the Republic of Geneva, and in the dedication he praised his native city, its government, and its magistrates, giving himself up completely to his republican enthusiasm and patriotic zeal. Upon his return to his native land in June 1754, he decided to become a Protestant again in order to resume his rights as a Genevan citizen. He attached so little importance to matters of cult and to those questions which divided the Christian confessions that he failed for the second time to attribute religious significance to the change. “Believing that there were not two ways for a reasonable man to be a Christian, I believed also,” he wrote in the Confessions, “that all matters of formality and discipline in any state fall within the purview of the laws” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 392 in the Gallimard edition). Thus, his return to the religion of his fathers was, in effect, a civic act rather than a religious one.

In the patriotic joy of his homecoming, Rousseau may have intended to settle in Geneva. If such was indeed his intention, it was an idea which he quickly abandoned. Voltaire had just moved into Les Délices, quite near Geneva, and Rousseau knew well enough that there was not room for both of them in his native city. He also knew that he would be less free in Geneva than in France to publish his writings under his own name. This consideration weighed heavily in his decision to accept the invitation of Mme. d’Épinay to move to L’Ermitage, a summer house which she had prepared for him on her estate on the edge of the Montmorency forest. After so many years spent in Paris, “city of noise, smoke, and mud,” Rousseau was delighted to return to country life. However, he stayed there less than two years; he moved in during April 1756 and left in December 1757, after a memorable quarrel with Mme. d’Épinay, with Grimm, and even with Diderot. The origins of the quarrel lay in Rousseau’s infatuation with Sophie d’Houdetot, a sister-in-law of Mme. d’fipinay. The young countess encouraged his passion, if she did not share it; it was the great passion of Rousseau’s mature life. The novel he was writing, La nouvelle He’loise (1760), was one source of his involvement: he fell in love with Mme. d’Houdetot, seeing in her his own heroine Julie—a case of literary creation giving rise to events in real life.

The amorous involvement at L’Ermitage lasted barely four months. Mme. d’Houdetot ended all communication with Rousseau as soon as she saw herself compromised by his indiscretions. Rousseau suspected Diderot of having divulged the secret and, feeling himself betrayed, decided not merely to break with Diderot but to break with him publicly, which he did in the Preface to his Lettre à M. d’Alembert (1758).

Despite the break with Diderot and Mme. d’Épinay, Rousseau refused either to return to Paris or to leave the Montmorency forest, which he had made his “study.” He stayed on at Montmorency for more than four years, first in a house he rented in the Mont-Louis park, and then in the Petit Chateau of the marshal of Luxembourg.

While at L’Ermitage, Rousseau abandoned once and for all the idea of writing a work entitled “La morale sensitive ou le matérialisme du sage.” He postponed the final version of his Dictionnaire de musique (which was not finished until 1764 in Môtiers and not published until 1768 in Paris). He tried to finish a work on the abbé de Saint-Pierre as quickly as possible, and therefore he unfortunately gave up his original plan to analyze all the abbé’s projets and to write his biography, for which, he felt, he “had collected some rather good materials.” Instead, he dealt only with the Projet de paix perpétuelle and the Polysynodie (a proposal for multiple advisory councils), presenting a “critique” after each.

Shortly after moving to Mont-Louis, in February 1758, Rousseau wrote the Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles. This was again a work prompted by circumstance. D’Alembert had written the article “Genève,” published in the fall of 1757 in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédic Two passages in the article, both inspired by Voltaire, caught Rousseau’s attention—a malicious praise of the Genevan clergy (”a number of Genevan pastors have no other religion than pure socinianism“) and a plea for the establishment of a theater in the city. Preferring to let the pastors defend themselves, Rousseau passed rapidly over the religious question, and he devoted the greater part of the work to public entertainment generally, not simply to the theater, as is often supposed. Indeed, the Lettre a M. d’Alembert contains, in addition to Rousseau’s criticism of the theater and of actors, a rough outline of a sociology of entertainment, considering entertainment in relation to the society for which it is intended. Thus, monarchies can support the luxury of a theater, but republics, and particularly small cities, require forms of entertainment more appropriate to them, such as festivals, public balls, games, dances, concerts, gymnastic competitions, and military parades; in short, free entertainment held in the open air.

According to the Confessions, Rousseau wrote the Lettre à M. d’Alembert in only three weeks and then devoted his time to the completion of his novel, which was printed in Holland by Marc-Michel Rey. La nouvelle Héloïse appeared in the beginning of 1761, under the title Lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes, recueillies et publiées par J.-J. Rousseau. It enjoyed an immediate and huge success with the public and ever since has been counted among the masterpieces of European literature.

Thoughts on childhood

With La nouvelle Héloïse finished, Rousseau returned to two other major projects: Émile (1762b), which was to present his system of education, and the “Institutions politiques.” He did finish a full-scale version of the first; the second was reduced to a short treatise, to which he gave the title Du contrat social, ou prin-cipes du droit politique (1762a). Both works have become classics, in pedagogy and political science, respectively.

An innovator in almost all domains, Rousseau gave proof of his originality especially in his treatise on education, which has so much in common with the pedagogy of our own time. His object in Émile was not to make a craftsman or a gentleman of his pupil; his aim was to “educate him to be a man,” for, as he said, “a natural education should fit him for any human vocation.” Instead of letting himself become imprisoned within the narrow framework of pedagogy, Rousseau conceived of his book as a reflection upon man and man’s estate. “It matters little to me,” he said further, “that I have written a novel. Human nature itself makes a rather fine novel” (Oeuvres complétes, vol. 2, p. 387 in the Hachette edition). But while the object of education is to form a man, its subject is the child. Rousseau reproached his predecessors for having forgotten this fact, and he blamed adults in general for being unable to imagine any mentality other than their own. “Childhood,” he said, “has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try to replace them with ours” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 37). There is, then, a mentality peculiar to the child, and the first aim must be to understand it. Rousseau is probably the first to have linked the science of education to the scientific understanding of the child, and for this reason he is rightfully recognized today as the precursor and even the founder of child psychology.

Nevertheless, his conception of childhood remained theoretical rather than experimental, for it rested almost entirely on an analogy drawn between the state of childhood and the state of nature. The child is as alone in human society as the savage in the thick of his woods. It is because of the child’s natural solitude that Rousseau warned against premature socialization. “Parents who live in civilized society bring their children into it too young” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 51). The second mistake to avoid is that of reasoning with children, since the other characteristic common to both childhood and the state of nature is a life governed by pure instinct; reason awakens and develops only with age and through social relationships. This is why Rousseau divided education into two distinct phases: the first, education concerned with the world of things, occupies the period of childhood; the second, moral education, must be put off until the beginning of adolescence, when the young man, having become involved in social relationships, develops his reason naturally, rather than prematurely, because he needs it to control his awakening passions. “The proper study of man is the study of his relationships. As long as he knows himself only through his physical being, he must study himself in relation to things; this is the program of his childhood: when he begins to sense his moral being, he must study himself in relation to men; this is the program of his entire life …” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 184).

The “Social Contract.”

While Émile is a treatise on man, the Contrat social is a treatise on the citizen, but both are inspired by the same ideal—they are intended to safeguard liberty, which is constantly threatened by social relationships and social institutions. “The greatest good,” said Rousseau in Émile, “is not authority, but liberty.” Relationships of authority are almost always arbitrary or tend to become so. “Dependence among men being without order or rule,” authority gradually transforms itself into domination and obedience into servitude. If, therefore, liberty is to be preserved, this dependence among men must be eliminated or at least subjected to regulation. From this point of view, the requirements of liberty create the same task for the legislator as for the educator. Natural education, we have seen, consists in withdrawing the child from dependence upon adults in order to subject him to dependence upon things. Similarly, the art of politics consists in making each citizen extremely dependent upon the polis in order to free him from dependence upon other citizens (Contrat social, book 2, chapter 12 in Oeuvres completes, vol. 3, p. 394 in the Gallimard edition).

Not only are the various clauses of the Contratsocial finally reducible to a single stipulation—”the total surrender of each individual with all his rights to the whole community” (ibid., vol. 3, p. 360)— but the contract or pact correspondingly establishes the absolute supremacy of the state over all its members. Unlike Locke or Montesquieu, Rousseau asserted no fundamental law, nor did he place constitutional limitations on sovereignty. “It is the essence of Sovereign Power,” Rousseau said in 1764, in his Lettres écrites de la montagne, “to be illimitable; it is omnipotent or it is nothing” (ibid., vol. 3, p. 826). Rousseau’s political doctrine excludes any balance or equilibrium of powers; there is in the state only one supreme power, to which all others are subordinated. The sovereign people can at any time change its rulers and its laws or modify the form of its governmental administration and the constitution of the state. In principle there is nothing it cannot do.

It is understandable, therefore, that a considerable number of historians have reproached Rousseau for having paid only lip service to the cause of liberty and for having in fact opened the gates to despotism, collectivism, and totalitarianism. In France, he has been blamed for having sacrificed, through his theory of sovereignty, the rights of the individual to the omnipotence of the state. This error, said Benjamin Constant in 1815, made his Contrat social, “which is often invoked in behalf of liberty, the most terrible weapon of all types of despotism” ([1815] 1957, p. 1105). A century later, the jurist Léon Duguit called Rousseau the “source of all the doctrines of dictatorship and tyranny, from the doctrines of the Jacobins in 1793 to the Bolshevist doctrines of 1920” (1922, p. 135). In England, and elsewhere, the Contrat social did not arouse such impassioned discussion as in France. Nevertheless, it is significant that the scholarly editor of The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, C. E. Vaughan, considered it anti-Lockean: “…while the Contract of Locke,” he says, “is expressly devised to preserve and confirm the rights of the individual, that of Rousseau ends, and is intended to end, in their destruction…. One is a charter of individualism. The other, with certain crucial qualifications to be noted shortly, is an extreme form of collectivism” ([1915] 1962, p. 48). More recently, J. L. Talmon stated that Rousseau’s ideas were to blame for the “rise of totalitarian democracy” (1952).

These interpretations, based on the concepts of the “total surrender” of individual rights (“l’aliéna-tion totale”) and of the absolute sovereignty of the state over all its members, draw conclusions from the Contrat social that are fundamentally opposed to the intentions of its author. Indeed, for Rousseau, liberty was the most precious of possessions, a gift which nature has made to men. They can no more be deprived of it rightfully than they can be deprived of life itself; nor can they be permitted to divest themselves of it for any price whatsoever. The social pact should not be interpreted as abrogating, in effect, a right which Rousseau declared inalienable and inseparable from the essential character of man. Rousseau affirmed that the surrender of rights is only apparent and that in the end individuals regain the rights which they appear to have given up. “Instead of a surrender,” he said, “they have only made a profitable exchange” (Contrat social, book 2, chapter 4 in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 375 in the Gallimard edition). In effect, the social contract is designed to secure or to restore to individuals in the state of civilization the equivalent of the rights they enjoyed in the state of nature.

The best interpreters of Rousseau, including Vaughan, have asserted that the theory of the general will constitutes a guarantee of individual rights, rather than their sacrifice. By the social pact individuals place themselves under “the supreme direction of the general will,” and, in Rousseau’s definition, it is “the exercise of the general will” that is sovereignty. Rousseau replaced the sovereignty of kings with the sovereignty of the people. But even this is not the essential safeguard to liberty. While the sovereign people cannot harm all its members—for this would be to harm itself— nonetheless this scarcely constitutes assurance that it cannot harm a single individual or that it cannot sacrifice the minority to the interests of the majority. This is why Montesquieu, for example, spoke of the “despotism of all.” But such an eventuality is rendered impossible in Rousseau’s system by the fact that the general will can never rule on individual cases or issues, but imposes the same sacrifices and confers the same advantages upon all citizens. If one individual is wronged, all are thereby wronged. The equality established among all citizens by the general will is their protection against any abuse of power by the sovereign. Since, in Rousseau’s system, the sovereign authority cannot exceed “the limits of the general covenants,” it follows that sovereignty, although absolute in principle, is always limited in practice.

Rousseau presented still another argument: that the citizen, by subjecting himself to the general will and to the laws which it prescribes, obeys no one but himself and, therefore, “remains as free as he was before.” This reasoning is not entirely without difficulties, however, for in point of fact the “general will” is not the “will of all.” The general will is a corporate will, the will of the corporate people. But this body is made up of citizens, and their general will as citizens may well be different from the particular wills they have as individuals. The general will cannot finally prevail in the individual heart unless the man disappears behind the citizen and changes his “nature,” so to speak, in order to identify himself with the polis. To make a man a citizen, it is thus indispensable to transform the human mentality. In the Contrat social, Rousseau entrusted this task to the legislator, but according to Émile, it is the proper goal of public education, without which there can be no citizens.

Although Rousseau affirmed in Book 4 of the Contrat social that “since man is born free and his own master, no one can govern him without his consent” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 440 in the Gallimard edition), it is doubtful whether the “consent” of the governed in his system has the same importance as in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: the ideal of “government by consent” remains closer to liberal theories of the state than to the equalitarian conception of Rousseau.

By the logic of Rousseau’s doctrine, it is precisely because the general will maintains equality among citizens that its exercise is not susceptible to abuse. Abuses of power and risks of oppression can come only from the intermediate body which is responsible for the enforcement of the laws or the administration of the state. (According to the terminology created by Rousseau, which subsequently became common, this intermediate body is called the government, as distinguished from the sovereign.) Sovereignty being nothing else than the exercise of the general will, the sovereign can act only by means of laws and consequently must entrust the executive power to a subordinate body. But this body, like all collective bodies, tends to place its own corporate interest before the common interest and to substitute itself for the sovereign. The true political problem for Rousseau consisted, thus, in keeping the government within the limits of its power and in preventing it from becoming master of the state by usurping that sovereignty, or legislative power, which can belong only to the people.

The great distance that separates Rousseau’s political doctrine from Montesquieu’s emerges clearly. Not only is Rousseau’s doctrine equalitarian and antihierarchical; it is at the same time republican and antimonarchist. To be sure, he retained monarchy among the forms of government, but he saw kings simply as magistrates or officers responsible for the enforcement of the laws. This qualification in effect withdraws from kings the rights of sovereignty and confers these rights solely upon the people. As Rousseau’s contemporaries observed, and as the Jesuit G. F. Berthier in particular noted in his Observations sur le Contrat social (1789), it was tantamount to granting recognition neither to monarchy nor to aristocracy, but only to democracy.

Last years

Rousseau was clearly running great risks by publishing such a book as the Contrat social under his own name. It was published in Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey and distributed in the spring of 1762. Its circulation was forbidden in France, but no further measures were taken against it. Émile, however, unleashed a storm. It had been printed in Paris by Duchesne (under the fictitious editorship of Jean Neaulme of Amsterdam) and was offered for sale in May 1762. Rousseau had inserted in the work a section which had originally been separate and in which he presented his religious ideas, Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard. This was the pretext seized upon by the Parlement of Paris to condemn the work and to issue a writ for Rousseau’s arrest on June 9, 1762. (The Parlement proceeded against him with such severity because it was about to expel the Society of Jesus from France and wished to strike at unbelievers at the same time.) However, the writ of arrest was not enforced with much haste, and Rousseau was able to leave France without being harassed.

Where was he to go? Even had he wished, he could not have gone to Geneva, for on June 19, ten days after the writ of the Parlement, the Genevan Advisory Council condemned both Émile and the Contrat social, charging that both works were “destructive of the Christian religion and of all governments.” During his years of exile Rousseau constantly sought a suitable place to stay, an agonizing problem for a man 50 years old and afflicted with a painful infirmity. Switzerland was the country he preferred, but where in Switzerland? First Rousseau resided for three years—July 1762-Septem-ber 1765—at Môtiers in the principality of Neu-chatel, which then belonged to the king of Prussia. There he prepared two polemical writings in defense of his work, an open letter addressed to the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, which he composed during the winter of 1762 and published the following year, and the Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), an answer to the Lettres écrites de la camvagne, written by the prosecuting attorney, J.-R. Tronchin. He declined responsibility, however, for the agitation on his behalf by his Genevan friends and preferred to renounce his Genevan citizenship in 1763, rather than involve himself in a political quarrel. His vocation was to write, not to become a party leader.

Rousseau was driven from Metiers by a popular demonstration, the importance of which he exaggerated, and subsequently he was expelled from the lie Saint-Pierre by the Bernese authorities. He returned to Paris without being harassed, but only for a temporary stay. Then, at the invitation of David Hume, he agreed to go to Scotland, but quarreled with his host. Rousseau stayed almost a year and a half in England, first on the outskirts of London, then at Wootton in Derbyshire, and finally returned to France in May 1767. Here, for three years, he lived the life of a hunted man, first at Trye-le-Château in the Oise region, then at Bourgoin and at Monquin in the province of Dauphiné. During this time he changed not only his residence but also his name, signing his letters as “Renou.”

In 1770 Rousseau received assurance that he could reside in Paris without being disturbed and thereupon moved into small quarters on the rue Platriere. For several years he was obsessed to the point of madness by the idea that there was a plot or a kind of universal conspiracy against his person and his writings. He never did wholly shake off this obsession, although toward the end of his life he succeeded in regaining a certain peace of mind. In Paris he spent his time copying music (which was his livelihood), gathering herbs, and writing.

He did not stop writing after the publication of his three great works. During his stay in Môtiers in 1765, he drafted the Projet de constitution pour la Corse, which was never finished, and in Paris in 1772, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne. In the first of these two works, the author of the Contrat social applied his “principles” to the problems of legislating for a newly independent people and in the second he proposed reforms to a proud nation threatened by powerful neighbors.

His primary concern was a vast project which he had been contemplating for a long time, his autobiography. It was an undertaking which would require several years of unceasing work. Rousseau knew this and, despairing of bringing the project to completion, wrote in 1762 the four autobiographical Lettres à M. de Malesherbes. Later, however, he succeeded in drafting his Confessions, which were composed in two different periods, from 1765 to 1767 and in the winter of 1769/1770. The Confessions were written largely for the pleasure of knowing himself and reliving his past, but the three dialogues, written in the period 1772–1775 and entitled Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, were composed while he was haunted by fears of persecution. He wrote this strange book to vindicate himself: “I should willingly consent,” he said, “to not existing at all in the memory of men, but I cannot consent to remain there forever dishonored by calumny” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 953 in the Gallimard edition). His obsession with a conspiracy, which dominated the dialogues, persisted to some extent in his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782), but Rousseau had largely regained his serenity when he wrote these reflections. None of his autobiographical writings was published until after his death, which came suddenly on July 2, 1778, in Ermenonville. He was buried at Ermenon-ville, and pilgrimages were made to his tomb there until the Convention ordered his remains transferred to the Panthéon.

In our day, sociologists and ethnologists have recognized Rousseau, the self-styled “apologist of nature,” as a forerunner of the social sciences and perhaps, even, as their founder. Émile Durk-heim said succinctly of the Discours sur I’origine de l’inégalité: “Rousseau demonstrated a long time ago that if all that comes to man from society were peeled off, there would remain nothing but a creature reduced to sense experience and more or less undifferentiated from the animal” (1906, p. 132). To rise above the animal stage, men must become sociable and therefore must relinquish the state of nature. Such appears to be the teaching of the second Discours. According to Rousseau, what distinguishes man from the animal is his perfectibility. But perfectibility is closely connected with sociability, which permits it to develop, whereas in the state of nature it is only a “potential faculty.” Rousseau held that “Man in a state of isolation always remains the same; only in society does he progress” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 533 in the Gallimard edition). So long as he lives in the isolation of the state of nature, he exists only as a physical being. As a moral being he is formed in society, for his passions, his reason, and even his conscience become active and develop only in social relationships. It is true that perfectibility brings in its wake a multitude of evils from which man in the state of nature was exempt, but “nature does not retrogress.” From this it follows that human history begins with life in society.

Such considerations as these anticipated later developments in social science. Claude Lévi-Strauss has recently shown that ethnology is indebted to Rousseau and that it has borrowed from him the methodological rule he stated in the Essai sur I’origine des langues: “To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences” (Oeuvres complétes, vol. 1, p. 384 in the Hachette edition). This passage shows clearly what kind of research Rousseau thought necessary for the understanding of man; sociology had its objective fixed in advance, so to speak, by the precept of Émile: “We must study society by studying men, and men by studying society. Those who expect to treat political and moral philosophy as separate entities will never understand anything about either” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 206).

Robert DerathÉ

[See alsoConsensus; Constitutions and constitutionalism; General will; Majority rule; Natural law; Social contract; Sovereignty; State; Utopianism, article onutopias and utopianism.Other relevant material may be found inPolitical theoryand in the biography ofDurkheim.]

WORKS BY ROUSSEAU

(1750) 1946 Discours sur les sciences et les arts. Critical edition. The Modern Language Association of America, Monograph Series, No. 15. New York: The Association; London: Oxford Univ. Press. → First published as Discours qui a remporte le prix a I’Academie de Dijon.

(1750–1755) 1964 The First and Second Discourses. Edited with an introduction and notes by Roger D. Masters. New York: St. Martins. → Contains Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality. First published in French.

(1752) 1964 Le devin du village. Volume 2, pages 1093–1114 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complétes. Paris: Gallimard.

(1755) 1941 Discours sur I’origine et les fondements de Xine’galite’ parmi les hommes. Cambridge Univ. Press.

(1758) 1948 Lettre a M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles. Critical edition, by M. Fuchs. Lille: Giard. → Translated into English as Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre and published by the Free Press in 1960.

(1761) 1964 La nouvelle Helo’ise. Volume 2, pages 5–796 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complétes. Paris: Gallimard.

(1762a) 1961 The Social Contract. London: Dent. → First published in French.

(1762b) 1963 Émile. London: Dent; New York: Dutton. → First published in French.

(1762c) 1873 Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard. Volume 2, pages 236–327 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complétes. Paris: Hachette.

(1762d) 1928 Lettres à M. de Malesherbes. London: Scho-lartis Press.

1763 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citoyen de Genève, à Chris-tophe de Beaumont, archêvique de Paris. Amsterdam: Rey.

(1764) 1962 Lettres éorites de la montagne. Neuchatel (Switzerland): Ides et Calendes.

(1765–1770) 1960 The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. 2 vols. New York: Dutton; London: Dent. → Written between 1765 and 1770; first published between 1782 and 1789 in French.

(1772) 1873 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne. Volume 5, pages 237–302 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complétes. Paris: Hachette.

(1772–1775) 1959 Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Volume 1, pages 657–992 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complétes. Paris: Gallimard.

(1781) 1877 Essai sur I’origine des langues. Volume 1, pages 370–408 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complétes. Paris: Hachette.

(1782) 1948 Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Critical edition by John S. Spink. Paris: Didier. → An English translation, The Reveries of a Solitary, was published by Routledge in 1927.

Correspondance complete. Édition critique, établie et an-notée par R. A. Leigh. Vols. 1—. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, Les Délices, 1965—. → Volume 1 contains letters 1–97, dating from 1730 to 1744.

Correspondance générale de J.-J. Rousseau. 20 vols. Annotated by Théophile Dufour. Paris: Colin, 1924–1934. → Letters dated 1728–1778.

Oeuvres complétes. 12 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1871–1877. → Customarily designated the “vulgate” edition of Rousseau’s works. See especially Volumes 1 and 2: Discours and Émile. Translations have been provided by the editors.

Oeuvres complétes. 3 vols. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Bibliotheque de la Plélade. Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1964. → Volumes published as of 1964 are the following: Volume 1: Les confessions; Autres textes autobiographiques. Volume 2: La nouvelle Héloïse; Théâtre; Poesies; Essais littéraires. Volume 3: Du contrat social; Écrits politiques. Translations have been provided by the editors.

Political Writings. 2 vols. Edited from the original manuscripts and authentic editions, with an introduction and notes by C. E. Vaughan. New York: Wiley, 1962. → This edition was first published in 1915.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berthier, Guillaume F. 1789 Observations sur le Contrat social de J.-J. Rousseau. Paris: Mérigot le jeune.

Burgelin, Pierre 1952 La philosophie de Vexistence de J.-J. Rousseau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Cassirer, Ernst (1932) 1954 The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated and edited by Peter Gay. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. → First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Indiana University Press.

Chapman, John W. 1956 Rousseau: Totalitarian or Liberal? New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Cobban, Alfred (1934) 1964 Rousseau and the Modern State. 2d ed. London: Allen & Unwin.

Constant de Rebecque, Henri Benjamin (1815) 1957 Principes de politique. Pages 1097–1249 in Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, Oeuvres. Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, No. 123. Paris: Gallimard.

Courtois, Louis J. 1923 Chronologie critique de la vie et des oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Annales 15:1–364.

DerathÉ, Robert 1948 Le rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

DerathÉ, Robert 1950 Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps. Paris: Presses Univer-sitaires de France.

Duguit, LÉon 1922 Souveraineté et liberté. Paris: Alcan.

Durkheim, Émile 1906 Détermination du fait moral. Société Française de Philosophie, Bulletin 6:113–138. → Letters and discussions of Durkheim’s article appear on pages 169–212. The article and discussions were partially translated and published in 1953 in Durkheim’s Sociology and Philosophy.

Durkheim, Émile (1918) 1960 Rousseau’s Social Contract. Pages 65–138 in Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan. → First published in French.

Fetscher, Iring 1960 Rousseaus politische Philosophie. Neuwied (Germany): Luchterhand.

Guehenno, Jean (1948–1952)1966 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New ed. 2 vols. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. → Volume 1: 1712–1758. Volume 2: 1758–1788. First published in French. An excellent biography.

Hendel, Charles W. (1934) 1962 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill.

Hubert, RenÉ 1928 Rousseau et l’Encyclopédie: Essai sur la formation des idées politiques de Rousseau (1742–1756). Paris: Gamber.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Samuel Baud-Bovy et al. 1962 Neuchâtel (Switzerland): La Baconnière.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau et son oeuvre: Problemes et re-cherches. 1964 Paris: Klincksieck. → Commemorative work published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Rousseau. Colloquy of the College de France, October 16–20, 1962.

LacharriÈre, RenÉ De 1963 Études sur la théorie démocratique: Spinoza-Rousseau-Hegel-Marx. Paris: Payot.

Masson. Pierre M. 1916 La religion de J.-J. Rousseau. 3 vols. Paris: Hachette.

Plan, Pierre P. 1953 Table de la Correspondance générale de J.-J. Rousseau. With an introduction by Bernard Gagnebin and some unpubUshed letters by Rousseau. Geneva: Droz.

Rang, Martin 1959 Rousseaus Lehre vom Menschen. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Ravier, AndrÉ 1941 L’éducatiora de Vhomme nouveau: Essai historique et critique sur le livre de l’Émile de J.-J. Rousseau. 2 vols. Lyon: Riou.

Raymond, Marcel 1962 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La quête de soi et la riverie. Paris: Corti.

Rousseau et la philosophie politique. Annales de philosophie politique, No. 5. 1965 Paris: Presses Uni-versitaires de France.

SÉnelier, Jean 1950 Bibliographic générale des oeuvres de J.-J. Rousseau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

SociÉtÉ Jean-jacques Rousseau, GenevaAnnales. → Published since 1905. Contains original studies, bibliographical news, and reviews.

Starobinski, Jean 1957 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et Vobstacle. Paris: Plon.

Talmon, Jacob L. (1952) 1965 The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. 2d ed. New York: Praeger.

Vaughan, C. E. (1915) 1962 Introduction. Volume 1, pages 1–117 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Political Writings. New York: Wiley.

Vossler, Otto 1963 Rousseaus Freiheitslehre. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Swiss-born philosopher, author, political theorist, and composer Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) ranks as one of the greatest figures of the French Enlightenment.

Both Jean Jacques Rousseau the man and his writings constitute a problem for anyone who wants to grasp his thought and to understand his life. He claimed that his work presented a coherent outlook; yet many critics have found only contradictions and passionate outbursts of rhetoric. One interpreter has called Rousseau "an irresponsible writer with a fatal gift for epigram." In the eyes of others Rousseau was not a "serious thinker" but only a mere feeler who occasionally had a great thought. Still others have found Rousseau a mere juggler of words and definitions. Even those who turn to him as an innovating genius have been at odds concerning what he advocated. Rousseau has been variously applauded or denounced as the founder of the romantic movement in literature, as the intellectual father of the French Revolution, as a passionate defender of individual freedom and private property, as a socialist, as a collectivist totalitarian, as a superb critic of the social order, and as a silly and pernicious utopian. Some few critics notably Gustave Lanson and E. H. Wright—have taken Rousseau at his word and believe that he attempted to answer only one question: how can civilized man recapture the benefits of "natural man" and yet neither return to the state of nature nor renounce the advantages of the social state?

For Rousseau's biographers the man himself has been as puzzling as his work—a severe moralist who lived a dangerously "relaxed" life, a misanthrope who loved humanity, a cosmopolitan who prided himself on being a "citizen of Geneva," a writer for the stage who condemned the theater, and a man who became famous by writing essays that denounced culture. In addition to these anomalies, his biographers have had to consider his confessed sexual "peculiarities"—his lifelong habit of masturbation, his exhibitionism, his youthful pleasure in being beaten, his 33-year liaison with a virtual illiterate, and his numerous affairs—and, characteristic of his later years, his persecution suspicions that reached neurotic intensity.

Three major periods characterize Rousseau's life. The first (1712-1750) culminated in the succe‧s de scandale of his Discours sur les sciences et les arts. The second (1750-1762) saw the publication of his closely related major works: La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), L'Émile (1762), and Du contrat social (1762). The last period (1762-1778) found Rousseau an outcast, hounded from country to country, his books condemned and burned, and a personnage, respected and with influential friends. The Confessions, Dialogues, and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire date from this period.

Youth, 1712-1750

Rousseau was the second child of a strange marriage. His mother, Suzanne Bernard, had at the age of 33 married Isaac Rousseau, a man less wellborn than she. Isaac, exhausted perhaps by his frequent quarrels over money with his mother-in-law, left his wife in 1705 for Constantinople. He returned to Suzanne in September 1711. Jean Jacques was born on June 28, 1712, at Geneva, Switzerland. Nine days later his mother died.

At the age of 3, Jean Jacques was reading and weeping over French novels with his father. From Isaac's sister the boy acquired his passion for music. His father fled Geneva to avoid imprisonment when Jean Jacques was 10. By the time he was 13, his formal education had ended. Apprenticed to a notary public, he was soon dismissed as fit only for watchmaking. Apprenticed again, this time to an engraver, Rousseau spent 3 wretched years in hateful servitude, which he abandoned when he found himself unexpectedly locked out of the city by its closed gates. He faced the world with no visible assets and no obvious talents.

Rousseau found himself on Palm Sunday, 1728, in Annecy at the house of Louise Eleonore, Baronne de Warens. She sent him to a hospice for catechumens in Turin, where among "the biggest sluts and the most disgusting trollops who ever defiled the fold of the Lord," he embraced the Roman Catholic faith. His return to Madame de Warens in 1729 initiated a strange alliance between a 29-year-old woman of the world and a sensitive 17-year-old youth.

Rousseau lived under her roof off and on for 13 years and was dominated by her influence. He became her Petit; she was his Maman. Charming and clever, a born speculator, Madame de Warens was a woman who lived by her wits. She supported him; she found him jobs, most of which he regarded as uncongenial. A friend, after examining the lad, informed her that he might aspire to become a village curé but nothing more. Still Rousseau read, studied, and reflected. He pursued music and gave lessons. For a time he was a not too successful tutor.

First Publications and Operas

In 1733, disturbed by the advances made to Rousseau by the mother of one of his music pupils, Madame de Warens offered herself to him. Rousseau became her lover: "I felt as if I had been guilty of incest." The sojourn with Madame de Warens was over by 1742. Though she had taken other lovers and he had enjoyed other escapades, Rousseau was still devoted to her. He thought that the scheme of musical notation he had developed would make his fortune in Paris and thus enable him to save her from financial ruin. But his journey to Paris took Rousseau out of her life. He saw her only once again, in 1754. Reduced to begging and the charity of her neighbors, Madame de Warens died destitute in 1762.

Rousseau's scheme for musical notation, published in 1743 as Dissertation sur la musique moderne, brought him neither fame nor fortune—only a letter of commendation from the Académie des Sciences. But his interest in music spurred him to write two operas—Les Muses galantes (1742) and Le Devin du village (1752)—and permitted him to write articles on music for Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie; the Lettre sur la musique française, which embroiled him in a quarrel with the Paris Opéra (1753); and the Dictionnaire de musique, published in 1767.

From September 1743 until August 1744 Rousseau served as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice. He experienced at firsthand the stupidity of officialdom and began to see how institutions lend their authority to injustice and oppression in the name of peace and order. Rousseau spent the remaining years before his success with his first Discours in Paris, where he lived from hand to mouth the life of a struggling intellectual.

In March 1745 Rousseau began a liaison with Thére‧se Le Vasseur. She was 24 years old, a maid at Rousseau's lodgings. She remained with him for the rest of his life—as mistress, housekeeper, mother of his children, and finally, in 1768, as his wife. He portrayed her as devoted and unselfish, although many of his friends saw her as a malevolent gossip and troublemaker who exercised a baleful influence on his suspicions and dislikes. Not an educated woman— Rousseau himself cataloged her malapropisms—she nonetheless possessed the uncommon quality of being able to offer stability to a man of volatile intensity. They had five children—though some biographers have questioned whether any of them were Rousseau's. Apparently he regarded them as his own even though he abandoned them to the foundling hospital. Rousseau had no means to educate them, and he reasoned that they would be better raised as workmen and peasants by the state.

By 1749 Diderot had become a sympathetic friend, and Rousseau regarded him as a kindred spirit. The publication of Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles had resulted in his imprisonment at Vincennes. While walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot, Rousseau read an announcement of a prize being offered by the Dijon Academy for the best essay on the question: has progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or to the purification of morals?

Years of Fruition, 1750-1762

Rousseau won the prize of the Dijon Academy with his Discours sur les sciences et les arts and became "l'homme du jour." His famous rhetorical "attack" on civilization called forth 68 articles defending the arts and sciences. Though he himself regarded this essay as "the weakest in argument and the poorest in harmony and proportion" of all his works, he nonetheless believed that it sounded one of his essential themes; the arts and sciences, instead of liberating men and increasing their happiness, have for the most part shackled men further. "Necessity erected thrones; the arts and sciences consolidated them," he wrote.

The Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes, written in response to the essay competition proposed by the Dijon Academy in 1753 (but which did not win the prize), elaborated this theme still further. The social order of civilized society, wrote Rousseau, introduced inequality and unhappiness. This social order rests upon private property. The man who first enclosed a tract of land and called it his own was the true founder of civilized society. "Don't listen to that imposture; you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and the earth to no one," he wrote. Man's greatest ills, said Rousseau, are not natural but made by man himself; the remedy lies also within man's power. Heretofore, man has used his wit and art not to alter his wretchedness but only to intensify it.

Three Major Works

Rousseau's novel La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) attempted to portray in fiction the sufferings and tragedy that foolish education and arbitrary social conventions work among sensitive creatures. Rousseau's two other major treatises—L'Émile ou de l'éducation (1762) and Du contrat social (1762)—undertook the more difficult task of constructing an education and a social order that would enable men to be natural and free; that is, that would enable men to recognize no bondage except the bondage of natural necessity. To be free in this sense, said Rousseau, was to be happy.

Rousseau brought these three works to completion in somewhat trying circumstances. After having returned to the Protestant fold in 1755 and having regained his citizenship of Geneva that same year, Rousseau accepted the rather insistent offer of Madame Louise d'Épinay to install Thére‧se and himself in the Hermitage, a small cottage on thÉpinay estate at Montmorency. While Rousseau was working on his novel there, its heroine materialized in the person of Sophie, Comtesse d'Houdetot; and he fell passionately in love with her. He was 44 years old; Sophie was 27, married to a dullard, the mistress of the talented and dashing Marquis Saint-Lambert, and the sister-in-law of Rousseau's hostess. Rousseau was swept off his feet. Their relationship apparently was never consummated; Sophie pitied Rousseau and loved Saint-Lambert. But Madame d'Épinay and her paramour, Melchior Grimm, meddled in the affair; Diderot was drawn into the business. Rousseau felt that his reputation had been blackened, and a bitter estrangement resulted. Madame d'Épinay insulted Rousseau until he left the Hermitage in December 1757. However, he remained in Montmorency until 1762, when the condemnation of L'Émile forced him to flee from France.

La Nouvelle Héloïse appeared in Paris in January 1761. Originally entitled Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, the work was structurally a novel in letters, after the fashion of the English author Samuel Richardson. The originality of the novel won it hostile reviews, but its romantic eroticism made it immensely popular with the public. It remained a best seller until the French Revolution.

The notoriety of La Nouvelle Héloïse was nothing compared to the storm produced by L'Émile and Du contrat social. Even today the ideas promulgated in these works are revolutionary. Their expression, especially in L'Émile, in a style both readable and alluring made them dangerous. L'Émile was condemned by the Paris Parlement and denounced by the archbishop of Paris. Both of the books were burned by the authorities in Geneva.

L'Émile and Du contrat social

L'EL'É mile ou de l'éducation remains one of the world's greatest speculative treatises on education. However, Rousseau wrote to a correspondent who tried to follow L'Émile literally, "so much the worse for you!" The work was intended as illustrative of an educational program rather than prescriptive of every practical detail of a proper education. Its overarching spirit is best sensed in opposition to John Locke's essay on education. Locke taught that man should be educated to the station for which he is intended. There should be one education for a prince, another for a physician, and still another for a farmer. Rousseau advocated one education for all. Man should be educated to be a man, not to be a doctor, lawyer, or priest. Nor is a child merely a little man; he is, rather, a developing creature, with passions and powers that vary according to his stage of development. What must be avoided at all costs is the master-slave mode of instruction, with the pupil as either master or slave, for the medium of instruction is far more influential than any doctrine taught through that medium. Hence, an education resting merely on a play of wills—as when the child learns only to please the instructor or when the teacher "teaches" by threatening the pupil with a future misfortune—produces creatures fit to be only masters or slaves, not free men. Only free men can realize a "natural social order," wherein men can live happily.

A few of the striking doctrines set forth in L'Émile are: the importance of training the body before the mind, learning first through "things" and later through words, teaching first only that for which a child feels a need so as to impress upon him that thought is a tool whereby he can effectively manage things, motivating a child by catering to his ruling passion of greed, refraining from moral instruction until the awakening of the sexual urge, and raising the child outside the doctrines of any church until late adolescence and then instructing him in the religion of conscience. Although Rousseau's principles have never been fully put into practice, his influence on educational reformers has been tremendous.

L'Émile's companion master work, Du contrat social, attempted to spell out the social relation that a properly educated man—a free man—bears to other free men. This treatise is a difficult and subtle work of a penetrating intellect fired by a great passion for humanity. The liberating fervor of the work, however, is easily caught in the key notions of popular sovereignty and general will. Government is not to be confused with sovereignty of the people or with the social order that is created by the social contract. The government is an intermediary set up between the people as law followers and the people as law creators, the sovereignty. Furthermore, the government is an instrument created by the citizens through their collective action expressed in the general will. The purpose of this instrument is to serve the people by seeing to it that laws expressive of the general will of the citizens are in fact executed. In short, the government is the servant of the people, not their master. And further, the sovereignty of the people—the general will of the people—is to be found not merely in the will of the majority or in the will of all but rather in the will as enlightened by right judgment.

As with L'Émile, Du contrat socialis a work best understood as elaborating the principles of the social order rather than schematizing the mechanism for those general principles. Rousseau's political writings more concerned with immediate application include his Considérations sur le gouvernement de la Pologne (1772) and his incomplete Projet de constitution pour la Corse, published posthumously in 1862.

Other writings from Rousseau's middle period include the Encyclopédie article Économie politique (1755); Lettre sur la Providence (1756), a reply to Voltaire's poem on the Lisbon earthquake; Lettre a‧ d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758); Essai sur l'origine des langues (1761); and four autobiographical Lettres a‧ Malesherbes (1762).

Exile and Apologetics, 1762-1778

Forced to flee from France, Rousseau sought refuge at Yverdon in the territory of Bern. Expelled by the Bernese authorities, he found asylum in Môtiers, a village in the Prussian principality of Neuchâtel. Here in 1763 he renounced his Genevan citizenship. The publication of his Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), in which he defended L'Émile and criticized "established" reformed churches, aroused the wrath of the Neuchâtel clergy. His house was stoned, and Rousseau fled to the isle of St. Pierre in the Lake of Biel, but he was again expelled by the Bernese. Finally, through the good offices of the British philosopher David Hume, he settled at Wotton, Derbyshire, England, in 1766. Hume managed to obtain from George III a yearly pension for Rousseau. But Rousseau, falsely believing Hume to be in league with his Parisian and Genevan enemies, not only refused the pension but also openly broke with the philosopher. Henceforth, Rousseau's sense of persecution became ever more intense, even at times hysterical.

Rousseau returned to France in June 1767 under the protection of the Prince de Conti. Wandering from place to place, he at last settled in 1770 in Paris. There he made a living, as he often had in the past, by copying music. By December 1770 the Confessions, upon which he had been working since 1766, was completed, and he gave readings from this work at various private homes. Madame d'Épinay, fearing an unflattering picture of herself and her friends, intervened; the readings were forbidden by the police. Disturbed by the reaction to his readings and determined to justify himself before the world, Rousseau wrote Dialogues ou Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques (1772-1776). Fearful lest the manuscript fall into the hands of his enemies, he attempted to place it on the high altar of Notre Dame. Thwarted in this attempt, he left a copy with the philosopher Étienne Condillac and, not wholly trusting him, with an English acquaintance, Brooke Boothby. Finally, in 1778 Rousseau entrusted copies of both the Confessions and the Dialogues to his friend Paul Moultou. His last work, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, begun in 1776 and unfinished at his death, records how Rousseau, an outcast from society, recaptured "serenity, tranquility, peace, even happiness."

In May 1778 Rousseau accepted Marquis de Giradin's hospitality at Ermenonville near Paris. There, with Thére‧se at his bedside, he died on July 2, 1778, probably from uremia. From birth he had suffered from a bladder deformation. From 1748 onward his condition had grown worse. His adoption of the Armenian mode of dress was due to the embarrassment caused by this affliction, and it is not unlikely that much of his suspicious irritability can be traced to the same malady. Rousseau was buried on the île des Peupliers at Ermenonville. In October 1794 his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. Thére‧se, surviving him by 22 years, died in 1801 at the age of 80.

Further Reading

Rousseau himself is the best introduction to his own thought. Everyman's Library offers translations of Emile and a volume containing The Social Contract and the two Discourses. The Confessions is available in a Modern Library edition. The most accessible English version of Rousseau's novel is Julie, or the New Eloise, translated and abridged by J. H. McDowell (1968). A sampling of Rousseau's letters appears in Citizen of Geneva: Selections from the Letters of J.-J. Rousseau, edited by C. W. Hendel (1937). Useful biographies include Matthew Josephson, J. J. Rousseau (1931); R. B. Mowat, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1938); and Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Quest, 1712-1758 (1968).

The literature on Rousseau is vast. An excellent introduction to his thought as a whole is E. H. Wright, The Meaning of Rousseau (1929). A critical study of Rousseau's life and writings is Frederick C. Green, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1955), valuable for his life but less illuminating on the works. Ronald Grimsley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Study in Self-awareness (1961), focuses on Rousseau's attempts to answer the riddle of his personal existence. See also Grimsley's Rousseau and the Religious Quest (1968). Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932), presents Rousseau as offering a non-Christian interpretation of the universe; and in his Kant, Rousseau, Goethe (1945), Cassirer suggests that Rousseau was a profound influence on Kantian thought. Roger Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau (1967), examines an important aspect of Rousseau's work. Frederika Macdonald, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A New Criticism (2 vols., 1906), presents Rousseau as a victim of Madame d'Épinay's vilification. For a helpful review of fairly recent Rousseau literature see Peter Gay's chapter on Rousseau in his The Party of Humanity (1964). □

Jean Jacques Rousseau , 1712–78, Swiss-French philosopher, author, political theorist, and composer.

Life and Works

Rousseau was born at Geneva, the son of a Calvinist watchmaker. His mother died shortly after his birth, his father abandoned him about a decade later, and his upbringing was haphazard. At 16 he set out on a wandering, irregular life that brought him into contact (c.1728) with Louise de Warens, who became his patron and later his lover. She arranged for his trip to Turin, where he became an unenthusiastic Roman Catholic convert. After serving as a footman in a powerful family, he left Turin and spent most of the next dozen years at Chambéry, Savoy, with his patron. In 1742 he went to Paris to make his fortune with a new system of musical notation, but the venture failed. Once in Paris, however, he became an intimate of the circle of Denis Diderot (to whose Encyclopédie Rousseau contributed music articles), Melchior Grimm , and Mme d' Épinay . At this time also began his liaison with Thérèse Le Vasseur, a semiliterate servant who became his common-law wife.

In 1749, Rousseau won first prize in a contest, held by the Academy of Dijon, on the question: "Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the corruption or to the improvement of human conduct?" Rousseau took the negative stand, contending that humanity was good by nature and had been fully corrupted by civilization. His essay made him both famous and controversial. Although it is still widely believed that all of Rousseau's philosophy was based on his call for a return to nature, this view is an oversimplification, caused by the excessive importance attached to this first essay. A second philosophical essay, Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes (1754), is one of Rousseau's most mature and daring productions. After its publication, Rousseau returned to Geneva, reverted to Protestantism in order to regain his citizenship, and returned to Paris with the title "citizen of Geneva."

Mme d'Épinay lent him a cottage, the Hermitage, on her estate at Montmorency. But Rousseau began to quarrel with Mme d'Épinay, Diderot, and Grimm, all of whom he accused of complicity in a sordid plot against him, and left the Hermitage to become the guest of the tolerant duc de Luxembourg, whose château was also at Montmorency. There he finished his novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), written in part under the influence of his love for Mme d'Houdetot, the sister-in-law of Mme d'Épinay; his Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), a diatribe against the suggestion that Geneva would be better off for having a theater; his Du contrat social (1762); and his Émile (1762), which offended both the French and Genevan ecclesiastic authorities and was burned at Paris and at Geneva.

Rousseau, with the connivance of highly placed friends, escaped, however, to the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel, then a Prussian possession. His house was stoned, and Rousseau fled once more, this time to the canton of Bern, settling on the small island of Saint-Pierre, in the Lake of Biel. In 1765 he was expelled from Bern and accepted the invitation of David Hume to live at his house in England; there he began to write the first part of his Confessions, but after a year he quarreled violently with Hume, whom he believed to be in league with Diderot and Grimm, and returned to France (1767). His suspicion of people deepened and became a persecution mania.

After wandering through the provinces, he finally settled (1770) at Paris, where he lived in a garret and copied music. The French authorities left him undisturbed, while curious foreigners flocked to see the famous man and be insulted by him. At the same time he went from salon to salon, reading his Confessions aloud. In his last years he began Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, descriptions of nature and his feeling about it, which was unfinished at the time of his death. Shortly before his death Rousseau moved to the house of a protector at Ermenonville, near Paris, where he died. In 1794 his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.

Rousseau's Thought

Few people have equaled Rousseau's influence in politics, literature, and education. His political thought is contained in Du contrat social, but it must be supplemented by other works, notably the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité and his drafts of constitutions for Corsica and for Poland. Rousseau is fundamentally a moralist rather than a metaphysician. As a moralist, he is also, unavoidably, a political theorist. His thought begins with the assumption that we are by nature good, and with the observation that in society we are not good. The fall of humanity was, for Rousseau, a social occurrence. "But human nature does not go backward, and we never return to the times of innocence and equality, when we have once departed from them."

Although he locates the cause of our deformity in society, Rousseau is not a primitivist. In Émile and Du contrat social, he proposed, on an individual and a social level, what might be done. What was new and important about his educational philosophy, as outlined in Émile, was its rejection of the traditional ideal: education was not seen to be the imparting of all things to be known to the uncouth child; rather it was seen as the "drawing out" of what is already there, the fostering of what is native. Rousseau's educational proposal is highly artificial, the process is carefully timed and controlled, but with the end of allowing the free development of human potential.

Similarly, with regard to the social order, Rousseau's aim is freedom, which again does not involve a retreat to primitivism but perfect submission of the individual to what he termed the general will. The general will is what rational people would choose for the common good. Freedom, then, is obedience to a self-imposed law of reason, self-imposed because imposed by the natural laws of humanity's being. The purpose of civil law and government, of whatever form, is to bring about a coincidence of the general will and the wishes of the people. Society gives government its sovereignty when it forms the social contract to achieve liberty and well-being as a group. While this sovereignty may be delegated in various ways (as in a monarchy, a republic, or a democracy) it cannot be transferred and resides ultimately with society as a whole, with the people, who can withdraw it when necessary.

Rousseau's political philosophy assumes that there really is a common good, and that the general will is not merely an ideal, but can, under the right conditions, be actual. And it is under such conditions, with the rule of the general will, that Rousseau sees our full development taking place, when "the advantages of a state of nature would be combined with the advantages of social life." Because he had such faith in the existence of the common good and the rightness of the general will, Rousseau was extreme in the sanctions he was willing to allow for its achievement: "If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: He has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law." Finally, Rousseau advocates a civil religion. Rousseau's thought sometimes rings of Calvinist Geneva, even though he reacted against its vision of humanity and had his books burned by its ecclesiastic authorities.

In its time his epistolary novel Héloïse was immensely popular, but it is scarcely read today, while the Confessions remains widely read. Proposing to describe not only his life, but also his innermost thought and feelings, hiding nothing be it ever so shameful, Rousseau followed the model of St. Augustine 's Confession, but he created a new, intensely personal style of autobiography. The Héloïse,Émile, the Confessions, and the Rêveries all transfer to the domain of literature Rousseau's longing for a closeness with nature.

His sensitive awareness apprehended the subtle influences of landscape, trees, water, birds, and other aspects of nature on the shifting state of the human soul. Rousseau was the father of Romantic sensibility; the trend existed before him, but he was the first to give it full expression. Rousseau's style, in all his writings, is always personal, sometimes bizarre, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes bitterly sarcastic, sometimes deliberately plebeian, and often animated by a tender and musical quality unequaled in French prose. Although self-taught, he possessed a thorough knowledge of musical theory, but his compositions exerted no direct influence on music.

Influence

Rousseau's influence on posterity has been equaled by only a few, and it is by no means spent. His influence on German and English romanticism —and thus, indirectly, on romanticism in general—is difficult to overestimate. In addition, men as diverse as Immanuel Kant , Johann Goethe , Maximilien de Robespierre , Johann Pestalozzi , and Leo Tolstoy have been his disciples. His doctrine of popular sovereignty had a profound impact on French revolutionary thought. Although he did not advocate collective ownership, his ideas also had their effect on socialist thought. It is probably more correct to say that he anticipated rather than influenced many insights of modern social psychology.

Bibliography

See biographies by F. C. Green (1955, repr. 1970), J. Guéhenno (2 vol., tr. 1966), L. G. Crocker (2 vol., 1968–73), and L. Damrosch (2005); I. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (2d ed. 1947, repr. 1965); E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau (tr. 1963); A. Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (2d ed. 1964); J. MacDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762–1791 (1965); W. Blanchard, Rousseau and the Spirit of Revolt (1967); R. D. Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau (1968); J. Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1970); R. Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau (1973).

ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES

Jean Jacques Rousseau achieved prominence as a philosopher and political theorist in eighteenth-century France. A talented musical composer and botanist, Rousseau's ideas on the nature of society made him an influential figure in Western thought. His belief that civilization had corrupted humankind was a central part of his philosophy. His work elevated the importance of the individual and personal liberty, providing support for U.S. revolutionary ideology.

Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712, in Geneva, Switzerland. By the age of sixteen, he had left home. In Savoy he met Baronne Louise De Warens, a wealthy woman who took Rousseau into her home and transformed him into a philosopher through a rigorous course of study. Rousseau also studied music during his time with De Warens. In 1742 he moved to Paris, where he became associated with Denis Diderot, a philosopher who was editor of the French Encyclopédie, a monumental work of scholarship about the arts and society. Diderot commissioned Rousseau to write articles about music for the work.

In 1750 Rousseau won a prize for his essay Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. The essay announced one of Rousseau's life-long tenets: human beings are inherently good but have been corrupted by society and civilization. In 1752 he won fame as a composer for his opera The Village Sage. Despite the accolades, Rousseau abandoned his musical career, believing it was morally unworthy to work in the theater. Instead he pursued his investigation of society, writing Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Mankind in 1752. He enlarged on his first work, criticizing civilization for its corrupting influence and praising the natural, or primitive, state as morally superior to the civilized state.

Rousseau left Paris in 1756 and secluded himself at Montmorency, so as to be closer to nature. He did not return to writing until 1761, when he wrote the romance Julie, or the New Eloise. The following year he wrote one of his

most enduring and influential works, The Social Contract. The book opens with the famous sentence, "Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains." Rousseau believed that society and government created a social contract when their goals were freedom and the benefit of the public. Government became the supreme ruler, but its existence depended on the will of the people. The social order was based on the general will, a shared belief in a common set of interests, which he believed was the natural choice of rational people. The general will was also a form of freedom, and the purpose of law was to combine the general will with the desires of the people.

Rousseau was convinced that laws could not be unjust if the general will of the people was followed. The Social Contract was suffused with

the belief that freedom and civil liberty are essential to a just society. Society should not be ruled by elites but by the general will of all people. Rousseau, like the English philosopher john locke (1632–1704), provided justification for the idea of a liberal society based on popular will that would be embraced by the American colonists in the years leading up to the U.S. Revolution. The American colonists believed that the social contract with England had been broken. Rousseau's belief in the primacy of the individual, however, has proved to be an idea that found its greatest acceptance in the United States.

Rousseau wrote the novel Émile in 1762, which was a platform for his ideas on education. He believed that the purpose of education is not to impart new information but to bring out what is inherently within each person and to encourage the full development of the human being. Children should be allowed self-expression and the opportunity to develop their own views about the world, rather than to submit to repression and conformity. Rousseau's ideas were radical for the time but have proved enduring.

The political climate was hostile to Rousseau following the publication of The Social Contract and Émile. The French Catholic Church banned both books, and Rousseau was forced to begin a period in exile. Driven from Switzerland for his ideas, he eventually arrived in England, where he was befriended by the philosopher david hume. While in England he prepared a treatise on botany.

"As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State, 'What does it matter to me?,' the State may be given up for lost."
—Jean Jacques Rousseau

In 1768 he returned to France under an assumed name. In 1770 he completed his Confessions, an autobiography of relentless self-examination in which he documented the emotional and moral conflicts of his life. He died on July 2, 1778, in Ermenonville, France.

further readings

Galanter, Marc. 1999. "Farther Along." Law & Society Review 33 (December).

O'Hagan, Timothy. 1999. Rousseau. London, New York: Routledge.

Wintgens, Luc J. 2001. "Sovereignty and Representation." Ratio Juris 14 (September).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1712-1778

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent much of his life in and around Paris acting as the gadfly of the philosophes, leaders of the French Enlightenment. He championed equality and popular sovereignty on the eve of the French Revolution, encouraged the birth of nationalism, historicism, and romanticism, and provided prescient critiques of the “bourgeois,” the quintessential figure of the democratic age he helped launch.

In On the Social Contract (1762), Rousseau denied the existence of any natural hierarchy or divine right that could legitimize political inequality, arguing that natural inequalities between human beings were politically irrelevant. The social contract substituted “a moral and legitimate equality for whatever inequality nature may have placed between men, and … while they may be unequal in force or genius, they all become equal by convention and right” ( On the Social Contract, I.ix). While he believed every legitimate government was republican, he understood by this only that the executive power should be beholden to the sovereign people (II.vi). His preferred regime was an aristocratic government, or executive, responsible to the people (III.vi). Ironically, while he was one of the first political thinkers to champion popular sovereignty, he maintained that a democratic government was suited only to a people of gods (Iii.iv).

Central to his political thought was the general will: the will of the political community as a whole, manifest in laws to which all citizens had consented and by which all were bound (II.iv). Rousseau held that “what generalizes the will is not so much the number of votes, as it is the common interest which unites them” (II.iv), and he wrote extensively, in Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772) and the Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758), on the need to encourage community spirit through civic education and the promotion of virtue. His emphasis on the particular character of political communities inspired the rise of nationalism, influencing the German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).

The argument of The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754) helped give birth to historicism: the idea that human ideas and actions are better explained by history rather than by nature or divine will. History, not nature, nor God, was responsible for the great paradox that: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” ( On the Social Contract, I.i). Free, contented, but asocial by nature, humans could hope only to legitimate rather than remove the chains brought by political life.

Rousseau’s autobiographical work, especially The Confessions (1782), his praise of nature, particularly in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), and his argument in the Discourse on the Sciences ands Arts (1751) that the popularization of science diverted people from the practice of moral duties, all contributed to the romantic movement.

Rousseau also offered one of the first critiques of the “bourgeois.” Alienated from nature, without being committed to political life, the bourgeois were torn between private interests and public duties. Materialistic and inauthentic, they were enslaved by the opinions of others and strangers to themselves.

SEE ALSO Enlightenment; Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Naturalism; Social Contract; State of Nature

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O’Hagan, Timothy. 1999. Rousseau. London and New York: Routledge.

Wokler, Robert. 1995. Rousseau. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fiona Miller

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.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French author. He became a RC in 1728. In 1741 he went to Paris; here he was introduced to the circle of the Encyclopaedists. He returned to his native city, Geneva, in 1754, and also to Calvinism. In the same year he wrote his Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes; on the gratuitous assumption that primitive man was a free and happy being, Rousseau alleged that human inequalities arose from the undue development of his social and proprietary instincts. In 1756 he settled near Montmorency, where he wrote his most famous works. In a chapter of Émile, ou de l'Éducation (1762) he summed up his religious beliefs. He advocated a Deism which, although similar to that of the Philosophes in affirming belief in the existence of God, the soul, and a future life, found its ultimate justification in the individual's sense of a personal relationship with God through the conscience, of which He is the source and inspiration. Du contract social (1762) set out his theory of a just state, resting on the general will of the people. Here ‘civic religion’ forbids all dogmatic intolerance and admits only those religions which do not claim to possess absolute truth.

After his death Rousseau became one of the most powerful influences in Europe. His religious impact was the deeper as he offered man a substitute for revealed religion which was not only doctrinally simple and unelaborate in its moral prescriptions, but also addressed his emotional as well as his intellectual needs.

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.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78) French philosopher and writer, born in Switzerland. From 1750 he came to fame with a series of works highly critical of the existing social order; his philosophy is underpinned by a belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature, encapsulated in the concept of the ‘noble savage’, and the warping effects of civilization. In his novel Émile (1762) Rousseau formulated new educational principles giving the child full scope for individual development in natural surroundings, shielded from the corrupting influences of civilization. His Social Contract (1762) anticipated much of the thinking of the French Revolution. Rousseau is also noted for his Confessions (1782), one of the earliest autobiographies.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (b Geneva, 1712; d Ermenonville, 1778). Swiss philosopher, composer, and writer on music. While working as copyist, devised new system of mus. notation which he published in Dissertation sur la musique moderne (Paris, 1743). Wrote opéra-ballet, Les muses galantes (1747), and very successful pastoral opera Le Devin du village (Fontainebleau 1752). Took It. side in Querelle des Bouffons and attacked Fr. mus. in his Lettre sur la musique française (1753). Pubd. Dictionnaire de Musique (1768). Left unfinished opera Daphnis et Chloé and wrote about 100 songs.