Jean Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 - July 2, 1778) 
was a Swiss-French philosopher, writer, political theorist, and 
self-taught composer of The Age of Enlightenment.

Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Ermenonville (28 miles 
northeast of Paris). His mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died a week after 
his birth, and his father Isaac abandoned him in 1722. His childhood education 
consisted solely of reading Plutarch's Lives and Calvinist sermons.

Rousseau left Geneva on March 14, 1728, after several years of apprenticeship 
to a notary and then an engraver. He lived with and was supported by 
Françoise-Louise de Warens, a French Catholic woman. Although she was twelve 
years older than he and married, they became lovers, and Rousseau 
converted to Catholicism. In 1742 he moved to Paris in order to present the 
Académie des Sciences with a new system of musical notation he had invented, 
which was rejected as useless and unoriginal. While in Paris, he became 
friends with Diderot and contributed several articles to his Encyclopédie. 
He also befriended and lived with Thérèse Lavasseur, an illiterate seamstress 
who bore him five children. As a result of his theories on education and 
child-rearing, Rousseau has often been criticized by Voltaire and modern 
commentators for putting his children in an orphanage as soon as they were 
weaned. In his defense, Rousseau explained that he would have been a poor 
father, and that the children would have a better life at the foundling home.

After gaining some fame with his "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" in 
1750, Rousseau had a series of falling-outs with his friends and associates 
in Paris. In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva, where he reconverted to 
Calvinism, but he soon left for Montmercy in 1757. While there he wrote 
the romantic novel Nouvelle Heloise (The New Heloise) and Emile, or 
Education. This book criticized religion, causing it to be burned in 
France. Rousseau was forced to flee the increasingly hostile French 
government. Geneva had exiled him, so he made a brief stay in Bern. In 
January of 1766, he took refuge with the philosopher David Hume in Great 
Britain, but after 18 months he left because he believed Hume was plotting 
against him[1] (http://www.connect.net/ron/davidhume.html).

Rousseau returned to France under the name "Renou," although officially 
he was not allowed back in until 1770. As a condition of his return, 
he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his 
Confessions, Rousseau began private readings. In 1771 he was forced to 
stop this, and the book was not published until after his death in 1782. 
Rousseau continued to write, producing works such as Reveries of the 
Solitary Walker, and in order to support himself he returned to copying 
music. Because of his partially-justified paranoia, he did not seek 
attention or the company of others. While taking a morning walk on the 
estate of the Marquis de Giradin at Ermenonville, Rousseau suffered a 
hemorrhage and died on July 2, 1778.

Rousseau was interred in The Panthéon in Paris in 1794, sixteen years 
after his death. The tomb was designed to resemble a rustic temple, to 
recall Rousseau's theories of nature.

In 1834, the Genevan government reluctantly erected a statue in his 
honor on the tiny Ile Rousseau in Lake Geneva. In 2002, the Espace 
Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's 
birthplace.

Philosophy of Rousseau


The theory of the 'noble savage'

Rousseau contended that man was good by nature, a "noble savage" when 
in the state of nature (the state of all the "other animals", and the 
condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization and 
society), but is corrupted by society. He viewed society as artificial 
and held that the development of society, especially the growth of 
social interdependence, has been inimical to the well-being of human 
beings.

Rousseau's essay, "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" (1750), which 
won the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon, argued that the 
advancement of art and science had not been beneficial to humankind. 
He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more 
powerful and had crushed individual liberty. He concluded that 
material progress had actually undermined the possibility of sincere 
friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and suspicion.

His subsequent Discourse on Inequality, tracked the progress and 
degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern 
society. He suggested that the earliest human beings were isolated 
semi-apes who were differentiated from animals by their capacity for 
free will and their perfectibility. He also argued that these 
primitive humans were possessed of a basic drive to care for 
themselves and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. As 
humans were forced to associate together more closely, by the 
pressure of population growth, they underwent a psychological 
transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as 
an essential component of their own well being. Rousseau associated 
this new self-awareness with a golden age of human flourishing. 
However, the development of agriculture and metallurgy, private 
property and the division of labour led to increased interdependence 
and inequality. The resulting state of conflict led Rousseau to 
suggest that the first state was invented as a kind of social 
contract made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful. This 
original contract was deeply flawed as the wealthiest and most 
powerful members of society tricked the general population, and 
so cemented inequality as a permanent feature of human society. 
His Social Contract can be understood as an alternative to this 
fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on 
Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in 
the eyes of others, which originated in the golden age, comes to 
undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked 
by interdependence, hierarchy, and inequality.


The Social Contract

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, 
which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. 
Published in 1762 and condemned by the Parlement of Paris when 
it appeared, it became one of the most influential works of 
abstract political thought in the Western tradition. Building on 
his earlier work, such as the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau 
claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a 
brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the 
human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. In the 
degenerate phase of the state of nature, man is prone to be in 
frequent competition with his fellow men whilst at the same time 
becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure 
threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to 
Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and 
abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both 
preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission 
to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole 
guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills 
of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because 
they are, collectively, the authors of the law. Whilst Rousseau 
argues that sovereignty should thus be in the hands of the people, 
he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. 
The government is charged with implementing and enforcing the 
general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, 
known as magistrates. Rousseau was bitterly opposed to the idea 
that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative 
assembly. Rather, they should make the laws directly. This 
restriction means that Rousseau's ideal state could only be 
realised, if at all, within a very small society. Much of the 
subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on 
disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to 
obey the general will are thereby rendered free.


Effects of Rousseau's thought

Rousseau's ideas were influential at the time of the French 
Revolution although since popular sovereignty was exercised 
through representatives rather than directly, it cannot be said 
that the Revolution was in any sense an implementation of Rousseau's 
ideas. Subsequently, writers such as Benjamin Constant and Hegel 
sought to blame the excesses of the Revolution and especially The 
Terror on Rousseau, but the justice of their claims is a matter 
of controversy.

Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack 
the institution of private property, and therefore is often 
considered a forebearer of modern socialism and communism (see Karl 
Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings). Rousseau 
also questioned the assumption that the will of the majority is 
always correct. He argued that the goal of government should be to 
secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, 
regardless of the will of the majority (see democracy).

One of the primary principles of Rousseau's political philosophy is 
that politics and morality should not be separated. When a state 
fails to act in a moral fashion, it ceases to function in the proper 
manner and ceases to exert genuine authority over the individual. The 
second important principle is freedom, which the state is created to 
preserve.

Rousseau's ideas about education have profoundly influenced modern 
educational theory. He minimizes the importance of book-learning, 
and recommends that a child's emotions should be educated before 
his reason. He placed a special emphasis on learning by experience. 
John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centred Education and its Critics 
argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series 
of footnotes to Rousseau.

In his earlier writings Rousseau identified nature with the 
primitive state of savage man. Later, especially under the 
criticism of Voltaire, Rousseau took nature to mean the 
spontaneity of the process by which man builds his personality 
and his world. Nature thus signifies interiority, integrity, 
spiritual freedom, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement 
which society imposes in the name of civilization.

Hence, to go back to nature means to restore to man the forces of 
this natural process, to place him outside every oppressing bond 
of society and the prejudices of civilization. It is this idea 
that made his thought particularly imporant in Romanticism, though 
Rousseau himself is generally regarded as a figure of The 
Enlightenment.

Quotes

"Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains." -- Rousseau, 
The Social Contract, 1762

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within 
himself while social man lives outside himself and can only 
live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive 
the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of 
others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to 
insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from 
this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, 
or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there 
is but art and mummery in even honour, friendship, virtue, and 
often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of 
boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never 
daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, 
benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, 
we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and 
deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without 
wisdom, and pleasure without happiness."

"Let us return to nature."

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought 
of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to 
believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many 
crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might 
the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling 
up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his 
fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are 
lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and 
that the earth belongs to no one.'" -- Rousseau, Discourse 
on Inequality, 1755

"In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never 
existed, and will never exist. It is against natural order 
that the great number should govern and that the few should 
be governed." -- Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

"Finally, I remembered the way out suggested by a great 
princess when told the peasants had no bread: 'Well, let 
them eat cake'" [qu'ils mangent de la brioche]. (This was 
falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette, though it was written 
in 1766, when the ten-year-old princess was still four years
 away to her marriage with Louis XVI of France).



Translation

His works were translated by Nakae Chomin to Japanese in the Meiji Era.


Major works

    * Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les 
    sciences et les arts), 1750
    * Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy, 1752
    * Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among 
    Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité 
    parmi les hommes), 1754
    * Discourse on Political Economy, 1755
    * Letters to M. d'Alembert on the Theater, 1758
    * The New Heloise (Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse), 1761
    * Emile, or Education (Émile ou de l'éducation), 1762
    * The Creed of a Savoyard Priest, 1762. (in Emile)
    * The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right 
    (Du Contrat social), 1762
    * Four Letters to M. de Malesherbes, 1762
    * Letters Written from the Mountain, 1764
    * Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 
    1770, published 1782
    * Constitutional Project for Corsica, 1772
    * Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1772
    * Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 1780, published 1782
    * Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, published 1782