Western1712–1778

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Geneva

Genevan philosopher of the general will whose ideas fueled the age of revolutions.

Biography

Jean-Jacques Rousseau — watchmaker's son of Calvinist Geneva, runaway at fifteen, convert and re-convert, self-taught composer whose opera charmed the French court he then refused — was the Enlightenment's inside critic and the modern age's first confessional self.

His entry came by lightning: the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750) answered an essay prize by arguing that the arts and sciences had corrupted morals. The Discourse on Inequality (1755) deepened the case with a conjectural history: natural man, solitary and content, is deformed by property, comparison, and amour-propre — the restless self-regard born of others' eyes. Evil, for Rousseau, is social, not original: a direct rebuttal of the doctrine of original sin, and one reason Paris and Geneva both burned his books.

The Social Contract (1762) opens with the most quoted sentence in political philosophy — "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" — and seeks legitimacy in the general will of a self-legislating people. Its closing chapter on civil religion — tolerant of all faiths that tolerate others, intolerant of theocracy — was read as blasphemy and revolution at once.

Emile (1762), his treatise on education, contains the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar: religion grounded not in miracles, books, or priests but in conscience — "divine instinct" — and the felt order of nature. It offended orthodoxy (revelation demoted) and the philosophes (materialism refused) equally; warrants were issued for his arrest the week of publication, and he spent years as Europe's most famous fugitive, quarreling tragically with Hume in England.

The Confessions, published after his death in 1778, invented modern autobiography. Robespierre kept a bust of him; the Romantics kept his heart. Liberal theology's turn from proof to feeling — Schleiermacher's "sense and taste for the infinite" — walks a path the Vicar cleared.

Works

A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among MankindJean-Jacques Rousseau

A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind

Equality; Natural law; Political science

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Biography

Works

A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind

Eloisa : $b or, A series of original letters

Emile

Émile; Or, Concerning Education; Extracts

Jacqueline of Golden River

Quotes and Images From The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

Rousseau and Romanticism

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 01

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 02

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 03

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 04

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 05

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 06

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 07

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 08

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 09

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 10

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 11

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 12

The Messiah of the Cylinder

The social contract & discourses

Widger's Quotations from Project Gutenberg Edition of The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Social Contract

Books by & about Jean-Jacques Rousseau