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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophers

                           Western Philosophers
   18th-century philosophy
   (Modern Philosophy)
   Jean-Jacques Rousseau
         Name:       Jean-Jacques Rousseau
        Birth:       June 28, 1712 (Geneva, Switzerland)
        Death:       July 2, 1778 ( Ermenonville, France)
   School/tradition: Social contract theory
    Main interests:  Political philosophy,music, education, literature,
                     autobiography
    Notable ideas:   General will, amour-propre
      Influences:    Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Denis Diderot
      Influenced:    Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm
                     Friedrich Hegel, the Romantic movement

   Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Genevan
   philosopher of the Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the
   French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth
   of nationalism. Rousseau also made important contributions to music
   both as a theorist and as a composer. With his Confessions and other
   writings, he practically invented modern autobiography and encouraged a
   new focus on the building of subjectivity that would bear fruit in the
   work of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Freud. His novel Julie, ou la
   nouvelle Héloïse was one of the best-selling fictional works of the
   eighteenth century and was important to the development of romanticism.

Biography

   Rousseau was born in Geneva (then an independent republic, today part
   of Switzerland) and throughout his life described himself as a citizen
   of Geneva. His mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died nine days after
   his birth due to complications from childbirth, and his father Isaac, a
   failed watchmaker, abandoned him in 1722 to avoid imprisonment for
   fighting a duel. His childhood education consisted solely of reading
   Plutarch's Lives and Calvinist sermons. After his father's departure,
   Rousseau was placed in the care of a pastor at Bossey, near Geneva.
   According to Rousseau's own account in Book I of the Confessions, his
   experience of corporal punishment at the hands of the pastor's sister
   was important in the formation of his sexuality.

   Rousseau left Geneva on March 14, 1728, after several years of
   apprenticeship to a notary and then an engraver. He then met
   Françoise-Louise de Warens, a French Catholic baroness twelve years his
   elder who would later become his lover. Under the protection of de
   Warens, he converted to Catholicism.

   In 1742 Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des
   Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he had
   invented, based on a single line displaying numbers that represented
   intervals between notes and dots and commas that indicated rhythmic
   values. The system was intended to be compatible with typography. The
   Academy rejected it as impractical and unoriginal, but a version of the
   system remains in use in some parts of the world.

   From 1743 to 1744, he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice,
   whose republican government Rousseau would refer to often in his later
   political work. After this, he returned to Paris, where he befriended
   and lived with Thérèse Levasseur, a semi-literate seamstress who,
   according to Rousseau, bore him five children, though this number may
   not be accurate. All the children were deposited at a foundling
   hospital soon after birth and would most likely have perished soon
   afterwards, as the mortality rate for such children was very high.
   Rousseau's abandonment of his children became a source of embarrassment
   once he became known as a theorist of education and child-rearing, and
   was used by enemies including Voltaire to attack him. In his defense,
   Rousseau explained that he would have been a poor father, and,
   implausibly, that the children would have a better life at the
   foundling home.
   The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris
   Enlarge
   The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris

   While in Paris, he became friends with Diderot and beginning in 1749
   contributed several articles to his Encyclopédie, beginning with some
   articles on music. His most important contribution was an article on
   political economy, written in 1755. Soon after, his friendship with
   Diderot and the Encyclopedists would become strained.

   In 1749, as Rousseau walked to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, he
   read in the Mercure de France of an essay competition sponsored by the
   Académie de Dijon, asking whether the development of the arts and
   sciences had been morally beneficial. Rousseau claimed that this
   question caused him to have a moment of sudden inspiration by the
   roadside, during which he perceived the principle of the natural
   goodness of humanity on which all his later philosophical works were
   based. As a consequence of this, he answered the competition question
   in the negative, in his 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences",
   which won him first prize in the contest and gained him significant
   fame.

   During this period he continued his interest in music and in 1752 his
   opera Le Devin du Village was performed for King Louis XV. The same
   year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their
   performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, prompted
   the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of French music
   against supporters of the Italian style. Rousseau was an enthusiastic
   supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others,
   making an important contribution with his Letter on French Music.

   In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva where he reconverted to Calvinism
   and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755 Rousseau
   completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis
   of Inequality Among Men. This began a troubled period in Rousseau's
   personal relationships in which he gradually became estranged from his
   former friends such as Diderot and Grimm and from benefactors such as
   Madame d'Epinay. He also pursued an important but unconsummated
   romantic attachment with Sophie d'Houdetot. Following his break with
   the Encyclopedists, he enjoyed the support and patronage of the Duc de
   Luxembourg, one of the wealthiest nobles in France.

   Rousseau, in 1761 published the successful romantic novel Julie, ou la
   nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloise). In 1762 he published two major
   books, first Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique (in
   English, literally Of Social Contract, Principles of Political Right)
   in April and then Émile, or On Education in May. Both books criticized
   religion and were banned in both France and Geneva. Rousseau was forced
   to flee arrest and made stops in both Bern and Môtiers in Switzerland,
   where he enjoyed the protection of Frederick the Great of Prussia and
   his local representative, Lord Keith. While in Motiers, Rousseau wrote
   the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la
   Corse).

   Facing criticism in Switzerland – his house in Motiers was stoned in
   1765 – he took refuge with the philosopher David Hume in Great Britain.
   Isolated at Wootton on the borders of Derbyshire and Staffordshire,
   Rousseau suffered a serious decline in his mental health and began to
   experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume
   and others. As a result he fled back to France in 1767 under the name
   "Renou," although officially he was not allowed to return before 1770.
   In 1768 he went through a legally invalid marriage to Thérèse, and in
   1770 he returned to Paris. 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. At the request of Madame
   d'Epinay the police ordered him to stop, and the Confessions, was only
   partially published in 1782, four years after his death. All his
   subsequent works were also only to appear posthumously.

   Rousseau continued to write until his death. In 1772, he was invited to
   present recommendations for a new constitution for Poland, resulting in
   the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his
   last major political work. In 1776 he completed Dialogues: Rousseau
   Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary
   Walker. In order to support himself through this time, he returned to
   copying music. Because of his prudential suspicion, 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 (28 miles northeast of
   Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died on July 2, 1778.

   Rousseau was initially buried on the Ile des Peupliers. His remains
   were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, sixteen years after his
   death and located directly across from those of his contemporary
   Voltaire. 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 honour on the tiny Ile Rousseau in
   Lake Geneva. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40
   Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

Philosophy

Nature vs. society

   Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature.
   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. (Rousseau, however, never used
   the phrase "noble savage".) This does not require, however, that humans
   act civilly; in fact, speaking in terms of 'just' or 'wicked' is
   impossible in Rousseau's pre-political society. Humans may act with all
   of the ferocity of an animal. They are good because they are
   self-sufficent and thus not subject to the vices of political 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.

   Society's negative influence on otherwise virtuous men centers, in
   Rousseau's philosophy, on its transformation of amour de soi, a
   positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi
   represents the instinctive human desire for self preservation, combined
   with the human power of reason. In contrast, amour-propre is artificial
   and forces man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted
   fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of
   others. Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction; it had
   been invoked by, among others, Vauvenargues.

   In " Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" Rousseau argued that the arts
   and sciences had not been beneficial to humankind because they were not
   human needs, but rather a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the
   opportunities they created for idleness and luxury contributed to the
   corruption of man. 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,
   metallurgy, private property, and the division of labor led to humans
   becoming increasingly dependent on one another, and led to 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 thus instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of
   human society. Rousseau's own conception of the 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.

Political theory

   A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay
   Enlarge
   A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay

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
   it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in
   the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an
   earlier work, the article Economie Politique, featured in Diderot's
   Encyclopédie. 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 while 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.

   While Rousseau argues that sovereignty should 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. It has been argued that
   this would prevent Rousseau's ideal state being realized in a large
   society, though in modern times, communication may have advanced to the
   point where this is no longer the case. 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.

Education

   Rousseau set out his views on education in Émile, a semi-fictitious
   work detailing the growth of a young boy of that name, presided over by
   Rousseau himself. He brings him up in the countryside, where, he
   believes, humans are most naturally suited, rather than in a city,
   where we only learn bad habits, both physical and intellectual. The aim
   of education, Rousseau says, is to learn how to live, and this is
   accomplished by following a guardian who can point the way to good
   living.

   The growth of a child is divided into three sections, first to the age
   of about 12, when calculating and complex thinking is not possible, and
   children, according to his deepest conviction, live like animals.
   Second, from 12 to about 16, when reason starts to develop, and finally
   from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develops into an adult. At
   this point, Emile finds a young woman to complement him.

   The book is based on Rousseau's ideals of healthy living. The boy must
   work out how to follow his social instincts and be protected from the
   vices of urban individualism and self-consciousness.

   Rousseau's account of the education of Emile is, however, not an
   account of education of a gender-neutral "child." The education he
   proposes for Sophie, the young woman Emile is destined to marry, is
   importantly different to that of Emile. Sophie (as a representative of
   ideal womanhood) is educated to be governed (by her husband) while
   Emile (as a representative of the ideal man) is educated to be
   self-governing. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's
   educational and political philosophy, it is essential to his account of
   the distinction between private, personal relations and the public
   world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines
   it depends on the (naturalized) subordination of women in order for
   both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to
   function as Rousseau imagines it could and should.

   The education proposed in Émile has been criticized for being
   impractical, and the topic itself (the education of children) has led
   the text to be ignored by many studying Rousseau’s more “political”
   works. However, of particular interest to anyone interested in
   Rousseau’s intentions in Émile is a letter he wrote to his friend
   Cramer on October 13, 1764. In the letter, Rousseau answers the
   criticism of impracticability: “You say quite correctly that it is
   impossible to produce an Emile. But I cannot believe that you take the
   book that carries this name for a true treatise on education. It is
   rather a philosophical work on this principle advanced by the author in
   other writings that man is naturally good” (Italics in the original).

Religion

   Rousseau was most controversial in his own time for his views on
   religion. His view that man is good by nature conflicts with the
   doctrine of original sin and his theology of nature expounded by the
   Savoyard Vicar in Émile led to the condemnation of the book in both
   Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. In the Social Contract he claims
   that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens. This was one
   of the reasons for the book's condemnation in Geneva. Rousseau
   attempted to defend himself against critics of his religious views in
   his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris.

Legacy

   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 Reign of 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 sometimes considered
   a forebear of modern socialism and communism (see Friedrich Engels and
   Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings).
   Rousseau also questioned the assumption that majority will 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. In Émile he differentiates between healthy and
   "useless" crippled children. Only a healthy child can be the rewarding
   object of any educational work. 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-Centered Education and its
   Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a
   series of footnotes to Rousseau.

   In his main writings Rousseau identifies nature with the primitive
   state of savage man. Later he took nature to mean the spontaneity of
   the process by which man builds his egocentric, instinct based
   character and his little world. Nature thus signifies interiority and
   integrity, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement which
   society imposes in the name of progressive emancipation from
   coldhearted brutality.

   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 important in Romanticism, though Rousseau himself
   is sometimes regarded as a figure of The Enlightenment.

Major works

     * Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et
       les arts), 1750
     * Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy, 1752
     * Le Devin du Village: an opera, 1752, score
     * 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
     * Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles, 1758 (Lettre à d'Alembert
       sur les spectacles)
     * Julie, or the New Heloise ( Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse), 1761
     * Émile: or, on Education (Émile ou de l'éducation), 1762
     * The Creed of a Savoyard Priest, 1762 (in Émile)
     * 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 (Lettres de la montagne)
     * Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1770,
       published 1782
     * Constitutional Project for Corsica, 1772
     * Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1772
     * Essay on the origin of language, published 1781 (Essai sur
       l'origine des langues)
     * Reveries of a Solitary Walker, incomplete, published 1782 (Rêveries
       du promeneur solitaire)
     * Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, published 1782

Editions in English

     * Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis:
       Hackett Publishing, 1987.
     * Collected Writings, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly,
       Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1990-2005, 11 vols.
       (Does not as yet include Émile.)
     * The Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University
       Press, 2000.
     * Emile, or On Education, trans. with an introd. by Allan Bloom, New
       York: Basic Books, 1979.
     * "On the Origin of Language," trans. John H. Moran. In On the Origin
       of Language: Two Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
       1986.
     * Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France. London: Penguin
       Books, 1980.
     * 'The Discourses' and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor
       Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
     * 'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings, trans.
       Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Online texts

     * Emile French text and English translation (Grace G. Roosevelt's
       revision and correction of Barbara Foxley's Everyman translation,
       at Columbia)
     * Mondo Politico Library's presentation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
       book, The Social Contract (G.D.H. Cole translation; full text)
     * Wikisource, texts in French
     * 'Elementary Letters on Botany', 1771-3 English translation
     * A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences English
       translation
     * Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy English translation
     * Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men English
       translation
     * Discourse on Political Economy English translation
     * The Creed of a Savoyard Priest English translation
     * The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right English
       translation
     * Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau English translation, as
       published by Project Gutenberg, 2004 [EBook #3913]
     * Constitutional Project for Corsica English translation
     * Considerations on the Government of Poland English translation
     * Works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Project Gutenberg

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