Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712; his mother died days later. His father, a watchmaker, read novels with him through the night, then abandoned him at ten after a quarrel. Apprenticed to an engraver who beat him, he ran away at sixteen and was taken in, in Savoy, by Madame de Warens, a Catholic convert who became his protector, “Maman”, and later his lover. Self-taught, he arrived in Paris in 1742 with a new system of musical notation, befriended Diderot, wrote for the Encyclopédie, and lived with Thérèse Levasseur, a laundress; their five children were all placed in the Paris foundling hospital.

The illumination of Vincennes

In 1749, walking to visit Diderot, imprisoned at Vincennes, Rousseau read in a newspaper the essay question set by the Academy of Dijon: “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” He recalled being overwhelmed — “I saw another universe and I became another man” — and sat under a tree, weeping. His answer, the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), argued no: civilization had corrupted morals. It won the prize and made him famous.

The Discourse on Inequality

The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) imagined humanity in a state of nature: solitary, healthy, peaceful, moved by self-love (amour de soi) and pity, with few desires. Against Hobbes, natural man is not warlike; it is society that makes him so. Inequality began when:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Society breeds amour-propre — the need to be esteemed, compared, preferred — which makes us live “outside ourselves”, in the opinion of others.

The Social Contract

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

So opens The Social Contract (1762). Rousseau seeks a form of association “in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” The answer: each gives himself wholly to the community, and receives back, as a citizen, a share in the sovereign. The sovereign is the general will (volonté générale), which aims at the common good — distinct from the “will of all”, the sum of private interests. Laws must be made by the people as a whole. And notoriously:

Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body: which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.

Admirers (Kant, the French revolutionaries) saw here the foundation of democratic self-government and moral autonomy; critics (Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin, J. L. Talmon) saw the seeds of “totalitarian democracy”.

Emile, Julie, the Confessions

Emile, or On Education (1762) describes raising a boy “according to nature”, learning from experience rather than books, protected from society’s vanity; its section “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” advocated a natural religion of the heart — and got the book burned in Paris and Geneva. Rousseau fled into exile; David Hume brought him to England in 1766, and Rousseau came to believe Hume was plotting against him.

Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), an epistolary love novel, was the bestseller of the century and launched the cult of sensibility. The Confessions (written 1765–70, published posthumously) begins: “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent… I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.” With unprecedented candour — about masochism, theft, the children abandoned — it invented the modern autobiography of the inner self. His last work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, is a meditation on nature and solitude.

He died in 1778 at Ermenonville; in 1794 the revolutionaries moved his remains to the Panthéon, near Voltaire’s.

Legacy

Rousseau inspired the French Revolution, Romanticism (the love of nature, feeling, authenticity), progressive education, Immanuel Kant‘s ethics of autonomy (“Rousseau set me right… I learned to honour human beings”), Karl Marx‘s critique of property, and Leo Tolstoy‘s simplicity — Tolstoy wore a medallion with Rousseau’s portrait as a young man.

Using Rousseau in conversation

• On freedom and society: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
• On property: the first man who fenced a field and said “this is mine”.
• On social media and status: amour-propre — living in the eyes of others.
• On democracy: the general will versus the will of all.