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
Madame Louise de Warens,
a
French
Catholic
woman. Although she was twelve years older than him 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,
six 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.
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