ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES (1712–1778)
ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES (1712–1778), French philosopher and writer. Rousseau is widely viewed as the greatest social, political, and pedagogical philosopher of the French Enlightenment. He gives education the task of transforming naturally self-loving egoists animated only by their own "particular wills" into polis-loving citizens with a civic "general will" ("the will one has as a citizen"). For Rousseau, the "Great Legislator" (more accurately the great civic educator) must "change the nature of man" by turning self-lovers into "Spartan mothers" (who ask not whether their own sons have survived battles but whether the "general good" of the city still lives). Rousseau also insists that education, however "denaturing," must finally produce autonomous adults who can ultimately say to their teachers (with Émile), "I have decided to be what you made me" (Foxley translation, p. 435).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in the Calvinist stronghold of Geneva on 28 June 1712, the second son of the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau and his wife Susan; both were "citizens" of Geneva, and Rousseau styled himself citoyen de Genève until his final renunciation of citizenship in 1764. Rousseau's mother died ten days after his birth. With his father the child read (and then perpetually cherished) Plutarch's Lives of the greatest Greeks and Romans. Later he was brought up by a puritanical aunt who (he admitted in the Confessions) did much to warp his sexuality. In 1722 Isaac Rousseau fled Geneva after a quarrel, and the ill-educated Jean-Jacques had to be apprenticed, first to a notary, then to an engraver.
In March 1728 Rousseau missed the Genevan city curfew, found himself locked outside the gates, and wandered on foot to Annecy in Savoy, where he was taken in by Mme de Warens, who became his protector and then (1733–1740) his lover. In the provincial salon of Mme de Warens ("Les Charmettes"), Rousseau acquired the education he had lacked in Geneva (Plutarch apart). One gets some sense of his autodidactic passion from his poem, "Le Verger des Charmettes," in which he declares his debt to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Nicholas de Malebranche, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.
Mme de Warens, who specialized in finding Catholic converts, sent the young Rousseau to Turin, where he renounced his inherited Calvinism and converted to the Roman Church; he even briefly attended a seminary for priests, until a Catholic ecclesiastic attempted to seduce him. Returning to Les Charmettes, he lived with de Warens ("Maman"), completed his education, and undertook his earliest writings, including the remarkable Chronologie universelle (c. 1737), with its eloquent praise of Fénelon's charitable moral universalism.
In 1740 Rousseau began to serve as a tutor, moving north to Lyon and living in the house of M. de Mably, whose children he instructed. However, in Lyon he met M. de Mably's two elder brothers, Étienne Bonnot (later the Abbé de Condillac, with Voltaire the greatest "Lockean" in post-Regency France) and the Abbé de Mably. This was the beginning of Rousseau's connection to the Paris philosophes, with whom he would later have a love-hate relationship. At this same time Rousseau became a considerable composer, music theorist, and copyist; in later years he would represent himself as a simple Swiss republican who earned a living as a musical craftsman.
In 1742 Rousseau moved definitively northward to Paris, carrying with him a new system of musical notation, a comedy, an opera, and a collection of poems. In Paris Rousseau eked out a precarious living by tutoring, writing, and copying music; for a brief period (1743–1744) he served, not very happily, as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice—an interlude that he described in his later Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764). He also met and befriended Denis Diderot, soon-to-be editor of the great Encyclopédie, who would ultimately commission Rousseau's first great writing on civic "general will," the Économie politique of 1755.
It was while visiting Diderot in prison (for alleged impiety) in 1749 that Rousseau decided to write an essay for a prize competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon, dealing with the question whether morals had been harmed or advanced by the rebirth (renaissance) of the arts and sciences. Rousseau won the prize with Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the arts and sciences), the so-called First Discourse, in which he defended Spartan-Roman civic généralité against the Athenian literary "tyranny" of poets and orators. The Discourse made his European reputation, even attracting the criticism of the king of Poland, and from this period forward Rousseau was a leading citizen, however reluctantly, of the République des lettres (as Voltaire maliciously reminded him).
In 1752 his opera, Le devin du village (The village soothsayer), was performed at the court of Louis XV at Versailles; at roughly the same time his black comedy Narcissus, the Lover of Himself was given in Paris at the Theatre français. As a good citoyen de Genève, Rousseau refused a royal pension, continuing his republican self-support as a musician by publishing La lettre sur la musique française (Letter on French music) in 1753, which, with its strong defense of Italian simplicity against French elaborateness, led to a collision with Jean-Baptiste Rameau, the greatest French composer of the day.
Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the origins of inequality among men) was completed in May 1754. The most radical of his works, this so-called Second Discourse urges that existing government is a kind of confidence trick on the part of the rich, who persuade the poor that it is universally and equally advantageous to be subjected to law and to political order. In June 1754 Rousseau left Paris for a visit to his native Geneva, where he reconverted to Calvinism and had his civic rights restored and where, in 1755, he published his Inégalité and the Économie politique (the Third Discourse). In 1756 he moved to the countryside, taking up residence at l'Hermitage, the country seat of Mme d'Epinay (inspiring Diderot's sarcastic epigram, "a fine citizen a hermit is"), a move that marked the start of the weakening of Rousseau's ties to the philosophes—a process accelerated by his 1758 Lettre à d'Alembert, which opposed the latter's scheme to found a theater in Geneva. (Platolike, Rousseau urged that such a theater would be inimical to civic virtue and good morals and that Molière's Misanthrope would have a deleterious effect.)
In 1758, too, Rousseau began L'état de guerre (The state of war), his most brilliant and scathing critique of Thomas Hobbes and Hobbism. Taking over observations first made by René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Essais de théodicée, 1710), Rousseau insists that Hobbes has simply mistaken badly socialized, ill-educated Englishmen for "natural" men, leading to Hobbesian unquestionable "sovereignty" as the only antidote to rapacious appetite: Looking out his London window, Hobbes "thinks that he has seen the natural man," but he has really only viewed "a bourgeois of London or Paris." Hobbes, for Rousseau, has simply inverted cause and effect, mistaking a bad effect for "natural" depravity.
In the late 1750s Rousseau labored on (but never published) the Lettres morales (for Sophie d'Houdetot) and then produced his vast epistolary novel, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (published 1761), with its celebrated account of a small ideal society, Clarens, superintended by the godlike, all-seeing M. de Wolmar. The novel was a runaway best-seller, the greatest literary success since Fénelon's Telemachus, Son of Ulysses in 1699.
In May 1762 Rousseau brought out two of his greatest but most ill-fated works: Du contrat social (The social contract) and Émile, ou Traitéde l'éducation (both focusing on transformative, "denaturing" education). Both were condemned and publicly burned in Paris at the behest of Archbishop
Christophe de Beaumont (and with the acquiesence of the Parlement of Paris); Rousseau, under order of arrest, fled to Geneva (only to find the same works condemned and burned there). Against charges of impiety leveled by the Genevan public prosecutor—alleging the danger of Rousseau's "natural" theology in Émile's "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar"—Rousseau composed and published his trenchant Lettres de montagne (Letters written from the mountain), in which he defended ancient "civic" religion and insisted that Christianity produces good men whose other-worldliness makes them "bad citizens." This of course only increased the furor against him, and he took refuge in the Prussian enclave of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). Renouncing his Genevan citizenship definitively, Rousseau occupied himself by writing a constitution for recently liberated Corsica; increasingly threatened, his paranoia aggravated by genuine danger, Rousseau accepted the offer of British refuge from David Hume, although he soon came to see the benevolent Scot as part of the "league of malignant enemies" bent on his destruction. After an unhappy period in England, Rousseau returned incognito to France, living under the assumed name of Renou. While living under this name, Rousseau finally married his longtime companion, Thérèse Levasseur, by whom he had fathered—if the Confessions are to be believed—five children, all supposedly abandoned in a foundling hospital.
The Confessions themselves increasingly occupied Rousseau's time, and he often read substantial fragments of this work in progress in sympathetic aristocratic salons. In 1772 he produced the remarkable Gouvernement de Pologne as part of an effort to avert partition by Prussia, Austria, and Russia; the book combines intelligent constitutional reforms with Rousseau's most glowing account of Spartan and Roman-republican civic virtue. In the same year he wrote (without publishing) the brilliantly innovative Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in which he bifurcated himself and had one half comment on the other half—schizophrenia turned into a literary genre.
In 1777 Rousseau wrote his last great confessional work, Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire (The reveries of a solitary walker), which begins with the celebrated words, "Here I am, then, alone on the Earth, no longer having any brother, or neighbor, or friend, or society except myself." A year later, while in refuge on an aristocratic estate at Ermenonville (north of Paris) and while engaging in his beloved botanical studies, Rousseau died quite suddenly on 2 July 1778. He was originally buried in a quasi-Roman sarcophagus on the Isle of Poplars at Ermenonville, but at the height of the French Revolution his ashes were translated, in a dramatic torchlight procession, to the Pantheon in Paris and placed next to the remains of his nemesis Voltaire (1794).
Secondary Sources
Charvet, John. The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau. Cambridge, U.K., 1974.
Hendel, Charles William. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist. 2 vols. London, 1934.
Riley, Patrick. "General Will." In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Philosophy. Edited by A. Ryan, et al. Oxford, 1988.
——. The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic. Princeton, 1986.
Shklar, Judith N. Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1969. Reprint, 1985.
Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle. Paris, 1971. Translated into English as Transparency and Obstruction by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 1988.
Wokler, Robert. Rousseau. Oxford, 1995.
