Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an 18th-century Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer whose work profoundly influenced political theory, education, literature, and the French Revolution. The Social Contract opens with his famous declaration that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains, and develops a theory of legitimate political authority grounded in the general will. Emile presented a sweeping theory of education centered on the natural development of the child. His autobiographical Confessions inaugurated a new genre of frank self-disclosure in literature. Rousseau's thought stands at the headwaters of both modern democratic political theory and Romanticism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in Geneva and lived a peripatetic life across France, Switzerland, and briefly England, falling in and out of friendship with Diderot, Voltaire, Hume, and most of the French philosophes. His major philosophical works appeared in a remarkable burst in the early 1760s.

The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755) argues that natural humanity is peaceful, self-loving, and largely independent, and that the introduction of property and social comparison is the origin of inequality and corruption. Émile (1762) develops a philosophy of education from this account, with the project of allowing the natural development of the child to unfold without the distortions of conventional schooling. The Social Contract (1762) develops the corresponding political philosophy: legitimate political authority is the general will of the citizen body acting on its own behalf.

Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution, the Romantic movement, and modern political philosophy is enormous. His autobiographical Confessions, written in the 1760s and published posthumously, founded the modern genre of confessional self-examination. He died at Ermenonville in 1778; his remains were transferred to the Panthéon during the Revolution. The contradictions in his work — between liberty and the general will, between natural goodness and social corruption, between the philosophical individual and the citizen — have shaped political and educational philosophy ever since.