Rousseau,
Jean Jacques (1712-1778), French philosopher, social and political
theorist, musician, botanist, and one of the most eloquent writers of the Age of
Enlightenment.
Rousseau
was born in Geneva on June 18, 1712, and was raised by an aunt and uncle
following the death of his mother a few days after his birth. He was apprenticed
at the age of 13 to an engraver, but after three years he ran away and became
secretary and companion to Madame Louise de Warens, a wealthy and charitable
woman who had a profound influence on Rousseau's life and writings. In 1742
Rousseau went to Paris, where he earned his living as a music teacher, music
copyist, and political secretary. He became a close friend of the French
philosopher Denis Diderot
Rousseau's
unconventional views antagonized French and Swiss authorities and alienated many
of his friends, and in 1762 he fled first to Prussia and then to England. There
he was befriended by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, but they soon
quarreled and denounced each other in public letters. During his stay in England
he prepared the manuscript for his posthumously published treatise on botany,
La botanique (Botany, 1802). Rousseau returned to France in 1768 under
the assumed name Renou. In 1770 he completed the manuscript of his most
remarkable work, the autobiographical Confessions (1782; trans. 1783,
1790), which contained a penetrating self-examination and revealed the intense
emotional and moral conflicts in his life. He died July 2, 1778, in
Ermenonville, France
Although
Rousseau contributed greatly to the movement in Western Europe for individual
freedom and against the absolutism of church and state, his conception of the
state as the embodiment of the abstract will of the people and his arguments for
strict enforcement of political and religious conformity are regarded by some
historians as a source of totalitarian ideology. Rousseau's theory of education
led to more permissive and more psychologically oriented methods of child care,
and influenced the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the Swiss educational
reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and other pioneers of modern education.
The New Heloise and Confessions introduced a new style of extreme
emotional expression, concern with intense personal experience, and exploration
of the conflicts between moral and sensual values. In these writings Rousseau
profoundly influenced romanticism in literature and philosophy in the early 19th
century. He also affected the development of the psychological literature,
psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy of existentialism of the 20th century,
particularly in his insistence on free will, his rejection of the doctrine of
original sin, and his
defense
of learning through experience rather than analysis. The spirit and ideas of
Rousseau's work stand midway between the 18th-century Enlightenment, with its
passionate
defense
of reason and individual rights, and early 19th-century romanticism, which
defended intense subjective experience against rational
thought.