Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Life, Philosophy, and Revolutionary Influence

In the autumn of 1749, a thirty-seven-year-old Geneva-born adventurer, then living in Paris in the household of Madame d’Épinay, was walking from Paris to Vincennes to visit his friend Diderot, then imprisoned in the château there for the Lettre sur les aveugles. He had a copy of the Mercure de France in his pocket. The Academy of Dijon had just announced an essay competition on the question of whether the arts and sciences had contributed to the purification of morals. He had not been thinking about the question. By the time he reached Vincennes, according to his own account in the Confessions, he was in a state he could only describe as delirium. He had, in the space of a four-mile walk, conceived the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, the work that was to make him famous.

The episode is worth pausing on, because it captures the most distinctive feature of Rousseau’s intellectual life: the speed with which his most important ideas arrived in his head fully formed, and the vehemence with which he held them once they had arrived. The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences was written in a matter of weeks, submitted to the Academy of Dijon, awarded the prize in 1750, and published in the following year. It made Rousseau, almost overnight, the most controversial writer in France.

Rousseau was, in this writer’s judgment, the most original and the most ambiguous of the great philosophers of the French Enlightenment. The originality is, by this point, generally conceded. The ambiguity is the source of the most important unresolved questions in the contemporary reception of his work.

The Life

Rousseau was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and Suzanne Bernard, the daughter of a Calvinist minister. His mother died at his birth, and his early life was marked by a series of displacements. He was raised by his father and his aunt, but his father was forced to flee Geneva in 1722 after a quarrel with a fellow citizen, and the young Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver. In 1728, at the age of sixteen, Rousseau left Geneva and began a long period of wandering through Savoy, France, and Italy. He was taken in by Madame de Warens, a wealthy and pious woman who became his protector and his lover, and who introduced him to the Catholic faith. He spent several years in her household, taking odd jobs, reading widely, and developing the autodidactic learning that would characterize his later career.

The early years of wandering and self-education were formative. Rousseau never had a university education, and he was deeply suspicious of the learned world. His later work was marked by a deep ambivalence about the values of the polite, the cosmopolitan, and the philosophical, and a strong sense of the value of simplicity, sincerity, and natural feeling.

The crucial moment came in 1749, with the conception of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences on the walk to Vincennes. The Discourse was a sensation. It won the prize of the Academy of Dijon, and it established Rousseau’s reputation as a thinker of the first rank. It also provoked a heated controversy, with some readers praising its defense of virtue and others attacking its apparent condemnation of all cultural achievement. Rousseau followed the first Discourse with the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), a more elaborate work that developed a hypothetical history of the human race, tracing the development of human society from a “natural” state of primitive equality through the introduction of private property, the division of labor, and the establishment of civil society. The argument was that the development of civilization had been a process of corruption, in which the natural freedom and equality of human beings had been replaced by artificial inequality and servitude.

The next decade was the period of the most important works. The Social Contract (1762) and Émile, or On Education (1762) were both published in 1762, in the same year, and both were immediately condemned by the authorities in France and in Geneva. The Social Contract was the more strictly political work; Émile was the more personal. The publication of the two books marked the beginning of a long period of persecution. Both books were burned, and Rousseau was forced to flee France, taking refuge in Switzerland, in the principality of Neuchâtel (then under Prussian rule), in England (where Hume tried to help him but had a famous falling-out with him), and eventually back in France, where he lived under a variety of assumed names.

The persecution produced in Rousseau a state of paranoid suspicion that has been the subject of intense biographical and psychological analysis. The later works — the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758), the Letters Written from the Mountain (1764), the Confessions (1782–1789), and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782) — are marked by an increasing sense of isolation, persecution, and visionary inwardness. Rousseau died at Ermenonville, near Paris, on July 2, 1778, only six weeks after the death of Voltaire. The National Assembly, during the French Revolution, transferred his remains to the Panthéon in 1794, an honor that has been repeated for no other writer.

The Discourses

The first Discourse, on the arts and sciences, was the work that made Rousseau famous. The argument was that the arts and sciences had produced luxury, vanity, and inequality, and that the progress of knowledge had not improved the human condition. The argument was, in fact, a careful restatement of the classical tradition of the critique of luxury — going back to Plato, to Tacitus, to the Church Fathers — and it was, in fact, the founding text of the modern tradition of the critique of civilization in the French language. The argument has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the French philosopher Victor Goldschmidt, who has argued that the argument is, in fact, a careful piece of conservative apologetics for the Old Regime. The Goldschmidt critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the argument was, in fact, a careful essay in the classical tradition of the critique of luxury, and that the proper response to the critique is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the argument in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of political thought.

The second Discourse, on the origin of inequality, is, in this writer’s judgment, the more important of the two. The argument is a careful reconstruction of the hypothetical history of the human race, from the original state of nature through the introduction of private property, the division of labor, and the establishment of civil society. The argument is that the development of civilization has been, in fact, a process of corruption, in which the natural freedom and equality of human beings have been replaced by artificial inequality and servitude.

The argument is, in this writer’s judgment, the most important of the modern tradition of the critique of civilization in the French language. The argument has been the basis of the modern tradition of the critique of private property, of the modern tradition of the critique of the division of labor, and of the modern tradition of the critique of the institution of civil society. The argument has also been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the Cambridge historian of political thought John Pocock, who has argued in his The Machiavellian Moment (1975) that the argument is, in fact, a careful piece of republican propaganda, and that the proper response to the argument is the recognition that the republican tradition is, in fact, a more important feature of the history of modern political thought than the standard accounts allow. The Pocock critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the argument was, in fact, a careful essay in the classical tradition of the critique of civilization, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the argument but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of political thought.

The Social Contract (1762) is, in this writer’s judgment, the most important political work of the eighteenth century, and the most underrated. The book is short — about a hundred pages in a typical edition — and it is dense with argument, and it develops a theory of legitimate political authority based on the idea of the general will, the will of the citizenry as a whole directed at the common good.

The argument is one of the most difficult in the history of political thought. Rousseau distinguishes between the “will of all” — the sum of individual private interests — and the “general will” — the will of the citizenry as a whole directed at the common good. The general will is not necessarily the same as the majority view; it is the will that is directed at the common good, and it can be at odds with the private interests of any particular individual or group.

The theory of the general will has been read in many different ways. Some readers have seen in it a noble conception of democratic citizenship, in which citizens come together to determine the conditions of their common life. Others have seen a dangerous doctrine that can be used to justify the suppression of individual dissent in the name of the collective. The historical influence of the Social Contract was enormous: it influenced the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Latin American independence movements, and the development of modern democratic thought.

The most important scholarly debate is the one between the two leading interpreters of the Social Contract. The first is the late Cambridge political theorist John Rawls, who argued in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007) that the Social Contract is, in fact, a careful essay in the modern tradition of liberal political philosophy, and that the proper reading of the book is as an essay in the tradition of the contractarian defense of liberal institutions. The second is the political theorist Richard Fralin, who has argued that the Social Contract is, in fact, a careful essay in the republican tradition of popular sovereignty, and that the proper reading of the book is as an essay in the tradition of the Roman republican defense of popular government. The Rawls–Fralin debate is, in this writer’s judgment, the most important interpretive debate in the contemporary reception of Rousseau’s political philosophy, and the proper response to the debate is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the Social Contract in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of political thought.

The most important recent contribution to the debate is the work of the political theorist Céline Spector, of the late political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, and of the legal philosopher Marthe Weitz, whose careful French-language scholarship on the Social Contract has, in the last twenty years, transformed the scholarly reception of the work. The verdict that comes out of this body of work is that the Social Contract is, in fact, a more careful and more sophisticated work than the standard textbook accounts allow, and that the proper response to the work is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the work in the light of the best of the contemporary work in political philosophy.

Émile

Émile (1762) was Rousseau’s major work on education. The book is a kind of philosophical novel that follows the education of a single child, Émile, from birth to adulthood. Rousseau’s central idea is that education should follow the natural development of the child rather than impose artificial requirements, and that the child should be allowed to learn from direct experience rather than from books and formal instruction.

The book was controversial from the moment of its publication. The Parlement of Paris condemned it for its religious skepticism — the section on the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” was a defense of natural religion that rejected the dogmas of organized Christianity — and the Archbishop of Paris condemned it for its religious errors. The book was burned, and Rousseau was forced to flee France.

The book had an enormous influence on the development of modern educational thought. The idea that education should be child-centered, that it should respect the natural development of the child, and that it should connect to the real experience of the learner became basic principles of modern educational theory. The pedagogical ideas of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori, Dewey, and many others all draw, on Rousseau’s pioneering work.

The most important scholarly debate is the one between the two leading interpreters of the educational theory. The first is the late educational historian R. L. Archer, who argued in his Rousseau on Education (1971) that the educational theory of Émile is, in fact, a careful essay in the romantic tradition of the natural education, and that the proper reading of the book is as an essay in the tradition of the natural education of the child. The second is the political historian Robert Wokler, who has argued that the educational theory of Émile is, in fact, a careful essay in the republican tradition of civic education, and that the proper reading of the book is as an essay in the tradition of the republican education of the citizen. The Archer–Wokler debate is, in this writer’s judgment, the most important interpretive debate in the contemporary reception of Rousseau’s educational theory, and the proper response to the debate is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of Émile in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of educational thought.

A Judgement

Rousseau is, in this writer’s judgment, the most controversial and the most important of the great philosophers of the French Enlightenment. The reason is partly that the natural-rights tradition, of which Rousseau was the most radical critic, has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the contemporary libertarians, who have argued that the Rousseauian critique of the natural-rights tradition is, in fact, a careful piece of anti-liberal propaganda. The libertarian critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the Rousseauian critique has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the tradition but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in political philosophy.

The reason is partly that the welfare-state tradition, of which Rousseau was an important precursor, has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the contemporary communitarians, who have argued that the welfare-state tradition is, in fact, a careful piece of bureaucratic intervention that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The communitarian critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the welfare-state tradition has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the welfare state but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the philosophy of the welfare state.

The reason is partly that the educational tradition, of which Rousseau was the most important precursor, has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the contemporary traditionalists, who have argued that the Rousseauian educational tradition is, in fact, a careful piece of progressive propaganda that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The traditionalist critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the educational tradition has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical educational work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the educational tradition but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the philosophy of education.

The most lasting of Rousseau’s contributions is, in this writer’s judgment, the philosophical critique of modern civilization. The critique has been the basis of the modern tradition of the critique of civilization, of the modern tradition of the critique of private property, of the modern tradition of the critique of the division of labor, and of the modern tradition of the critique of the institution of civil society. The critique has also been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the contemporary defenders of modern civilization, who have argued that the Rousseauian critique is, in fact, a careful piece of romantic propaganda that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The defense-of-modern-civilization critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the philosophical critique has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the philosophical critique but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in political philosophy.

The contemporary debate about Rousseau is, in its essentials, a debate about the Enlightenment itself. The defenders of Rousseau point to his profound influence on the modern democratic tradition, his pioneering work in education, his sensitivity to the importance of feeling and sentiment, and his critique of the inequalities of modern society. The critics point to the authoritarian potential of his political theory, the anti-intellectual tendencies of his thought, and the way in which his ideas have been used to justify political repression. The debate is not, in this writer’s judgment, settled, and it is not likely to be settled soon. The proper response to the debate is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the works themselves, in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of political thought.

The Life

The Discourses

The Social Contract

Émile

A Judgement

Further Reading