Jean Jacques Rousseau

 Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is best known for his line about people being born free but finding themselves in chains. His mother had died a few days after his birth. His father abandoned him when he was ten, leaving him with relatives and friends. He was brought up a Calvinist, and although he had no regular schooling he was encouraged to pursue his precocious taste for reading serious books. At sixteen he began homeless wandering. In the 1740s in his thirties, he appeared in Paris as a writer of poetry, opera and comedy, and there he made friends with a few other writers, including Denis Diderot, a year younger than he, but formally educated.

In 1750 Rousseau won a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for an essay on the question of whether the arts and sciences had conferred benefits upon "mankind." His essay claimed that people were good and innocent by nature and had been corrupted by the arts and sciences. It expressed some of the values of his religious heritage and also his general dislike for the upper classes. Letters and the arts, he claimed, were the worst enemies of morals, for they created wants. Science and virtue, he wrote, were incompatible. Science, he wrote, had ignoble origins. Physics, he said, had risen from vain curiosity. He approved of virtue, but the study of ethics he described as having its source in human pride. He located the basis of ethics in emotions rather than reason.

Rousseau continued writing. In 1754 his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality was published. In it he described the invention of private property as a fateful moment in human history. He preferred the sharing that had existed among Stone Age communal societies, and he lauded the relative equality and the greater bond of affection with which he believed these people regarded each other. He recognized that modern societies would not be remade into the smaller societies of those former times, but in his novel Emile and in his work titled Social Contract, both published in 1762, he tried to explain how civilized society could be improved. Rousseau opposed slavery – which was still widely accepted. He believed in Locke's social contract. He was radical in that he believed in democracy, setting himself apart from Voltaire among others. Moreover, Rousseau put himself on the side of the social revolution. Liberty, he wrote, was not to be found in any existing form of government, it was in the hearts of free men. He described existing laws as "always useful to those who own and as injurious to those who do not." And such laws, he wrote, "give the weak new burdens, the strong new powers and irretrievably destroy natural freedom."

In a society not based on private property, he claimed, individuals could join together to make laws that give expression to a "General Will," uniting people who share a sense of social responsibility. Instead of wanting to return to a Stone Age tribal society he wanted to create a civilization that was democratic and communal, a society worthy of humanity which would appeal to humanity's better nature and make humanity worthy of civilization.

Rousseau gave a boost to romanticism in the arts, believing as he did more in the emotions of the unlearned than in the reason of intellectuals. He had no use for Plato, Aristotle or the scholastics. He was for action rather than what the well-to-do called reason. With Voltaire he was for a time friendly, but Voltaire was anti-Romantic. Voltaire didn't trust emotions the way that Rousseau did, and he criticized Rousseau's admiration for Stone Age tribal society, writing to Rousseau that after reading his work, "one feels like crawling on all fours."

Rousseau had an independent approach to religion. Calvinists and Roman Catholics saw him as a "freethinking" heretic. But Rousseau believed in a personal god, in divine providence and the immortality of the soul. He saw morality and virtue as rising from the faith and hope of religious people. He differed with most Christians in his belief that it was not Original Sin that troubled humanity. He wanted to create a natural religion that rises from instinct, a religion that returns people to nature, with no intermediary priesthood between people and their god. He claimed that Jesus Christ was not the Redeemer but was a model for the recovery of one's nature.

In 1762, Rousseau was driven into exile – to Switzerland and England. In 1763, his book The Social Contract made the Catholic Church's index of forbidden books, and an order went out for his arrest. He was well received in London, but there he was overcome by feelings of persecution, and in 1767 he returned to France, where he was still wanted by the law. In France the authorities ignored him, and he died the following year, at the age of sixty-six.