Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau was born in Geneva to a watchmaker; his mother died giving birth to him, his father taught him Plutarch and then fled the city when he was ten. Boarded out and apprenticed to an engraver, he ran away at sixteen. Taken in by the young Madame de Warens, he converted to Catholicism and taught himself music and philosophy. At thirty he reached Paris, lived by copying music, befriended Diderot, wrote the music articles for the Encyclopédie, and took up with a laundress, Thérèse, whose five children by him he sent to the foundling hospital.

In 1749, walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, he read the Dijon Academy's essay question, whether the progress of the sciences and arts had improved morals, and, he said, burst into tears. His answer was no; it won the prize and made him famous. The Discourse on Inequality argued that natural man is solitary and good and that property and society corrupted him. In 1762 The Social Contract and Émile appeared together; both were burned in Paris and Geneva, a warrant was issued for him, and he spent years in flight through Switzerland, England and France, broke with Hume, sank into persecution mania, and wrote the Confessions and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

The Social Contract seeks a form of association in which each, while obeying, remains as free as before. The answer is that each gives himself wholly to the community and obeys the 'general will', which is not the will of the majority but the community's will for the common good. The book became the bible of the French Revolution, and Robespierre had his remains moved to the Panthéon. Émile holds that education should follow nature and let the child learn from experience. Kant said Rousseau taught him to honour ordinary people, and Romanticism begins with him.