Pars may refer to:

• Fārs Province, modern Persian language name for Pars Province, central Iranian kingdom of the ancient Persian empire
• Pars News Agency and Pars Agency, names of the national Iranian news agency prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979
• Pārs as occasionally used in the Persian language as Persia or Iran
• FNSS Pars, a Turkish wheeled armoured vehicle
• Krisztián Pars, Hungarian athlete
• Pars interarticularis, in spinal anatomy
• The Pars, nickname for Dunfermline Athletic Football Club

PARS may refer to:

• PARS (point-a-rally system), used in the game of squash
• Pakistan Amateur Radio Society
• Programmed Airline Reservations System
• Russian Mission Airport (ICAO location indicator: PARS), in Russian Mission, Alaska, United States
• PARS (Pre-arrival Review System), a system to expedite customs clearance of items into Canada. Administered by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Jacques Higelin
Jacques Higelin live at the Zarbs festival in July 2007
Background information
Birth name	Jacques Joseph Victor Higelin
Born	(1940-10-18)18 October 1940 Brou-sur-Chantereine, France
Genres	French pop
Occupations	French singer-songwriter
Instruments	Guitar Piano
Years active	1969–present
Website	Jacques Higelin <FR>

Jacques Joseph Victor Higelin (born 18 October 1940 in Brou-sur-Chantereine, Seine-et-Marne, France) is a French pop singer who rose to prominence in the early 1970s. Early in his career, many of Higelin's songs were effectively blacklisted from French radio because of his controversial left wing political beliefs, and his association with socialist groups. He and his wife, Kuelan, are the parent of actor Ken Higelin, he also has a daughter Izïa Higelin (singer) with Aziza and an elder son Arthur H (famous French singer) with Nicole Courtois.

Higelin's entertainment career began at age 14, when he left school to work as a stunt double. While playing a number of small roles in various motion pictures, Higelin was taught to play the guitar by Henri Crolla, a French-Italian jazz guitarist and film composer. By the early sixties, Higelin was attending the René Simon drama school, where he won the François Perier award.

For two years starting in 1961, Higelin served in the French military in various countries. Upon returning to France, he resumed his cinematic career, but increasingly began to focus on music over film. By the end of the decade, he was also very active in the artistic underground in Paris, and he began to channel his music towards radical militancy. He began attracting popular attention through his live concerts, typically held in smaller venues, and released his first solo album, in 1971. By the middle of the 1970s, Higelin had become one of France's most successful musicians, and he remains influential to this day. The CD featured performances by: Nina Hagen, Tore Kunda, Trio Esperança, Princess Erika, Spencer Davis, Amina, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Annette Austin, and a 72 voices of members of "The Genesis Choir" and "The Reverend Martin Luther King Choir" recorded at studio "Z", Sacramento, California. European performer's recorded at Ferber Studios, Paris France.

Discography[link]

• 1969 – Higelin et Areski (with Areski Belkacem)
• 1970 – Inédits 1970 (with Areski Belkacem)
• 1971 – Jacques "Crabouif" Higelin
• 1973 – Jacques Canetti présente Jacques Higelin
• 1974 – BBH 75
• 1975 – Irradie
• 1976 – Alertez les Bébés
• 1978 – No Man's Land
• 1979 – Caviar Pour les Autres and Champagne Pour Tout le Monde
• 1982 – Higelin 82
• 1985 – Aï
• 1988 – Tombé du Ciel
• 1990 – Follow the Live
• 1991 – Illicite and Au Coeur d'Higelin
• 1992 – Le Rex
• 1994 – Aux Héros de la Voltige
• 1998 – Paradis Païen
• 2000 – Higelin Live 2000
• 2005 – Entre Deux Gares
• 2006 – Amor Doloroso
• 2010 – Coup de foudre

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jacques Higelin

• "Biography – Jacques Higelin" June 2005. RFI Musique Last accessed on 25 January 2006.
• "Site officiel- Jacques Higelin"
• Jacques Higelin on Europopmusic.eu (English)

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2011)

Jean-Jacques Goldman
Jean-Jacques Goldman, during a concert in may 2002 at the Zénith de Paris.
Background information
Born	(1951-10-11) October 11, 1951 (age 60)
Origin	Paris, France
Genres	Pop rock rock progressive rock New wave
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	Vocalist, guitarist, pianist
Years active	1975–present
Associated acts	Taï Phong, Céline Dion, Les Enfoirés, Fredericks Goldman Jones, Grégoire

Jean-Jacques Goldman (born October 11, 1951) is a Grammy Awards-winning French singer-songwriter. He is hugely popular in the French-speaking world, and since 2003 was the second-highest-grossing French living pop-rock singer, after Johnny Hallyday. In the 1990s, he was part of the famous trio Fredericks Goldman Jones with a string of hits.

Biography[link]

Born in Paris to an immigrant Polish Jewish father, Alter Mojze Goldman and a German Jewish mother, Ruth Ambrunn, Goldman was the third of four children. As a child, he began his music studies on the violin, then the piano. In 1968, he abandoned his classical music studies for "American Rock & Roll" as well as folk music, emphasizing the guitar.^[1] He also earned a business degree from the École Des Hautes Études Commerciales, commonly known as EDHEC, in Lille. In 1972, he met Catherine, his first wife, with whom he had three children. He first entered the French music scene as member of a progressive rock group named Taï Phong ("great wind, typhoon" in Vietnamese), which released its first album in 1975. Their first song to be a moderate hit was "Sister Jane." After singing four years and three albums in English with Taï Phong, Goldman was determined to do it alone and write and sing in French.

In 1981, Marc Lumbroso heard his recording "Il suffira d'un signe" on the album Démodé and signed him to a five-album contract with Epic Records. In 1982, his first hit album Minoritaire, which included the hit song "Quand la musique est bonne", was released; subsequent albums have all been successful. In 1987, he recorded the hit single "Là-bas" with Sirima, which remained a popular song throughout the years. From 1990 to 1995, he recorded 2 studio albums, one live album and released several singles (such as "Nuit", "À nos actes manqués", "Né en 17 à Leidenstadt" and "Tu manques") with Carole Fredericks and Michael Jones, which were successful. Several of these songs were recorded with English versions, but did not find much success in England or the United States. In 2007, he recorded the hit "4 Mots sur un piano" with Patrick Fiori and Christine Ricol.

Jones is a Welsh singer who had settled in his mother's native France. He and Goldman scored a hit in the early 1980s with "Je te donne" ("I give you"), a bilingual song with Jones singing the English lyrics and Goldman the French. Fredericks was an American singer, the sister of Taj Mahal who settled in France in the 1970's.

Jean-Jacques Goldman wrote the theme for "Resto du Coeur" the eponymous song performed by les Enfoirés as the theme of the charity created by Coluche, Les restos du coeur. Throughout his career, he has frequently written for other singers, notably Céline Dion, with whom he collaborated on D'eux (released in the US as The French Album) that is the best selling French album in history with 9.000.000 copies worldwide, S'il suffisait d'aimer and 1 fille & 4 types, he has also collaborated with Johnny Hallyday, Patricia Kaas, Garou, Marc Lavoine, Gérald De Palmas, Patrick Fiori, Khaled ("Aïcha"), Chet Baker, Lorie and Florent Pagny as well as Englishman Joe Cocker, and American songwriter Diane Warren.

His half-brother Pierre Goldman, a left-wing intellectual and convicted robber, was murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1979 in Paris. His younger brother Robert Goldman is also a songwriter (often known as J Kapler).

Discography[link]

Studio albums[link]

• Jean-Jacques Goldman (a/k/a Démodé) (1981, Epic)
• Jean-Jacques Goldman (a/k/a Minoritaire) (1982, Epic)
• Positif (1984, Epic)
• Non homologué (1985, Epic)
• Entre gris clair et gris foncé (1987, Epic)
• Fredericks Goldman Jones (1990, CBS) with Carole Fredericks and Michael Jones
• Rouge (1993, Columbia) with Red Army Choir, Carole Fredericks and Michael Jones
• En passant (1997, Columbia)
• Chansons pour les pieds (2001, Columbia)

Live albums[link]

• En public (1986, Epic)
• Traces (1989, Epic)
• Sur scène (1992, Columbia) with Carole Fredericks and Michael Jones
• Du New Morning au Zénith (1995, Columbia) with Carole Fredericks and Michael Jones
• En passant - Tournée 1998 (1999, Columbia)
• Un tour ensemble (2003, Columbia)

Compilations[link]

• Singulier 81/89 (1996, Columbia)
• Pluriel 90/96 (1996, Columbia) with Carole Fredericks and Michael Jones

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jean-Jacques Goldman

• (French) Jean-Jacques Goldman clip/vidéo/live
• (French) Là-bas
• Biography of Jean-Jacques Goldman, from Radio France Internationale
• (French) JJG famille
• (French) Parler d'sa vie
• (French) Autre Part : L'univers des frères Goldman

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau in 1753, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Born	(1712-06-28)28 June 1712 Geneva, Republic of Geneva
Died	2 July 1778(1778-07-02) (aged 66) Ermenonville, Kingdom of France
Era	18th century philosophy (Modern philosophy)
Region	Western Philosophers
School	Social contract theory Romanticism
Main interests	Political philosophy, music, education, literature, autobiography
Notable ideas	General will, amour-propre, moral simplicity of humanity, child-centered learning, civil religion, popular sovereignty, positive liberty
Influenced by Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel De Montaigne, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Barbeyrac, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Denis Diderot
Influenced Kant, The French Revolution, Robespierre, Louis de Saint-Just, The Counter-Enlightenment, Fichte, Hegel, Goethe, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Nietzsche, Romanticism, Paine, Comte, Bolívar, Marx, Engels, Derrida, Paul de Man, Benedetto Croce, Galvano Della Volpe, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Leo Strauss, Mary Shelley, Émile Durkheim, Mikhail Bakunin, Maria Montessori, Leo Tolstoy, John Rawls, Juan José Castelli, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism of French expression. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.

His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism^[1] and romanticism in fiction.^[2] Rousseau's autobiographical writings — his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker — exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought.

Rousseau was a successful composer of music. He wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and he made contributions to music as a theorist.

During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau, a Freemason,^[3] was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.

Biography[link]

Youth[link]

Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Rousseau was proud that his family, of the moyen order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. Throughout his life, he generally signed his books "Jean Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva". In theory, Geneva was governed democratically by its male voting citizens, a minority of the population. In fact, the city was ruled by a secretive executive committee, called the "Little Council", which was made up of 25 members of its wealthiest families. In 1707, a patriot called Pierre Fatio protested at this situation, and the Little Council had him shot. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father Isaac was not in the city at this time, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it.^[4]

The house where Rousseau was born at number 40, place du Bourg-de-Four

Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, was a watchmaker who, notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music. "A Genevan watchmaker," Rousseau wrote, "is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches."^[5]

Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, the daughter of a Calvinist preacher, died of puerperal fever nine days after his birth. He and his older brother François were brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne.

Rousseau had no recollection of learning to read, but he remembered how when he was 5 or 6 his father encouraged his love of reading:

Not long afterward, Rousseau abandoned his taste for escapist stories in favor of the antiquity of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which he would read to his father while he made watches.

When Rousseau was 10, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him. He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him.^[6] Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing. Rousseau, who was always deeply moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister.

Les Charmettes: where Rousseau lived with Mme de Warens in 1735-6, now a museum dedicated to Rousseau

Virtually, all our information about Rousseau's youth has come from his posthumously published Confessions, in which the chronology is somewhat confused, though recent scholars have combed the archives for confirming evidence to fill in the blanks. At age 13, Rousseau was apprenticed first to a notary and then to an engraver who beat him. At 15, he ran away from Geneva (on 14 March 1728) after returning to the city and finding the city gates locked due to the curfew. In adjoining Savoy he took shelter with a Roman Catholic priest, who introduced him to Françoise-Louise de Warens, age 29. She was a noblewoman of Protestant background who was separated from her husband. As professional lay proselytizer, she was paid by the King of Piedmont to help bring Protestants to Catholicism. They sent the boy to Turin, the capital of Savoy (which included Piedmont, in what is now Italy), to complete his conversion. This resulted in his having to give up his Genevan citizenship, although he would later revert to Calvinism in order to regain it.

In converting to Catholicism, both De Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity of man. Leo Damrosch writes, "an eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy still required believers to declare ‘that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good'."^[7] De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins.

Independence[link]

Finding himself on his own, since his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy) and France. During this time, he lived on and off with De Warens, whom he idolized and called his "maman". Flattered by his devotion, De Warens tried to get him started in a profession, and arranged formal music lessons for him. At one point, he briefly attended a seminary with the idea of becoming a priest. When Rousseau reached 20, De Warens took him as her lover, while intimate also with the steward of her house. The sexual aspect of their relationship (in fact a ménage à trois) confused Rousseau and made him uncomfortable, but he always considered De Warens the greatest love of his life. A rather profligate spender, she had a large library and loved to entertain and listen to music. She and her circle, comprising educated members of the Catholic clergy, introduced Rousseau to the world of letters and ideas. Rousseau had been an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself in earnest to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and music. At 25, he came into a small inheritance from his mother and used a portion of it to repay De Warens for her financial support of him. At 27, he took a job as a tutor in Lyon.

In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune. His system, intended to be compatible with typography, is based on a single line, displaying numbers representing intervals between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. Believing the system was impractical, the Academy rejected it, though they praised his mastery of the subject, and urged him to try again.

Palazzo belonging to Tommaso Querini at 968 Cannaregio Venice that served as the French Embassy during Rousseau's period as Secretary to the Ambassador

From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau had an honorable but ill-paying post as a secretary to the Comte de Montaigue, the French ambassador to Venice. This awoke in him a lifelong love for Italian music, particularly opera:

I had brought with me from Paris the prejudice of that city against Italian music; but I had also received from nature a sensibility and niceness of distinction which prejudice cannot withstand. I soon contracted that passion for Italian music with which it inspires all those who are capable of feeling its excellence. In listening to barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was... —Confessions

Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly.^[8] After 11 months, Rousseau quit, taking from the experience a profound distrust of government bureaucracy.

Returning to Paris, the penniless Rousseau befriended and became the lover of Thérèse Levasseur, a seamstress who was the sole support of her mother and numerous ne'er-do-well siblings. At first, they did not live together, though later Rousseau took Thérèse and her mother in to live with him as his servants, and himself assumed the burden of supporting her large family. According to his Confessions, before she moved in with him, Thérèse bore him a son and as many as four other children (there is no independent verification for this number^[9]). Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thérèse to give each of the newborns up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor". "Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she [Thérèse] allowed herself to be overcome" (Confessions). In his letter to Madame de Francueil in 1751, he first pretended that he wasn't rich enough to raise his children but in book IX of the confessions, he gave the true reasons of his choice : " I trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less."

Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son, but no record could be found. When Rousseau subsequently became celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment of his children was used by his critics, including Voltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for ad hominem attacks. In an irony of fate, Rousseau's later injunction to women to breastfeed their own babies (as had previously been recommended by the French natural scientist Buffon), probably saved the lives of thousands of infants.

While in Paris, Rousseau became a close friend of French philosopher Diderot and, beginning with some articles on music in 1749,^[10] contributed numerous articles to Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopédie, the most famous of which was an article on political economy written in 1755.

Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with Diderot. His genius lay in his strikingly original way of putting things rather than in the originality, per se, of his thinking. In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a lettre de cachet for opinions in his "Lettre sur les aveugles," that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection. Rousseau had read about an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon to be published in the Mercure de France on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. He wrote that while walking to Vincennes (about three miles from Paris), he had a revelation that the arts and sciences were responsible for the moral degeneration of mankind, who were basically good by nature. According to Diderot, writing much later, Rousseau had originally intended to answer this in the conventional way, but his discussions with Diderot convinced him to propose the paradoxical negative answer that catapulted him into the public eye. Rousseau's 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame.

Rousseau continued his interest in music. He wrote both the words and music of his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), which was performed for King Louis XV in 1752. The king was so pleased by the work that he offered Rousseau a lifelong pension. To the exasperation of his friends, Rousseau turned down the great honor, bringing him notoriety as "the man who had refused a king's pension." He also turned down several other advantageous offers, sometimes with a brusqueness bordering on truculence that gave offense and caused him problems. The same year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, prompted the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of French music against supporters of the Italian style. Rousseau as noted above, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others, making an important contribution with his Letter on French Music.

On returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (the Discourse on Inequality), which elaborated on the arguments of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (also based on memories of his idyllic youthful relationship with Mme de Warens). Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness and landlady Madame d'Epinay, whom he treated rather highhandedly. He resented being at Mme d'Epinay's beck and call and detested the insincere conversation and shallow atheism of the Encyclopedistes whom he met at her table. Wounded feelings gave rise to a bitter three-way quarrel between Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay; her lover, the philologist Grimm; and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau. Diderot later described Rousseau as being, "false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked ... He sucked ideas from me, used them himself, and then affected to despise me".^[11]

The mestizo Pierre Alexandre du Peyrou, rich inhabitant of Neufchâtel, plantation owner, writer, friend and publisher of some of Rousseau's oeuvre. His mansion was Le Palais du Peyrou

Rousseau's break with the Encyclopedistes coincided with the composition of his three major works, in all of which he emphasized his fervent belief in a spiritual origin of man's soul and the universe, in contradistinction to the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie, and d'Holbach. During this period Rousseau enjoyed the support and patronage of the Duc de Luxembourg, and the Prince de Conti, two of the richest and most powerful nobles in France. These men truly liked Rousseau and enjoyed his ability to converse on any subject, but they also used him as a way of getting back at Louis XV and the political faction surrounding his mistress, Mme de Pompadour. Even with them, however, Rousseau went too far, courting rejection when he criticized the practice of tax farming, in which some of them engaged.^[12]

Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was published in 1761 to immense success. The book's rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauty of the Swiss countryside struck a chord in the public and may have helped spark the subsequent nineteenth century craze for Alpine scenery. In 1762, Rousseau published Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique (in English, literally Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political Right) in April. Even his friend Antoine-Jacques Roustan felt impelled to write a polite rebuttal of the chapter on Civil Religion in the Social Contract, which implied that the concept of a Christian Republic was paradoxical since Christianity taught submission rather than participation in public affairs. Rousseau even helped Roustan find a publisher for the rebuttal.^[13]

Rousseau published Emile: or, On Education in May. The final section of Émile, "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," was intended to be a defense of religious belief. Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of humble peasant background (plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had met as a teenager) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in itself a daring innovation for the time. The vicar's creed was that of Socinianism (or Unitarianism as it is called today). Because it rejected original sin and divine Revelation, both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense. Moreover, Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. This religious indifferentism caused Rousseau and his books to be banned from France and Geneva. He was condemned from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were burned, and warrants were issued for his arrest.^[14] Former friends such as Jacob Vernes of Geneva could not accept his views, and wrote violent rebuttals.^[15]

A sympathetic observer, British philosopher David Hume, "professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau's books were banned in Geneva and elsewhere." Rousseau, he wrote, "has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country ... as not to render such an open attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous.'"^[16] Rousseau, who thought he had been defending religion, was crushed. Forced to flee arrest he made his way, with the help of the Duc of Luxembourg and Prince de Conti, to Neuchâtel, a Canton of the Swiss Confederation that was a protectorate of the Prussian crown. His powerful protectors discreetly assisted him in his flight and they helped to get his banned books (published in Holland by Marc-Michel Rey) distributed in France disguised as other works using false covers and title pages. In the town of Môtiers, he sought and found protection under Lord Keith, who was the local representative of the free-thinking Frederick the Great of Prussia. While in Môtiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse, 1765).

After his house in Môtiers was stoned on the night of 6 September 1765, Rousseau took refuge in Great Britain with Hume, who found lodgings for him at a friend's country estate in Wootton in Staffordshire. Neither Thérèse nor Rousseau was able to learn English or make friends. Isolated, Rousseau, never emotionally very stable, suffered a serious decline in his mental health and began to experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume and others. “He is plainly mad, after having long been maddish”, Hume wrote to a friend.^[17] Rousseau's letter to Hume, in which he articulates the perceived misconduct, sparked an exchange which was published in Paris and received with great interest at the time.

The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris

Although officially barred from entering France before 1770, Rousseau returned in 1767 under a false name. In 1768 he went through a marriage of sorts to Thérèse (marriages between Catholics and Protestants were illegal), whom he had always hitherto referred to as his "housekeeper". Though she was illiterate, she had become a remarkably good cook, a hobby her husband shared. In 1770 they were allowed to return to Paris. As a condition of his return he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private readings in 1771. At the request of Madame d'Epinay, who was anxious to protect her privacy, however, the police ordered him to stop, and the Confessions was only partially published in 1782, four years after his death. All his subsequent works were to appear posthumously.

The statue of Rousseau on the Île Rousseau, Geneva

In 1772, Rousseau was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his last major political work. In 1776, he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In order to support himself, he returned to copying music, spending his leisure time in the study of botany.

Although a celebrity, Rousseau's mental health did not permit him to enjoy his fame. His final years were largely spent in deliberate withdrawal. However, he did respond favorably to an approach from the composer Gluck, whom he met in 1774. Gluck admired Rousseau as "a pioneer of the expressive natural style" in music.^[18] One of Rousseau's last pieces of writing was a critical yet enthusiastic analysis of Gluck's opera Alceste. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the marquis René Louis de Girardin at Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died, aged 66.

Rousseau was initially buried at Ermenonville on the Ile des Peupliers, which became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers. Sixteen years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, where they are located directly across from those of his contemporary, Voltaire. His tomb, in the shape of a rustic temple, on which, in bas relief an arm reaches out, bearing the torch of liberty, evokes Rousseau's deep love of nature and of classical antiquity. In 1834, the Genevan government somewhat reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny Île Rousseau in Lake Geneva. Today he is proudly claimed as their most celebrated native son. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

Philosophy[link]

Theory of Natural Human[link]

A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay

In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical State of Nature as a normative guide.

Rousseau criticized Hobbes for asserting that since man in the "state of nature . . . has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue". On the contrary, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature" and he especially praised the admirable moderation of the Caribbeans in expressing the sexual urge^[19] despite the fact that they live in a hot climate, which "always seems to inflame the passions".^[20] Rousseau asserted that the stage of human development associated with what he called "savages" was the best and most optimal in human development, between the less-than optimal extreme of brute animals on the one hand and the extreme of decedent civilization on the other. "...nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man." ^[21] Referring to the stage of human development which Rousseau associates with savages, Rousseau writes:

"Hence although men had become less forebearing, and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never to have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species." ^[22]

Rousseau believed that the savage stage was not the first stage of human development, but the third stage. Rousseau held that this third savage stage of human societal development was an optimum, between the extreme of the state of brute animals and animal-like "ape-men" on the one hand, and the extreme of decadent civilized life on the other. This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage, ^[23] which Arthur Lovejoy' conclusively showed misrepresents Rousseau's thought.^[24] The expression, "the noble savage" was first used in 1672 by British poet John Dryden in his play The Conquest of Granada.^[25] Rousseau wrote that morality was not a societal construct, but rather "natural" in the sense of "innate," an outgrowth from man's instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise the emotions of compassion or empathy. These were sentiments shared with animals, and whose existence even Hobbes acknowledged.^[26]

Frontispiece and title page of an edition of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1754), published in 1755 in Holland.

Contrary to what his many detractors have claimed, Rousseau never suggests that humans in the state of nature act morally; in fact, terms such as "justice" or "wickedness" are inapplicable to prepolitical society as Rousseau understands it. Morality proper, i.e., self restraint, can only develop through careful education in a civil state. Humans "in a state of Nature" may act with all of the ferocity of an animal. They are good only in a negative sense, insofar as they are self-sufficient and thus not subject to the vices of political society. In fact, Rousseau's natural man is virtually identical to a solitary chimpanzee or other ape, such as the orangutan as described by Buffon; and the "natural" goodness of humanity is thus the goodness of an animal, which is neither good nor bad. Rousseau, a deteriorationist, proposed that, except perhaps for brief moments of balance, at or near its inception, when a relative equality among men prevailed, human civilization has always been artificial, creating inequality, envy, and unnatural desires.^{[citation needed]}

In Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason. In contrast, amour-propre is artificial and encourages man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others.^{[citation needed]} Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction. It had been invoked by Vauvenargues, among others.

In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for idleness and luxury have contributed to the corruption of man. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty; and he concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of true friendship by replacing it with jealousy, fear, and suspicion.

In contrast to the optimistic view of other Enlightenment figures, for Rousseau, progress has been inimical to the well-being of humanity, that is, unless it can be counteracted by the cultivation of civic morality and duty.

Only in civil society, can man be ennobled—through the use of reason:

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.^[27]

Society corrupts men only insofar as the Social Contract has not de facto succeeded, as we see in contemporary society as described in the Discourse on Inequality (1754).

In this essay, which elaborates on the ideas introduced in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau traces man's social evolution from a primitive state of nature to modern society. The earliest solitary humans possessed a basic drive for self preservation and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. They differed from animals, however, in their capacity for free will and their potential perfectibility. As they began to live in groups and form clans they also began to experience family love, which Rousseau saw as the source of the greatest happiness known to humanity. As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: They began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self esteem. Rousseau posits that the original, deeply flawed Social Contract (i.e., that of Hobbes), which led to the modern state, was made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful, who tricked the general population into surrendering their liberties to them and instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society. Rousseau's own conception of the Social Contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy. In the last chapter of the Social Contract, Rousseau would ask "What is to be done?" He answers that now all men can do is to cultivate virtue in themselves and submit to their lawful rulers. To his readers, however, the inescapable conclusion was that a new and more equitable Social Contract was needed.

Political theory[link]

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article Economie Politique (Discourse on Political Economy), featured in Diderot's Encyclopédie. The treatise begins with the dramatic opening lines, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they."

Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while also becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.

Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly (Book III, Chapter XV). The kind of republican government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva was a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau's principles. France could not meet Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big. Much subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free:

The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy. ... It is, however, an unfortunately obscure and controversial notion. Some commentators see it as no more than the dictatorship of the proletariat or the tyranny of the urban poor (such as may perhaps be seen in the French Revolution). Such was not Rousseau's meaning. This is clear from the Discourse on Political Economy, where Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place".^[28]

Education and child rearing[link]

Rousseau’s philosophy of education is not concerned with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather with developing the pupil’s character and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which he will have to live. The hypothetical boy, Émile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor. Today we would call this the disciplinary method of "natural consequences" since, like modern psychologists^[who?], Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The tutor will make sure that no harm results to Émile through his learning experiences.

Rousseau was one of the first to advocate developmentally appropriate education; and his description of the stages of child development mirrors his conception of the evolution of culture. He divides childhood into stages: the first is to the age of about 12, when children are guided by their emotions and impulses. During the second stage, from 12 to about 16, reason starts to develop; and finally the third stage, from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develops into an adult. Rousseau recommends that the young adult learn a manual skill such as carpentry, which requires creativity and thought, will keep him out of trouble, and will supply a fallback means of making a living in the event of a change of fortune. (The most illustrious aristocratic youth to have been educated this way may have been Louis XVI, whose parents had him learn the skill of locksmithing.^[29]) The sixteen-year-old is also ready to have a companion of the opposite sex.

Although his ideas foreshadowed modern ones in many ways, in one way they do not: Rousseau was a believer in the moral superiority of the patriarchal family on the antique Roman model. Sophie, the young woman Émile is destined to marry, as a representative of ideal womanhood, is educated to be governed by her husband while Émile, as representative of the ideal man, is educated to be self-governing. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational and political philosophy; it is essential to his account of the distinction between private, personal relations and the public world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it depends on the subordination of women, in order for both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function as Rousseau imagines it could and should. Rousseau anticipated the modern idea of the bourgeois nuclear family, with the mother at home taking responsibility for the household and for childcare and early education.

Feminists, beginning in the late 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792^[30] have criticized Rousseau for his confinement of women to the domestic sphere—unless women were domesticated and constrained by modesty and shame, he feared^[31] "men would be tyrannized by women... For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses... men would finally be their victims...."^[32] His contemporaries saw it differently because Rousseau thought that mothers should breastfeed their children.^[33] Marmontel wrote that his wife thought, "One must forgive something," she said, "in one who has taught us to be mothers."^[34]

Rousseau's detractors have blamed him for everything they do not like in what they call modern "child-centered" education. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centered Education and its Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau, a development he regards as bad. Good or bad, the theories of educators such as Rousseau's near contemporaries Pestalozzi, Mme de Genlis, and later, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey, which have directly influenced modern educational practices do have significant points in common with those of Rousseau.

Religion[link]

Having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva as part of his period of moral reform, Rousseau maintained a profession of that religious philosophy and of John Calvin as a modern lawgiver throughout the remainder of his life.^[35] His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism.

At the time, however, Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded by the Savoyard vicar in Émile, was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. His assertion in the Social Contract that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens may have been another reason for Rousseau's condemnation in Geneva.

Unlike many of the more radical Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion. But he repudiated the doctrine of original sin, which plays so large a part in Calvinism (in Émile, Rousseau writes "there is no original perversity in the human heart").^[36]

In the 18th century, many deists viewed God merely as an abstract and impersonal creator of the universe, which they likened to a giant machine. Rousseau's deism differed from the usual kind in its intense emotionality. He saw the presence of God in his creation, including mankind, which, apart from the harmful influence of society, is good, because God is good. Rousseau's attribution of a spiritual value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of 19th-century Romanticism towards nature and religion.

Rousseau was upset that his deistic views were so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophes were ignored. He defended himself against critics of his religious views in his "Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force."^[37]

Legacy[link]

This section may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (September 2011)

A plaque commemorating the bicentenary of Rousseau's birth. Issued by the city of Geneva on 28 June 1912. The legend at the bottom says "Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays" ("love your country"), and shows Rousseau's father gesturing towards the window. The scene is drawn from a footnote to the Letter to d'Alembert where Rousseau recalls witnessing the popular celebrations following the exercises of the St Gervais regiment.

Rousseau's idea of the volonté générale ("general will") was not original with him but rather belonged to a well-established technical vocabulary of juridical and theological writings in use at the time. The phrase was used by Diderot and also by Montesquieu (and by his teacher, the Oratorian friar Nicolas Malebranche). It served to designate the common interest embodied in legal tradition, as distinct from and transcending people's private and particular interests at any particular time. The concept was also an important aspect of the more radical 17th-century republican tradition of Spinoza, from whom Rousseau differed in important respects, but not in his insistence on the importance of equality. This emphasis on equality is Rousseau's most important and consequential legacy, causing him to be both reviled and applauded:

While Rousseau's notion of the progressive moral degeneration of mankind from the moment civil society established itself diverges markedly from Spinoza's claim that human nature is always and everywhere the same ... for both philosophers the pristine equality of the state of nature is our ultimate goal and criterion ... in shaping the "common good", volonté générale, or Spinoza's mens una, which alone can ensure stability and political salvation. Without the supreme criterion of equality, the general will would indeed be meaningless. ... When in the depths of the French Revolution the Jacobin clubs all over France regularly deployed Rousseau when demanding radical reforms. and especially anything – such as land redistribution – designed to enhance equality, they were at the same time, albeit unconsciously, invoking a radical tradition which reached back to the late seventeenth century.^[38]

The cult that grew up around Rousseau after his death, and particularly the radicalized versions of Rousseau's ideas that were adopted by Robespierre and Saint-Just during the Reign of Terror, caused him to become identified with the most extreme aspects of the French Revolution.^[39] Among other things, the ship of the line Jean-Jacques Rousseau (launched in 1795) was named after the philosopher. The revolutionaries were also inspired by Rousseau to introduce Deism as the new official civil religion of France, scandalizing traditionalists:

Ceremonial and symbolic occurrences of the more radical phases of the Revolution invoked Rousseau and his core ideas. Thus the ceremony held at the site of the demolished Bastille, organized by the foremost artistic director of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, in August 1793 to mark the inauguration of the new republican constitution, an event coming shortly after the final abolition of all forms of feudal privilege, featured a cantata based on Rousseau's democratic pantheistic deism as expounded in the celebrated "Profession de foi d'un vicaire savoyard" in Book Four of Émile.^[40]

Opponents of the Revolution and defenders of religion, most influentially the Irish essayist Edmund Burke, therefore placed the blame for the excesses of the French Revolution directly on the revolutionaries' misplaced (as he considered it) adulation of Rousseau. Burke's "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly", published in February 1791, was a diatribe against Rousseau, whom he considered the paramount influence on the French Revolution (his ad hominem attack did not really engage with Rousseau's political writings). Burke maintained that the excesses of the Revolution were not accidents but were designed from the beginning and were rooted in Rousseau's personal vanity, arrogance, and other moral failings. He recalled Rousseau's visit to Britain in 1766, saying: "I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day and he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity". Conceding his gift of eloquence, Burke deplored Rousseau's lack of the good taste and finer feelings that would have been imparted by the education of a gentleman:

Taste and elegance ... are of no mean importance in the regulation of life. A moral taste ... infinitely abates the evils of vice. Rousseau, a writer of great force and vivacity, is totally destitute of taste in any sense of the word. Your masters [i.e., the leaders of the Revolution], who are his scholars, conceive that all refinement has an aristocratic character. The last age had exhausted all its powers in giving a grace and nobleness to our mutual appetites, and in raising them into a higher class and order than seemed justly to belong to them. Through Rousseau, your masters are resolved to destroy these aristocratic prejudices.^[41]

In America, where there was no such cult, the direct influence of Rousseau was arguably less. The American founders rarely cited Rousseau, but came independently to their Republicanism and enthusiastic admiration for the austere virtues described by Livy and in Plutarch's portrayals of the great men of ancient Sparta and the classical republicanism of early Rome, as did many, if not most other enlightenment figures.^[42] Rousseau’s praise of Switzerland and Corsica’s economies of isolated and self-sufficient independent homesteads, and his endorsement of a well-regulated citizen militia, such as Switzerland’s, recall the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy. To Rousseau we owe the invention of the concept of a "civil religion", one of whose key tenets is religious toleration. Yet despite their mutual insistence on the self evidence that "all men are created equal", their insistence that the citizens of a republic be educated at public expense, and the evident parallel between the concepts of the "general welfare" and Rousseau's "general will", some scholars maintain there is little to suggest that Rousseau had that much effect on Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers.^[43] They argue that the American constitution owes as much or more to the English Liberal philosopher John Locke's emphasis on the rights of property and to Montesquieu's theories of the separation of powers.^[44] Rousseau's writings had an indirect influence on American literature through the writings of Wordsworth and Kant, whose works were important to the New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as on such Unitarians as theologian William Ellery Channing. American novelist James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and other novels reflect republican and egalitarian ideals present alike in Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and also in English Romantic primitivism.^[45] Another American admirer was lexicographer Noah Webster.^[46] The Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia sought to found a society based on the principles set forth in Rousseau's Social Contract.^[47]

The Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith in his 'Beyond the Human Condition' has formulated a thesis that seeks to ground Rousseau's concept of the noble savage and the artificiality of modern urban living in evolutionary psychology.

Criticisms of Rousseau[link]

A portrait of Rousseau in later life.

The first to criticize Rousseau were his fellow Philosophes, above all, Voltaire. According to Jacques Barzun:

Voltaire, who had felt annoyed by the first essay [On the Arts and Sciences], was outraged by the second, [Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men], declaring that Rousseau wanted us to “walk on all fours” like animals and behave like savages, believing them creatures of perfection. From these interpretations, plausible but inexact, spring the clichés Noble Savage and Back to Nature.^[48]

Barzun states that, contrary to myth, Rousseau was no primitivist; for him:

The model man is the independent farmer, free of superiors and self-governing. This was cause enough for the philosophes' hatred of their former friend. Rousseau’s unforgivable crime was his rejection of the graces and luxuries of civilized existence. Voltaire had sung “The superfluous, that most necessary thing." For the high bourgeois standard of living Rousseau would substitute the middling peasant’s. It was the country versus the city – an exasperating idea for them, as was the amazing fact that every new work of Rousseau’s was a huge success, whether the subject was politics, theater, education, religion, or a novel about love.^[49]

Following the French Revolution, other commentators fingered a potential danger of Rousseau’s project of realizing an “antique” conception of virtue amongst the citizenry in a modern world (e.g. through education, physical exercise, a citizen militia, public holidays, and the like). Taken too far, as under the Jacobins, such social engineering could result in tyranny.

As early as 1819, in his famous speech “On Ancient and Modern Liberty,” the political philosopher Benjamin Constant, a proponent of constitutional monarchy and representative democracy, criticized Rousseau, or rather his more radical followers (specifically the Abbé de Mably), for allegedly believing that "everything should give way to collective will, and that all restrictions on individual rights would be amply compensated by participation in social power.”

Common also were attacks by defenders of social hierarchy on Rousseau's "romantic" belief in equality. In 1860, shortly after the Sepoy Rebellion in India, two British white supremacists, John Crawfurd and James Hunt, mounted a defense of British imperialism based on “scientific racism".^[50] Crawfurd, in alliance with Hunt, took over the presidency of the British Anthropological Society, which had been founded with the mission to defend indigenous peoples against slavery and colonial exploitation. Invoking "science" and "realism", the two men derided their "philanthropic" predecessors for believing in human equality and for not recognizing that mankind was divided into superior and inferior races. Crawfurd, who opposed Darwinian evolution, "denied any unity to mankind, insisting on immutable, hereditary, and timeless differences in racial character, principal amongst which was the 'very great' difference in 'intellectual capacity.'" For Crawfurd, the races had been created separately and were different species. Since Crawfurd was Scottish, he thought the Scottish "race" superior and all others inferior; whilst Hunt, on the other hand, believed in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon "race". Crawfurd and Hunt routinely accused those who disagreed with them of believing in "Rousseau’s Noble Savage". (The pair ultimately quarreled because Hunt believed in slavery and Crawfurd did not). "As Ter Ellingson demonstrates, Crawfurd was responsible for re-introducing the Pre-Rousseauian concept of 'the Noble Savage' to modern anthropology, attributing it wrongly and quite deliberately to Rousseau.”^[51]

In 1919 Irving Babbitt, founder of a movement called the "New Humanism", wrote a critique of what he called "sentimental humanitarianism", for which he blamed Rousseau.^[52] Babbitt's depiction of Rousseau was countered in a celebrated and much reprinted essay by A. O. Lovejoy in 1923.^[53] In France, fascist theorist and anti-Semite Charles Maurras, founder of Action Française, “had no compunctions in laying the blame for both Romantisme et Révolution firmly on Rousseau in 1922."^[54]

During the Cold War, Karl Popper criticized Rousseau for his association with nationalism and its attendant abuses^{[citation needed]}. This came to be known among scholars as the "totalitarian thesis". An example is J. L. Talmon's, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952).^[55] Political scientist J. S. Maloy states that “the twentieth century added Nazism and Stalinism to Jacobinism on the list of horrors for which Rousseau could be blamed. ... Rousseau was considered to have advocated just the sort of invasive tampering with human nature which the totalitarian regimes of mid-century had tried to instantiate." But Maloy adds that "The totalitarian thesis in Rousseau studies has, by now, been discredited as an attribution of real historical influence.”^[56] Arthur Melzer, however, while conceding that Rousseau would not have approved of modern nationalism, observes that his theories do contain the "seeds of nationalism", insofar as they set forth the "politics of identification", which are rooted in sympathetic emotion. Melzer also believes that in admitting that people's talents are unequal, Rousseau therefore tacitly condones the tyranny of the few over the many.^[57] For Stephen T. Engel, on the other hand, Rousseau's nationalism anticipated modern theories of "imagined communities" that transcend social and religious divisions within states.^[58]

On similar grounds, one of Rousseau's strongest critics during the second half of the 20th century was political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Using Rousseau's thought as an example, Arendt identified the notion of sovereignty with that of the general will. According to her, it was this desire to establish a single, unified will based on the stifling of opinion in favor of public passion that contributed to the excesses of the French Revolution.^[59]

Major works[link]

• Dissertation sur la musique moderne, 1736
• Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et les arts), 1750
• Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy, 1752
• Le Devin du Village: an opera, 1752, scorePDF (21.7 MB)
• Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes), 1754
• Discourse on Political Economy, 1755
• Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles, 1758 (Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles)
• Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse), 1761
• Émile: or, on Education (Émile ou de l'éducation), 1762
• The Creed of a Savoyard Priest, 1762 (in Émile)
• The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (Du contrat social), 1762
• Four Letters to M. de Malesherbes, 1762
• Pygmalion: a Lyric Scene, 1762
• Letters Written from the Mountain, 1764 (Lettres de la montagne)
• Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1770, published 1782
• Constitutional Project for Corsica, 1772
• Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1772
• Essay on the Origin of Languages, published 1781 (Essai sur l'origine des langues)
• Reveries of a Solitary Walker, incomplete, published 1782 (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire)
• Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, published 1782

Editions in English[link]

• Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.
• Collected Writings, ed. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly, Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1990–2010, 13 vols.
• The Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Emile, or On Education, trans. with an introd. by Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1979.
• "On the Origin of Language," trans. John H. Moran. In On the Origin of Language: Two Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France. London: Penguin Books, 1980.
• 'The Discourses' and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• 'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• 'The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston. Penguin: Penguin Classics Various Editions, 1968–2007.
• The Political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited from the original MCS and authentic editions with introduction and notes by C.E.Vaughan, Blackwell, Oxford, 1962. (In French but the introduction and notes are in English).

Online texts[link]

• A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences English translation
• Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau English translation, as published by Project Gutenberg, 2004 [EBook #3913]
• Considerations on the Government of Poland English translation
• Constitutional Project for Corsica English translation
• Discourse on Political Economy English translation
• Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men English translation
• The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right English translation
• 'Elementary Letters on Botany', 1771-3PDF (4.23 MB)^{[dead link]} English translation
• Emile French text and English translation (Grace G. Roosevelt's revision and correction of Barbara Foxley's Everyman translation, at Columbia)
• Full Ebooks of Rousseau in french on the website 'La philosophie'
• Mondo Politico Library's presentation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book, The Social Contract (G.D.H. Cole translation; full text)
• Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy English translation
• Project Concerning New Symbols for Music French text and English translation, archived from the original on 2008-12-20
• The Creed of a Savoyard Priest English translation
• Works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Project Gutenberg
• (French) Texts of J.-J. Rousseau and biography at athena.unige.ch

See also[link]

• Age of Enlightenment
• Civil militia
• Classical republicanism
• Deism
• Georges Hébert, a physical culturist influenced by Rousseau's teachings
• Let them eat cake, a saying of Rousseau's
• Natural rights
• Rousseau Institute
• Rousseau's educational philosophy
• Social Contract
• State of Nature

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Abizadeh, Arash (2001). "Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie, and the Passions" Political Theory 29.4: 556–82.
• Babbitt, Irving ([1919] 1991). Rousseau and Romanticism. Edison, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers (Library of Conservative Thought)
• Bertram, Christopher (2003). Rousseau and The Social Contract. London: Routledge.
• Cassirer, Ernst (1945). Rousseau, Kant, Goethe. Princeton University Press.
• Cassirer, Ernst ([1935]1989). The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Peter Gay, editor and translator. Series editor, Jacques Barzun. Yale University Press.
• Conrad, Felicity (2008). "Rousseau Gets Spanked, or, Chomsky's Revenge." The Journal of POLI 433. 1.1: 1–24.
• Cooper, Laurence (1999). Rousseau, Nature and the Problem of the Good Life. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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External links[link]

Find more about Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Wikipedia's sister projects:
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• Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Jean Jacques Rousseau entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Rousseau Association/Association Rousseau, a bilingual association (English) (French) devoted to the study of Rousseau's life and works
• Encyclopædia Britannica entry of the Internet version
• Philosophy Bites Audio Lecture, Professor Melissa Lane, Princeton University
• Science Live Audio Lecture, Professor Timothy O'Hogan, Oxford University
• Free scores by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the International Music Score Library Project
• A version of The Social Contract, slightly modified for easier reading