Jean Jacques Rousseau by James Mannion
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was another French philosopher and social critic who also was one of the earliest practitioners of the tell-all memoir. His candor was shocking in his day.
Confessions
Rousseau's famous book Confessions is a distillation of a lifetime of philosophizing and also a very frank memoir. Rousseau's book is a forerunner of the psychobiography. Early on, he tells the story of being infatuated by his childhood governess, the fetching Mademoiselle Lambercier. The young woman gave the precocious eight-year-old Jean Jacques a spanking, and this seemingly innocuous event in the course of child-rearing had a profound effect and forever shaped the philosopher's personality and sexual proclivities. For the rest of his life, he sought the company of dominant, usually older, women. Rousseau announced in the very first sentence of Confessions that there had never been a book of its kind before and never would be one again, a claim that is not entirely accurate on either count. However, Confessions did introduce a new candor to literature, and it influenced the literature of Romanticism that flourished in the early nineteenth century.
Other Writings
In less titillating philosophizing, Rousseau wrote many treatises, dramas, operas, and novels, all of which included his theories and observations on the human condition. In his book Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind, he condemned the corrosive influence of polite society, including the arts and politics, suggesting that they were deleterious to mankind. He professed that the primitive people of the world were in every way superior to “civilized” societies. The more sophisticated the civilization, the more rampant were vice and corruption, according to Rousseau. Voltaire, for one, roundly mocked this belief, and the two men became enemies thereafter. For his own part, Rousseau did not elect to leave Europe, thus he was not a philosopher who applied his own words to actual practice. He later refined what he meant by a return to nature to mean an internal trek, adopting the virtues of innocence and spirituality.
Rousseau's Social Contract
Like Brits Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau took a crack at his version of the social contract, in a political treatise of the same name. Unlike the irascible Hobbes but kindred to the egalitarian Locke, Rousseau preached for the cause of liberty for the citizenry and against the oppressive divine right theory of monarchies. Just as Locke's writing inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, Rousseau's tome lit the fires of insurgency that prompted the French Revolution of the late 1700s. Unlike the French, however, the Americans got it right.
Rousseau opens The Social Contract with the famous line, “Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” In The Social Contract, Rousseau proposes that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. Sound familiar? Ironically, others see The Social Contract as a model for a totalitarian state.
Rousseau speaks of general will and the will of all. The general will is the inalienable right of every man. No king can bestow these rights upon you — you already have them. Governments can repress them, however, and often do. The will of all is a different matter. This is the will of certain factions of a society, whether they be the king or the aristocracy or any special interest groups. It is the rule of the powers-that-be, not really the “will of all” at all.
Rousseau sees freedom and liberty not as a license to do whatever you want, but rather, the opportunity to do the right thing. This includes obedience to authority — not an authority that is imposed on you, but one that governs by the assent of the citizens.
Education Reform
If Rousseau was a tad authoritarian even in his defense of liberty, he was a reformer regarding education. Rousseau's novel Émile was a vehicle to state his case for a new paradigm in education. It was critical of the rigidity of the time and proposed more freedom of expression in the learning process instead of learning by rote at the hands of a stern schoolmistress. Rousseau opposed what he felt was the stifling nature of the schooling of the time. Little ones, still in their natural and uncorrupted state, should have their spontaneous natures encouraged, not thwarted. The novel was burned and banned in France and Switzerland, and Rousseau found that he had a price on his head in many provinces.
His Final Years
Like his rival Voltaire, Rousseau often found himself on the lam from his native France and adopting aliases to escape angry authorities. He spent some time with Scottish philosopher David Hume, but as philosophers are wont to do, they feuded and thenceforth denounced one another in print. He romanced a succession of wealthy aristocratic women, yet he fathered five children with a simple peasant woman whom he eventually married late in life. While being a celebrated man of letters, he also managed to antagonize every religious and political authority of the time and spent his last years never settling anywhere too long, always being run out of town by the powers-that-be. He paid a hefty price to enrich the world with his philosophy.
