Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Genevan Enlightenment philosopher, writer and political theorist (1712–1778), born in Geneva into a family of Calvinist artisans, self-taught, who led an itinerant life across Europe — secretary, tutor, music copyist, vagabond — before achieving sudden fame at thirty-eight with his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), a prize-winning essay for the Academy of Dijon that already defended the provocative thesis that cultural and scientific progress had corrupted, rather than improved, human morality. This distrust of civilisation deepened in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), where he argued that human beings in the state of nature were essentially good, free and happy, and that the institution of private property was the historical origin of inequality, dependence and social conflict — a thesis summed up in his famous claim that the first man who enclosed a plot of land and said 'this is mine' was the true founder of civil society, with all its miseries. His masterwork of political theory, The Social Contract (1762), opens with his most famous line — 'man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains' — and proposes a radical theory of popular sovereignty: political legitimacy can only arise from a pact among free and equal citizens who surrender their natural liberty in exchange for civil liberty, subject to the 'general will', the expression of the common good that is always right even when it may contradict the majority's will at a given moment — an ambiguous, much-debated concept some have read as a source of democratic totalitarianism and others as the foundation of radical democracy. Emile, or On Education (1762), a pedagogical treatise in novel form, proposes a natural education respecting the child's spontaneous development away from social corruption. Persecuted and condemned by the authorities of both Geneva and Paris over his heterodox religious ideas, he spent his final years in tormented exile, writing his Confessions, one of the first great exercises in autobiographical introspection in Western literature.

12 works

• A Discourse on Political Economy (tr. Cole)
• Discours sur les sciences et les arts
• Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
• Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (ed. 2)
• Eloisa or, A series of original letters
• Emile
• Émile; Or, Concerning Education; Extracts
• Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles
• Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Fletcher, Routledge)
• The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete
• The Social Contract
• The Social Contract (ed. 2)