Formative years
Rousseau's mother died in childbirth and he was brought up
by his father, who taught him to believe that the city of
his birth was a republic as splendid as Sparta or ancient
Rome. Rousseau senior had an equally glorious image of his
own importance; after marrying above his modest station as
a watchmaker, he got into trouble with the civil authorities
by brandishing the sword that his upper-class pretentions
prompted him to wear, and he had to leave Geneva to avoid
imprisonment. Rousseau, the son, then lived for six years
as a poor relation in his mother's family, patronized and
humiliated, until he, too, at the age of 16, fled from Geneva
to live the life of an adventurer and a Roman Catholic convert
in the kingdoms of Sardinia and France.
Rousseau was fortunate in finding in the province of Savoy
a benefactress named the Baronne de Warens, who provided
him with a refuge in her home and employed him as her steward.
She also furthered his education to such a degree that the
boy who had arrived on her doorstep as a stammering apprentice
who had never been to school developed into a philosopher,
a man of letters, and a musician.
Mme de Warens, who thus transformed the adventurer into
a philosopher, was herself an adventuress—a Swiss convert
to Catholicism who had stripped her husband of his money
before fleeing to Savoy with the gardener's son to set herself
up as a Catholic missionary specializing in the conversion
of young male Protestants. Her morals distressed Rousseau,
even when he became her lover. But she was a woman of taste,
intelligence, and energy, who brought out in Rousseau just
the talents that were needed to conquer Paris at a time
when Voltaire had made radical ideas fashionable.
Rousseau reached Paris when he was 30 and was lucky enough
to meet another young man from the provinces seeking literary
fame in the capital, Denis Diderot. The two soon became
immensely successful as the centre of a group of intellectuals—or
“Philosophes”—who gathered round the great
French Encyclopédie, of which Diderot was appointed
editor. The Encyclopédie was an important organ of
radical and anticlerical opinion, and its contributors were
as much reforming and even iconoclastic pamphleteers as
they were philosophers. Rousseau, the most original of them
all in his thinking and the most forceful and eloquent in
his style of writing, was soon the most conspicuous. He
wrote music as well as prose, and one of his operas, Le
Devin du village (1752; The Cunning-Man), attracted so much
admiration from the king and the court that he might have
enjoyed an easy life as a fashionable composer, but something
in his Calvinist blood rejected this type of worldly glory.
Indeed, at the age of 37 Rousseau had what he called an
“illumination” while walking to Vincennes to visit
Diderot, who had been imprisoned there because of his irreligious
writings. In the Confessions, which he wrote late in life,
Rousseau says that it came to him then in a “terrible
flash” that modern progress had corrupted instead of
improved men. He went on to write his first important work,
a prize essay for the Academy of Dijon entitled Discours
sur les sciences et les arts (1750; A Discourse on the Sciences
and the Arts), in which he argues that the history of man's
life on earth has been a history of decay.
This Discourse is by no means Rousseau's best piece of
writing, but its central theme was to inform almost everything
else he wrote. Throughout his life he kept returning to
the thought that man is good by nature but has been corrupted
by society and civilization. He did not mean to suggest
that society and civilization were inherently bad but rather
that both had taken a wrong direction and become more harmful
as they had become more sophisticated. This idea in itself
was not unfamiliar when Rousseau published his Discourse
on the Sciences and the Arts. Many Roman Catholic writers
deplored the direction that European culture had taken since
the Middle Ages. They shared the hostility toward progress
that Rousseau had expressed. What they did not share was
his belief that man was naturally good. It was, however,
just this belief in man's natural goodness that Rousseau
made the cornerstone of his argument.
Rousseau may well have received the inspiration for this
belief from Mme de Warens; for although that unusual woman
had become a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church, she
retained—and transmitted to Rousseau—much of the
sentimental optimism about human purity that she had herself
absorbed as a child from the mystical Protestant Pietists
who were her teachers in the canton of Bern. At all events,
the idea of man's natural goodness, as Rousseau developed
it, set him apart from both conservatives and radicals.
Even so, for several years after the publication of his
first Discourse, he remained a close collaborator in Diderot's
essentially progressive enterprise, the Encyclopédie,
and an active contributor to its pages. His speciality there
was music, and it was in this sphere that he first established
his influence as reformer.
Controversy with Rameau
The arrival of an Italian opera company in Paris in 1752
to perform works of opera buffa by Pergolesi, Scarlatti,
Vinci, Leo, and other such composers suddenly divided the
French music-loving public into two excited camps, supporters
of the new Italian opera and supporters of the traditional
French opera. The Philosophes of the Encyclopédie—d'Alembert,
Diderot, and d'Holbach among them—entered the fray
as champions of Italian music, but Rousseau, who had arranged
for the publication of Pergolesi's music in Paris and who
knew more about the subject than most Frenchmen after the
months he had spent visiting the opera houses of Venice
during his time as secretary to the French ambassador to
the doge in 1743–44, emerged as the most forceful and
effective combatant. He was the only one to direct his fire
squarely at the leading living exponent of French operatic
music, Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Rousseau and Rameau must at that time have seemed unevenly
matched in a controversy about music. Rameau, already in
his 70th year, was not only a prolific and successful composer
but was also, as the author of the celebrated Traité
de l'harmonie (1722; Treatise on Harmony) and other technical
works, Europe's leading musicologist. Rousseau, by contrast,
was 30 years younger, a newcomer to music, with no professional
training and only one successful opera to his credit. His
scheme for a new notation for music had been rejected by
the Academy of Sciences, and most of his musical entries
for Diderot's Encyclopédie were as yet unpublished.
Yet the dispute was not only musical but also philosophical,
and Rameau was confronted with a more formidable adversary
than he had realized. Rousseau built his case for the superiority
of Italian music over French on the principle that melody
must have priority over harmony, whereas Rameau based his
on the assertion that harmony must have priority over melody.
By pleading for melody, Rousseau introduced what later came
to be recognized as a characteristic idea of Romanticism,
namely, that in art the free expression of the creative
spirit is more important than strict adhesion to formal
rules and traditional procedures. By pleading for harmony,
Rameau reaffirmed the first principle of French Classicism,
namely, that conformity to rationally intelligible rules
is a necessary condition of art, the aim of which is to
impose order on the chaos of human experience.
In music, Rousseau was a liberator. He argued for freedom
in music, and he pointed to the Italian composers as models
to be followed. In doing so he had more success than Rameau;
he changed people's attitudes. Gluck, who succeeded Rameau
as the most important operatic composer in France, acknowledged
his debt to Rousseau's teaching, and Mozart based the text
for his one-act operetta Bastien und Bastienne on Rousseau's
Devin du village. European music had taken a new direction.
But Rousseau himself composed no more operas. Despite the
success of Le Devin du village, or rather because of its
success, Rousseau felt that, as a moralist who had decided
to make a break with worldly values, he could not allow
himself to go on working for the theatre. He decided to
devote his energies henceforth to literature and philosophy.
Major works of political philosophy
As part of what Rousseau called his “reform,”
or improvement of his own character, he began to look back
at some of the austere principles that he had learned as
a child in the Calvinist republic of Geneva. Indeed he decided
to return to that city, repudiate his Catholicism, and seek
readmission to the Protestant church. He had in the meantime
acquired a mistress, an illiterate laundry maid named Thérèse
Levasseur. To the surprise of his friends, he took her with
him to Geneva, presenting her as a nurse. Although her presence
caused some murmurings, Rousseau was readmitted easily to
the Calvinist communion, his literary fame having made him
very welcome to a city that prided itself as much on its
culture as on its morals.
Rousseau had by this time completed a second Discourse
in response to a question set by the Academy of Dijon: “What
is the origin of the inequality among men and is it justified
by natural law?” In response to this challenge he produced
a masterpiece of speculative anthropology. The argument
follows on that of his first Discourse by developing the
proposition that natural man is good and then tracing the
successive stages by which man has descended from primitive
innocence to corrupt sophistication.
Rousseau begins his Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalité
(1755; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) by distinguishing
two kinds of inequality, natural and artificial, the first
arising from differences in strength, intelligence, and
so forth, the second from the conventions that govern societies.
It is the inequalities of the latter sort that he sets out
to explain. Adopting what he thought the properly “scientific”
method of investigating origins, he attempts to reconstruct
the earliest phases of man's experience of life on earth.
He suggests that original man was not a social being but
entirely solitary, and to this extent he agrees with Hobbes's
account of the state of nature. But in contrast to the English
pessimist's view that the life of man in such a condition
must have been “poor, nasty, brutish and short,”
Rousseau claims that original man, while admittedly solitary,
was healthy, happy, good, and free. The vices of men, he
argues, date from the time when men formed societies.
Rousseau thus exonerates nature and blames society for
the emergence of vices. He says that passions that generate
vices hardly exist in the state of nature but begin to develop
as soon as men form societies. Rousseau goes on to suggest
that societies started when men built their first huts,
a development that facilitated cohabitation of males and
females; this in turn produced the habit of living as a
family and associating with neighbours. This “nascent
society,” as Rousseau calls it, was good while it lasted;
it was indeed the “golden age” of human history.
Only it did not endure. With the tender passion of love
there was also born the destructive passion of jealousy.
Neighbours started to compare their abilities and achievements
with one another, and this “marked the first step towards
inequality and at the same time towards vice.” Men
started to demand consideration and respect; their innocent
self-love turned into culpable pride, as each man wanted
to be better than everyone else.
The introduction of property marked a further step toward
inequality since it made it necessary for men to institute
law and government in order to protect property. Rousseau
laments the “fatal” concept of property in one
of his more eloquent passages, describing the “horrors”
that have resulted from men's departure from a condition
in which the earth belonged to no one. These passages in
his second Discourse excited later revolutionaries such
as Marx and Lenin, but Rousseau himself did not think that
the past could be undone in any way; there was no point
in men dreaming of a return to the golden age.
Civil society, as Rousseau describes it, comes into being
to serve two purposes: to provide peace for everyone and
to ensure the right to property for anyone lucky enough
to have possessions. It is thus of some advantage to everyone,
but mostly to the advantage of the rich, since it transforms
their de facto ownership into rightful ownership and keeps
the poor dispossessed. It is a somewhat fraudulent social
contract that introduces government since the poor get so
much less out of it than do the rich. Even so, the rich
are no happier in civil society than are the poor because
social man is never satisfied. Society leads men to hate
one another to the extent that their interests conflict,
and the best they are able to do is to hide their hostility
behind a mask of courtesy. Thus Rousseau regards the inequality
between men not as a separate problem but as one of the
features of the long process by which men become alienated
from nature and from innocence.
In the dedication Rousseau wrote for the Discourse, in
order to present it to the republic of Geneva, he nevertheless
praises that city-state for having achieved the ideal balance
between “the equality which nature established among
men and the inequality which they have instituted among
themselves.” The arrangement he discerned in Geneva
was one in which the best men were chosen by the citizens
and put in the highest positions of authority. Like Plato,
Rousseau always believed that a just society was one in
which everyone was in his right place. And having written
the Discourse to explain how men had lost their liberty
in the past, he went on to write another book, Du Contrat
social (1762; The Social Contract), to suggest how they
might recover their liberty in the future. Again Geneva
was the model; not Geneva as it had become in 1754 when
Rousseau returned there to recover his rights as a citizen,
but Geneva as it had once been; i.e., Geneva as Calvin had
designed it.
The Social Contract begins with the sensational opening
sentence: “Man was born free, but he is everywhere
in chains,” and proceeds to argue that men need not
be in chains. If a civil society, or state, could be based
on a genuine social contract, as opposed to the fraudulent
social contract depicted in the Discourse on the Origin
of Inequality, men would receive in exchange for their independence
a better kind of freedom, namely true political, or republican,
liberty. Such liberty is to be found in obedience to a self-imposed
law.
Rousseau's definition of political liberty raises an obvious
problem. For while it can be readily agreed that an individual
is free if he obeys only rules he prescribes for himself,
this is so because an individual is a person with a single
will. A society, by contrast, is a set of persons with a
set of individual wills, and conflict between separate wills
is a fact of universal experience. Rousseau's response to
the problem is to define his civil society as an artificial
person united by a general will, or volonté générale.
The social contract that brings society into being is a
pledge, and the society remains in being as a pledged group.
Rousseau's republic is a creation of the general will—of
a will that never falters in each and every member to further
the public, common, or national interest—even though
it may conflict at times with personal interest.
Rousseau sounds very much like Hobbes when he says that
under the pact by which men enter civil society everyone
totally alienates himself and all his rights to the whole
community. Rousseau, however, represents this act as a form
of exchange of rights whereby men give up natural rights
in return for civil rights. The bargain is a good one because
what men surrender are rights of dubious value, whose realization
depends solely on an individual man's own might, and what
they obtain in return are rights that are both legitimate
and enforced by the collective force of the community.
There is no more haunting paragraph in The Social Contract
than that in which Rousseau speaks of “forcing a man
to be free.” But it would be wrong to interpret these
words in the manner of those critics who see Rousseau as
a prophet of modern totalitarianism. He does not claim that
a whole society can be forced to be free but only that an
occasional individual, who is enslaved by his passions to
the extent of disobeying the law, can be restored by force
to obedience to the voice of the general will that exists
inside of him. The man who is coerced by society for a breach
of the law is, in Rousseau's view, being brought back to
an awareness of his own true interests.
For Rousseau there is a radical dichotomy between true
law and actual law. Actual law, which he describes in the
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, simply protects the
status quo. True law, as described in The Social Contract,
is just law, and what ensures its being just is that it
is made by the people in its collective capacity as sovereign
and obeyed by the same people in their individual capacities
as subjects. Rousseau is confident that such laws could
not be unjust because it is inconceivable that any people
would make unjust laws for itself.
Rousseau is, however, troubled by the fact that the majority
of a people does not necessarily represent its most intelligent
citizens. Indeed, he agrees with Plato that most people
are stupid. Thus the general will, while always morally
sound, is sometimes mistaken. Hence Rousseau suggests the
people need a lawgiver—a great mind like Solon or Lycurgus
or Calvin—to draw up a constitution and system of laws.
He even suggests that such lawgivers need to claim divine
inspiration in order to persuade the dim-witted multitude
to accept and endorse the laws it is offered.
This suggestion echoes a similar proposal by Machiavelli,
a political theorist Rousseau greatly admired and whose
love of republican government he shared. An even more conspicuously
Machiavellian influence can be discerned in Rousseau's chapter
on civil religion, where he argues that Christianity, despite
its truth, is useless as a republican religion on the grounds
that it is directed to the unseen world and does nothing
to teach citizens the virtues that are needed in the service
of the state, namely, courage, virility, and patriotism.
Rousseau does not go so far as Machiavelli in proposing
a revival of pagan cults, but he does propose a civil religion
with minimal theological content designed to fortify and
not impede (as Christianity impedes) the cultivation of
martial virtues. It is understandable that the authorities
of Geneva, profoundly convinced that the national church
of their little republic was at the same time a truly Christian
church and a nursery of patriotism, reacted angrily against
this chapter in Rousseau's Social Contract.
By the year 1762, however, when The Social Contract was
published, Rousseau had given up any thought of settling
in Geneva. After recovering his citizen's rights in 1754,
he had returned to Paris and the company of his friends
around the Encyclopédie. But he became increasingly
ill at ease in such worldly society and began to quarrel
with his fellow Philosophes. An article for the Encyclopédie
on the subject of Geneva, written by d'Alembert at Voltaire's
instigation, upset Rousseau partly by suggesting that the
pastors of the city had lapsed from Calvinist severity into
unitarian laxity and partly by proposing that a theatre
should be erected there. Rousseau hastened into print with
a defense of the Calvinist orthodoxy of the pastors and
with an elaborate attack on the theatre as an institution
that could only do harm to an innocent community such as
Geneva.
Years of seclusion and exile
By the time his Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles
(1758; Letter to Monsieur d'Alembert on the Theatre) appeared
in print, Rousseau had already left Paris to pursue a life
closer to nature on the country estate of his friend Mme
d'Épinay near Montmorency. When the hospitality of
Mme d'Épinay proved to entail much the same social
round as that of Paris, Rousseau retreated to a nearby cottage,
called Montlouis, under the protection of the Maréchal
de Luxembourg. But even this highly placed friend could
not save him in 1762 when his treatise on education, Émile,
was published and scandalized the pious Jansenists of the
French Parlements even as The Social Contract scandalized
the Calvinists of Geneva. In Paris, as in Geneva, they ordered
the book to be burned and the author arrested; all the Maréchal
de Luxembourg could do was to provide a carriage for Rousseau
to escape from France. Rousseau spent the rest of his life
as a fugitive moving from one refuge to another.
The years at Montmorency had been the most productive of
his literary career; besides The Social Contract and Émile,
Julie: ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie:
or, The New Eloise) came out within 12 months, all three
works of seminal importance. The New Eloise, being a novel,
escaped the censorship to which the other two works were
subject; indeed of all his books it proved to be the most
widely read and the most universally praised in his lifetime.
It develops the Romanticism that had already informed his
writings on music and perhaps did more than any other single
work of literature to influence the spirit of its age. It
made the author at least as many friends among the reading
public—and especially among educated women—as
The Social Contract and Émile made enemies among
magistrates and priests. If it did not exempt him from persecution,
at least it ensured that his persecution was observed, and
admiring femmes du monde intervened from time to time to
help him so that Rousseau was never, unlike Voltaire and
Diderot, actually imprisoned.
The theme of The New Eloise provides a striking contrast
to that of The Social Contract. It is about people finding
happiness in domestic as distinct from public life, in the
family as opposed to the state. The central character, Saint-Preux,
is a middle-class preceptor who falls in love with his upper-class
pupil, Julie. She returns his love and yields to his advances,
but the difference between their classes makes marriage
between them impossible. Baron d'Étange, Julie's
father, has indeed promised her to a fellow nobleman named
Wolmar. As a dutiful daughter, Julie marries Wolmar and
Saint-Preux goes off on a voyage around the world with an
English aristocrat, Bomston, from whom he acquires a certain
stoicism. Julie succeeds in forgetting her feelings for
Saint-Preux and finds happiness as wife, mother, and chatelaine.
Some six years later Saint-Preux returns from his travels
and is engaged as tutor to the Wolmar children. All live
together in harmony, and there are only faint echoes of
the old affair between Saint-Preux and Julie. The little
community, dominated by Julie, illustrates one of Rousseau's
political principles: that while men should rule the world
in public life, women should rule men in private life. At
the end of The New Eloise, when Julie has made herself ill
in an attempt to rescue one of her children from drowning,
she comes face-to-face with a truth about herself: that
her love for Saint-Preux has never died.
The novel was clearly inspired by Rousseau's own curious
relationship—at once passionate and platonic—with
Sophie d'Houdetot, a noblewoman who lived near him at Montmorency.
He himself asserted in the Confessions (1781–88) that
he was led to write the book by “a desire for loving,
which I had never been able to satisfy and by which I felt
myself devoured.” Saint-Preux's experience of love
forbidden by the laws of class reflects Rousseau's own experience;
and yet it cannot be said that The New Eloise is an attack
on those laws, which seem, on the contrary, to be given
the status almost of laws of nature. The members of the
Wolmar household are depicted as finding happiness in living
according to an aristocratic ideal. They appreciate the
routines of country life and enjoy the beauties of the Swiss
and Savoyard Alps. But despite such an endorsement of the
social order, the novel was revolutionary; its very free
expression of emotions and its extreme sensibility deeply
moved its large readership and profoundly influenced literary
developments.
Émile is a book that seems to appeal alternately
to the republican ethic of The Social Contract and the aristocratic
ethic of The New Eloise. It is also halfway between a novel
and a didactic essay. Described by the author as a treatise
on education, it is not about schooling but about the upbringing
of a rich man's son by a tutor who is given unlimited authority
over him. At the same time the book sets out to explore
the possibilities of an education for republican citizenship.
The basic argument of the book, as Rousseau himself expressed
it, is that vice and error, which are alien to a child's
original nature, are introduced by external agencies, so
that the work of a tutor must always be directed to counteracting
those forces by manipulating pressures that will work with
nature and not against it. Rousseau devotes many pages to
explaining the methods the tutor must use. These methods
involve a noticeable measure of deceit, and although corporal
punishment is forbidden, mental cruelty is not.
Whereas The Social Contract is concerned with the problems
of achieving freedom, Émile is concerned with achieving
happiness and wisdom. In this different context religion
plays a different role. Instead of a civil religion, Rousseau
here outlines a personal religion, which proves to be a
kind of simplified Christianity, involving neither revelation
nor the familiar dogmas of the church. In the guise of La
Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard (1765; The Profession
of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar) Rousseau sets out what may
fairly be regarded as his own religious views, since that
book confirms what he says on the subject in his private
correspondence. Rousseau could never entertain doubts about
God's existence or about the immortality of the soul. He
felt, moreover, a strong emotional drive toward the worship
of God, whose presence he felt most forcefully in nature,
especially in mountains and forests untouched by the hand
of man. He also attached great importance to conscience,
the “divine voice of the soul in man,” opposing
this both to the bloodless categories of rationalistic ethics
and to the cold tablets of biblical authority.
This minimal creed put Rousseau at odds with the orthodox
adherents of the churches and with the openly atheistic
Philosophes of Paris, so that despite the enthusiasm that
some of his writings, and especially The New Eloise, excited
in the reading public, he felt himself increasingly isolated,
tormented, and pursued. After he had been expelled from
France, he was chased from canton to canton in Switzerland.
He reacted to the suppression of The Social Contract in
Geneva by indicting the regime of that city-state in a pamphlet
entitled Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764; Letters
Written from the Mountain). No longer, as in the Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality, was Geneva depicted as a model
republic but as one that had been taken over by “twenty-five
despots”; the subjects of the king of England were
said to be free men by comparison with the victims of Genevan
tryranny.
It was in England that Rousseau found refuge after he had
been banished from the canton of Bern. The Scottish philosopher
David Hume took him there and secured the offer of a pension
from King George III; but once in England, Rousseau became
aware that certain British intellectuals were making fun
of him, and he suspected Hume of participating in the mockery.
Various symptoms of paranoia began to manifest themselves
in Rousseau, and he returned to France incognito. Believing
that Thérèse was the only person he could
rely on, he finally married her in 1768, when he was 56
years old.
The last decade
In the remaining 10 years of his life Rousseau produced
primarily autobiographical writings, mostly intended to
justify himself against the accusations of his adversaries.
The most important was his Confessions, modeled on the work
of the same title by St. Augustine and achieving something
of the same classic status. He also wrote Rousseau juge
de Jean-Jacques (1780; “Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques”)
to reply to specific charges by his enemies and Les Rêveries
du promeneur solitaire (1782; Reveries of the Solitary Walker),
one of the most moving of his books, in which the intense
passion of his earlier writings gives way to a gentle lyricism
and serenity. And indeed, Rousseau does seem to have recovered
his peace of mind in his last years, when he was once again
afforded refuge on the estates of great French noblemen,
first the Prince de Conti and then the Marquis de Girardin,
in whose park at Ermenonville he died.
Bibliography
Jean Sénelier, Bibliographie générale
des oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1950), is still the
best available source. Théophile Dufour, Recherches
bibliographiques sur les oeuvres imprimées de J.J.
Rousseau, 2 vol. (1925, reprinted in 1 vol., 1971), is not
entirely superseded by Sénelier's work. Albert Schinz,
État present des travaux sur J.-J. Rousseau (1941,
reprinted 1971), includes publications in languages other
than French. Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (1963, reissued
1971), contains a critical bibliography in English of Rousseau
and his contemporaries. Société Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Geneva, Annales (irregular), published since 1905,
contains reviews of all important publications in several
languages, concerning Rousseau. Hermine de Saussure, Rousseau
et les manuscrits des Confessions (1958), and Étude
sur le sort des manuscrits de J.-J. Rousseau (1974), provide
information on the whereabouts of Rousseau's manuscripts
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