ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES. – Philosopher, man of letters, b. 28 June 1712 in Geneva to the Calvinist Isaac R., watchmaker, and Suzanne Bernard; d. at Ermenonville, 3 July 1778. He was brought up by his uncle Bernardo and learned Latin; he proved unable to adapt himself to the trades of clerk and then engraver. In 1728 (14 March), finding the gates of Geneva closed at nightfall, he took to wandering through Savoy until, taken in by the Catholic curé of Confignon, he was presented to Mme de Warens in Annecy and sent by her to Turin for his conversion to Catholicism (21–23 April 1728). As a servant in the household of the Counts of Govone, he met Abbé Jean-Claude Gaime (1692–1701: the “Vicar of Savoy”), who gave him some guidance in his studies. Returning the following year from Mme de Warens in Chambery, he obtained permission to study music; in 1732 he took a post in the cadastre of the King of Sardinia and began an amorous liaison with his patroness (Maman) that lasted until 1741. During his stay at the villa of Les Charmettes in Chambery (1738–40), he began systematic study of science and history and reflected on the Port-Royalists and the Oratorians. In 1740–41 he worked as a tutor in Lyon in the household of Bonnet de Mably, brother of the historian Mably and the philosopher Condillac (v.).
At the end of 1741, R., carrying with him a Projet concernant des nouveaux signes pour musique, set out for Paris, where he obtained approval from the Académie des Sciences for his musical system and published it (1742) with a Dissertation sur la musique moderne. Secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, Montagu, he returned to Paris after a year (1743–44) and found a hospitable protector in Dupont de Francueil, secretary to the King’s cabinet, who entrusted him with the education of his son in chemistry. In 1745 he managed to have his comic opera Les Muses galantes performed at the Opéra and collaborated with Voltaire (v.) on a reworking of Les fêtes de Ramire (a ballet by Voltaire and Rameau). In 1746 he married Marie-Thérèse Le Vasseur, a seamstress (1721–1801), by whom he had five children, all successively left at foundling hospitals for financial reasons. DIDEROT, DENIS (v.) to write the musical entries for the Encyclopédie, in 1749 he addressed the topic proposed by the Academy of Dijon: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to corrupt or to purify morals?” He competed for the prize, and the following year his Discours was awarded II. This was followed in 1753 by the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes on the same Academy’s theme. Meanwhile, between 1752 and 1753, R. had had performed before the King his comic opera Le Devin du village and the comedy Narcisse by the Comédie Française, with which he had come to Paris. On this occasion he also published a Lettre sur la musique française.
In 1754 R., now famous, was triumphantly received in Geneva (where he returned to the Calvinist faith) and began to plan a vast work of “Political Institutions.” From spring 1756 to the end of 1757 he left Paris for Montmorency, where his patroness, Mme d’Épinay, had offered him the country retreat of l’Ermitage. But because of his affair with Mlle de l’Houdetot, sister-in-law of Mme d’Épinay, he had to leave the Hermitage and come into conflict with his friends of the Encyclopédie. He was taken in by the Marshal of Luxembourg at the château of Montmorency, where he remained from 1757 to 1762, completing his major literary and philosophical works: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a novel (in epistolary form) in which he recounts his passion for Mme d’Houdetot; the Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758–59), concerning the article “Genève” in the Encyclopédie; Du contrat social (1762), the only completed part of the “Political Institutions”; Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762); and the posthumous Essai sur l’origine des langues. Both Du contrat social and Émile were condemned by the Holy Office, and on 9 June 1762 the Parliament of Paris, on the advice of the Sorbonne, condemned Émile and ordered the author’s arrest. On 19 June the Parliament of Geneva also condemned the two works. R. managed to flee Paris on 10 June and took refuge first at Môtiers-Travers near Neuchâtel, a domain of the King of Prussia, then, frightened by a popular demonstration, on the islet of St-Pierre in Lake Bienne, where he stayed until 1765. There he wrote the Lettre à Mgr Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, in defence of Émile (1763) and the Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), in reply to the Lettres écrites de la campagne against Du contrat social by Jean Robert Tronchin, Attorney-General of the Republic of Geneva (1741–93). During this period he also worked on the composition of Pygmalion, a lyric scene for music, and on the compilation of the Dictionnaire de musique (1767). In 1765 R. was also expelled from Bienne; early in 1766 Hume (v.) in England. The failure to secure a pension from King George III plunged him into a crisis of persecution mania. Returning to France in June 1767, he was first the guest of the Prince of Conti at the château of Trye (1767–68), then travelled in the Dauphiné, and finally, in June 1770, settled again in Paris, living in poverty as a copyist of music. He then composed the Confessions (begun in 1761, continued until 1765; posthumous); the apologetic dialogues (R. juge de J.-J. [1772–76]; posthumous); and, from 1776 to 1778, at the suggestion of his last friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (posthumous). He died at Ermenonville, a guest of the Marquis de Girardin. His remains were transferred to Paris by decree of the Convention in 1794.
As a musician, R. was rather a theorist and reformer than a creator or artist. His system of musical notation, which substituted reading on the staff with numbers assigned to the notes, has only pedagogical value. Yet his persistent involvement with music and the theatre shows that this was the most naïve side of his personality and the one in which he was most convinced of himself. On the other hand, he criticized contemporary theatre (Préface au Narcisse, Lettre à M. d’Alembert) as artificial and corrupting of feeling.
In literature R. introduced and made triumphant sentimentalism, hitherto regarded as the preserve of the English and their imitators and opposed by hedonistic Enlightenment thought. La Nouvelle Héloïse, narrating in the form of passionate outpourings the love of Julie, wife of the rationalist Wolmar, for the brooding Saint-Preux, represents the first modern attempt to unite the inner drama of love with the torment of the moral and social problem of fidelity and the search for a universal law that justifies feeling in its untrammelled expansion. The Confessions place R. among the masters of the sentimental autobiography: he attempts to recount himself, blending psychological realism with the loving and intellectual simplicity that he takes to constitute the tone of his own personality. Even of himself he maintained that society and intercourse with men had corrupted the original purity, defined by the spontaneous tendency to follow in one’s actions one’s own way of feeling, loving, and thinking (cf. Conf., I. VI). The naïve impulse of humanity was for him as fertile of inspiration as feminine gentleness, and to be found alike in the individual and in the mass. It was artistically united with the idyllic and vitalistic aspect of nature, and led poetry and music to interpret consciousness as the sentimental unity of nature and man (op. cit., I. IX). Yet he achieved the full expression of this unity only at the last, and in madness, in the Rêveries, where the freest memories of childhood are interwoven with descriptive pages worthy of Romanticism (v.). This may be considered that he pursued more consciously than any of his contemporaries, though his uncertain and contradictory relations with Christianity prevented him from attaining its realization, confining him to preromanticism.
As a political thinker, Rousseau criticized progressive Enlightenment thought and initiated the movement of ideas that led to the French Revolution. His two *Discourses* of 1749 and 1753 adopt a starkly anti-historical stance toward the entire Renaissance, the age of scientific progress, and the absolutist and commercialist system that had taken hold in the modern era. Rousseau’s fundamental concept is that, even in nature, man is created by God as good and equal to his fellow beings, and that nature provides the conditions for realizing this goodness and equality (*Discourse on Inequality*, preface and Part I). This ideal is still discernible in the civilization and forms of wisdom of the ancients who were closest to nature, as Montaigne and Montesquieu had shown.
Progressive and feudal society corrupts this original purity and equality in favor of vested interests, artificial morality, oppressive religion, and ruinous, unjustified hierarchies grounded in sophistic science. Only a return to nature and the orders and forms it demands can save humanity (*Discourse on the Sciences and Arts*, Part II; *Discourse on Inequality*, Part II). In this way, Rousseau aligned himself with modern natural law theory, from Grotius to Vico, and notably with the form it took among the Encyclopedists, as defined by Leibniz and Montesquieu.
Yet, while conceding that Roman law and its political consequences were most in conformity with this theory, and that natural society ought to organize itself according to rationally established contractual and conventional principles, Rousseau, in *The Social Contract* (though already in the *Discourse* of 1753 and in another posthumous work, *On the Origin of Languages*), sought to give the dual foundation—historical and Epicurean, natural and conventional—of that system a psychological justification that led him to far-reaching conclusions. Every individual, he argued, possesses by nature a dual will: one individual and naive, the “will of all,” exercised by each citizen in pursuit of his own spontaneous interest, and another directed toward the common good, the “general will,” which generates the social contract among citizens so that they may live together according to reason and morality (*The Social Contract*, I.2.1–3; I.4.1). The general will is indivisible; it founds the real freedom and equality of the body politic and its members, and is represented by the sovereign power, as a single and indivisible authority, by elective democratic institutions, and by laws that subordinate particular and transient wills to itself.
This faith in a reason-guided will, transcending the hedonistic moment of individual consciousness, and the appeal to human nature in its spontaneous sentiment as its source, set Rousseau apart from Calvinists and Enlightenment thinkers, making him historically the precursor of Kant’s distinction between the categorical and hypothetical imperatives. Yet in Rousseau himself, this faith remains dogmatic, for he insists that a general will, nourished and arising from sentiment, can be identified with reason.
Rousseau’s pedagogy thus defined human nature as the ensemble of spontaneous dispositions formed within us by sensitive consciousness in its evaluation of objects of appetite or aversion, pleasure or pain, and of their suitability or unsuitability, as well as by our judgments regarding their relation to happiness or rational perfection. This inner nature must unfold in relation to the nature of things through experience, so as to educate the individual until he is habituated to take his place in a perfect society. Education imposed by men in the name of a preconstituted society is instead corruptive of natural energies and must be avoided or reformed (*Émile*, I.1). In *Émile*, drawing on his manifold experiences as a tutor and the projects he had compiled, Rousseau presented a plan of education he termed “natural.” The author, acting as tutor, selects a single pupil, Émile, from infancy, secures from his family a life of rural solitude, and devotes himself exclusively to Émile’s education until the boy, now an adolescent eager for activity and work, is introduced by Rousseau into civil society and a family where he is to marry Sophie, educated according to analogous individualistic principles.
Rousseau’s proposed method for Émile’s education is “negative”: the tutor’s role is merely to ensure that the pupil avoids corrupting social influences, while his individuality develops from earliest childhood according to his spontaneous inclinations and the experiences he naturally seeks and acquires, until the emergence of moral consciousness confronts him with the personality of the adult man and with social relations. Rousseau’s followers often interpret this method as “active,” inasmuch as it bases pedagogy entirely on the pupil’s own activity in seeking expression and knowledge; historically, however, Rousseau developed only a rudimentary idea of the active method, in the sense of the autogenesis of consciousness and the quasi-vegetative spontaneity of education.
In his novel, by contrast, Rousseau placed the greatest emphasis on a gradual method, tracking Émile’s education stage by stage: infancy (Book I), boyhood (II), childhood (III), adolescence (IV), and youth (V). To these stages correspond: the origins of sensibility (I), the formation of expressive, imaginative, and emotional powers (II), the experience of nature and of scientific and economic phenomena (III), and the development of moral, religious, and social consciousness (IV). It is here that Rousseau inserts the *Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar*, in memory of his youthful conversations in Turin with Abbé Gaime, and finally the culminating test of love for Sophie and family life. This last test does not entirely succeed for Émile: he marries his beloved, but only after traveling the world and submitting himself to the social contract can he father children.
Though these divisions and sequences of stages correspond to Rousseau’s abstract notions (for example, he treats Émile’s growth as that of a slow-developing child who can only at age twelve engage in reading, study, and artistic exercises according to a set program), they enabled him to incorporate into *Émile* important and decisive contributions from his own researches on typology (in which he was an emulator of Locke’s pedagogy), on the relations between child consciousness and the primitive and heroic world (cf. G. B. Vico), on methods of teaching geography and the physical sciences (drawing on ideas from Spinoza), and on linking pedagogy with the philosophy of religion and society. Despite condemnation by Catholics (Gerdil, Muzzarelli, Formey, De Staël, Necker de Saussure, Capponi, Gioberti), imitation by the Romantics (Goethe, Richter), and imposition by naturalists and positivists as the greatest classic of pedagogy, the novel has enjoyed immense and enduring success. In truth, it has contributed more intrinsically to the development of modern thought through its later analyses of practical activity in its formation and distinction (Kant) and through the connections between philosophy and pedagogy (Fichte), while its educational merit, though exceptional, remains suggestive and abstract in character.
R.'s philosophy is systematically linked by him to the history of empiricism (v.) and LOCKE, JOHN (v.), with extensive connections to the *Systèmes de la Nature* of Spinozist inspiration. Yet the genesis of sentimentalism is to be sought, more than in the English philosophers of this school (Shaftesbury [v.], Butler), in the sensism of Condillac (v.). Émile becomes conscious progressively in accord with Condillac’s genetic psychology, and the feeling of spiritual spontaneity develops in him according to the evolution of sensibility.
ROUSSEAU JEAN-JACQUES — ROVENIUS PHILIP
Firenze 1934; B. Brunello, R., Modena 1936; J. Sciaky, Il problema dello Stato nel pensiero del R., Firenze 1938; R. Buck, R. u. die deutsche Romantik, Berlin 1939; E. Cassirer, Il problema G. G. R., Firenze 1939; C. A. Sacheli, R., Messina 1940, 2nd ed., 1942; A. Cresson, J.-J. R., Paris 1940; A. Schinz, État présent des travaux sur J.-J. R., vi 1941; D. Morando, R., Brescia 1945; N. Petruzzelli, Il pensiero politico e pedagogico di G. G. R., Roma 1946; S. Caramella, Leibniz e R., in Arch. di filos., 16 (1947), pp. 15-18; A. Saloni, R., Milano 1949, Santino Caramella.