ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES. - Philosopher, man of letters, b. June 28, 1712 in Geneva to the Calvinist Isaac R., a watchmaker, and Suzanne Bernard; d. at Ermenonville on July 3, 1778. He was educated by his uncle Bernard and learned Latin: he was unable to adapt himself to a trade, first as a clerk, then as an engraver. In 1728 (March 14), having found the gates of Geneva closed in the evening, he took to wandering through Savoy, until, taken in by the Catholic curate of Confignon, the latter presented him to Mme de Warens, in Annecy, and by her he was sent to Turin for his conversion to Catholicism (April 21-23, 1728). As a servant he met, at the home of the counts of Govone, the abbé Jean-Claude Gaime (1692-1701: the "Savoyard Vicar"), who gave him some direction in his studies. Having returned the following year to Mme de Warens, at Chambéry, he obtained permission to study music; in 1732 he took employment in the cadastre of the King of Sardinia and began an amorous relationship with his protectress (Maman), which lasted until 1741. During his stay at the villa of Les Charmettes at Chambéry (1738-40), he began to study science and history systematically and to meditate on the Port-Royalists and the Oratorians. In 1740-41 he was a tutor at Lyon in the household of Bonnet de Mably, brother of the historian Mably and of the philosopher Condillac (v.).
At the end of 1741 R., carrying with him a Projet concernant des nouveaux signes pour musique, left for Paris, where he obtained the approval of the Académie des Sciences for his musical system and published it (1742) together with a Dissertation sur la musique moderne. Secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, Montaigu, after a year (1743-44) he returned to Paris and found hospitable protection with Duon de Franceuil, cabinet secretary to the King, who entrusted him with the instruction of his son in chemistry. In 1745 he succeeded in having performed at the Opéra his musical comedy *Les
Muses galantes and collaborated with Voltaire (v.) on the reworking of Les festes 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 to the orphanage owing to economic hardship. Invited by Diderot (v.) to write the articles on music for the Encyclopédie, in 1749 he learned of the topic proposed by the Academy of Dijon: "Si le progrès des sciences et des arts a contribué à corrompre ou à épurer les moeurs." He entered the competition, and the following year his Discours was awarded the prize. There followed, in 1753, the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, on a topic set by the same Academy. Meanwhile, between 1752 and 1753, R. had had his comic opera Le Devin du village and the comedy Narcisse performed before the King, 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., by then famous, was received triumphantly at Geneva (where he returned to the Calvinist faith) and began to meditate a vast work of "Political Institutions." From the spring of 1756 to the end of 1757 he left Paris for Montmorency, where his protectress Madame d'Epinay had offered him the country residence of the Hermitage. But because of his love affair with Mme d'Houdetot, the sister-in-law of Mme d'Epinay, he had to abandon the Hermitage and fell into conflict with his friends of the Encyclopédie. He was the guest of the Marshal of Luxembourg at the castle of Montmorency and remained there from 1757 to 1762, bringing to completion his major literary and philosophical works: Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a novel (in epistolary form) in which he summed up his passion for Mme d'Houdetot; the Lettre à M. D'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758-59), concerning the article Genève in the Encyclopédie; the Contrat social (1762), the only part completed of the "Political Institutions"; the Emile ou de l'éducation (1762) and the posthumous Essai sur l'origine des langues. The Contrat and the Emile were condemned by the Holy Office, and on 9 June 1762 the Parliament of Paris, on the advice of the Sorbonne, condemned the Emile and ordered the author's arrest. On 19 June the Parliament of Geneva likewise condemned the two works. R. managed to flee from 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 little island of St-Pierre in the lake of Bienne, until 1765, where he wrote the Lettre à Mgr Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, in defense of the Emile (1763) and the Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), in reply to the Lettres écrites de la campagne against the Contrat social by Jean Robert Tronchin, procurator general of the Republic of Geneva (1741-93). During this period he attended to the composition of Pygmalion, a lyrical scene for music, and to the drafting of the Dictionnaire de musique (1767). In 1765 R. was evicted from Bienne as well; at the beginning of 1766 he took refuge with David Hume (v.) in England. The failure to grant him a pension on the part of King George III brought on in him a crisis of persecution mania. Having returned to France in June 1767, he was first the guest of the Prince of Conti at the castle of Trye (1767-68), then traveled in the Dauphiné, and finally in June 1770 settled again in Paris, living poorly 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 St-Pierre, the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire [posthumous]. He died at Ermenonville, as the guest of the Marquis of Girardin. His remains were transferred to Paris by decree of the Convention of 1794.
As a musician, R. was rather a theorist and reformer than a creator and artist. His system of musical notation, replacing reading on the staff with that of numbers assigned to the notes, has only didactic value. Nevertheless the very persistence of his interest in music and the theater shows that this was the most ingenuous aspect of his personality and the one in which he was most convinced of himself. He criticized contemporary theater (Préface au Narcisse, Lettre à M. d'Alembert) as artificial and corrupting of feeling.
In literature R. introduced and brought to triumph sentimentalism, until then regarded as proper to the English and their imitators, and opposed by hedonistic Enlightenment thought. The Nouvelle Héloïse, narrating in the form of passionate outpourings the loves of Julie, wife of the rationalist Wolmar, for the brooding Saint-Preux, represents the first modern attempt to unite the intimate drama of love with the torment of the moral and social problem of fidelity, and the search for a universal law that would justify feeling in its unbridled expansion. The Confessions bring R. to the fore among the masters of sentimental autobiography: he attempts to recount himself, fusing psychological realism with the amorous and intellectual simplicity in which he makes the tone of his own personality consist. Of himself too he maintained that society and commerce with men had corrupted the primitive 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 ingenuous movement of humanity was for him as fertile in inspiration as feminine gentleness, and discernible in the individual as in the masses. It was united artistically 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). The full expression of this unity, however, he attained only at the last, and in madness, with the Rêveries, in which the freest childhood memories are interwoven with descriptive pages worthy of Romanticism (v.). This one may hold that he anticipated more consciously than all his contemporaries, although his uncertain and contradictory relations with Christianity prevented him from achieving its realization, holding him back within pre-Romanticism.
As a politician, R. criticized progressive Enlightenment thought (v.), and initiated the movement of ideas that led to the French Revolution. The two Discours of 1749 and 1753 stand in a clearly anti-historical attitude toward the whole Renaissance and the age of scientific progress, and toward the absolutist and mercantilist system established in the modern era. R.'s fundamental concept is that even in nature man is created by God good and equal to his fellows, and that nature offers him the conditions for realizing this goodness and equality (Disc. sur l'inégalité, preface and part 1): something still discernible in the civilization and forms of wisdom of the ancients closest to nature, as Montaigne (v.) and Montesquieu (v.) had shown. Progressive and feudalist society corrupts primitive purity and equality in favor of created interests, an artificial morality, an impositive religion and ruinous and unjustified hierarchies founded on a sophistical science. Only the return to nature and to the orders and forms required by it can save humanity (Disc. sur les moeurs, part 2: Disc. sur l'inégal., part 2). Thus R. came to rejoin modern natural-law thought, from Grotius (v. GROOT) to Vico (v.) and especially to the form of it prevailing among the Encyclopedists and defined by Leibniz (v.) and by Montesquieu. However, while agreeing that Roman law and its political consequences was what most conformed to it, and that natural society had to organize itself according to contractual and conventional principles rationally established, R. in the Contrat social (but already in the Discours of 1753, and in the other, posthumous one, on the origin of languages) wished to give to the double foundation, historical and Epicurean, natural and conventional, of that system, a psychological justification that led him to quite different consequences. There is in every individual (he maintains), and by nature, a double will: the one individual and ingenuous, the "will of all," which each of the citizens of a State exercises in his own spontaneous interest, and the other directed to the common good, the "general will," which generates the bargaining among citizens to live together according to reason and morality (Contrat, I. II, 1-3; I. IV, 1). The "general will" is indissoluble, it founds the real freedom and equality of the body politic and of its members, and is represented by the sovereign power, as one and indivisible, by elective democratic institutions and by the laws that subject particular and transient wills to it. Faith in this will according to reason, surpassing the hedonic moment of individual consciousness, and the appeal to human nature itself in its spontaneous feeling as its source, detach R. from the Calvinists and from the Enlightenment thinkers, and historically make him the precursor of the Kantian distinction between categorical imperative and hypothetical imperative. But in him it is justified by revolutionary intentions, because it remains dogmatic for the same author that a general will, nourished and arisen from feeling, can identify itself with reason.
The pedagogy of R. thus came to define human nature as the set of spontaneous dispositions formed in us by the sensible consciousness in its evaluation of the objects of appetite or repulsion to pleasure and pain, and of their conveniences or inconveniences, and by our judgments relative to their relation with happiness or rational perfection. This intimate nature must develop in relation with the nature of things, in experience, in order to educate the individual up to accustoming him to be part of a perfect society. The education given by men in the name of a pre-constituted society is instead corrupting of natural energies and must be avoided, or reformed (Emile, I. I). R. in the Emile, summarizing his many trials as a tutor and the projects he compiled, presented a plan of education that he called "natural." The author as teacher chooses in Emile from infancy a single pupil, and, having obtained from his family a condition of country and solitary life, devotes himself exclusively to his education until Emile, having become an adolescent desirous of activity and work, is presented by him in civil society and to a family in which his bride, Sophie, educated with analogous individualist criteria, awaits him. The method proposed by R. for the education of Emile is "negative": that is, it involves on the teacher's part nothing other than the supervision of the pupil so that he may not encounter corrupting social factors, but that his individuality may develop from earliest infancy according to his spontaneous tendencies and experience naturally sought and acquired, until the arising of the moral consciousness brings him face to face with the personality of the adult man and with social relations. This method is usually interpreted by R.'s followers as "active," inasmuch as it founds its didactics entirely on the pupil's activity in search of expression and knowledge: but historically R. developed a first idea of the active method only in the sense of the autogenesis of consciousness and of the quasi-vegetative spontaneity of education.
R. instead in his novel gave the greatest importance to the "gradual method," proposing and following the education of Emile from age to age and from phase to phase: infancy (I. I), boyhood (II), childhood (III), adolescence (IV), youth (V). To these phases correspond: the origins of sensibility (I), the formation of the expressive, imaginative and sentimental powers (II), the experience of nature and of scientific and economic phenomena (III), the development of the moral, religious and social conscience (IV); it is here that R. inserts the "Profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar," in memory of his youthful Turin conversations with the abbé Gaime), and finally the final test of love for Sophie and for the family. This last test does not turn out entirely favorable to Emile: he marries his bride, and succeeds in having children by her only after having traveled the world and submitted himself to the "social contract." Although these partitions and successions of phases correspond to abstract notions of R. (for example, he regards Emile's growth as that of a late-developing child, who only at twelve years of age can devote himself to reading, studies, and exercises in art according to a program), they allowed him to insert into the Emile important and decisive contributions from his research on child-rearing (in which he was an emulator of Locke's pedology), on the relations of the infantile consciousness with the primitive and heroic world (cf. G. B. Vico), on the method of teaching geography and the physical sciences (for which he takes up ideas of Spinoza), and to link his pedagogy with the philosophy of religion (v.) and of society (v.). Despite the condemnation, the novel immediately enjoyed, and still enjoys, immense success; criticized by Catholics (Gerdil, Muzzarelli, Formey, De Staël, Necker de Saussure, Capponi, Gioberti), imitated by the Romantics (Goethe, Richter), it was imposed by the naturalists and the positivists as the greatest classic of pedagogy (v.). In fact, it contributed more intrinsically to the development of modern thought through the subsequent analyses of practical activity in its formation and distinction (Kant) and through the connections between philosophy and pedagogy (Fichte): while its educational merit, although exceptional, is of a suggestive and abstract nature.
R.'s philosophy is systematically linked by him to the history of empiricism (v.) and adheres to the theories of Locke (v.), with extensive relations to the Systèmes de la Nature of Spinozian inspiration. But the genesis of sentimentalism is to be sought, more than in the English philosophers of this current (Shaftesbury [v.], Butler), in the sensism of Condillac (v.). Emile becomes conscious gradually according to the genetic psychology of Condillac, and the feeling of spiritual spontaneity develops in him according to the evolution of sensibility than that studied by him. Other notable elements in R.'s thought are his derivations from Malebranche (v.) for the theory of a rational social order founded on the moral and religious conscience (cf. Malebranche, Traité de morale, I, 7 and II, 9), and from Leibniz for the monadological conception of Emile's consciousness and its relations to the idea of perfection. Sensism nevertheless still prevails in the derivation of the genesis of the moral conscience, in the manner of the French moralists and educationists (from Montaigne to Fénelon), from the internal crisis of natural egoism (amour-propre, self-love). In metaphysics, on the other hand, R. falls back toward creationist deism, after the manner of the Encyclopedists (Diderot, Voltaire).
Bibliography38 works
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