Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan-born philosopher, novelist and composer whose writings made him one of the most influential and controversial figures of the eighteenth century. He argued that human beings are naturally good but corrupted by society, that legitimate government must rest on the general will of free and equal citizens, and that education should follow the natural development of the child. His political ideas inspired the radicals of the French Revolution, his novel and autobiography helped launch Romanticism, and his work remains central to debates about democracy, inequality and freedom.

Rousseau was born in Geneva, then an independent Calvinist republic and now part of Switzerland, on 28 June 1712. His mother died a few days after his birth, and his father, a watchmaker who held the privileged rank of citizen of Geneva, raised him on a diet of novels and Plutarch's lives of ancient heroes, which left him with a lasting admiration for republican virtue. When his father fled the city after a quarrel in 1722, the boy was boarded with a pastor and then apprenticed to an engraver.

At sixteen he left Geneva and came under the protection of Françoise-Louise de Warens, a Catholic convert in Savoy, who sent him to Turin, where he converted to Catholicism in 1728. For more than a decade he drifted between jobs as a servant, music teacher, copyist and tutor, living for long periods with Madame de Warens near Chambéry, where he became her lover and read widely in philosophy. In 1742 he went to Paris with a new system of musical notation, which the Academy of Sciences rejected. After a spell as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, he settled in Paris, became a close friend of Denis Diderot and wrote articles on music for the Encyclopédie.

Around 1745 he began a lifelong relationship with Thérèse Levasseur, a laundress, whom he married in 1768. By his own account they had five children, all of whom he placed in the Paris foundling hospital, where most infants died. He later defended and agonised over this, and his enemies, Voltaire among them, used it against him.

In 1749, walking to the fortress of Vincennes to visit the imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau read of an essay competition set by the Academy of Dijon on whether the revival of the arts and sciences had improved morals. He later described the moment as a sudden illumination. His Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, arguing that they had in fact corrupted virtue, won the prize in 1750 and, published the following year, made him famous.

His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) developed the argument into a conjectural history of humanity. In the state of nature, he suggested, people were solitary, healthy and largely content, moved by self-preservation and by pity for others' suffering, not the warlike beings described by Thomas Hobbes. As they settled together, they began to compare themselves with one another and to crave esteem, and the invention of private property, metallurgy and agriculture created dependence and lasting inequality. Laws and governments, he argued, were a confidence trick by which the rich secured their advantages. The work set him at odds with the optimism of many philosophes about progress, and his break with Diderot, Voltaire and their circle followed in the later 1750s. The same years saw his popular opera Le Devin du village (1752) and a defence of Italian over French music.

Rousseau's most productive years were spent outside Paris, first at the Hermitage, a cottage lent by Madame d'Épinay, then at Montmorency. Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), an epistolary novel of love and virtue, became one of the best-selling books of the century, prized for its intense feeling and descriptions of nature.

The Social Contract (1762) opens with the claim that man is born free yet is everywhere in chains, and asks how political authority can be legitimate. Rousseau's answer is a contract in which each person gives himself wholly to the community, so that, obeying laws he has helped make, he obeys only himself and remains free. Sovereignty belongs to the people as a body, expressed through the general will, which aims at the common good and is distinct from the sum of private interests. Laws must be made by the citizens directly, not by representatives, which he thought practical only in small states like Geneva or the ancient republics. Those who refuse to obey the general will may be "forced to be free", one of the phrases that has led critics to see in him a forerunner of totalitarianism, while admirers read him as a theorist of radical democracy.

Emile, or On Education (1762), part novel and part treatise, describes the upbringing of a boy shielded from society's corruptions and allowed to learn by experience at his own pace. It transformed thinking about childhood, although its account of the education of Sophie, Emile's future wife, prepared for a subordinate domestic role, was sharply criticised by Mary Wollstonecraft. A section of Emile, the Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, set out a natural religion without revelation.

Both books were condemned in Paris and in Geneva, and a warrant was issued for Rousseau's arrest. He fled to Môtiers, in the Prussian-ruled principality of Neuchâtel, and then briefly to the island of Saint-Pierre in Lake Biel. In January 1766 David Hume brought him to England, where he stayed in Staffordshire. Increasingly suspicious and unstable, Rousseau became convinced that Hume was part of a conspiracy against him, and their quarrel became public. He returned to France in 1767 and lived his final years quietly in Paris, copying music for a living and studying botany. He completed his Confessions, a frank and self-justifying autobiography, the Dialogues and the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and wrote constitutional proposals for Corsica and Poland. He died at Ermenonville, north of Paris, on 2 July 1778.

Rousseau's posthumously published Confessions became a model for modern autobiography, and his cult of feeling, nature and sincerity fed the Romantic movement. During the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins revered him, and in 1794 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris. Immanuel Kant was deeply influenced by his ideas of freedom and moral autonomy, and Karl Marx and later critics of inequality drew on the Second Discourse.

He belongs to the Enlightenment and was also one of its sharpest critics, questioning whether reason, science and commerce made people happier or better. His ideas of popular sovereignty and the general will remain at the centre of arguments about what democracy requires.