Born: 6/28/1712 Died: 7/2/1778
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss-born French philosopher, novelist, autobiographer, and composer. He has had an immense influence on modern culture, both directly and through his influences on other philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. A philosopher of the Enlightenment, his writings helped catalyze the French Revolution, while his operas inspired the King of France to offer him a court position. Rousseau wrote one of the great works of political philosophy, The Social Contract, as well as one of the first novels, Julie, or the New Heloise. Freud thought Rousseau’s autobiography, The Confessions, prefigured psychoanalysis. In his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences he concluded that culture can enchain us and that progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty. His Discourse on Inequality made the idea of the noble savage and the possibility of social evolution (or devolution) central ideas in modernity. Finally, his Emile, is often thought second only to Plato’s Republic in the history of the philosophy of education. Rousseau thought humans are naturally good, yet corrupted by their social environments and the choices they make in them.
