Blackwell Reference Online

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a musician, composer, playwright, novelist, and autobiographer, but is best known today for his social and political writings, most notably The Social Contract with its concept of the “general will” and its ringing first line: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.’ He was and remains a controversial figure. Ridiculed by Voltaire as a nostalgic primitivist, denounced by De Maistre as an impious revolutionary, yet venerated by Kant, Rousseau was a major influence on Hegel and Marx, has been enduringly significant as a political and constitutional theorist, and was accounted by Durkheim an important forerunner of (his own) sociology. The son of a Genevan clockmaker, exiled when Rousseau was 10, and a higher-born minister's daughter who died at his birth, Jean-Jacques left home, and a miserable apprenticeship under the guardianship of his maternal uncle, at 16. He moved first to Italy and Savoy, then to Paris where, among and against the philosophes , he made his name. Many have noted the impact of Rousseau's family circumstances on his thought and personality, evident in his nostalgia for a maternally figured “nature” and in his aversion to class and rank distinction. This aversion was expressed not only in his writings but also in his later adoption of peasant dress, as well as in his lifelong companionship with Thérèse Levasseur, a working-class ... log in or subscribe to read full text