1712-1778
Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent much of his life in and around Paris acting as the gadfly of the philosophes, leaders of the French Enlightenment. He championed equality and popular sovereignty on the eve of the French Revolution, encouraged the birth of nationalism, historicism, and romanticism, and provided prescient critiques of the "bourgeois," the quintessential figure of the democratic age he helped launch.
In On the Social Contract (1762), Rousseau denied the existence of any natural hierarchy or divine right that could legitimize political inequality, arguing that natural inequalities between human beings were politically irrelevant. The social contract substituted "a moral and legitimate equality for whatever inequality nature may have placed between men, and … while they may be unequal in force or genius, they all become equal by convention and right" (On the Social Contract, I.ix). While he believed every legitimate government was republican, he understood by this only that the executive power should be beholden to the sovereign people (II. vi). His preferred regime was an aristocratic government, or executive, responsible to the people (III.vi). Ironically, while he was one of the first political thinkers to champion popular sovereignty, he maintained that a democratic government was suited only to a people of gods (Iii.iv).
Central to his political thought was the general will: the will of the political community as a whole, manifest in laws to which all citizens had consented and by which all were bound (Il.iv). Rousseau held that "what generalizes the will is not so much the number of votes, as it is the common interest which unites them" (Il.iv), and he wrote extensively, in Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772) and the Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758), on the need to encourage community spirit through civic education and the promotion of virtue. His emphasis on the particular character of political communities inspired the rise of nationalism, influencing the German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).
The argument of The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754) helped give birth to historicism: the idea that human ideas and actions are better explained by history rather than by nature or divine will. History, not nature, nor God, was responsible for the great paradox that: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" (On the Social Contract, I.i). Free, contented, but asocial by nature, humans could hope only to legitimate rather than remove the chains brought by political life.
Rousseau’s autobiographical work, especially The Confessions (1782), his praise of nature, particularly in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), and his argument in the Discourse on the Sciences ands Arts (1751) that the popularization of science diverted people from the practice of moral duties, all contributed to the romantic movement.
Rousseau also offered one of the first critiques of the "bourgeois." Alienated from nature, without being committed to political life, the bourgeois were torn between private interests and public duties. Materialistic and inau-thentic, they were enslaved by the opinions of others and strangers to themselves.
