Rousseau biography

 ROUSSEAU

Biography 

 

 INTRODUCTION

About the great thinker:

Jean Jacques Rousseau, a native of Geneva with French Protestant ancestors, led an adventurous but unrestrained and unhappy life spent mostly in France. He was a man with abnormally intense feelings and emotions, a vivid imagination and warm sympathies. Whatever be the philosophy he propounded, a prominent feature about the man was the honesty with which in his Confession he acknowledged his weaknesses and shortcomings and even exaggerates them. Almost all philosophers since Bacon had prided themselves upon the triumph of reason over emotions, and had looked to the unhampered progress of the arts and sciences ' for the liberation and advancement of man. Rousseau , on the contrary , regarded the evils of the times as the fruits of an artificial civilization , and in his early essays he praised the life of primitive man , as he romantically imagined it to have been , when all were equal , and before the institution of private property . He taught the 18th century to love the beauties of natural scenery, and to find in them a source of inward joy. In so doing he was an important source of inspiration to the Romantic poets of the 19th century in England and Germany. He wrote many books in which he effectively contrasted the inner solace that one can have without getting involved in dogma or doctrinal set up. In The Social Contract, Rousseau is constructive while establishing the principles on which a democratic government can be based. Similarly, in Emile (1762), whom many regard as the greatest work of Rousseau, he outlines a course for a single pupil of the better classes under the guidance of a tutor. During his last years he suffered from persecution complexes and must have been, at times, partially insane

 

 

SUMMARY

 

 Jean Jacques Rousseau was the intellectual father of the French Revolution, as well as the last and perhaps greatest of the modern contract theorists. He was in some sense aware of his own importance, for he claimed to have resolved what he believed to be the most fundamental issue of modern political life. In his major political work, the social contract, he frames the issue as follows: Man is born free, and yet we see him everywhere in chains. Those who believe themselves masters of others cease not to be even greater slaves than the people they govern. Rousseau is popularly thought to be the champion of an attitude that saw virtue in natural things and ' the noble savage as the ideal human being, but his mature thought rejected much of this view. In his book- “the Social Contract " he investigates the principles of freedom , examining ' men as they are ' and ' laws as they can be ' , Rousseau was born in Geneva to an artisan family . His mother died when he was a few days old and his father's care of him was somewhat erratic. As a young man, he was apprenticed in several trades, and in 1728 he set out for a period of travel during which he engaged in an extensive process of self education. In 1742 Rousseau set out for Paris where he met the leading cultural, scientific, and philosophical luminaries of enlightenment France, Rousseau wrote several novels and numerous essays, and he produces three autobiographical works the most important of which is the confessions. In 1761, the same year that saw the publication of the social contract. Rousseau published Emile, perhaps the most famous work on education ever written. In the social contract, Rousseau suggests that society is like a family and ruler is like a father of a family. Rousseau says that might is not right we obey the laws because of legitimacy. 

The social contract transformed the natural liberty into civil liberty .Rousseau also makes distinction between ' General Will ' and ' Will of All ‘. According to Rousseau ' will of all ' is totally individual self interested whereas ' general will ' produces the good of all. In his social contract Rousseau remarks , ' there is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will the latter considers only the common interest while the former takes private interest into account , and is no more than a sum of particular wills ' . 136 Rousseau got very much popularity serving the French Revolution in 1791. His name was on many lips in France and his idea of ‘General Will ‘was common parlance. In his famous work on education ' Emile ' Rousseau considers the development of a child growing up in the country and tries to analyze the principles underlying a natural process of maturing from infancy to adulthood. Rousseau's writings have an intense and personal quill that compellingly transmits his vision a society in which every person will be happy and free. His views have been widely influential because they focus on issues of freedom and human relationships.