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ROUSSEAU (1712–78), French author. He was the son of a French refugee family at Geneva, and, though brought up a Calvinist, became a Catholic in 1728 through the influence of Mme de Warens, his benefactress and later his mistress, herself a convert from Protestant Pietism. She had a large share in his religious formation, combining Deistic beliefs, which excluded doctrines such as Hell and Original Sin, with a kind of Quietist sentimentalism. During the years spent with her (1731–40), Rousseau completed his sketchy education by omnivorous reading, including the works of R. Descartes, G. W. Leibniz, J. Locke, B. Pascal, and others.
In 1741 he went to Paris, where he met Thérèse Levasseur, a servant girl, by whom he had five children whom he placed in a foundlings’ hospital. Through D. Diderot he was introduced to the circle of the Encyclopaedists, for whom he wrote several contributions, all but one of them on musical subjects. In 1750 he published his Discours sur les sciences et les arts, a prize essay for Dijon Academy, in which he defended the thesis that technical progress and material goods corrupt human morals. In 1754 he returned to Geneva and once more became a Calvinist, and
in the same year wrote his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Inspired by H. Grotius, S. Pufendorf, and others, he treated the subject regardless of historical reality, and, on the gratuitous assumption that the primitive man was a free and happy being living in acc. with his instincts, without virtue or vice, alleged that human inequalities arose from the undue development of his social and proprietary instincts.
In 1756 Rousseau settled near Montmorency, where he wrote the works which made him world-famous. In Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a passionate love story, he condemned a society which for the sake of convention divorced love from marriage, and put forward a defence of a natural religion based on an undogmatic personal interpretation of the Gospels which, he maintained, is necessary for morality. In Émile, ou de l’Éducation (1762) he developed a Utopian programme of an education far from the corrupting influence of society and in accordance with nature.
In the famous chapter entitled ‘La Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard’ he summed up his religious ideas. He advocated a Deism which, although similar to that of the Philosophes in affirming belief in the existence of God, the soul, and a future life, found its ultimate justification in the individual’s sense of a personal relationship with God through the conscience, of which He is the source and inspiration. Du contrat social (1762) set out his theory of the just state, resting on the general will of the people, the expression of which are the laws. This too, contained a chapter on religion, ‘De la religion civile’, in which ‘civic religion’ was distinguished from natural religion. The articles of this civic religion, which are fixed and enforced by the state, bear on the same subjects as natural religion, forbid all dogmatic intolerance, and admit only those religions which do not claim to possess the absolute truth. Émile, put on the Index in 1762, and Du contrat social were condemned in France and at Geneva, and Rousseau fled first to Neuchâtel, then to an island in the Canton of Berne, and, in 1766–7, he was the guest of D. Hume in England. But, suffering from persecution mania, he went back to France, where he married Thérèse Levasseur ‘before nature’ in 1768, and in 1772 completed his Confessions, with their curious mixture of vanity and self-accusation.
After his death Rousseau became one of the most powerful influences in Europe. In France his ideas were taken up by the Revolution, in Germany by the ‘Storm and Stress’ movement. His religious impact was the deeper as, unlike Voltaire, he offered man a substitute for revealed religion which was not only doctrinally simple and unelaborate in its moral prescriptions, but also addressed to his emotional as well as his intellectual needs. It has sometimes been asserted that he served Christianity by propagating its fundamental truths among his unbelieving contemporaries. A more just estimate might point out that, by eliminating the idea of original sin and replacing the need for grace by belief in the complete adequacy of reason, conscience, and free-will, he removed the foundations of sound religion and became a forerunner of humanistic liberalism.
Many edns. of his collected works, incl. that of V. D. MussetPathay (24 vols., Paris, 1823–6). Convenient edn. by B. Gagnebin, M. Raymond, and others (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 5 vols., 1959–95), but this does not incl. correspondence. Religious Writings, ed. R. Grimsley (Oxford, 1970). Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh (vols. 1–14, Geneva, 1965–71; 15–24, Thorpe Mandeville, Banbury, 1972–5; 25–53, Oxford, 1976–97). Useful edns. of his Political Writings, with introd. and notes in Eng., by C. E. Vaughan (2 vols., Cambridge, 1915). Eng. trs. incl. that of The Social Contract by M. Cranston (Penguin Classics, 1968), and also, with The Discourses, by G. D. H. Cole (Everyman’s Library, 660 [1913]); of Émile by B. Foxley (ibid. [1911]); of his Confessions by A. Scholar, with introd. by P. Coleman (Oxford World’s Classics [2000]). Studies incl. those of J. Morley (2 vols., London, 1873), J. H. Broome (ibid., 1963) and T. O’Hagan (Arguments of the Philosophers, 1999); also M. Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (1983); id., The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–1762 (1991); id., The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (1997). A. Schinz, La Pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2 vols., Northampton, Mass., 1929). R. Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (1950). S. Baud-Bovy and others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Université Ouvrière et Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Genève, Neuchâtel, 1962). Études sur le Contrat social de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Actes des journées d’étude organisées à Dijon pour la commémoration du 200e anniversaire du Contrat social (Publications de l’Université de Dijon, 30; 1964). R. A. Leigh (ed.), Rousseau after Two Hundred Years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium (Cambridge, 1982). P. Riley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (2001). P. M. Masson, La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau (3 vols., 1916); R. Derathé, Le Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau (1948); J. F. Thomas, Le Pélagianisme de J.-J. Rousseau (1956); R. Grimsley, Rousseau and the Religious Quest (Oxford, 1968); P. Lefebvre, Les pouvoirs de la parole: L’Église et Rousseau (1762–1848) (1992). J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (1957; 2nd edn., 1971); R. Grimsley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Study in Selfawareness (Cardiff, 1961). H. Roddier, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle (Études de Littérature étrangère et comparée [1950]). J.-A. E. McEachern, Bibliography of the Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau to 1800 (Oxford, 1989 ff.). Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 1905 ff.).
(3) CALL for REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was a romantic, neurotic, immoral worshipper of nature. “What is peculiar to Jean Jacques, his special privilege, is his resignation to himself. . . . He acquiesces in being yes and no at the same time; and that he can do just as far as he acquiesces in falling from the state of reason and letting the disconnected pieces of his soul vegetate as they are. Such is the sincerity of Jean Jacques and his friends. It consists in never meddling with what you find in yourself at each moment of your life for fear of perverting your being. ... He delights at the same time in the good he loves but does not, and the evil he does and hates not.” 9
‘Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), p. 98.
Rousseau’s political maxims included:
(1) Nature—an Eden without original sin; whence
(2) absolute liberty, and
(3) absolute equality are deduced.
(4) This Utopia, once lost through oppressors, is to be regained by
(5) the social contract, producing
(6) the general will of the common self born of sacrifice of individual selves on the altar of the state.
(7) Law is the expression of this general will, ascertained by [p. 347]
(8) universal suffrage of the people, enlightened perhaps by
(9) a philosophic legislative superman.
Rousseau’s “Contrat Social” (1762) closely influenced the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, and more than anyone else he is the author of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—his Jacobin disciples would read his works in chorus. Rousseau retained Hobbes’s social contract, but to the latter’s pessimism opposed an optimistic deification of natural man. The contract in Hobbes was but a device of the powerful to enslave the poor; Rousseau reinterpreted it as an agreement made by men as individuals with themselves as a collective body: “Man was born free, but is now everywhere in chains.” In the new regime all will give up everything; therefore all will be equal and free; indeed, if need be, men must be forced to be free. Government will then be the expression of the “general will”: infallible, omnipotent, indivisible, and eternal. This is to be determined by direct suffrage of the sovereign people, for the common man, with universal behaviorist education, will be wise and just. Governors are merely the “depositaries of executive power: they are not masters of the people, but its officers.” It might happen, however, that the people might constitute some philosopher sole depositary to interpret the general will—a reminiscence of Platonism and a seed of Totalitarianism. Rousseau’s vague and inconsistent theories, taken in his primary and obvious sense, are the French Revolution in germ. Yet that Revolution would reveal that they could bear the interpretation of a dictatorship, either of Robespierre or of Bonaparte. Finally, if one attends to sly hints at the irresponsibility of all government, the need of perpetual revolution, the sharing of wives and property, Rousseau could be deemed a father of Anarchism or Socialism. In any event many a disturbing idea came out of his Pandora’s box.
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