Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The essay that made Rousseau famous. Asked by the Academy of Dijon whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has helped to purify morals, the 'Citizen of Geneva' answered no: learning, letters and the arts, born of our vices, have spread garlands of flowers over our chains, softened our courage, and taught us to seem virtuous instead of being so.”

“Rousseau's Second Discourse. Stripping away everything society has added to human nature, he imagines man in the state of nature — solitary, robust, free, moved only by self-love and pity — and then tells the long story of how he lost that state: through the family, the hut, the village dance, iron and corn, and at last the man who first fenced a field and said 'This is mine.' Property, law and government, he concludes, have fixed for ever an inequality that nature never made.”

“'Letters of two lovers living in a little town at the foot of the Alps.' Julie d'Étange, a baron's daughter, and her tutor, a young commoner later called Saint-Preux, fall in love beside Lake Geneva; her father forbids the match and gives her to the wise, cold M. de Wolmar. Years later, Wolmar invites the former lover to live with them at Clarens — and a novel of passion becomes a novel of virtue, friendship and faith, until Julie's death reveals what her heart had never ceased to feel.”

“Rousseau imagines himself the tutor of an ordinary boy, Emile, and follows him from birth to marriage, to show how a man might be raised according to nature rather than against it: free of swaddling and of books in childhood, taught by things rather than words, given a trade, led to religion through the conscience in the 'Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar' — and at last given a companion, Sophie.”

“'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' Rousseau asks what could make political authority legitimate, and answers: a pact by which each gives himself wholly to the community and so obeys only himself. From this social contract he derives the sovereignty of the people and the general will, the nature of law, the forms of government, the danger of representatives, and the civil religion that binds citizens to their republic.”

“'I want to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself.' Rousseau tells his life from his birth in Geneva in 1712 to his expulsion from the Island of Saint-Pierre in 1765: the runaway apprentice, the years with Madame de Warens at Les Charmettes, Venice and Paris, Thérèse and the children he abandoned, the sudden fame of the Discourses, 'Julie' and 'Emile,' the persecutions — hiding nothing, he says, of his faults.”

“Rousseau's last book, written in the two years before his death: ten 'walks,' in which the old man, convinced that the world has conspired against him, gives up the struggle and talks with his own soul — of an accident on the road to Ménilmontant, of lying, of the Island of Saint-Pierre where he drifted in a boat and was 'sufficient to himself like God,' of plants, of charity, of children, and, in an unfinished last page, of Madame de Warens fifty years before.”