title: Dead Sea

text: With 34.2% salinity (in 2011), it is one of the world's saltiest bodies of water, though Lake Vanda in Antarctica (35%), Lake Assal in Djibouti (34.8%), Lagoon Garabogazköl in the Caspian Sea (up to 35%) and some hypersaline ponds and lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica (such as Don Juan Pond (44%)) have reported higher salinities.


title: Dead Sea

text: In the 19th century and the early 20th century, the surface layers of the Dead Sea were less salty than today, which resulted in an average density in the range of 1.15-1.17 g/cm instead of the present value of around 1.25 g/cm. A sample tested by Bernays in the 19th century had a salinity of 19%. By the year 1926, the salinity had increased (although it was also suspected that the salinity varies seasonally and depends on the distance from the mouth of the Jordan).


title: Dead Sea

text: Until the winter of 1978–79, when a major mixing event took place, the Dead Sea was composed of two stratified layers of water that differed in temperature, density, age, and salinity. The topmost or so of the Dead Sea had an average salinity of about 30%, and a temperature that swung between and . Underneath a zone of transition, the lowest level of the Dead Sea had waters of a consistent temperature, salinity of over 34%, and complete saturation of sodium chloride (NaCl). Since the water near the bottom is saturated with NaCl, that salt precipitates out of solution onto the sea floor.


title: Dead Sea

text: Beginning in the 1960s, water inflow to the Dead Sea from the Jordan River was reduced as a result of large-scale irrigation and generally low rainfall. By 1975, the upper water layer was saltier than the lower layer. Nevertheless, the upper layer remained suspended above the lower layer because its waters were warmer and thus less dense. When the upper layer cooled so its density was greater than the lower layer, the waters mixed (1978–79). For the first time in centuries, the lake was a homogeneous body of water. Since then, stratification has begun to redevelop.


title: Dead Sea

text: The mineral content of the Dead Sea is very different from that of ocean water. The exact composition of the Dead Sea water varies mainly with season, depth and temperature. In the early 1980s, the concentration of ionic species (in g/kg) of Dead Sea surface water was Cl (181.4), Br (4.2), SO (0.4), HCO (0.2), Ca (14.1), Na (32.5), K (6.2) and Mg (35.2). The total salinity was 276 g/kg. These results show that the composition of the salt, as anhydrous chlorides on a weight percentage basis, was calcium chloride (CaCl) 14.4%, potassium chloride (KCl) 4.4%, magnesium chloride (MgCl) 50.8% and sodium chloride (NaCl) 30.4%. In comparison, the salt in the water of most oceans and seas is approximately 85% sodium chloride. The concentration of sulfate ions (SO) is very low, and the concentration of bromide ions (Br) is the highest of all waters on Earth.


title: Dead Sea

text: The salt concentration of the Dead Sea fluctuates around 31.5%. This is unusually high and results in a nominal density of 1.24 kg/L. Anyone can easily float in the Dead Sea because of natural buoyancy. In this respect the Dead Sea is similar to the Great Salt Lake in Utah in the United States.


title: Dead Sea

text: An unusual feature of the Dead Sea is its discharge of asphalt. From deep seeps, the Dead Sea constantly spits up small pebbles and blocks of the black substance. Asphalt-coated figurines and bitumen-coated Neolithic skulls from archaeological sites have been found. Egyptian mummification processes used asphalt imported from the Dead Sea region.


title: Dead Sea

text: The Dead Sea area has become a location for health research and potential treatment for several reasons. The mineral content of the water, the low content of pollens and other allergens in the atmosphere, the reduced ultraviolet component of solar radiation, and the higher atmospheric pressure at this great depth each may have specific health effects. For example, persons experiencing reduced respiratory function from diseases such as cystic fibrosis seem to benefit from the increased atmospheric pressure.


title: Dead Sea

text: The region's climate and low elevation have made it a popular center for assessment of putative therapies:


title: Dead Sea

text: Climatotherapy at the Dead Sea may be a therapy for psoriasis by sunbathing for long periods in the area due to its position below sea level and subsequent result that UV rays are partially blocked by the increased thickness of the atmosphere over the Dead Sea.


title: Dead Sea

text: Rhinosinusitis patients receiving Dead Sea saline nasal irrigation exhibited improved symptom relief compared to standard hypertonic saline spray in one study.


title: Dead Sea

text: Dead Sea mud pack therapy has been suggested to temporarily relieve pain in patients with osteoarthritis of the knees. According to researchers of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, treatment with mineral-rich mud compresses can be used to augment conventional medical therapy.


title: Dead Sea

text: The sea is called "dead" because its high salinity prevents macroscopic aquatic organisms, such as fish and aquatic plants, from living in it, though minuscule quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi are present.


title: Dead Sea

text: In times of flood, the salt content of the Dead Sea can drop from its usual 35% to 30% or lower. The Dead Sea temporarily comes to life in the wake of rainy winters. In 1980, after one such rainy winter, the normally dark blue Dead Sea turned red. Researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem found the Dead Sea to be teeming with an alga called "Dunaliella". "Dunaliella" in turn nourished carotenoid-containing (red-pigmented) halobacteria, whose presence caused the color change. Since 1980, the Dead Sea basin has been dry and the algae and the bacteria have not returned in measurable numbers.


title: Dead Sea

text: In 2011 a group of scientists from Be'er Sheva, Israel and Germany discovered fissures in the floor of the Dead Sea by scuba diving and observing the surface. These fissures allow fresh and brackish water to enter the Dead Sea. They sampled biofilms surrounding the fissures and discovered numerous species of bacteria and archaea.


title: Dead Sea

text: Many animal species live in the mountains surrounding the Dead Sea. Hikers can see ibex, hares, hyraxes, jackals, foxes, and even leopards. Hundreds of bird species inhabit the zone as well. Both Jordan and Israel have established nature reserves around the Dead Sea.


title: Dead Sea

text: The delta of the Jordan River was formerly a jungle of papyrus and palm trees. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus described Jericho as "the most fertile spot in Judea". In Roman and Byzantine times, sugarcane, henna, and sycamore fig all made the lower Jordan valley wealthy. One of the most valuable products produced by Jericho was the sap of the balsam tree, which could be made into perfume. By the 19th century, Jericho's fertility had disappeared.


title: Dead Sea

text: There are several small communities near the Dead Sea. These include Ein Gedi, Neve Zohar and the Israeli settlements in the Megilot Regional Council: Kalya, Mitzpe Shalem and Avnat. There is a nature preserve at Ein Gedi, and several Dead Sea hotels are located on the southwest end at Ein Bokek near Neve Zohar. Highway 90 runs north–south on the Israeli side for a total distance of from Metula on the Lebanese border in the north to its southern terminus at the Egyptian border near the Red Sea port of Eilat.


title: Dead Sea

text: Potash City is a small community on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, and others including Suweima. Highway 65 runs north–south on the Jordanian side from near Jordan's northern tip down past the Dead Sea to the port of Aqaba.


title: Dead Sea

text: Dwelling in caves near the Dead Sea is recorded in the Hebrew Bible as having taken place before the Israelites came to Canaan, and extensively at the time of King David.


title: Dead Sea

text: Just northwest of the Dead Sea is Jericho. Somewhere, perhaps on the southeastern shore, would be the cities mentioned in the Book of Genesis which were said to have been destroyed in the time of Abraham: Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18) and the three other "Cities of the Plain", Admah, Zeboim and Zoar (Deuteronomy 29:23). Zoar escaped destruction when Abraham's nephew Lot escaped to Zoar from Sodom (Genesis 19:21–22). Before the destruction, the Dead Sea was a valley full of natural tar pits, which was called the vale of Siddim. King David was said to have hidden from Saul at Ein Gedi nearby.


title: Dead Sea

text: In Ezekiel 47:8–9 there is a specific prophecy that the sea will "be healed and made fresh", becoming a normal lake capable of supporting marine life. A similar prophecy is stated in Zechariah 14:8, which says that "living waters will go out from Jerusalem, half of them to the eastern sea [likely the Dead Sea] and half to the western sea [the Mediterranean]."


title: Dead Sea

text: Aristotle wrote about the remarkable waters. The Nabateans and others discovered the value of the globs of natural asphalt that constantly floated to the surface where they could be harvested with nets. The Egyptians were steady customers, as they used asphalt in the embalming process that created mummies. The Ancient Romans knew the Dead Sea as ""Palus Asphaltites"" (Asphalt Lake).


title: Dead Sea

text: The Dead Sea was an important trade route with ships carrying salt, asphalt and agricultural produce. Multiple anchorages existed on both sides of the sea, including in Ein Gedi, Khirbet Mazin (where the ruins of a Hasmonean-era dry dock are located), Numeira and near Masada.


title: Dead Sea

text: King Herod the Great built or rebuilt several fortresses and palaces on the western bank of the Dead Sea. The most famous was Masada, where in 70 CE a small group of Jewish zealots fled after the fall of the destruction of the Second Temple. The zealots survived until 73 CE, when a siege by the X Legion ended in the deaths by suicide of its 960 inhabitants. Another historically important fortress was Machaerus (מכוור), on the eastern bank, where, according to Josephus, John the Baptist was imprisoned by Herod Antipas and died.


title: Dead Sea

text: Also in Roman times, some Essenes settled on the Dead Sea's western shore; Pliny the Elder identifies their location with the words, "on the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the coast ... [above] the town of Engeda" ("Natural History", Bk 5.73); and it is therefore a hugely popular but contested hypothesis today, that same Essenes are identical with the settlers at Qumran and that "the Dead Sea Scrolls" discovered during the 20th century in the nearby caves had been their own library.


title: Dead Sea

text: Josephus identified the Dead Sea in geographic proximity to the ancient Biblical city of Sodom. However, he referred to the lake by its Greek name, Asphaltites.


title: Dead Sea

text: Various sects of Jews settled in caves overlooking the Dead Sea. The best known of these are the Essenes of Qumran, who left an extensive library known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The town of Ein Gedi, mentioned many times in the Mishna, produced persimmon for the temple's fragrance and for export, using a secret recipe. "Sodomite salt" was an essential mineral for the temple's holy incense, but was said to be dangerous for home use and could cause blindness. The Roman camps surrounding Masada were built by Jewish slaves receiving water from the towns around the lake. These towns had drinking water from the Ein Feshcha springs and other sweetwater springs in the vicinity.


title: Dead Sea

text: Intimately connected with the Judean wilderness to its northwest and west, the Dead Sea was a place of escape and refuge. The remoteness of the region attracted Greek Orthodox monks since the Byzantine era. Their monasteries, such as Saint George in Wadi Kelt and Mar Saba in the Judaean Desert, are places of pilgrimage.


title: Dead Sea

text: In the 19th century the River Jordan and the Dead Sea were explored by boat primarily by Christopher Costigan in 1835, Thomas Howard Molyneux in 1847, William Francis Lynch in 1848, and John MacGregor in 1869. The full text of W. F. Lynch's 1949 book "" is available online. Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles travelled along the shores of the Dead Sea already in 1817–18, but didn't navigate on its waters.


title: Dead Sea

text: Explorers and scientists arrived in the area to analyze the minerals and research the unique climate.


title: Dead Sea

text: After the find of the "Moabite Stone" in 1868 on the plateau east of the Dead Sea, Moses Wilhelm Shapira and his partner Salim al-Khouri forged and sold a whole range of presumed "Moabite" antiquities, and in 1883 Shapira presented what is now known as the "Shapira Strips", a supposedly ancient scroll written on leather strips which he claimed had been found near the Dead Sea. The strips were declared to be forgeries and Shapira took his own life in disgrace.


title: Dead Sea

text: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, hundreds of religious documents dated between 150 BCE and 70 CE were found in caves near the ancient settlement of Qumran, about inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea (presently in the West Bank). They became known and famous as the Dead Sea Scrolls.


title: Dead Sea

text: The world's lowest roads, Highway 90, run along the Israeli and West Bank shores of the Dead Sea, along with Highway 65 on the Jordanian side, at below sea level.


title: Dead Sea

text: The first major Israeli hotels were built in nearby Arad, and since the 1960s at the Ein Bokek resort complex.


title: Dead Sea

text: Israel has 15 hotels along the Dead Sea shore, generating total revenues of $291 million in 2012. Most Israeli hotels and resorts on the Dead Sea are on a stretch of the southern shore.


title: Dead Sea

text: On the Jordanian side, nine international franchises have opened seaside resort hotels near the King Hussein Bin Talal Convention Center, along with resort apartments, on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. The 9 hotels have boosted the Jordanian side's capacity to 2,800 rooms.


title: Dead Sea

text: On November 22, 2015, the Dead Sea panorama road was included along with 40 archaeological locations in Jordan, to become live on Google Street View.


title: Dead Sea

text: The portion of Dead Sea coast which Palestinians could possibly eventually manage is about long. The World Bank estimates that such Dead Sea tourism industry could generate $290 million of revenues per year and 2,900 jobs. However, Palestinians have been unable to obtain construction permits for tourism-related investments on the Dead Sea. According to the World Bank, officials in the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities state that the only way to apply for such permits is through the Joint Committees established under the Oslo Agreement, but the relevant committee has not met with any degree of regularity since 2000.


title: Dead Sea

text: In the early part of the 20th century, the Dead Sea began to attract interest from chemists who deduced the sea was a natural deposit of potash (potassium chloride) and bromine. A concession was granted by the British Mandatory government to the newly formed Palestine Potash Company in 1929. Its founder, Siberian Jewish engineer and pioneer of Lake Baikal exploitation, Moses Novomeysky, had worked for the charter for over ten years having first visited the area in 1911. The first plant, on the north shore of the Dead Sea at Kalya, commenced production in 1931 and produced potash by solar evaporation of the brine. Employing Arabs and Jews, it was an island of peace in turbulent times. The company quickly grew into the largest industrial site in the Middle East, and in 1934 built a second plant on the southwest shore, in the Mount Sodom area, south of the 'Lashon' region of the Dead Sea. Palestine Potash Company supplied half of Britain's potash during World War II. Both plants were destroyed by the Jordanians in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.


title: Dead Sea

text: The Dead Sea Works was founded in 1952 as a state-owned enterprise based on the remnants of the Palestine Potash Company. In 1995, the company was privatized and it is now owned by Israel Chemicals. From the Dead Sea brine, Israel produces (2001) 1.77 million tons potash, 206,000 tons elemental bromine, 44,900 tons caustic soda, 25,000 tons magnesium metal, and sodium chloride. Israeli companies generate around US$3 billion annually from the sale of Dead Sea minerals (primarily potash and bromine), and from other products that are derived from Dead Sea Minerals.


title: Dead Sea

text: On the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, Arab Potash (APC), formed in 1956, produces 2.0 million tons of potash annually, as well as sodium chloride and bromine. The plant is located at Safi, South Aghwar Department, in the Karak Governorate.


title: Dead Sea

text: Jordanian Dead Sea mineral industries generate about $1.2 billion in sales (equivalent to 4 percent of Jordan's GDP).


title: Dead Sea

text: The Palestinian Dead Sea Coast is about long. The Palestinian economy is unable to benefit from Dead Sea chemicals due to restricted access, permit issues and the uncertainties of the investment climate. The World Bank estimates that a Palestinian Dead Sea chemicals industry could generate $918M incremental value added per year, "almost equivalent to the contribution of the entire manufacturing sector of Palestinian territories today".


title: Dead Sea

text: Both companies, Dead Sea Works Ltd. and Arab Potash, use extensive salt evaporation pans that have essentially diked the entire southern end of the Dead Sea for the purpose of producing carnallite, potassium magnesium chloride, which is then processed further to produce potassium chloride. The ponds are separated by a central dike that runs roughly north–south along the international border. The power plant on the Israeli side allows production of magnesium metal (by a subsidiary, Dead Sea Magnesium Ltd.).


title: Dead Sea

text: Due to the popularity of the sea's therapeutic and healing properties, several companies have also shown interest in the manufacturing and supplying of Dead Sea salts as raw materials for body and skin care products.


title: Dead Sea

text: Since 1930, when its surface was and its level was below sea level, the Dead Sea has been monitored continuously. The Dead Sea has been rapidly shrinking since the 1960s because of diversion of incoming water from the Jordan River to the north as part of the National Water Carrier scheme, completed in 1964. The southern end is fed by a canal maintained by the Dead Sea Works, a company that converts the sea's raw materials. From a water surface of below sea level in 1970 it fell to below sea level in 2006, reaching a drop rate of per year. As the water level decreases, the characteristics of the Sea and surrounding region may substantially change.


title: Dead Sea

text: The Dead Sea level drop has been followed by a groundwater level drop, causing brines that used to occupy underground layers near the shoreline to be flushed out by freshwater. This is believed to be the cause of the recent appearance of large sinkholes along the western shore—incoming freshwater dissolves salt layers, rapidly creating subsurface cavities that subsequently collapse to form these sinkholes. Ein Gedi, on the western coast, has been subject to a large number of sinkholes appearing in the area, attributed to the decline in the water level of the Dead Sea.


title: Dead Sea

text: , the surface of the Sea has shrunk by about 33 percent since the 1960s, which is partly attributed to the much-reduced flow of the Jordan River since the construction of the National Water Carrier project, and the amount of water from the rains reaching the Dead Sea has diminished even further since flash floods started pouring into the sinkholes. The EcoPeace Middle East, a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental group, has estimated that the annual flow into the Dead Sea from the Jordan is less than of water, compared with former flows of between and .


title: Dead Sea

text: In May 2009 at the World Economic Forum, Jordan introduced plans for a "Jordan National Red Sea Development Project" (JRSP). This is a plan to convey seawater from the Red Sea near Aqaba to the Dead Sea. Water would be desalinated along the route to provide fresh water to Jordan, with the brine discharge sent to the Dead Sea for replenishment. Israel has expressed its support and will likely benefit from some of the water delivery to its Negev region.


title: Dead Sea

text: At a regional conference in July 2009, officials expressed concern about the declining water levels. Some suggested industrial activities around the Dead Sea might need to be reduced. Others advised environmental measures to restore conditions such as increasing the volume of flow from the Jordan River to replenish the Dead Sea. Currently, only sewage and effluent from fish ponds run in the river's channel. Experts also stressed the need for strict conservation efforts. They said agriculture should not be expanded, sustainable support capabilities should be incorporated into the area and pollution sources should be reduced.


title: Dead Sea

text: In October 2009, the Jordanians accelerated plans to extract around of water per year from the Red Sea, desalinate it for use as fresh water and send the waste water to the Dead Sea by tunnel, despite concerns about inadequate time to assess the potential environmental impact. According to Jordan's minister for water, General Maysoun Zu'bi, this project could be considered as the first phase of the Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance.


title: Dead Sea

text: In December 2013, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement for laying a water pipeline to link the Red Sea with the Dead Sea. The pipeline would be long and is estimated to take up to five years to complete. In January 2015 it was reported that the level of water was dropping by a year.


title: Dead Sea

text: On 27 November 2016, the Jordanian government shortlisted five consortia to implement the project. Jordan's ministry of Water and Irrigation said that the $100 million first phase of the project would begin construction in the first quarter of 2018, and would be completed by 2021. The project was officially abandoned in June 2021, having never broken ground.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: His "Discourse on Inequality" and "The Social Contract" are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau's sentimental novel "Julie, or the New Heloise" (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction. His "Emile, or On Education" (1762) is an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—the posthumously published "Confessions" (composed in 1769), which initiated the modern autobiography, and the unfinished "Reveries of the Solitary Walker" (composed 1776–1778)—exemplified the late 18th-century "Age of Sensibility", and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy (now a canton of Switzerland). Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Five generations before Rousseau, his ancestor Didier, a bookseller who may have published Protestant tracts, had escaped persecution from French Catholics by fleeing to Geneva in 1549, where he became a wine merchant.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau was proud that his family, of the "moyen" order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. Throughout his life, he generally signed his books "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Geneva, in theory, was governed "democratically" by its male voting "citizens". The citizens were a minority of the population when compared to the immigrants, referred to as "inhabitants", whose descendants were called "natives" and continued to lack suffrage. In fact, rather than being run by vote of the "citizens", the city was ruled by a small number of wealthy families that made up the "Council of Two Hundred"; these delegated their power to a 25-member executive group from among them called the "Little Council".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: There was much political debate within Geneva, extending down to the tradespeople. Much discussion was over the idea of the sovereignty of the people, of which the ruling class oligarchy was making a mockery. In 1707, a democratic reformer named Pierre Fatio protested this situation, saying "a sovereign that never performs an act of sovereignty is an imaginary being". He was shot by order of the Little Council. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father, Isaac, was not in the city at this time, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, followed his grandfather, father and brothers into the watchmaking business. He also taught dance for a short period. Isaac, notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music. Rousseau wrote that "A Genevan watchmaker is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In 1699, Isaac ran into political difficulty by entering a quarrel with visiting English officers, who in response drew their swords and threatened him. After local officials stepped in, it was Isaac who was punished, as Geneva was concerned with maintaining its ties to foreign powers.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, was from an upper-class family. She was raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher. He cared for Suzanne after her father, Jacques, who had run into trouble with the legal and religious authorities for fornication and having a mistress, died in his early 30s. In 1695, Suzanne had to answer charges that she had attended a street theater disguised as a peasant woman so she could gaze upon M. Vincent Sarrasin, whom she fancied despite his continuing marriage. After a hearing, she was ordered by the Genevan Consistory to never interact with him again. She married Rousseau's father at the age of 31. Isaac's sister had married Suzanne's brother eight years earlier, after she had become pregnant and they had been chastised by the Consistory. The child died at birth. The young Rousseau was told a fabricated story about the situation in which young love had been denied by a disapproving patriarch but later prevailed, resulting in two marriages uniting the families on the same day. Rousseau never learnt the truth.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712, and he would later relate: "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me". He was baptized on 4 July 1712, in the great cathedral. His mother died of puerperal fever nine days after his birth, which he later described as "the first of my misfortunes".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: He and his older brother François were brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne. When Rousseau was five, his father sold the house that the family had received from his mother's relatives. While the idea was that his sons would inherit the principal when grown up and he would live off the interest in the meantime, in the end the father took most of the substantial proceeds. With the selling of the house, the Rousseau family moved out of the upper-class neighborhood and moved into an apartment house in a neighborhood of craftsmen—silversmiths, engravers, and other watchmakers. Growing up around craftsmen, Rousseau would later contrast them favorably to those who produced more aesthetic works, writing "those important persons who are called artists rather than artisans, work solely for the idle and rich, and put an arbitrary price on their baubles". Rousseau was also exposed to class politics in this environment, as the artisans often agitated in a campaign of resistance against the privileged class running Geneva.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau had no recollection of learning to read, but he remembered how when he was five or six his father encouraged his love of reading:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Witnessing the local townsfolk participate in militias made a big impression on Rousseau. Throughout his life, he would recall one scene where, after the volunteer militia had finished its manoeuvres, they began to dance around a fountain and most of the people from neighboring buildings came out to join them, including him and his father. Rousseau would always see militias as the embodiment of popular spirit in opposition to the armies of the rulers, whom he saw as disgraceful mercenaries.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: When Rousseau was ten, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him. He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him. Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here, the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing. Rousseau, who was always deeply moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Virtually all our information about Rousseau's youth has come from his posthumously published "Confessions", in which the chronology is somewhat confused, though recent scholars have combed the archives for confirming evidence to fill in the blanks. At age 13, Rousseau was apprenticed first to a notary and then to an engraver who beat him. At 15, he ran away from Geneva (on 14 March 1728) after returning to the city and finding the city gates locked due to the curfew.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In adjoining Savoy he took shelter with a Roman Catholic priest, who introduced him to Françoise-Louise de Warens, age 29. She was a noblewoman of Protestant background who was separated from her husband. As professional lay proselytizer, she was paid by the King of Piedmont to help bring Protestants to Catholicism. They sent the boy to Turin, the capital of Savoy (which included Piedmont, in what is now Italy), to complete his conversion. This resulted in his having to give up his Genevan citizenship, although he would later revert to Calvinism to regain it.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In converting to Catholicism, both de Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity of man. Leo Damrosch writes: "An eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy still required believers to declare 'that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good'". De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Finding himself on his own, since his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy) and France. During this time, he lived on and off with de Warens, whom he idolized and called his "maman". Flattered by his devotion, de Warens tried to get him started in a profession, and arranged formal music lessons for him. At one point, he briefly attended a seminary with the idea of becoming a priest.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: When Rousseau reached 20, de Warens took him as her lover, while intimate also with the steward of her house. The sexual aspect of their relationship (a "ménage à trois") confused Rousseau and made him uncomfortable, but he always considered de Warens the greatest love of his life. A rather profligate spender, she had a large library and loved to entertain and listen to music. She and her circle, comprising educated members of the Catholic clergy, introduced Rousseau to the world of letters and ideas. Rousseau had been an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself in earnest to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and music. At 25, he came into a small inheritance from his mother and used a portion of it to repay de Warens for her financial support of him. At 27, he took a job as a tutor in Lyon.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune. His system, intended to be compatible with typography, is based on a single line, displaying numbers representing intervals between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. Believing the system was impractical, the Academy rejected it, though they praised his mastery of the subject, and urged him to try again. He befriended Denis Diderot that year, connecting over the discussion of literary endeavors.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau had an honorable but ill-paying post as a secretary to the Comte de Montaigue, the French ambassador to Venice. This awoke in him a lifelong love for Italian music, particularly opera:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly. After 11 months, Rousseau quit, taking from the experience a profound distrust of government bureaucracy.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Returning to Paris, the penniless Rousseau befriended and became the lover of Thérèse Levasseur, a seamstress who was the sole support of her mother and numerous ne'er-do-well siblings. At first, they did not live together, though later Rousseau took Thérèse and her mother in to live with him as his servants, and himself assumed the burden of supporting her large family. According to his "Confessions", before she moved in with him, Thérèse bore him a son and as many as four other children (there is no independent verification for this number).


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thérèse to give each of the newborns up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor". "Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she [Thérèse] allowed herself to be overcome" ("Confessions"). In his letter to Madame de Francueil in 1751, he first pretended that he wasn't rich enough to raise his children, but in Book IX of the "Confessions" he gave the true reasons of his choice: "I trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son, but no record could be found. When Rousseau subsequently became celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment of his children was used by his critics, including Voltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for arguments "ad hominem".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Beginning with some articles on music in 1749, Rousseau contributed numerous articles to Diderot and D'Alembert's great "Encyclopédie", the most famous of which was an article on political economy written in 1755.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with Diderot. In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a "lettre de cachet" for opinions in his "Lettre sur les aveugles", that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection. According to science historian Conway Zirkle, Rousseau saw the concept of natural selection "as an agent for improving the human species."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau had read about an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon to be published in the "Mercure de France" on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. He wrote that while walking to Vincennes (about three miles from Paris), he had a revelation that the arts and sciences were responsible for the moral degeneration of mankind, who were basically good by nature. Rousseau's 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau continued his interest in music. He wrote both the words and music of his opera "Le devin du village" ("The Village Soothsayer"), which was performed for King Louis XV in 1752. The king was so pleased by the work that he offered Rousseau a lifelong pension. To the exasperation of his friends, Rousseau turned down the great honor, bringing him notoriety as "the man who had refused a king's pension". He also turned down several other advantageous offers, sometimes with a brusqueness bordering on truculence that gave offense and caused him problems. The same year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's "La serva padrona", prompted the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of French music against supporters of the Italian style. Rousseau, as noted above, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others, making an important contribution with his "Letter on French Music".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men" (the "Discourse on Inequality"), which elaborated on the arguments of the "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novel "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse" (also based on memories of his idyllic youthful relationship with Mme de Warens). Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness and landlady Madame d'Épinay, whom he treated rather high-handedly. He resented being at Mme. d'Épinay's beck and call and detested the insincere conversation and shallow atheism of the "Encyclopédistes" whom he met at her table. Wounded feelings gave rise to a bitter three-way quarrel between Rousseau and Madame d'Épinay; her lover, the journalist Grimm; and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau. Diderot later described Rousseau as being "false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked... He sucked ideas from me, used them himself, and then affected to despise me".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's break with the "Encyclopédistes" coincided with the composition of his three major works, in all of which he emphasized his fervent belief in a spiritual origin of man's soul and the universe, in contradistinction to the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie and D'Holbach. During this period, Rousseau enjoyed the support and patronage of Charles II François Frédéric de Montmorency-Luxembourg and the Prince de Conti, two of the richest and most powerful nobles in France. These men truly liked Rousseau and enjoyed his ability to converse on any subject, but they also used him as a way of getting back at Louis XV and the political faction surrounding his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Even with them, however, Rousseau went too far, courting rejection when he criticized the practice of tax farming, in which some of them engaged.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse", was published in 1761 to immense success. The book's rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauty of the Swiss countryside struck a chord in the public and may have helped spark the subsequent nineteenth-century craze for Alpine scenery. In 1762, Rousseau published "Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique" (in English, literally "Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political Right") in April. Even his friend Antoine-Jacques Roustan felt impelled to write a polite rebuttal of the chapter on Civil Religion in the "Social Contract", which implied that the concept of a Christian republic was paradoxical since Christianity taught submission rather than participation in public affairs. Rousseau helped Roustan find a publisher for the rebuttal.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau published "Emile, or On Education" in May. A famous section of "Emile", "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar", was intended to be a defense of religious belief. Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of humble peasant background (plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had met as a teenager) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in itself a daring innovation for the time. The vicar's creed was that of Socinianism (or Unitarianism as it is called today). Because it rejected original sin and divine revelation, both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Moreover, Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. This religious indifferentism caused Rousseau and his books to be banned from France and Geneva. He was condemned from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were burned and warrants were issued for his arrest. Former friends such as Jacob Vernes of Geneva could not accept his views, and wrote violent rebuttals.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: A sympathetic observer, David Hume "professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau's books were banned in Geneva and elsewhere". Rousseau, he wrote, "has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country... as not to render such an open attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: After Rousseau's "Emile" had outraged the French parliament, an arrest order was issued by parliament against him, causing him to flee to Switzerland. Subsequently, when the Swiss authorities also proved unsympathetic to him—condemning both "Emile", and also "The Social Contract"—Voltaire issued an invitation to Rousseau to come and reside with him, commenting that: "I shall always love the author of the 'Vicaire savoyard' whatever he has done, and whatever he may do...Let him come here [to Ferney]! He must come! I shall receive him with open arms. He shall be master here more than I. I shall treat him like my own son."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau later expressed regret that he had not replied to Voltaire's invitation. In July 1762, after Rousseau was informed that he could not continue to reside in Bern, d'Alembert advised him to move to the Principality of Neuchâtel, ruled by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Subsequently, Rousseau accepted an invitation to reside in Môtiers, fifteen miles from Neuchâtel. On 11 July 1762, Rousseau wrote to Frederick, describing how he had been driven from France, from Geneva, and from Bern; and seeking Frederick's protection. He also mentioned that he had criticized Frederick in the past and would continue to be critical of Frederick in the future, stating however: "Your Majesty may dispose of me as you like." Frederick, still in the middle of the Seven Years' War, then wrote to the local governor of Neuchâtel, Marischal Keith, who was a mutual friend of theirs:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau, touched by the help he received from Frederick, stated that from then onwards he took a keen interest in Frederick's activities. As the Seven Years' War was about to end, Rousseau wrote to Frederick again, thanking him for the help received and urging him to put an end to military activities and to endeavor to keep his subjects happy instead. Frederick made no known reply, but commented to Keith that Rousseau had given him a "scolding".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: For more than two years (1762–1765) Rousseau lived at Môtiers, spending his time in reading and writing and meeting visitors such as James Boswell (December 1764). In the meantime, the local ministers had become aware of the apostasies in some of his writings, and resolved not to let him stay in the vicinity. The Neuchâtel Consistory summoned Rousseau to answer a charge of blasphemy. He wrote back asking to be excused due to his inability to sit for a long time due to his ailment. Subsequently, Rousseau's own pastor, Frédéric-Guillaume de Montmollin, started denouncing him publicly as the Antichrist. In one inflammatory sermon, Montmollin quoted Proverbs 15:8: "The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is his delight"; this was interpreted by everyone to mean that Rousseau's taking communion was detested by the Lord. The ecclesiastical attacks inflamed the parishioners, who proceeded to pelt Rousseau with stones when he would go out for walks. Around midnight of 6–7 September 1765, stones were thrown at the house Rousseau was staying in, and some glass windows were shattered. When a local official, Martinet, arrived at Rousseau's residence he saw so many stones on the balcony that he exclaimed "My God, it's a quarry!" At this point, Rousseau's friends in Môtiers advised him to leave the town.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Since he wanted to remain in Switzerland, Rousseau decided to accept an offer to move to a tiny island, the Île de St.-Pierre, having a solitary house. Although it was within the Canton of Bern, from where he had been expelled two years previously, he was informally assured that he could move into this island house without fear of arrest, and he did so (10 September 1765). Here, despite the remoteness of his retreat, visitors sought him out as a celebrity. However, on 17 October 1765, the Senate of Bern ordered Rousseau to leave the island and all Bernese territory within fifteen days. He replied, requesting permission to extend his stay, and offered to be incarcerated in any place within their jurisdiction with only a few books in his possession and permission to walk occasionally in a garden while living at his own expense. The Senate's response was to direct Rousseau to leave the island, and all Bernese territory, within twenty four hours. On 29 October 1765 he left the Île de St.-Pierre and moved to Strasbourg. At this point:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 9 December 1765, having secured a passport from the French government to come to Paris, Rousseau left Strasbourg for Paris where he arrived after a week, and lodged in a palace of his friend, the Prince of Conti. Here he met Hume, and also numerous friends, and well wishers, and became a very conspicuous figure in the city. At this time, Hume wrote:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: One significant meeting could have taken place at this time: Diderot wanted to reconcile and make amends with Rousseau. However, both Diderot and Rousseau wanted the other person to take the initiative, so the two did not meet.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 1 January 1766, Grimm wrote a report to his clientele, in which he included a letter said to have been written by Frederick the Great to Rousseau. This letter had actually been composed by Horace Walpole as a playful hoax. Walpole had never met Rousseau, but he was well acquainted with Diderot and Grimm. The letter soon found wide publicity; Hume is believed to have been present, and to have participated in its creation. On 16 February 1766, Hume wrote to the Marquise de Brabantane: "The only pleasantry I permitted myself in connection with the pretended letter of the King of Prussia was made by me at the dinner table of Lord Ossory." This letter was one of the reasons for the later rupture in Hume's relations with Rousseau.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 4 January 1766 Rousseau left Paris with Hume, the merchant De Luze (an old friend of Rousseau), and Rousseau's pet dog Sultan. After a four-day journey to Calais, where they stayed for two nights, the travelers embarked on a ship to Dover. On 13 January 1766 they arrived in London. Soon after their arrival, David Garrick arranged a box at the Drury Lane Theatre for Hume and Rousseau on a night when the King and Queen also attended. Garrick was himself performing in a comedy by himself, and also in a tragedy by Voltaire. Rousseau became so excited during the performance that he leaned too far and almost fell out of the box; Hume observed that the King and Queen were looking at Rousseau more than at the performance. Afterwards, Garrick served supper for Rousseau, who commended Garrick's acting: "Sir, you have made me shed tears at your tragedy, and smile at your comedy, though I scarce understood a word of your language."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: At this time, Hume had a favorable opinion of Rousseau; in a letter to Madame de Brabantane, Hume wrote that after observing Rousseau carefully he had concluded that he had never met a more affable and virtuous person. According to Hume, Rousseau was "gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested, of extreme sensitivity". Initially, Hume lodged Rousseau in the house of Madam Adams in London, but Rousseau began receiving so many visitors that he soon wanted to move to a quieter location. An offer came to lodge him in a Welsh monastery, and he was inclined to accept it, but Hume persuaded him to move to Chiswick. Rousseau now asked for Thérèse to rejoin him.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Meanwhile, James Boswell, then in Paris, offered to escort Thérèse to Rousseau. (Boswell had earlier met Rousseau and Thérèse at Motiers; he had subsequently also sent Thérèse a garnet necklace and had written to Rousseau seeking permission to occasionally communicate with her.) Hume foresaw what was going to happen: "I dread some event fatal to our friend's honor." Boswell and Thérèse were together for more than a week, and as per notes in Boswell's diary they consummated the relationship, having intercourse several times. On one occasion, Thérèse told Boswell: "Don't imagine you are a better lover than Rousseau."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Since Rousseau was keen to relocate to a more remote location, Richard Davenport—a wealthy and elderly widower who spoke French—offered to accommodate Thérèse and Rousseau at Wootton Hall in Staffordshire. On 22 March 1766 Rousseau and Thérèse set forth for Wootton, against Hume's advice. Hume and Rousseau would never meet again. Initially Rousseau liked his new accommodation at Wootton Hall, and wrote favorably about the natural beauty of the place, and how he was feeling reborn, forgetting past sorrows.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 3 April 1766 a daily newspaper published the letter constituting Horace Walpole's hoax on Rousseau—without mentioning Walpole as the actual author; that the editor of the publication was Hume's personal friend compounded Rousseau's grief. Gradually articles critical of Rousseau started appearing in the British press; Rousseau felt that Hume, as his host, ought to have defended him. Moreover, in Rousseau's estimate, some of the public criticism contained details to which only Hume was privy. Further, Rousseau was aggrieved to find that Hume had been lodging in London with François Tronchin, son of Rousseau's enemy in Geneva.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: About this time, Voltaire anonymously published his "Letter to Dr. J.-J. Pansophe" in which he gave extracts from many of Rousseau's prior statements which were critical of life in England; the most damaging portions of Voltaire's writeup were reprinted in a London periodical. Rousseau now decided that there was a conspiracy afoot to defame him. A further cause for Rousseau's displeasure was his concern that Hume might be tampering with his mail. The misunderstanding had arisen because Rousseau tired of receiving voluminous correspondence whose postage he had to pay. Hume offered to open Rousseau's mail himself and to forward the important letters to Rousseau; this offer was accepted. However, there is some evidence of Hume intercepting even Rousseau's outgoing mail.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: After some correspondence with Rousseau, which included an eighteen-page letter from Rousseau describing the reasons for his resentment, Hume concluded that Rousseau was losing his mental balance. On learning that Rousseau had denounced him to his Parisian friends, Hume sent a copy of Rousseau's long letter to Madame de Boufflers. She replied stating that, in her estimate, Hume's alleged participation in the composition of Horace Walpole's "faux" letter was the reason for Rousseau's anger.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: When Hume learnt that Rousseau was writing the "Confessions", he assumed that the present dispute would feature in the book. Adam Smith, Turgot, Marischal Keith, Horace Walpole, and Mme de Boufflers advised Hume not to make his quarrel with Rousseau public; however, many members of d'Holbach's coterie—particularly, d'Alembert—urged him to reveal his version of the events. In October 1766 Hume's version of the quarrel was translated into French and published in France; in November it was published in England. Grimm included it in his "correspondance"; ultimately,


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: After the dispute became public, due in part to comments from notable publishers like Andrew Millar, Walpole told Hume that quarrels such as this only end up becoming a source of amusement for Europe. Diderot took a charitable view of the mess: "I knew these two philosophers well. I could write a play about them that would make you weep, and it would excuse them both." Amidst the controversy surrounding his quarrel with Hume, Rousseau maintained a public silence; but he resolved now to return to France. To encourage him to do so swiftly, Thérèse advised him that the servants at Wootton Hall sought to poison him. On 22 May 1767 Rousseau and Thérèse embarked from Dover for Calais.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 22 May 1767, Rousseau reentered France even though an arrest warrant against him was still in place. He had taken an assumed name, but was recognized, and a banquet in his honor was held by the city of Amiens. French nobles offered him a residence at this time. Initially, Rousseau decided to stay in an estate near Paris belonging to Mirabeau. Subsequently, on 21 June 1767, he moved to a chateau of the Prince of Conti in Trie.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Around this time, Rousseau started developing feelings of paranoia, anxiety, and of a conspiracy against him. Most of this was just his imagination at work, but on 29 January 1768, the theatre at Geneva was destroyed through burning, and Voltaire mendaciously accused Rousseau of being the culprit. In June 1768, Rousseau left Trie, leaving Thérèse behind, and went first to Lyon, and subsequently to Bourgoin. He now invited Thérèse to this place and "married" her, under his alias "Renou" in a faux civil ceremony in Bourgoin on 30 August 1768.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In January 1769, Rousseau and Thérèse went to live in a farmhouse near Grenoble. Here he practiced botany and completed the "Confessions". At this time he expressed regret for placing his children in an orphanage. On 10 April 1770, Rousseau and Thérèse left for Lyon where he befriended Horace Coignet, a fabric designer and amateur musician. At Rousseau's suggestion, Coignet composed musical interludes for Rousseau's prose poem "Pygmalion"; this was performed in Lyon together with Rousseau's romance "The Village Soothsayer" to public acclaim. On 8 June, Rousseau and Thérèse left Lyon for Paris; they reached Paris on 24 June.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In Paris, Rousseau and Thérèse lodged in an unfashionable neighborhood of the city, the Rue Platrière—now called the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He now supported himself financially by copying music, and continued his study of botany. At this time also, he wrote his "Letters on the Elements of Botany". These consisted of a series of letters Rousseau wrote to Mme Delessert in Lyon to help her daughters learn the subject. These letters received widespread acclaim when they were eventually published posthumously. "It's a true pedagogical model, and it complements "Emile"," commented Goethe.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In order to defend his reputation against hostile gossip, Rousseau had begun writing the "Confessions" in 1765. In November 1770, these were completed, and although he did not wish to publish them at this time, he began to offer group readings of certain portions of the book. Between December 1770, and May 1771, Rousseau made at least four group readings of his book with the final reading lasting seventeen hours. A witness to one of these sessions, Claude Joseph Dorat, wrote:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: After May 1771, there were no more group readings because Madame d'Épinay wrote to the chief of police, who was her friend, to put a stop to Rousseau's readings so as to safeguard her privacy. The police called on Rousseau, who agreed to stop the readings. The "Confessions" were finally published posthumously in 1782.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In 1772, Rousseau was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the "Considerations on the Government of Poland", which was to be his last major political work.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Also in 1772, Rousseau began writing his "", which was another attempt to reply to his critics. He completed writing it in 1776. The book is in the form of three dialogues between two characters; a "Frenchman" and "Rousseau", who argue about the merits and demerits of a third character—an author called "Jean-Jacques". It has been described as his most unreadable work; in the foreword to the book, Rousseau admits that it may be repetitious and disorderly, but he begs the reader's indulgence on the grounds that he needs to defend his reputation from slander before he dies.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In 1766, Rousseau had impressed Hume with his physical prowess by spending ten hours at night on the deck in severe weather during the journey by ship from Calais to Dover while Hume was confined to his bunk. "When all the seamen were almost frozen to death...he caught no harm...He is one of the most robust men I have ever known," Hume noted. By 1770, Rousseau's urinary disease had also been greatly alleviated after he stopped listening to the advice of doctors. At that time, notes Damrosch, it was often better to let nature take its own course rather than subject oneself to medical procedures. His general health had also improved. However, on 24 October 1776, as he was walking on a narrow street in Paris a nobleman's carriage came rushing by from the opposite direction; flanking the carriage was a galloping Great Dane belonging to the nobleman. Rousseau was unable to dodge both the carriage and the dog, and was knocked down by the Great Dane. He seems to have suffered a concussion and neurological damage. His health began to decline; Rousseau's friend Corancez described the appearance of certain symptoms which indicate that Rousseau started suffering from epileptic seizures after the accident.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In 1777, Rousseau received a royal visitor, when the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to meet him. His free entry to the Opera had been renewed by this time and he would go there occasionally. At this time also (1777–78), he composed one of his finest works, "Reveries of a Solitary Walker".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In the spring of 1778, the Marquis Girardin invited Rousseau to live in a cottage in his château at Ermenonville. Rousseau and Thérèse went there on 20 May. Rousseau spent his time at the château in collecting botanical specimens, and teaching botany to Girardin's son. He ordered books from Paris on grasses, mosses and mushrooms, and made plans to complete his unfinished "Emile and Sophie" and "Daphnis and Chloe".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 1 July, a visitor commented that "men are wicked", to which Rousseau replied with "men are wicked, yes, but man is good"; in the evening there was a concert in the château in which Rousseau played on the piano his own composition of the Willow Song from "Othello". On this day also, he had a hearty meal with Girardin's family; the next morning, as he was about to go teach music to Girardin's daughter, he died of cerebral bleeding resulting in an apoplectic stroke. It is now believed that repeated falls, including the accident involving the Great Dane, may have contributed to Rousseau's stroke.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Following his death, Grimm, Madame de Staël and others spread the false news that Rousseau had committed suicide; according to other gossip, Rousseau was insane when he died. All those who met him in his last days agree that he was in a serene frame of mind at this time.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On 4 July 1778, Rousseau was buried on the , which became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers. On 11 October 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed near the remains of Voltaire.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau later noted, that when he read the question for the essay competition of the Academy of Dijon, which he would go on to win: "Has the rebirth of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification of the morals?", he felt that "the moment I read this announcement I saw another universe and became a different man". The essay he wrote in response led to one of the central themes of Rousseau's thought, which was that perceived social and cultural progress had in fact led only to the moral degradation of humanity. His influences to this conclusion included Montesquieu, François Fénelon, Michel de Montaigne, Seneca the Younger, Plato, and Plutarch.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau based his political philosophy on contract theory and his reading of Thomas Hobbes. Reacting to the ideas of Samuel von Pufendorf and John Locke was also driving his thought. All three thinkers had believed that humans living without central authority were facing uncertain conditions in a state of mutual competition. In contrast, Rousseau believed that there was no explanation for why this would be the case, as there would have been no conflict or property. Rousseau especially criticized Hobbes for asserting that since man in the "state of nature... has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue". On the contrary, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical "state of nature" as a normative guide. In the original condition, humans would have had "no moral relations with or determinate obligations to one another". Because of their rare contact with each other, differences between individuals would have been of little significance. Living separately, there would have been no feelings of envy or distrust, and no existence of property or conflict.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: According to Rousseau, humans have two traits in common with other animals: the "amour de soi", which describes the self-preservation instinct; and "pitié", which is empathy for the rest of one's species, both of which precede reason and sociability. Only humans who are morally deprived would care only about their relative status to others, leading to "amour-propre", or vanity. He did not believe humans to be innately superior to other species. However, human beings did have the unique ability to change their nature through free choice, instead of being confined to natural instincts.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Another aspect separating humans from other animals is the ability of "perfectability", which allows humans to choose in a way which improves their condition. These improvements could be lasting, leading not only to individual, but also collective change for the better. Together with human freedom, the ability to improve makes possible the historic evolution of humanity. However, there is no guarantee that this evolution will be for the better.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau asserted that the stage of human development associated with what he called "savages" was the best or optimal in human development, between the less-than-optimal extreme of brute animals on the one hand and the extreme of decadent civilization on the other. "...[N]othing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man". This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage, which Arthur Lovejoy claimed misrepresents Rousseau's thought.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: According to Rousseau, as savages had grown less dependent on nature, they had instead become dependent on each other, with society leading to the loss of freedom through the misapplication of perfectability. When living together, humans would have gone from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled one, leading to the invention of private property. However, the resulting inequality was not a natural outcome, but rather the product of human choice.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's ideas of human development were highly interconnected with forms of mediation, or the processes that individual humans use to interact with themselves and others while using an alternate perspective or thought process. According to Rousseau, these were developed through the innate perfectibility of humanity. These include a sense of self, morality, pity, and imagination. Rousseau's writings are purposely ambiguous concerning the formation of these processes to the point that mediation is always intrinsically part of humanity's development. An example of this is the notion that an individual needs an alternative perspective to come to the realization that he or she is a 'self'.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: they began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self-esteem.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: As humans started to compare themselves with each other, they began to notice that some had qualities differentiating them from others. However, only when moral significance was attached to these qualities did they start to create esteem and envy, and thereby, social hierarchies. Rousseau noted that whereas "the savage lives within himself, sociable man, always outside himself, can only live in the opinion of others". This then resulted in the corruption of humankind, "producing combinations fatal to innocence and happiness".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Following the attachment of importance to human difference, they would have started forming social institutions, according to Rousseau. Metallurgy and agriculture would have subsequently increased the inequalities between those with and without property. After all land had been converted into private properties, a zero-sum game would have resulted in competition for it, leading to conflict. This would have led to the creation and perpetuation of the 'hoax' of the political system by the rich which perpetuated their power.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: According to Rousseau, the original forms of government to emerge, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, were all products of the differing levels of inequality in their societies. However, they would always end up with ever worse levels of inequality, until a revolution would have overthrown it and new leaders would have emerged with further extremes of injustice. Nevertheless, the human capacity for self-improvement remained. As the problems of humanity were the product of political choice, they could also be improved by a better political system.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: "The Social Contract" outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article "Économie Politique" ("Discourse on Political Economy"), featured in Diderot's "Encyclopédie". In the book, Rousseau sketched the image of a new political system for regaining human freedom.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, the division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while also becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau opposed the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly (Book III, Chapter XV). He approved the kind of republican government of the city-state, for which Geneva provided a model—or would have done if renewed on Rousseau's principles. France could not meet Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big. Much subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy. ... It is, however, an unfortunately obscure and controversial notion. Some commentators see it as no more than the dictatorship of the proletariat or the tyranny of the urban poor (such as may perhaps be seen in the French Revolution). Such was not Rousseau's meaning. This is clear from the "Discourse on Political Economy", where Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: A remarkable peculiarity of "Social Contract" is its logical rigor, which Rousseau had learned in his twenties from mathematics:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau offers a wealth of economic thought in his writings, especially the "Discourse on Inequality", "Discourse on Political Economy", the "Social Contract", as well as his constitutional projects for Corsica and Poland. Rousseau's economic theory has been criticised as sporadic and unrigorous by later economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, but has been praised by historians of economic thought for its nuanced view of finance and mature thought on development. Scholars generally accept that Rousseau offers a critique of modern wealth and luxury. Moreover, Rousseau's economic thought is associated with agrarianism and autarkism. Historian Istvan Hont modifies this reading, however, by suggesting that Rousseau is both a critic and a thinker of commerce, leaving room for well-regulated commerce within a well-governed civil space. Political theorists Ryan Hanley and Hansong Li further argue that as a modern legislator, Rousseau seeks not to reject, but to tame utility, self-love, and even trade, finance, and luxury to serve the health of the republic.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's philosophy of education concerns itself not with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather with developing the pupil's character and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which he will have to live. A hypothetical boy, Émile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor. Today we would call this the disciplinary method of "natural consequences". Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The tutor will make sure that no harm results to Émile through his learning experiences.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau became an early advocate of developmentally appropriate education; his description of the stages of child development mirrors his conception of the evolution of culture. He divides childhood into stages:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau recommends that the young adult learn a manual skill such as carpentry, which requires creativity and thought, will keep him out of trouble, and will supply a fallback means of making a living in the event of a change of fortune (the most illustrious aristocratic youth to have been educated this way may have been Louis XVI, whose parents had him learn the skill of locksmithing). The sixteen-year-old is also ready to have a companion of the opposite sex.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Although his ideas foreshadowed modern ones in many ways, in one way they do not: Rousseau was a believer in the moral superiority of the patriarchal family on the antique Roman model. Sophie, the young woman Émile is destined to marry, as his representative of ideal womanhood, is educated to be governed by her husband while Émile, as his representative of the ideal man, is educated to be self-governing. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational and political philosophy; it is essential to his account of the distinction between private, personal relations and the public world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it depends on the subordination of women, for both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function as Rousseau imagines it could and should. Rousseau anticipated the modern idea of the bourgeois nuclear family, with the mother at home taking responsibility for the household and for childcare and early education.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Feminists, beginning in the late 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, have criticized Rousseau for his confinement of women to the domestic sphere—unless women were domesticated and constrained by modesty and shame, he feared "men would be tyrannized by women ... For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses—men would finally be their victims ..." His contemporaries saw it differently because Rousseau thought that mothers should breastfeed their children. Marmontel wrote that his wife thought, "One must forgive something," she said, "in one who has taught us to be mothers."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's ideas have influenced progressive "child-centered" education. John Darling's 1994 book "Child-Centered Education and its Critics" portrays the history of modern educational theory as a series of footnotes to Rousseau, a development he regards as bad. The theories of educators such as Rousseau's near contemporaries Pestalozzi, Mme. de Genlis and, later, Maria Montessori and John Dewey, which have directly influenced modern educational practices, have significant points in common with those of Rousseau.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva as part of his period of moral reform, Rousseau maintained a profession of that religious philosophy and of John Calvin as a modern lawgiver throughout the remainder of his life. Unlike many of the more agnostic Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion. His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded in "Émile", was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. Although he praised the Bible, he was disgusted by the Christianity of his day. Rousseau's assertion in "The Social Contract" that true followers of Christ would not make good citizens may have been another reason for his condemnation in Geneva. He also repudiated the doctrine of original sin, which plays a large part in Calvinism. In his "Letter to Beaumont", Rousseau wrote, "there is no original perversity in the human heart."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In the 18th century, many deists viewed God merely as an abstract and impersonal creator of the universe, likened to a giant machine. Rousseau's deism differed from the usual kind in its emotionality. He saw the presence of God in the creation as good, and separate from the harmful influence of society. Rousseau's attribution of a spiritual value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of 19th-century Romanticism towards nature and religion. (Historians—notably William Everdell, Graeme Garrard, and Darrin McMahon—have additionally situated Rousseau within the Counter-Enlightenment.) Rousseau was upset that his deism was so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophers were ignored. He defended himself against critics of his religious views in his "Letter to Mgr de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris", "in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau was a moderately successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and contributed to music theory. As a composer, his music was a blend of the late Baroque style and the emergent Classical fashion, i.e. Galant, and he belongs to the same generation of transitional composers as Christoph Willibald Gluck and C. P. E. Bach. One of his more well-known works is the one-act opera "The Village Soothsayer". It contains the duet "Non, Colette n'est point trompeuse," which was later rearranged as a standalone song by Beethoven, and the gavotte in scene no. 8 is the source of the tune of the folk song "Go Tell Aunt Rhody". He also composed several noted motets, some of which were sung at the Concert Spirituel in Paris. Rousseau's Aunt Suzanne was passionate about music and heavily influenced Rousseau's interest in music. In his "Confessions", Rousseau claims he is "indebted" to her for his passion of music. Rousseau took formal instruction in music at the house of Françoise-Louise de Warens. She housed Rousseau on and off for about 13 years, giving him jobs and responsibilities. In 1742, Rousseau developed a system of musical notation that was compatible with typography and numbered. He presented his invention to the Academie Des Sciences, but they rejected it, praising his efforts and pushing him to try again. In 1743, Rousseau wrote his first opera, "", which was first performed in 1745.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau argued over the superiority of Italian music over French. Rousseau argued that Italian music was superior based on the principle that melody must have priority over harmony. Rameau argued that French music was superior based on the principle that harmony must have priority over melody. Rousseau's plea for melody introduced the idea that in art, the free expression of a creative person is more important than the strict adherence to traditional rules and procedures. This is now known today as a characteristic of Romanticism. Rousseau argued for musical freedom, and changed people's attitudes towards music. His works were acknowledged by composers such as Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After composing "The Village Soothsayer" in 1752, Rousseau felt he could not go on working for the theater because he was a moralist who had decided to break from worldly values.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's idea of the "volonté générale" ("general will") was not original but rather belonged to a well-established technical vocabulary of juridical and theological writings in use at the time. The phrase was used by Diderot and also by Montesquieu (and by his teacher, the Oratorian friar Nicolas Malebranche). It served to designate the common interest embodied in legal tradition, as distinct from and transcending people's private and particular interests at any particular time. It displayed a rather democratic ideology, as it declared that the citizens of a given nation should carry out whatever actions they deem necessary in their own sovereign assembly.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The concept was also an important aspect of the more radical 17th-century republican tradition of Spinoza, from whom Rousseau differed in important respects, but not in his insistence on the importance of equality:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Robespierre and Saint-Just, during the Reign of Terror, regarded themselves to be principled egalitarian republicans, obliged to do away with superfluities and corruption; in this they were inspired most prominently by Rousseau. According to Robespierre, the deficiencies in individuals were rectified by upholding the 'common good' which he conceptualized as the collective will of the people; this idea was derived from Rousseau's "General Will". The revolutionaries were also inspired by Rousseau to introduce Deism as the new official civil religion of France:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution was noted by Edmund Burke, who critiqued Rousseau in "Reflections on the Revolution in France," and this critique reverberated throughout Europe, leading Catherine the Great to ban his works. This connection between Rousseau and the French Revolution (especially the Terror) persisted through the next century. As François Furet notes that "we can see that for the whole of the nineteenth century Rousseau was at the heart of the interpretation of the Revolution for both its admirers and its critics."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: According to some scholars, Rousseau exercised minimal influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States, despite similarities between their ideas. They shared beliefs regarding the self-evidence that "all men are created equal," and the conviction that citizens of a republic be educated at public expense. A parallel can be drawn between the United States Constitution's concept of the "general welfare" and Rousseau's concept of the "general will". Further commonalities exist between Jeffersonian democracy and Rousseau's praise of Switzerland and Corsica's economies of isolated and independent homesteads, and his endorsement of a well-regulated civic militia, such as a navy for Corsica, and the militia of the Swiss cantons.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: However, Will and Ariel Durant have opined that Rousseau had a definite political influence on America. According to them:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: One of Rousseau's most important American followers was textbook writer Noah Webster (1758–1843), who was influenced by Rousseau's ideas on pedagogy in "Emile" (1762). Webster structured his "Speller" in accord with Rousseau's ideas about the stages of a child's intellectual development.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's writings perhaps had an indirect influence on American literature through the writings of Wordsworth and Kant, whose works were important to the New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as on Unitarians such as theologian William Ellery Channing. "The Last of the Mohicans" and other American novels reflect republican and egalitarian ideals present alike in Thomas Paine and in English Romantic primitivism.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The first to criticize Rousseau were his fellow "Philosophes", above all, Voltaire. According to Jacques Barzun, Voltaire was annoyed by the first discourse, and outraged by the second. Voltaire's reading of the second discourse was that Rousseau would like the reader to "walk on all fours" befitting a savage.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Samuel Johnson told his biographer James Boswell, "I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Jean-Baptiste Blanchard was his leading Catholic opponent. Blanchard rejects Rousseau's negative education, in which one must wait until a child has grown to develop reason. The child would find more benefit from learning in his earliest years. He also disagreed with his ideas about female education, declaring that women are a dependent lot. So removing them from their motherly path is unnatural, as it would lead to the unhappiness of both men and women.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Historian Jacques Barzun states that, contrary to myth, Rousseau was no primitivist; for him:The model man is the independent farmer, free of superiors and self-governing. This was cause enough for the "philosophes"' hatred of their former friend. Rousseau's unforgivable crime was his rejection of the graces and luxuries of civilized existence. Voltaire had sung "The superfluous, that most necessary thing." For the high bourgeois standard of living Rousseau would substitute the middling peasant's. It was the country versus the city—an exasperating idea for them, as was the amazing fact that every new work of Rousseau's was a huge success, whether the subject was politics, theater, education, religion, or a novel about love.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: As early as 1788, Madame de Staël published her "Letters on the works and character of J.-J. Rousseau". In 1819, in his famous speech "On Ancient and Modern Liberty", the political philosopher Benjamin Constant, a proponent of constitutional monarchy and representative democracy, criticized Rousseau, or rather his more radical followers (specifically the Abbé de Mably), for allegedly believing that "everything should give way to collective will, and that all restrictions on individual rights would be amply compensated by participation in social power."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Frédéric Bastiat severely criticized Rousseau in several of his works, most notably in "The Law", in which, after analyzing Rousseau's own passages, he stated that:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Bastiat believed that Rousseau wished to ignore forms of social order created by the people—viewing them as a thoughtless mass to be shaped by philosophers. Bastiat, who is considered by thinkers associated with the Austrian School of Economics to be one of the precursors of the "spontaneous order", presented his own vision of what he considered to be the "Natural Order" in a simple economic chain in which multiple parties might interact without necessarily even knowing each other, cooperating and fulfilling each other's needs in accordance with basic economic laws such as supply and demand. In such a chain, to produce clothing, multiple parties have to act independently—"e.g." farmers to fertilize and cultivate land to produce fodder for the sheep, people to shear them, transport the wool, turn it into cloth, and another to tailor and sell it. Those persons engage in economic exchange by nature, and don't need to be ordered to, nor do their efforts need to be centrally coordinated. Such chains are present in every branch of human activity, in which individuals produce or exchange goods and services, and together, naturally create a complex social order that does not require external inspiration, central coordination of efforts, or bureaucratic control to benefit society as a whole.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Bastiat also believed that Rousseau contradicted himself when presenting his views concerning human nature; if nature is "sufficiently invincible to regain its empire", why then would it need philosophers to direct it back to a natural state? Another point of criticism Bastiat raised was that living purely in nature would doom mankind to suffer unnecessary hardships.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The Marquis de Sade's "Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue" (1791) partially parodied and used as inspiration Rousseau's sociological and political concepts in the "Discourse on Inequality" and "The Social Contract". Concepts such as the state of nature, civilization being the catalyst for corruption and evil, and humans "signing" a contract to mutually give up freedoms for the protection of rights, particularly referenced. The Comte de Gernande in "Justine", for instance, after Thérèse asks him how he justifies abusing and torturing women, states: The necessity mutually to render one another happy cannot legitimately exist save between two persons equally furnished with the capacity to do one another hurt and, consequently, between two persons of commensurate strength: such an association can never come into being unless a contract ["un pacte"] is immediately formed between these two persons, which obligates each to employ against each other no kind of force but what will not be injurious to either. . . [W]hat sort of a fool would the stronger have to be to subscribe to such an agreement?


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Edmund Burke formed an unfavorable impression of Rousseau when the latter visited England with Hume and later drew a connection between Rousseau's egoistic philosophy and his personal vanity, saying Rousseau "entertained no principle... but vanity. With this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness".


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Thomas Carlyle said that Rousseau possessed "the face of what is called a Fanatic . . . his Ideas "possessed" him like demons". He continued:The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word, "Egoism" . . . He had not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises of men. . . . His Books, like himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something "operatic"; a kind of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment.Charles Dudley Warner wrote about Rousseau in his essay, "Equality"; "Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sovereignty; but this was not his only lack of originality. His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: In 1919, Irving Babbitt, founder of a movement called the "New Humanism", wrote a critique of what he called "sentimental humanitarianism", for which he blamed Rousseau. Babbitt's depiction of Rousseau was countered in a celebrated and much reprinted essay by A.O. Lovejoy in 1923. In France, conservative theorist Charles Maurras, founder of "Action Française", "had no compunctions in laying the blame for both "Romantisme et Révolution" firmly on Rousseau in 1922."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: During the Cold War, Rousseau was criticized for his association with nationalism and its attendant abuses, for example in . This came to be known among scholars as the "totalitarian thesis". Political scientist J.S. Maloy states that "the twentieth century added Nazism and Stalinism to Jacobinism on the list of horrors for which Rousseau could be blamed. ... Rousseau was considered to have advocated just the sort of invasive tampering with human nature which the totalitarian regimes of mid-century had tried to instantiate." But he adds that "The totalitarian thesis in Rousseau studies has, by now, been discredited as an attribution of real historical influence." Arthur Melzer, however, while conceding that Rousseau would not have approved of modern nationalism, observes that his theories do contain the "seeds of nationalism", insofar as they set forth the "politics of identification", which are rooted in sympathetic emotion. Melzer also believes that in admitting that people's talents are unequal, Rousseau therefore tacitly condones the tyranny of the few over the many. Others counter, however, that Rousseau was concerned with the concept of equality under the law, not equality of talents. For Stephen T. Engel, on the other hand, Rousseau's nationalism anticipated modern theories of "imagined communities" that transcend social and religious divisions within states.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: On similar grounds, one of Rousseau's strongest critics during the second half of the 20th century was political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Using Rousseau's thought as an example, Arendt identified the notion of sovereignty with that of the general will. According to her, it was this desire to establish a single, unified will based on the stifling of opinion in favor of public passion that contributed to the excesses of the French Revolution.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The book "Rousseau and Revolution", by Will and Ariel Durant, begins with the following words about Rousseau:


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The German writers Goethe, Schiller, and Herder have stated that Rousseau's writings inspired them. Herder regarded Rousseau to be his "guide", and Schiller compared Rousseau to Socrates. Goethe, in 1787, stated: ""Emile" and its sentiments had a universal influence on the cultivated mind."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: The elegance of Rousseau's writing is held to have inspired a significant transformation in French poetry and drama—freeing them from rigid literary norms.


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Other writers who were influenced by Rousseau's writings included Leopardi in Italy; Pushkin and Tolstoy in Russia; Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Blake in England; and Hawthorne and Thoreau in America. According to Tolstoy: "At sixteen I carried around my neck, instead of the usual cross, a medallion with Rousseau's portrait."


title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: Rousseau's "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences", emphasizing individualism and repudiating "civilization", was appreciated by, among others, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Shelley, Tolstoy, and Edward Carpenter. Rousseau's contemporary Voltaire appreciated the section in "Emile" titled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar".