The development of socialism from radicalism started in the 1860s with the establishment of the International Workingmen's Association
(IWA), and saw the foundation of a number of workers' societies
demanding radical reform and civil liberties. By the 1870s, anarchism
had been introduced to the country from Europe and America and the
establishment of the Labour Emancipation League
(LEL) in 1881 marked the beginning of the organized anarchist movement
in the United Kingdom. The LEL was instrumental in the foundation of the
Socialist League, which in 1888 came under the control of the anarchist Frank Kitz.
The historian Peter Marshall traced the roots of British anarchism back to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, during which yeomans rose up against the Bad Parliament's poll tax, fearing it to be an attempt by the nobility to force the yeomanry into serfdom. The peasants were further agitated by the preaching of the radical priest John Ball, who conceived of the Garden of Eden as a state of nature where class stratification did not yet exist, attacked the institutions of private property and social inequality, and called for everything to be brought under common ownership and the creation of a classless society. With Wat Tyler elected as their captain, 100,000 peasant rebels marched from Essex to London, where they were joined by the local population. Although Richard II had promised them that he would free the villeins, the rebels demolished the Savoy Palace, released all the local prisoners and executed Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now that the rebels had captured the capital, they issued their demands, which included the introduction of wage labour, the cessation of feudal duties and the establishment of a free market.
The King agreed to most of their demands in his meetings with the rebel
leaders, during which Tyler called for the total abolition of serfdom
and the expansion of liberty and social equality, while his more radical lieutenant Jack Straw allegedly declared that the noble and clerical classes would need to be exterminated. However, the rebel's demands would never be met as William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, assassinated Tyler and Straw. The King then revoked his promises and the revolt was definitively crushed. But John Ball's radical egalitarian philosophy lived on through the centuries, most notably being re-invoked in 1888 by William Morris, in his novel A Dream of John Ball.
The Declaration and Standard of the Levellers of England.
In the lead up to the English Civil War,
radical republican and democratic ideas were first starting to
circulate, advocating the abolition of existing institutions such as the
monarchy, church and feudalism. In December 1640, 15,000 Londoners presented Parliament with the "Root and Branch petition", advocating for the abolition of the episcopacy, a proposition which was denounced as "absolute Anarchism" by the royalist MP Edward Dering. When the Bill itself failed to pass, anti-clerical riots erupted in London, eventually forcing Charles I
to flee the capital, along with royalist MPs and bishops, which allowed
parliament the means to pass anti-clerical bills into law.
Following the Parliamentarian victory in the Second English Civil War, the removal of dissenting voices from the House of Commons and the execution of Charles I, power lay entirely in the hands of the Grandees of the New Model Army. Unwilling to implement the radical policies advanced by the Levellers, the Grandees instead turned towards mysticism and the implementation of a Puritan religious order. But this new environment of Christian mysticism branched out into a variety of anti-authoritarian strains, with a number of English Dissenters separating entirely from the Church of England. These religious dissenters included the Quakers, Ranters, Anabaptists, Familists and Diggers.
Notably, the Ranters and Diggers have been labelled as "anarchists" by
historians, due to their radical egalitarian philosophies and communist practices.
The Diggers believed in creating an egalitarian society of small
agrarian communities and put this into practice by occupying a number of
tracts of common land for the purposes of farming it, but these
settlements were eventually suppressed by the authorities of the Commonwealth.
In 1688, the Glorious Revolution definitively established a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary supremacy in Britain. The Revolution was most notably defended by John Locke, whose justifications for democratic governance laid the foundations for classical liberalism. According to Locke, while the "state of nature" represented a state of total liberty and social equality, competition between individuals had caused instability,
which made the establishment of a government to protect "life, liberty
and property" a necessity. This led Locke to propose the formation of a social contract between the British people and their government, which would have the power make laws and protect the institution of private property. The Lockean proviso soon came to represent a progression from the traditionalist conservatism of the established landed gentry (later known as Tories) to the propertarianism of the emerging middle classes (later known as Whigs). By the turn of the 18th-century, Lockean liberalism started to give way to libertarianism, which centered the individual freedom of citizens within the new constitutional monarchy.
In 1756, Edmund Burke espoused a defense of the "state of nature" in A Vindication of Natural Society, painting a picture of human society being governed by reason until the invention of the state and the episcopacy, in what the historian Peter Marshall
described as "one of the most powerful arguments for anarchist society
made in the eighteenth century." Burke denounced the state as the sole
reason for all social conflict and war, arguing that the division of humanity into different nationalities had created bigotry and that the social stratification of society had concentrated wealth in the hands of those that didn't work for it. When looking at the dominant forms of government, Burke found democracy to be more preferable to despotism and aristocracy, but still considered it lacking, calling for a complete rejection of church and state, and the reclamation of "perfect liberty". Burke would later turn towards conservatism and disown his Vindication, claiming it to be a satire of the parliamentary opposition leader Henry St John, but the text still went on to inspire the anarchist philosophy of William Godwin and the libertarian socialism of George Holyoake.
Paine took the side of the "swinish multitude" and criticised Burke for subordinating individual rights to the "authority of the dead", adapting Lockean liberalism in the direction of libertarianism and direct democracy.
To protect people's natural rights, he again recommended the
establishment of a limited government, which would itself have no
authority and would be entirely subjected to the people's authority, in
order to ensure "the good of all".
In Part II of his pamphlet, Paine approached anarchism with his
declaration that societal order would prevail even if all government
were abolished, claiming that civil society "performs for itself almost
everything which is ascribed to government." He asserted that all order
stemmed from human nature, itself fundamentally good but corrupted by
established governments, and that individuals were chiefly regulated by
their own common interest, rather than by legal codes. Drawing from British history, Paine concluded by calling for the establishment of a self-governing society,
declaring that "the instant formal government is abolished, society
begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest
produces common security." He therefore considered the ideal form of
government to be a limited one, solely in place to secure the natural
rights of individual people, looking to the nascent federal government of the United States as an example. Despite his libertarian inclinations, it was his advocacy of constitutionalism, republicanism and propertarianism that would ultimately separate Paine from modern anarchism.
It was during the Revolution Controversy that William Godwin published his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which became the first clear expression of philosophical anarchism, with his declaration that all government ought to be abolished. Although the book was rather expensive on release, with the prime minister William Pitt
even deciding against banning the book due to its high price, many
British workers threw their money together to purchase a copy by
subscription, pirated copies were distributed throughout Ireland and
Scotland, and Godwin ended up reducing the price. When Pitt's government began to carry out the political persecutions against the British radical movement, Godwin was among those that came to the defense of the Radicals on trial, eventually securing their release. Although alienated by the defeat of the French Revolution, Godwin's influence extended on to the next generation of Radicals. His son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley became a widely-renowned poet, putting much of Godwin's anarchist philosophy into verse, while his disciple Robert Owen went on to become the founding father of British socialism. Following his death, Political Justice continued to inspire the Chartists and Owenites, who published new editions of the book, as well as the Ricardian socialism of Thomas Hodgskin and William Thompson, which in turn influenced the Marxist theory of the "withering away of the state".
But by the turn of the 19th century, British radicals still had
not adopted the term "anarchist" as their own. Even Godwin associated
the word "anarchy" with disorder, although he still considered it
preferable to despotism, due to its resemblance to "true liberty".
Nevertheless, followers of Godwin's political philosophy found
themselves being labelled as "anarchists", most notably by the Tory
statesman George Canning, who denounced William Godwin, Thomas Paine and the reformer John Thelwall as anarchists in the Anti-Jacobin Review.
By 1881, the movement of British revolutionary socialists towards anarchism culminated with the establishment of the Labour Emancipation League (LEL). The LEL quickly gained support for its libertarian socialist platform from the workers of London's East End, declaring themselves against all forms of government, before they merged into the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). But the authoritarianism of the SDF's leader Henry Hyndman caused a split within the organization, resulting in the formation of the Socialist League (SL) by a number of libertarian socialists around William Morris.
Though himself a staunch anti-parliamentarian, Morris would end up
leaving the SL following the rise of its anarchist faction in 1887,
leading to a marked radicalization of the League's publications under H. B. Samuels.
Poster advertising a meeting in support of the Walsall Anarchists
But anarchism was unable to win over the more reform-minded labour movement, with anarcho-syndicalism only developing at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1910s, Tom Mann's Industrial Syndicalist Education League attempted to encourage the establishment of industrial unions in Britain, advocating for direct class conflict with the goal of workers' control. But the influence of anarcho-syndicalism waned in the wake of World War I, which caused a split within the anarchist movement. Although anarcho-communists like Guy Aldred
attempted to keep the movement alive, by the mid-1920s, the British
anarchist movement had almost dissolved, with only a few anarchist
groups remaining in urban centers. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
brought with it a revival of the British anarchist movement, which
cultivated a new generation of anarchists by the subsequent outbreak of World War II.
Post-war era
When Vernon Richards
and three other editors were arrested at the beginning of 1945 for
attempting "to undermine the affections of members of His Majesty's
Forces.", Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, Augustus John, George Orwell, Herbert Read (chairman), Osbert Sitwell and George Woodcock set up the Freedom Defence Committee
to "uphold the essential liberty of individuals and organizations, and
to defend those who are persecuted for exercising their rights to
freedom of speech, writing and action."
The Syndicalist Workers' Federation was a syndicalist group active in post-war Britain, and one of the Solidarity Federation's earliest predecessors. It was formed in 1950 by members of the dissolved Anarchist Federation of Britain
(AFB). Unlike the AFB, which was influenced by anarcho-syndicalist
ideas but ultimately not syndicalist itself, the SWF decided to pursue a
more definitely syndicalist, worker-centred strategy from the outset. The group joined the International Workers' Association and during the Franco era gave particular support to the Spanish resistance and the underground CNT anarcho-syndicalist union, previously involved in the 1936 Spanish Revolution and subsequent Civil War against a right-wing military coup backed by both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The SWF initially had some success, but when Tom Brown, a long-term and very active member was forced out of activity, it declined until by 1979 it had only one lone branch in Manchester. The SWF then dissolved itself into the group founded as the Direct Action Movement. Its archives are held by the International Institute of Social History, and a selection of the SWFs publications have been digitally published at libcom.org.
Colin Ward was an editor of the Britishanarchist newspaper Freedom from 1947 to 1960, and founder/editor of the monthly anarchist journal Anarchy
from 1961 until it ceased publication in 1970. There were 118 issues.
It is not to be confused with the subsequent, shorter-lived magazine of
the same name, sometimes referred to as Anarchy (Second Series), which
was edited/published by a quite separate group.
The leading anarcho-pacifist writer and gerontologist Alex Comfort
characterised himself as an "aggressive anti-militarist". He held that
pacifism rested "solely upon the historical theory of anarchism". An active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he had been a conscientious objector in World War II. In 1951 Comfort was a signatory of the
Authors’ World Peace Appeal. He later resigned from its committee, asserting that Soviet sympathisers now dominated the AWPA. He later in the decade actively supported the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War. A prominent member of the Committee of 100, he was
imprisoned for a month, together with Bertrand Russell
and others. They had refused to be bound over, not to take part in a
Trafalgar Square mass protest in September 1961. Comfort is Peace and Disobedience (1946), one of many pamphlets he wrote for Peace News and PPU, and Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State (1950). He exchanged public correspondence with George Orwell defending pacifism in the open letter/poem, "Letter to an American Visitor", under the pseudonym "Obadiah Hornbrooke". Comfort's 1972 book The Joy of Sex
earned him worldwide fame and $3 million. He regretted that he as a
consequence became known as "Dr. Sex" and that his numerous other works
received so little attention.
Anarchists in London
On the last day of July 1964 an 18-year-old Stuart Christie departed London for Paris, where he picked up plastic explosives from the anarchist organisation Defensa Interior, and then Madrid
on a mission to kill General Francisco Franco. This was to be one of at
least 30 attempts on the dictator's life. After his release he
continued his activism in the anarchist movement in the United Kingdom, re-formed the Anarchist Black Cross and Black Flag with Albert Meltzer, was acquitted of involvement with the Angry Brigade,
and started the publishing house Cienfuegos Press (later Refract
Publications), which for a number of years he operated from the remote
island of Sanday, Orkney, where he also edited and published a local Orcadian newspaper, The Free-Winged Eagle. Christie wrote with Meltzer, The Floodgates of Anarchy and later We, the Anarchists! A study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937 (2000).
Around the turn of the century, Movement Against the Monarchy demonstrated against Britain's monarchy in 1998 and 2000. The anarchists planned a campaign for mid 2002. Demonstrators arrested during the 2002 Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II were later compensated for unlawful arrest.
Anarchists were involved in late-20th-century war opposition,
with campaigns like No War but the Class War during the early 1990s First Gulf War.
Woman with slogan and a hammer and sickle symbol with a fork instead of a hammer (Madrid, 2012)
"Eat the rich" is a political slogan associated with anti-capitalism and left-wing politics, as well as sometimes anarchist violent extremism. It may variously be used as a metaphor for class conflict, a demand for wealth redistribution. The phrase is commonly attributed to political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from a quote first popularized during the French Revolution: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich".
Rousseau faisait parti du peuple aussi, et il disait: 'Quand le peuple n'aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche.
Rousseau, who was also one of the people, said: 'When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.
The phrase was initially a criticism of the French nobility, but it was later popularized in France as a response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution that perpetuated poverty in the country.
Modern usage
In the 21st century, the phrase is used in response to the increasing wealth inequality and food insecurity. In the United States, the phrase was used by the crowd at a rally for progressive Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren in 2019 in approval of Warren's positions on wealth redistribution, including her position on the wealth tax.
The phrase has trended on major social networks online. It became prominent on TikTok around 2019, with users posting videos critical of the rich. Many of these videos also targeted more mundane first world behavior, directing the phrase toward people who study abroad, pay for a Spotify
subscription, or have a second refrigerator. In many cases, these
videos were produced to demonstrate hypocrisy of those who use the
phrase while enjoying the comforts of a first world society. Usage of the phrase was noted to have increased following the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.
In 2022, Amazon union leader Christian Smalls wore a jacket which said 'Eat the Rich' to the White House when he met President Joe Biden.
In 2023, American United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain adopted the phrase for GM, Ford, and Stellantis employees' fight for increased wages and benefits in Detroit.
In May 2024, a boycott started in Canada urging customers to shop elsewhere and avoid Loblaws in order to cut costs and support independent grocers.
In popular culture
The phrase has been used for the title of a 1987 film and a song for the film by Motörhead. It was also the title of a 1993 song by Aerosmith. The book Eat the Rich was published by P. J. O'Rourke in 1998. The comic series Eat the Rich debuted in 2021.
Rainer Zitelmann, a real estate expert, argues that language like "Eat the Rich" is prejudicial, perpetuating stereotypes, and engaging in classism. He also says that it can serve to dehumanize people wealthier than the speaker and poses risks of inciting violence.
Left-wing critics of the term argue that it is used hypocritically by
those in the middle class that have relatively comfortable lives.
His Discourse on Inequality, which argues that private property is the source of inequality, and The Social Contract,
which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order, are
cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau's sentimental novelJulie, 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 (completed in 1770), 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.
Biography
Youth
Rousseau was born in the Republic of 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.
The house where Rousseau was born at number 40, Grand-Rue, Geneva
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". Geneva, in theory, was governed democratically by its male voting citizens. The citizens were a minority of the population when compared to the immigrants (inhabitants) and their descendants (natives).
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; they delegated their power to a 25-member executive group from among them called the "Small Council".
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, democratic reformer 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 Small Council. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father, Isaac, was not in the city then, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it.
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".
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.
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
theatre 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.
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".
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 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
neighbourhood and into an apartment house in a neighbourhood of
craftsmen—silversmiths, engravers, and other watchmakers. Growing up
around craftsmen, Rousseau would later contrast them favourably 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.
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:
Every night, after supper, we read
some part of a small collection of romances [adventure stories], which
had been my mother's. My father's design was only to improve my reading,
and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a
fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the
adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights
together and could not bear to give over until after a volume.
Sometimes, in the morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my
father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, "Come, come, let us
go to bed; I am more a child than thou art." (Confessions, Book 1)
Rousseau's reading of escapist stories (such as L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé)
affected him; he later wrote that they "gave me bizarre and romantic
notions of human life, which experience and reflection have never been
able to cure me of".
After they had finished reading the novels, they began to read a
collection of ancient and modern classics left by his mother's uncle. Of
these, his favourite was Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans,
which he would read to his father while he made watches. Rousseau saw
Plutarch's work as another kind of novel—the noble actions of heroes—and
he would act out the deeds of the characters he was reading about. In
his Confessions,
Rousseau stated that the reading of Plutarch's works and "the
conversations between my father and myself to which it gave rise, formed
in me the free and republican spirit".
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 neighbouring 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.
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 and his
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.
Les Charmettes, where Rousseau lived with Françoise-Louise de Warens from 1735 to 1736, now a museum dedicated to Rousseau
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.
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 a Protestant background who was
separated from her husband. As a 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.
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.
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. Maurice Cranston notes, "Madame de Warens [...] took him into her household and mothered him; he called her 'maman' and she called him 'petit.'"
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.
Early adulthood
Françoise-Louise de Warens
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.
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.
Palazzo belonging to Tommaso Querini at 968 Cannaregio Venice that served as the French Embassy during Rousseau's period as Secretary to the Ambassador
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:
I had brought with me from Paris
the prejudice of that city against Italian music; but I had also
received from nature a sensibility and niceness of distinction which
prejudice cannot withstand. I soon contracted that passion for Italian
music with which it inspires all those who are capable of feeling its
excellence. In listening to barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was...
— Confessions
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.
Return to Paris
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).
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 was
not 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".
Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son,
but unfortunately 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Return to Geneva
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.
A contemporary portrait of the Countess of Houdetot
He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novelJulie, 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".
Mme d'Épinay by Jean-Étienne Liotard, ca 1759 (Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Voltaire and Frederick the Great
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."
1766 portrait of Rousseau wearing an Armenian papakha and costume, Allan Ramsay
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:
We must succor this poor
unfortunate. His only offense is to have strange opinions which he
thinks are good ones. I will send a hundred crowns, from which you will
be kind enough to give him as much as he needs. I think he will accept
them in kind more readily than in cash. If we were not at war, if we
were not ruined, I would build him a hermitage with a garden, where he
could live as I believe our first fathers did...I think poor Rousseau
has missed his vocation; he was obviously born to be a famous anchorite,
a desert father, celebrated for his austerities and flagellations...I
conclude that the morals of your savage are as pure as his mind is
illogical.
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".
Fugitive
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). (Boswell recorded his private discussions with
Rousseau, in both direct quotation and dramatic dialog, over several
pages of his 1764 journal.)
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 an 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.
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 he received invitations from several
parties in Europe, and soon decided to accept Hume's invitation to go to England.
On 9 December 1765, having secured a passport from the French
government, Rousseau left Strasbourg for Paris where he arrived a week
later 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 conspicuous figure in the city.
At this time, Hume wrote: "It is impossible to express or imagine the
enthusiasm of this nation in Rousseau's favor...No person ever so much
enjoyed their attention...Voltaire and everybody else are quite
eclipsed.
Although Diderot
at this time desired a reconciliation with Rousseau, both of them
expected an initiative by the other, and the two did not meet.
Letter of Walpole
On 1 January 1766, Grimm
included in his "Correspondance littéraire" a letter said to have been
written by Frederick the Great to Rousseau. It 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.
In Britain
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."
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.
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 communicate occasionally 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."
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.
Quarrel with Hume
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.
About this time, Voltaire anonymously (as always) 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.
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.
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 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 littéraire; ultimately:
...the quarrel resounded in Geneva, Amsterdam, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. A dozen pamphlets redoubled the bruit. Walpole printed his version of the dispute; Boswell attacked Walpole; Mme. de La Tour's Precis sur M. Rousseau
called Hume a traitor; Voltaire sent him additional material on
Rousseau's faults and crimes, on his frequentation of "places of ill
fame", and on his seditious activities in Switzerland. George III "followed the battle with intense curiosity".
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.
In Grenoble
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
I
expected a session of seven or eight hours; it lasted fourteen or
fifteen. ... The writing is truly a phenomenon of genius, of simplicity,
candor, and courage. How many giants reduced to dwarves! How many
obscure but virtuous men restored to their rights and avenged against
the wicked by the sole testimony of an honest man!
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. His Confessions were finally published posthumously in 1782.
Also in 1772, Rousseau began writing Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques,
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.
Final years
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. His 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.
The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris
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 (1777–1778), he composed one of his finest works, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, ultimately interrupted by his death.
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.
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.
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.
On 4 July 1778, Rousseau was buried on the Île des Peupliers, a tiny, wooded island in a lake at Ermenonville, 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 those of Voltaire.
Philosophy
Influences
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.
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".
Human nature
Statue of Rousseau on the Île Rousseau, Geneva
The first man who, having fenced in
a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to
believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how
many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes
might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or
filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to
this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the
earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
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.
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.
Another aspect separating humans from other animals is the ability of perfectability, which allows humans to choose in a way that 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.
Human development
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.
...
nothing 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.
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 perfectibility.
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.
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 realize that he or she is a 'self'.
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
opinions of others as essential to their self-esteem.
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".
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.
Political theory
Île Rousseau, Geneva
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rousseau opposed the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly
(Book III, chapter XV). He approved the form 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:
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.
A remarkable peculiarity of Social Contract is its logical rigor, which Rousseau had learned in his twenties from mathematics:
Rousseau develops his theory in an
almost mathematical manner, deriving statements from the initial thesis
that man must keep close to nature. The 'natural' state, with its
original liberty and equality, is hindered by man's 'unnatural'
involvement in collective activities resulting in inequality which, in
turn, infringes on liberty. The purpose of this social contract, which
is a kind of tacit agreement, is simply to guarantee equality and,
consequently, liberty as the superior social values...
A number of political statements, particularly about the organization of
powers, are derived from the 'axioms' of equality among citizens and
their subordination to the general will.
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.
The noblest work in education is
to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making
him reason! This is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument
of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to
be educated.
— Rousseau, Émile, p. 52
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.
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:
The first to the age of about 12, when children are guided by their emotions and impulses
During the second stage, from 12 to about 16, reason starts to develop
Finally the third stage, from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develops into an adult
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).
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 bourgeoisnuclear family, with the mother at home taking responsibility for the household and for childcare and early education.
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 ..." Rousseau also believed that Mothers were to breastfeed their children rather than using wet-nurses. Marmontel wrote that his wife thought, "We must pardon him [Rousseau] something" she used to say, "who has taught us to be mothers."
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.
Religion
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.
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."
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."
Composer
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, Les Muses galantes [fr], which was first performed in 1745. Rousseau also developed a style of "boustrophedon"
notation which would have music read in alternating directions (right
to left for a second staff, and then left to right for the next staff
for example) in an effort to allow musicians to not have to "jump"
staffs while reading.
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
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.
Bicentenary of Rousseau's birth (plaque), Geneva, 28 June 1912, Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays [love your country], showing Rousseau's father gesturing towards the window. The scene is drawn from a footnote to the Letter to d'Alembert where Rousseau recalls witnessing the popular celebrations following the exercises of the St Gervais regiment.
General will
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.
Rousseau believed in a legislative process that necessitates the active
involvement of every citizen in decision-making through discussion and
voting. He coined this process as the “general will”,
the collective will of a society as a whole, even if it may not
necessarily coincide with the individual desires of each member.
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:
While Rousseau's notion of the
progressive moral degeneration of mankind from the moment civil society
established itself diverges markedly from Spinoza's claim that human
nature is always and everywhere the same ... for both philosophers the
pristine equality of the state of nature is our ultimate goal and
criterion ... in shaping the "common good", volonté générale, or Spinoza's mens una,
which alone can ensure stability and political salvation. Without the
supreme criterion of equality, the general will would indeed be
meaningless. ... When in the depths of the French Revolution the Jacobin
clubs all over France regularly deployed Rousseau when demanding
radical reforms. and especially anything—such as land
redistribution—designed to enhance equality, they were at the same time,
albeit unconsciously, invoking a radical tradition which reached back
to the late seventeenth century.
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:
Ceremonial and symbolic
occurrences of the more radical phases of the Revolution invoked
Rousseau and his core ideas. Thus the ceremony held at the site of the
demolished Bastille, organized by the foremost artistic director of the
Revolution, Jacques-Louis David,
in August 1793 to mark the inauguration of the new republican
constitution, an event coming shortly after the final abolition of all
forms of feudal privilege, featured a cantata based on Rousseau's
democratic pantheistic deism as expounded in the celebrated "Profession
de foi d'un vicaire savoyard" in book four of Émile.
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."
Effect on the American Revolution
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.
However, Will and Ariel Durant have opined that Rousseau had a definite political influence on America. According to them:
The
first sign of [Rousseau's] political influence was in the wave of
public sympathy that supported active French aid to the American
Revolution. Jefferson derived the Declaration of Independence
from Rousseau as well as from Locke and Montesquieu. As ambassador to
France (1785–89) he absorbed much from both Voltaire and Rousseau...The
success of the American Revolution raised the prestige of Rousseau's
philosophy.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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."
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:
And what part do persons play in all this? They are
merely the machine that is set in motion. In fact, are they not merely
considered to be the raw material of which the machine is made? Thus the
same relationship exists between the legislator and the prince as
exists between the agricultural expert and the farmer; and the
relationship between the prince and his subjects is the same as that
between the farmer and his land. How high above mankind, then, has this
writer on public affairs been placed?
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.
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.
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?
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".
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."
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."
During the Cold War, Rousseau was criticized for his association with nationalism and its attendant abuses, for example in Jacob Leib Talmon (1952), The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. 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.
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.
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.
How did it come about that a man
born poor, losing his mother at birth and soon deserted by his father,
afflicted with a painful and humiliating disease, left to wander for
twelve years among alien cities and conflicting faiths, repudiated by
society and civilization, repudiating Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopédie and the Age of Reason,
driven from place to place as a dangerous rebel, suspected of crime and
insanity, and seeing, in his last months, the apotheosis of his
greatest enemy—how did it come about that this man, after his death,
triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education,
elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer,
the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth,
Byron and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy and,
altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or
thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more
influential than they had ever been before?
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."
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.
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."
Despite his criticisms, Carlyle admired Rousseau's sincerity: "with all
his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief
characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these French Philosophers were." He also admired his repudiation of atheism:
Strangely
through all that defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is
in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once
more, out of the element of that withered mocking Philosophism,
Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable
feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a Scepticism,
Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made
that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it
spoken out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,—as clearly as
he could.
Modern admirers of Rousseau include John Dewey and Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Matthew Josephson,
Rousseau has remained controversial for more than two centuries, and
has continued to gain admirers and critics down to the present time.
However, in their own way, both critics and admirers have served to
underscore the significance of the man, while those who have evaluated
him with fairness have agreed that he was the finest thinker of his time
on the question of civilization.
Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
Collected Writings, ed. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly, Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1990–2010, 13 vols.
The Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Émile or On Education, trans. with an introd. by Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1979.
"On the Origin of Language", trans. John H. Moran. In On the Origin of Language: Two Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France. London: Penguin Books, 1980.
'The Discourses' and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
'The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston. Penguin: Penguin Classics Various Editions, 1968–2007.
The Political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited with
introduction and notes by C.E.Vaughan, Blackwell, Oxford, 1962. (In
French but the introduction and notes are in English).
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