Philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Overview
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (UK: , US: ; French: [ʒɑ̃ʒak ʁuso]; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, philosophe, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
Rousseau's 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 novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction. His Émile, 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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau you can read
- The social contract & discourses
- The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete
- The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 02
- Emile
- A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind
- Widger's Quotations from Project Gutenberg Edition of The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Eloisa
Philosophers who discussed Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Edmund Burke
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- John Rawls
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- William Godwin
- John Locke
- Karl Marx
- John Amos Comenius
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr
- Samuel von Pufendorf
- Baron d'Holbach
- Claude Adrien Helvétius
- Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
- Leo Strauss
- Joseph de Maistre
- John Cowper Powys
- Noam Chomsky
- Johann Georg Hamann
- Plutarch
- Voltaire
- Peter Abelard
- T. M. Scanlon
- Moses Hess
- Blaise Pascal
Ideas Jean-Jacques Rousseau discusses
- Edmund Burke
- Encyclopédie
- Essay
- French Revolution
- Frédéric Bastiat
- Treatise
- Geneva
- Thomas Carlyle
- Horace Walpole
- Emile, or On Education
- Western philosophy
- City-state
- William Godwin
- Reflections on the Revolution in France
- Immanuel Kant
- Private property
- Classical republicanism
- Joseph Schumpeter
- John Calvin
- John Locke
- John Dewey
- Suicide
- Nicolas Malebranche
- Samuel von Pufendorf
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.