Book description
In A Discourse on Inequality Rousseau sets out to demonstrate how the
growth of civilization corrupts man's natural happiness and freedom by
creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege.
Contending that primitive man was equal to his fellows, Rousseau
believed that as societies become more sophisticated, the strongest and
most intelligent members of the community gain an unnatural advantage
over their weaker brethren, and that constitutions set up to rectify
these imbalances through peace and justice in fact do nothing but
perpetuate them. Rousseau's political and social arguments in the
Discourse were a hugely influential denunciation of the social
conditions of his time and one of the most revolutionary documents of
the eighteenth-century. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in Geneva in
1712. Abandoned by his father at the age of ten he tried his hand as an
engraver's apprentice before he left the city in 1728. From then on he
was to wander Europe seeking an elusive happiness. At Turin he became a
Catholic convert; and as a footman, seminarist, music teacher or tutor
visited many parts of Switzerland and France. In 1732 he settled for
eight years at Chamb ry or Les Charmettes, the country house of Madame
de Warens, remembered by Rousseau as an idyllic place in the
Confessions. In 1741 he set out for Paris where he met Diderot who
commissioned him to write the musical articles for the Encyclop die. In
the meantime he fathered five children by Th r se Levasseur, a servant
girl, and abandoned them to a foundling home. The 1750s witnessed a
breach with Voltaire and Diderot and his writing struck a new note of
defiant independence. In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts and
the Discours sur l'origine de l'in galit he showed how the growth of
civilization corrupted natural goodness and increased inequality between
men. In 1758 he attacked his former friends, the Encyclopaedists, in the
Lettre d'Alembert sur les spectacles which pilloried cultured society.
In 1757 he moved to Montmorency and these five years were the most
fruitful of his life. His remarkable novel
La nouvelle H loise
(1761), met with immediate and enormous success. In this and in mile,
which followed a year later, Rousseau invoked the inviolability of
personal ideals against the power of the state and the pressures of
society. The crowning achievement of his political philosophy was The
Social Contract
, published in 1762. That same year he wrote an attack on revealed
religion, the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. He was driven from
Switzerland and fled to England where he only succeeded in making an
enemy of Hume and returned to his continental peregrinations. In 1770
Rousseau completed his Confessions. His last years were spent largely in
France where he died in 1778.
