(1712-1778)

No history of psychology is complete without a look at Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He has influenced education to the present day, philosophy (Kant, Schopenhauer...), political theory (the French Revolution, Karl Marx...), and he inspired the Romantic Movement in Philosophy, which in turn influenced all these things, and psychology, once again.

Plus, he’s one of the most colorful characters we have and, as an added bonus, he has left a particularly revealing autobiography in The Confessions.

He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1712 to the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau and his wife Suzanne Bernard Rousseau. Athough a Calvinist, Isaac was also a bit unstable, and left his wife and first son, returned to father Jean-Jacques, then left again. His mother died one week after Jean-Jacques was born, and he was raised by an aunt and uncle.

They sent him off to boarding school in the country where, he says, he learned “all the insignificant trash that has obtained the name of education.” The experience did, however, serve as the start of his love-affair with rural life.

At twelve years old, he returned to his aunt and uncle.  There apprenticed to a watchmaker, he developed two other personal qualities:  The constant beatings from his master (as well as at school) led him to lying and idleness;  and adolescence led him to develop a rather bizarre romantic streak.  He would spend much of his life falling in love.

At sixteen, he ran away from home with no money nor possessions.  A priest led him to baroness Mme de Warens, a 29 year old beauty who apparently had a soft spot for losers and potential converts.  Her influence led him to convert to Catholicism, though he was not yet ready to give up his exhibitionism nor his desire to be spanked by lovely ladies.  He entered a seminary in 1729, but was promptly dismissed.  He eventually developed an on-again, off-again physical relationship with the lovely Mme Warens.

In the meantime, he walked all over the countryside, often long distances.  He loved the woods, mountains, and nature itself.  He served as an occasional tutor and music teacher, but spent much of his time reading Enlightenment authors.  Voltaire’s work turned him to a Nature worship quite congenial to his personality.

In 1742, when he was 30 years old, he left for Paris.  He quickly befriended the political writer Diderot , who managed to help him get a job as a secretary at the French Embassy in Venice.  He was dismissed because of his insolent nature.

In 1746 he met and fell in love with Therese Levasseur, a simple-minded laundress and seamstress.  They together had four children, all of whom were send to orphanages.  Keep in mind that that was a common response to poverty in those days (i.e. from the fall of Rome to World War II!).  He did feel considerable remorse about it later, but admitted that he would have made a really lousy father!  No one doubts him on that.

He worked as a secretary to various aristocrats and spent quite some time composing music.  He even rewrote an operetta by Voltaire and wrote to him.  A literary contest with a monetary prize caught his attention and, in 1750, he won with Discours sur les arts et les sciences -- a powerful attack on civilization.

This was the first time we see his ideas about the natural goodness of man.  And although we think of him as an Enlightenment thinker, this thesis was actually anti-Enlightenment, anti-philosophy, anti-reason, anti-Voltaire, and even anti-printing press!  The good life, he was saying, is the simple life of the peasants.  This conception of “back to nature” involved, of course, a romanticized notion of nature, and stands in stark contrast to the nature of jungles and deserts!

1752 was another active year.  He wrote his comedy Narcisse.  His operetta Le devin du village was successfully presented to the King.  Unfortunately, his illness -- he suffered from a variety of painful and humiliating bladder problems -- kept him from meeting the King, and he forfeited a pension.

In 1753, another competition was announced.  Rousseau’s entry, Discourse sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, won and was published two years later.

In this piece, he accepted biological inequalities, but argued that there were no natural bases for any other inequalities -- economic, political, social, or moral!  These, he said, were basically due to the existence of private property and the need to defend it with force.  Man is good, he argued, but society, which is little more than the reification of greed, corrupts us all.

He admits that it is no longer possible for us to leave civilized society now.  It has, in fact, become a part of our nature!  The best we can do is to lead simpler lives with fewer luxuries with the simple morality of the gospels to guide us.

In his article on economics for the Encyclopedia, he suggest that it would help if we had a graduated income tax, a tax on luxuries (and none on necessities), and national free public education.

In 1756, he moved with Therese and her elderly mother into “the Hermitage,” a cottage lent to him by Mme d’Épinay.  There he wrote a novel (or “romance”) called Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise, referring to the Heloise of Heloise and Abelard fame.  It became perhaps the most famous novel of the 1700s.

On the other side, he alienated his friends with unpleasant letters and his rudeness towards his benefactress Mme D’Epinay.  Even his oldest friend, Diderot, called him mad.  In a huff, he left the Hermitage.

In 1762, Rousseau published both Émile and The Social Contract.  The first line of The Social Contract is the most famous:  “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.”  The purpose of the rest of the book was to describe a society that would instead preserve that freedom.

“The social contract” is an admittedly mythological contract among individuals to surrender some of their freedoms to ensure a community which respects the individual and, thereby, preserves as much freedom as possible.  This idea, combined with Locke’s thoughts on government, were to inspire the founding fathers of the new United States.

It should be noted, though, that at the end of the book, Rousseau does prescribe death as the punishment for anyone who, by their actions, shows that they do not hold the common values of the community!  The French Revolution would show more clearly than the American what a double-edged sword a philosophy such as Rousseau’s can be!

Émile was far more sedate.  It is a treatise on child-rearing, from the man who sent his four children to orphanages!  Turns out, though, he had some pretty good advice.

He condemned all forms of education that use force.  Instead, he promoted education that nurtured the natural unfolding of a child’s potentials.  This in a time when it was thought that if you didn’t beat children regularly with a good sized stick, they would grow up spoiled!  And Nature, he said, is to be the child’s primary teacher, with freedom to explore the major teaching method.

Basically, he says, the child learns by gradual adaptation to necessities, and by imitation of those around him.  Education should be primarily moral until the child is twelve, when intellectual education begins.  Religious education should be held off until the child is 18.  This way, the child can develop reasonable religious beliefs, rather than unthinking acceptance of mythology and miracles.

The book is beautifully written, but many would say almost naively idealistic.  It would be a great influence in Europe and later in the United States.  Maria Montessori in Italy, for example, based many of her ideas on Rousseau, as did John Dewey in the US.  What we now call progressive education and learning by doing come basically from Émile!

The great philosophers of his time laughed at him -- but the clergy was outraged!  Rousseau’s friends warned him and encouraged him to flee.  In 1762, the French parlement ordered all copies of Emile confiscated and burned.  Rousseau fled to Switzerland, only to have both his books burned in Calvinist Geneva.

He begged Frederick the Great for asylum in Neuchâtel.  There he lived, more eccentric than ever.  And yet he was the idol of women everywhere, and his publishers begged him for more.  He gave them more, primarily in the form of essays or letters to his critics.

But the local ministers in Neuchâtel were also upset about his writings, and a local sermon led to an attack on Rousseau’s house.  He and Therese moved again, to a lone cottage on a tiny island in a lake in Switzerland.  But he was again ordered to leave, which he did, first to Strasbourg, then to England at the invitation of David Hume in 1766.

At first in London he was the talk of the town, and everyone wanted to meet him.  But he tired of this quickly and asked Hume to find him a place in the country.  There, Rousseau, Therese, and their dog Sultan put quite a strain on their hosts’ hospitality.

Rousseau began to read critical articles in the British press.  Already rather paranoid, he responded to them as if there were a conspiracy against him, and even accused Hume of being a part of it.  He and Therese “escaped” from England back to France.

Although technically still in danger of arrest in France, he nevertheless enjoyed the reception his fans gave him.  But fearing for his life, he fled into the countryside to wander anonymously.  In 1768, he finally married his Therese.

She begged him to go back to Paris, so they did (under pseudonyms).  There he copied music for a living, and also finally finished, in 1770, his autobiography.

He continued to write, some of his most beautiful work as well as some of his most paranoid, until 1778.  He had moved into a cottage offered by the Marquis de Girardin, where he happily studied the local flora, when he suffered a stroke.  Therese tried to move him onto his bed, but he fell again and cut his head.  By the time the Marquis got to him, he was dead.

He was buried on the estate, and his grave become a pilgrimage site.  He was later moved to the Pantheon in Paris, and laid to rest not far from, of all people, Voltaire.