Life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva the 28th June 1712, and died the 2nd July 1778 in Ermenonville, France. Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist whose treatises and novels inspired the leaders of the French Revolution and the Romantic generation.
His ideas were about political and ethical thinking with which he had a profound impact on people´s way of life.
Formative Years
Rousseau’s mother died in childbirth, and he was grown up by his father. His father was a watchmaker and in the time he got some troubles with the civil authorities he had to move and leave Geneva , to avoid imprisonment. Rousseau Rousseau, the son, then lived for six years as a poor relation in his mother’s family, patronized and humiliated, until he, too, at the age of 16, fled from Geneva. He found there a benefactor, the baroness de Warens who host tim as a refugee in her home and employed him as her steward. She also provided him an education transforming Rousseau into a philosopher, musician and a man of letters. In his final years he was forced to leave his house due to popular contestations. His friend David Hume offered him a help hosting him in his house. This deal lasted really short due to different political views. At that point Rousseau decided to go back to France under the name of Jean-Joseph Renou. His final days were quite complicated because of some neurological issues that later on will cause his death. Thought. The necessity of freedom In his work, Rousseau addresses freedom more than any other problem of political philosophy and aims to explain how man in the state of nature is blessed with an enviable total freedom. …show more content…
For Rousseau man is a slave to his own needs and is responsible for all his societal ills , from dominations of others to poor self-esteem and depression.
Rousseau also believed that good government must have the freedom of all its citizens as its most fundamental objective. The Social Contract in particular is Rousseau’s attempt to imagine the form of government that best affirms the individual freedom of all its citizens, with certain constraints inherent to a complex, modern, civil society. Rousseau acknowledged that as long as property and laws exist, people can never be as entirely free in modern society as they are in the state of nature, a point later echoed by Marx and many other Communist and anarchist social philosophers. Nonetheless, Rousseau strongly believed in the existence of certain principles of government that, if enacted, can afford the members of society a level of freedom that at least approximates the freedom enjoyed in the state of nature. In The Social Contract and his other works of political philosophy, Rousseau is devoted to outlining these principles and how they may be given expression in a functional modern state. DEFINING THE NATURAL AND THE STATE OF NATURE For Rousseau to succeed in determining which societal institutions and structures contradict man’s natural goodness and freedom, he must first define the ”natural”. Rousseau strips away all the ideas that centuries of development have imposed on the true nature of man and concludes that many of the ideas we take for granted, such as property, law, and moral inequality, actually have no basis in nature. As Rousseau discusses in the Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract, the state of nature
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva the 28th June 1712, and died the 2nd July 1778 in Ermenonville, France. Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist whose treatises and novels inspired the leaders of the French Revolution and the Romantic generation.
His ideas were about political and ethical thinking with which he had a profound impact on people´s way of life.
Formative Years
Rousseau’s mother died in childbirth, and he was grown up by his father. His father was a watchmaker and in the time he got some troubles with the civil authorities he had to move and leave Geneva , to avoid imprisonment. Rousseau Rousseau, the son, then lived for six years as a poor relation in his mother’s family, patronized and humiliated, until he, too, at the age of 16, fled from Geneva. He found there a benefactor, the baroness de Warens who host tim as a refugee in her home and employed him as her steward. She also provided him an education transforming Rousseau into a philosopher, musician and a man of letters. In his final years he was forced to leave his house due to popular contestations. His friend David Hume offered him a help hosting him in his house. This deal lasted really short due to different political views. At that point Rousseau decided to go back to France under the name of Jean-Joseph Renou. His final days were quite complicated because of some neurological issues that later on will cause his death. Thought. The necessity of freedom In his work, Rousseau addresses freedom more than any other problem of political philosophy and aims to explain how man in the state of nature is blessed with an enviable total freedom. …show more content…
For Rousseau man is a slave to his own needs and is responsible for all his societal ills , from dominations of others to poor self-esteem and depression.
Rousseau also believed that good government must have the freedom of all its citizens as its most fundamental objective. The Social Contract in particular is Rousseau’s attempt to imagine the form of government that best affirms the individual freedom of all its citizens, with certain constraints inherent to a complex, modern, civil society. Rousseau acknowledged that as long as property and laws exist, people can never be as entirely free in modern society as they are in the state of nature, a point later echoed by Marx and many other Communist and anarchist social philosophers. Nonetheless, Rousseau strongly believed in the existence of certain principles of government that, if enacted, can afford the members of society a level of freedom that at least approximates the freedom enjoyed in the state of nature. In The Social Contract and his other works of political philosophy, Rousseau is devoted to outlining these principles and how they may be given expression in a functional modern state. DEFINING THE NATURAL AND THE STATE OF NATURE For Rousseau to succeed in determining which societal institutions and structures contradict man’s natural goodness and freedom, he must first define the ”natural”. Rousseau strips away all the ideas that centuries of development have imposed on the true nature of man and concludes that many of the ideas we take for granted, such as property, law, and moral inequality, actually have no basis in nature. As Rousseau discusses in the Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract, the state of nature