Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ROUSSEAU

Of all French philosophers of the eighteenth century the most influential was Jean Jacques Rousseau, though his influence was greater outside philosophical circles than among professional philosophers. Like St Augustine, he wrote a book of autobiographical Confessions; his confessions are more vivid and more detailed than the Saint's, and contain more sins, less philosophy, and no prayers. He was born in Geneva, he tells us, and brought up as a Calvinist; at sixteen, a runaway apprentice, he became a Catholic in Turin. In 1731 he was befriended by the Baronne de Warens, with whom he lived for nine years. His first job was as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743; having quarrelled with him he went to Paris and met Voltaire and Diderot. In 1745 he began a lifelong relationship with a servant girl, and had by her five children whom he dumped, one after the other, in a foundling hospital. He achieved fame in 1750 by publishing a prize-winning essay in which he argued, to the horror of the Encyclopaedists, that the arts and sciences had a baneful effect on mankind. This was followed up, four years later, by a ‘Discourse on Inequality', which argued that man was naturally good, and corrupted by institutions. The two works held up the ideal of the ‘noble savage' whose simple goodness put civilized man to shame.