Explainer: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is profoundly contemporary

• No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.
• But like any major thinker, there are risks in summaries – some of which give us clues about Rousseau himself.
• Although he is known as a social and political philosopher, Rousseau’s creative output does not resemble that of a contemporary “theorist”.
• These are now conventional tropes, but they were only emerging at the time Rousseau was writing.

Natural or artificial

• Rousseau had shot to fame a decade earlier, after winning an essay competition advertised in the literary magazine Mercure de France.
• Where much philosophical discussion had been centred around the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”, Rousseau opposed the natural to the artificial.
• He argued that what we ordinarily think of as civilisational progress creates – and then aims to satisfy – new and artificial vices, serving our vanity and not our natural needs.
• In fact, he proposed there were many good reasons to think they were greater in both.
• Read more:
  Guide to the Classics: Voltaire’s Candide — a darkly satirical tale of human folly in times of crisis

Society and inequality

• Developing these ideas, in 1754, Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.
• In it, he attempted a thought experiment which imagined what humans may have been like in a “pre-civilisational” state.
• Rousseau was aware that this act of imagination was speculative and he could not be sure of its results.
• He held that inequality was artificial.

Education and politics

• The first was the institution of a new kind of education; the second was reorienting politics towards a new moral foundation.
• In Émile, or On Education (1862), Rousseau wrote a treatise on education in the form of a bildungsroman – the first and likely the last of its kind.
• He sought to outline the conditions of a good education, which he thought should be based on lived experience and the development of individual character, not rote learning, mechanical memorisation, or even the reading of books.
• As for moral education, young people should learn about the consequences of their actions.
• Rousseau’s terminology has oriented discussions of morality, self-development and politics from the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s, the New Age movement of the 1980s, and beyond.

Deism and human nature

• According to Rousseau, we know what we know of God from Nature and Reason alone.
• In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (1776), Rousseau addresses this question directly, and in typically Rousseauian fashion:
  whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
• He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.
• whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
• He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.