Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man is born good; society corrupts him.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778, Geneva, then France) : enlightenment and social contract. Man is naturally good: comparison with others, property and inequality made him wicked and unhappy. We cannot go back, but we can found a legitimate society: a pact in which each person, by obeying the laws he gives himself together with all, remains free. On AskPhilosophy: 4 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
The Social Contract grounds the idea that sovereignty belongs to the people: the French Revolution claimed it. Emile invents modern education, starting from the child as he is. Kant read him with passion. His Confessions open modern autobiography, and his critique of progress is still a reference for political ecology.
His times
The son of a Geneva watchmaker, with no degree, he taught himself. A friend of the Enlightenment philosophes (Diderot, d'Alembert), he fell out with them and with Voltaire. In 1762 Emile was condemned and burned in Paris, then Emile and the Social Contract in Geneva: he fled from country to country and ended his life near Paris.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe firmly believes in God, while granting that reason does not prove it. His is a natural religion, without a Church or imposed dogmas.
Our ideas come from experience, but the feelings that weigh them are in us from birth. The Savoyard vicar says it most clearly.
On the great metaphysical questions, reason proves neither side. He then relies on a "proof of sentiment", which convinces him but is no demonstration for others.
Human freedom shows that the soul is spiritual: physics explains the senses, not the power to choose.
What distinguishes man from animals is less intelligence than his quality as a "free agent": he can resist instinct.
Good and evil are not conventions: all peoples share the same notions of them. But they are known by feeling (conscience), not by reason alone. He says so mainly through the Savoyard vicar.
He refuses to submit reason to any authority. But when reason wavers, the heart decides: conscience never deceives, reason often does. Both sentences are the Savoyard vicar's; in the Letter to Voltaire, in his own name, he speaks of a "proof of sentiment".
Life has a given meaning: each person has a destiny willed by God, and thirty years of life are only a moment of a longer existence if the soul is immortal.
His central thesis: man is naturally good, and the progress of society made him wicked.
Each gives himself entirely to the community and must obey the general will. But the aim is each person's liberty and equality. Some readers see in it the origin of democracy, others a danger to the individual.
An ethics of feeling: natural pity, which acts before any reflection, and conscience, which makes us love the good as soon as reason shows it to us.