PhilosophersJean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man is born good; society corrupts him.
Enlightenment · Social contract1712 – 1778 SwitzerlandPolitical thinkerCritic of civilisationTheorist of educationBeliever without a Church
L’homme est né libre, & par-tout il est dans les fers
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Checked word for word
Ceci est à moi
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, said "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
Checked word for word
Conscience ! conscience ! instinct divin
Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct! Spoken by the Savoyard vicar, a character in Emile.
Checked word for word
on le forcera d’être libre
He will be forced to be free. Social Contract, I, 7: the most disputed sentence of the book.
Checked word for word
Misconceptions
Nuanced
For Rousseau, people are good.
He says the opposite about people as they are: "men are wicked". What is good is human nature. The changes brought by life in society depraved it.
False
Rousseau wanted us to go back to living in the wild.
He raises the question himself ("return to the forests to live among beasts?") in order to reject it. People like him, who can no longer do without laws, must respect the bonds of society and try to make it just.
False
The social contract and the state of nature are events that happened in history.
Rousseau states that the clauses of the pact "have perhaps never been formally set forth": it is a test of whether a society is legitimate. And he presents the state of nature as hypothetical reasoning, not as history.