Page "Jean-Jacques Rousseau" Paragraph 73

The American founders rarely cited Rousseau, but came independently to their Republicanism and enthusiastic admiration for the austere virtues described by Livy and in Plutarch's portrayals of the great men of ancient Sparta and the classical republicanism of early Rome, as did many, if not most other enlightenment figures.

Rousseau ’ s praise of Switzerland and Corsica ’ s economies of isolated and self-sufficient independent homesteads, and his endorsement of a well-regulated citizen militia, such as Switzerland ’ s, recall the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.

To Rousseau we owe the invention of the concept of a " civil religion ", one of whose key tenets is religious toleration.

Yet despite their mutual insistence on the self-evidence that " all men are created equal ", their insistence that the citizens of a republic be educated at public expense, and the evident parallel between the concepts of the " general welfare " and Rousseau's " general will ", some scholars maintain there is little to suggest that Rousseau had that much effect on Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers.

They argue that the American constitution owes as much or more to the English Liberal philosopher John Locke's emphasis on the rights of property and to Montesquieu's theories of the separation of powers.

Rousseau's writings had an indirect influence on American literature through the writings of Wordsworth and Kant, whose works were important to the New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as on such Unitarians as theologian William Ellery Channing.

American novelist James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and other novels reflect republican and egalitarian ideals present alike in Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and also in English Romantic primitivism.

Another American admirer was lexicographer Noah Webster.

The Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia sought to found a society based on the principles set forth in Rousseau's Social Contract.