Frontispiece and title page of an edition of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality ( 1754 ), published in 1755 in Holland.

" The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's ' Discourse on Inequality '".

" Lovejoy concludes that Rousseau's doctrine, as expressed in his Discourse on Inequality: declares that there is a dual process going on through history ; on the one hand, an indefinte progress in all those powers and achievements which express merely the potency of man's intellect ; on the other hand, an increasing estrangement of men from one another, an intensification of ill-will and mutual fear, cuminating in a monstrous epoch of universal conflict and mutual destruction fourth stage in which we now find ourselves.

This argument has remained a central argument in all political, ethical and moral thinking since then, and has become especially controversial since firstly Rousseau's Second Discourse, and secondly, the Theory of Evolution.

Frontispiece and title page of an edition of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality ( 1754 ), published by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 in Holland.

However Rousseau's proclamation of man's free will is undermined by his belief that man is " a being that always acts in accordance with certain and invariable principles ", and indeed contradicts the basic premise of the Discourse itself: that we can logically infer what actions man must have taken over the course of his development.

Rousseau's autobiographical writings — his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker — exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age.

Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of humble peasant background ( plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had met as a teenager ) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in itself a daring innovation for the time.

His tomb, in the shape of a rustic temple, on which, in bas relief an arm reaches out, bearing the torch of liberty, evokes Rousseau's deep love of nature and of classical antiquity.

In Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride.

The kind of republican government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva was a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau's principles.

Much subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free: The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy.

This emphasis on equality is Rousseau's most important and consequential legacy, causing him to be both reviled and applauded:

Thus the ceremony held at the site of the demolished Bastille, organized by the foremost artistic director of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, in August 1793 to mark the inauguration of the new republican constitution, an event coming shortly after the final abolition of all forms of feudal privilege, featured a cantata based on Rousseau's democratic pantheistic deism as expounded in the celebrated " Profession de foi d ' un vicaire savoyard " in Book Four of Émile.

Burke's " Letter to a Member of the National Assembly ", published in February 1791, was a diatribe against Rousseau, whom he considered the paramount influence on the French Revolution ( his ad hominem attack did not really engage with Rousseau's political writings ).

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.

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.

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

Common also were attacks by defenders of social hierarchy on Rousseau's " romantic " belief in equality.

For Stephen T. Engel, on the other hand, Rousseau's nationalism anticipated modern theories of " imagined communities " that transcend social and religious divisions within states.

It was Rousseau's fellow philosophe, Voltaire, objecting to Rousseau's egalitarianism, who charged him with primitivism and accused him of wanting to make people go back and walk on all fours.

Rousseau's conception of alpine purity was later emphasized with the publication of Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen that described the mountains as an area of mythical purity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father Isaac was not in the city at this time, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it.

Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, was a watchmaker who, notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music.

In listening to barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was ... — Confessions Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly.

Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness and landlady Madame d ' Epinay, whom he treated rather highhandedly.

Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was published in 1761 to immense success.

Rousseau's letter to Hume, in which he articulates the perceived misconduct, sparked an exchange which was published in Paris and received with great interest at the time.

One of Rousseau's last pieces of writing was a critical yet enthusiastic analysis of Gluck's opera Alceste.

In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

France could not meet Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big.

Such was not Rousseau's meaning.

At the time, however, Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded by the Savoyard vicar in Émile, was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris.

Rousseau's idea of the volonté générale (" general will ") was not original with him but rather belonged to a well-established technical vocabulary of juridical and theological writings in use at the time.

On similar grounds, one of Rousseau's strongest critics during the second half of the 20th century was political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

An early critic of social contract theory was Rousseau's friend, the philosopher David Hume, who in 1742 published an essay " Of Civil Liberty ", in whose second part, entitled, " Of the Original Contract ", he stressed that the concept of a " social contract " was a convenient fiction:

In France the first labour laws were Waldeck Rousseau's laws passed in 1884.

It originally appeared in Book VI of the first part ( finished in 1767, published in 1782 ) of Rousseau's putative autobiographical work, Les Confessions.

In France, the first labour laws were Waldeck Rousseau's laws passed in 1884.

Under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's doctrine of a return to nature, this book was at first intended to be a short narrative of the collapse of the life of a young artist.

The first full melodrama was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Pygmalion, the text of which was written in 1762 but was first staged in Lyon in 1770.

As a student, he published his first two works, Observations sur Émile ( on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile: Or, On Education ) in 1763 and Des Préjugés in 1764.

According to Meyer Reinhold, the name " Galatea " was first given wide circulation in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's scène lyrique of 1762, Pygmalion.

Covering the first fifty-three years of Rousseau's life, up to 1765, it was completed in 1769, but not published until 1782, four years after Rousseau's death, even though Rousseau did read excerpts of his manuscript publicly at various salons and other meeting places.

Rousseau's work is notable as one of the first major autobiographies.