This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage, which Arthur Lovejoy ' conclusively showed misrepresents Rousseau's thought.

It is a form of social contract, deduced from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a general will.

While Rousseau's notion of the progressive moral degeneration of mankind from the moment civil society established itself diverges markedly from Spinoza's claim that human nature is always and everywhere the same ... for both philosophers the pristine equality of the state of nature is our ultimate goal and criterion ... in shaping the " common good ", volonté générale, or Spinoza's mens una, which alone can ensure stability and political salvation.

In Ritter's opinion, the origins of National Socialism went back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the volonté générale ( general will ) and the Jacobins.

The legend at the bottom says " Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays " (" love your country "), and shows Rousseau's father gesturing towards the window.

St-Preux, a neo-romantic hero, will come back ( he who wanted to die ) after " having much suffered, and having seen even more suffering ..." This tale of thwarted love (" Héloïse " refers to the history of Héloïse and Abélard ) was a best-seller at the time, Rousseau's book so scrambled after that it was rented by the hour in the book-shops.

He recalled especially Rousseau's statue at the Panthéon (" I almost knelt before it ... he whom Tolstoy described as the conscience of the 18th century "), the River Seine and the tollings of the Notre Dame.

Another successful comic opera, Melnik – koldun, obmanshchik i svat (" The Miller who was a Wizard, a Cheat and a Match-maker "', text by Alexander Ablesimov, Moscow, 1779 ), on a subject resembling Rousseau's Devin, is attributed to Mikhail Sokolovsky.

The two fundamental principles of Rousseau's natural man are his natural, non-destructive love of self ( amour de soi meme ), and pity / compassion for the suffering of others (" another principle which has escaped Hobbes ").

Jean-Jacques Rousseau would argue, however, that his concept of " general will " in the " social contract " is not the simple collection of individual wills and precisely furthers the interests of the individual ( the constraint of law itself would be beneficial for the individual, as the lack of respect for the law necessarily entails, in Rousseau's eyes, a form of ignorance and submission to one's passions instead of the preferred autonomy of reason ).

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.

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.

Using Rousseau's thought as an example, Arendt identified the notion of sovereignty with that of the general will.

Rousseau's collectivism is most evident in his development of the " luminous conception " ( which he credited to Diderot ) of the general will.

Opposed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of social contract, Barrès considered the ' Nation ' ( which he used to replace the ' People ') as already historically founded: it did not need a " general will " to establish itself, thus also contrasting with Ernest Renan's definition of the Nation.

In Britain, many readers who were skeptical of French philosophy in general, welcomed her books because they presented many of Rousseau's methods while at the same time attacking his principles.

Rousseau's theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one's community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the ' general will '.

These two philosophers, he held, had rescued Jean-Jacques Rousseau's confused doctrine of the general will and placed it on a rationally-defensible footing.

The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy.

Among Rousseau's definitions of law, the textually closest variant can be found in a passage of the Lettres écrites de la montagne summarizing the argument of Du contrat social, in which law is defined as " a public and solemn declaration of the general will on an object of common interest.

Hegel argued that, because it lacked any grounding in an objective ideal of reason, Rousseau's account of the general will led ineluctably to the Terror.

In 1952 Jacob Talmon characterized Rousseau's " general will " as leading to a Totalitarian Democracy because, Talmon argued, the state subjected its citizens to the supposedly infallible will of the tyranny of the majority.

:" With some wavering, he extended Rousseau's doctrine of the identity of species of man and the chimp into the hypothesis of common descent of all the anthropoids, and suggested by implication a general law of evolution.

Rousseau's striking phrase that man must " be forced to be free " should be understood this way: since the indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, then if an individual lapses back into his ordinary egoism and disobeys the leadership, he will be forced to listen to what they decided as a member of the collectivity ( i. e. as citizens ).

This concept developed from Rousseau's considerations on the social contract theory of Hobbes, and describes the shared will of a whole citizenry, whose agreement is understood to exist in discussions about the legitimacy of governments and laws.

As commented in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract, " Citizenship is the expression of a sublime reciprocity between individual and General will " ( Schama ; 1989 ; 354 ).

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 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.

Rousseau's 1750 " Discourse on the Arts and Sciences " was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

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

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.

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: