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 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.

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 the phrase " noble savage " does not occur in any of Rousseau's writings.

The romantic temperament of the young Irishman found congenial soil in the wild surroundings of unexplored Canadian forests, and his enthusiasm for a life closer to nature may have been fortified by study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings, for which at a later period Lord Edward expressed his admiration.

At the age of five, he was enrolled in the Schnepfenthal Salzmann School, a school focused on the study of nature ( apparently influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on children's education ).

Rousseau's thesis has a basis in the prior writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, whom Rousseau called a " bon citoyen et honnête homme " and who alongside Montesquieu was one of Rousseau's sources for republican philosophy.

Sherman insisted that cavalry could not successfully break up hostile railways, yet Garrard's Covington raid and Rousseau's Opelika raid cut two-thirds of the rail lines he had to break and Sherman lived in mortal fear of what Forrest might do to his communications.

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.

In an irony of fate, Rousseau's later injunction to women to breastfeed their own babies ( as had previously been recommended by the French natural scientist Buffon ), probably saved the lives of thousands of infants.

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.

He recalled Rousseau's visit to Britain in 1766, saying: " I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day and he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity ".

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.

She was fascinated by Rousseau's " back to nature " philosophy, as well as the culture of the Incas of Peru and their worship of the sun, about which she had books in her library.

Rousseau then claimed the two had stolen the credit for the words and music he had contributed, though musicologists have been able to identify almost nothing of the piece as Rousseau's work.

Soane was very much influenced by the ideas that belonged to the enlightenment, and had read Voltaire's & Jean-Jacques Rousseau's works.

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.

Scholars have also tried to analyze the influence this liaison might have had on the composition of the novel and the evolution of Rousseau's ideas.

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.

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.

Wordsworth subscribed to Rousseau's belief that humanity was essentially good but was corrupted by the influence of society.

* Rousseau's religious ideas with reference to the religious ideas prominent in the revolution and to their influence on Robespierre and Saint Just, doctoral thesis by Elma Gillespie Martin ( 1918, Cornell University )

Historians find little trace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influence in America.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

" 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.

" A Possible Explanation of Rousseau's General Will ", " The American Political Science Review.

Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with Diderot.

His father, Jacques-François Deluc, was the author of some publications in refutation of Mandeville and other rationalistic writers, which are best known through Rousseau's humorous account of his ennui in reading them ; and he gave his son an excellent education, chiefly in mathematics and natural science.

As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile ( 1762 ) treatise on education ( or the " art of training men "), the Aufklärung conceived the human species as perfectible: human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy.

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 '.

In January 1757, her coachman took a wrong turn, and her carriage got stuck in the mud ; she got out and continued through the mire on foot, finally seeking shelter in Rousseau's modest dwelling.