Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology ( 1967 ), is the statement that " there is nothing outside the text " ( il n ' y a pas de hors-texte ),.

Rousseau appears to take a cynical view of civil society, where man has strayed from his " natural state " of isolation and consequent freedom to satisfy his individual needs and desires.

Should Rousseau have been able to leave room in his social theory for the advent of television, atomic energy, and IBM machines??

`` If they are here, then surely I have the right to be here '', Rousseau said.

Moreover, Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up.

Contrary to what his many detractors have claimed, Rousseau never suggests that humans in the state of nature act morally ; in fact, terms such as " justice " or " wickedness " are inapplicable to prepolitical society as Rousseau understands it.

In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity.

At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy.

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.

Rousseau ’ s philosophy of education is not concerned with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather with developing the pupil ’ s character and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which he will have to live.

Feminists, beginning in the late 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 have criticized Rousseau for his confinement of women to the domestic sphere — unless women were domesticated and constrained by modesty and shame, he feared " men would be tyrannized by women ... For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses ... men would finally be their victims ...." His contemporaries saw it differently because Rousseau thought that mothers should breastfeed their children.

Good or bad, the theories of educators such as Rousseau's near contemporaries Pestalozzi, Mme de Genlis, and later, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey, which have directly influenced modern educational practices do have significant points in common with those of Rousseau.

... Rousseau was considered to have advocated just the sort of invasive tampering with human nature which the totalitarian regimes of mid-century had tried to instantiate.

" But Maloy adds that " The totalitarian thesis in Rousseau studies has, by now, been discredited as an attribution of real historical influence .” Arthur Melzer, however, while conceding that Rousseau would not have approved of modern nationalism, observes that his theories do contain the " seeds of nationalism ", insofar as they set forth the " politics of identification ", which are rooted in sympathetic emotion.

In 2007 an anonymous group called The Meritocracy Party published its first manifesto, to which they have now added more than two million words on the subject ( discussing Hegel, Rousseau, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and various other philosophers, scientists, reformers and revolutionaries ).

And the chief cause of the latter process Rousseau, following Hobbes and Mandeville, found, as we have seen, in that unique passion of the self-conscious animal – pride, self esteem, le besoin de se mettre au dessus des autres need to put oneself above others ".

Alternatively, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, have argued that we gain civil rights in return for accepting the obligation to respect and defend the rights of others, giving up some freedoms to do so.

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.

A friendship with Rousseau, which lasted in some measure to the end, may have been due in the first instance to the fact that Rousseau had been domestic tutor in the family of Condillac's elder brother, Jean Bonnot, known as Monsieur de Mably, at Lyon.

In 1748 he accompanied August Heinrich, Count Friesen, to Paris as secretary, and he is said by Rousseau to have acted for some time as reader to Frederick, the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha.

Many of the most important figures in classical saxophone history have been Mule's disciples, including Frederick Hemke, Eugene Rousseau, Daniel Deffayet ( who succeeded Mule at the Paris Conservatoire in 1968 ) and Claude Delangle ( who succeeded Deffayet in 1988 ).

Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling and pursue instead an “ education direct from nature .” Ampère ’ s father actualized this ideal by allowing his son to educate himself within the walls of his well-stocked library.

In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune.

Rousseau believed that the savage stage was not the first stage of human development, but the third stage.

Grotius posited that individual human beings had natural rights ; Hobbes asserted that men consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government ( whether monarchial or parliamentary ); Pufendorf disputed Hobbes's equation of a state of nature with war ; Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable, and that the rule of God therefore superseded government authority ; and Rousseau believed that democracy ( self-rule ) was the best way of ensuring the general welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law.

Rousseau believed that liberty was possible only where there was direct rule by the people as a whole in lawmaking, where popular sovereignty was indivisible and inalienable.

In this sense, the law is a civilizing force, and therefore Rousseau believed that the laws that govern a people helped to mold their character.

As typically interpreted, Rousseau defined " civil religion " as a group of religious beliefs he believed to be universal, and which he believed governments had a right to uphold and maintain: belief in a deity ; belief in an afterlife in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished ; and belief in religious tolerance.

Some interpret the Social Contract to suggest that Rousseau believed that liberty was the power of individual citizens to act in the government to bring about changes ; this is essentially the power for self-governance and democracy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following the earthquake, whose severity he believed was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city.

Rousseau believed that at this phase education should be derived less from books and more from their interactions with the world, with an emphasis on developing the senses, and the ability to draw inferences from them.

Rousseau believed it necessary that the child must be taught a manual skill appropriate to his gender and age, and suitable to his inclinations, by worthy role models.

Rousseau, through the priest, leads his readers through an argument with only one concluding belief: “ natural religion .” Even more importantly, after this brief excursion into religious education, religion does not play any role in Emile ’ s life ; religion, however important to Rousseau ( Rousseau is believed to have created the Savoyard Vicar by combining the traits of two Savoyard priests whom he had known in his childhood: Abbé Gaime from Turin and Abbé Gâtier from Annecy ), is insignificant in Emile ’ s education and socialization.

Thus, The Government of Poland provides perhaps our best perspective on how Rousseau believed his overarching principles could be applied to realistic situations.

In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a lettre de cachet for opinions in his " Lettre sur les aveugles ," that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection.

Gluck admired Rousseau as " a pioneer of the expressive natural style " in music.

Rousseau wrote that morality was not a societal construct, but rather " natural " in the sense of " innate ," an outgrowth from man's instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise the emotions of compassion or empathy.

According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free.

The hypothetical boy, Émile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor.

Today we would call this the disciplinary method of " natural consequences " since, like modern psychologists, Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment.

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men ( 1754 ), Rousseau maintained that man in a State of Nature had been a solitary, ape-like creature, who was not méchant ( bad ), as Hobbes had maintained, but ( like some other animals ) had an " innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer " ( and this natural sympathy constituted the Natural Man's one-and-only natural virtue ).

Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes ( 1651 ), Samuel Pufendorf ( 1673 ), John Locke ( 1689 ), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( 1762 ) are among the most prominent of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theorists of social contract and natural rights.

According to other social contract theorists, citizens can withdraw their obligation to obey or change the leadership, through elections or other means including, when necessary, violence, when the government fails to secure their natural rights ( Locke ) or satisfy the best interest of society ( called the " general will " in Rousseau, who is more concerned with forming new governments than in overthrowing old ones ).

Rousseau is notable as the philosopher who first proposed, in his second Discourse, that reason ( along with political life ) is not natural to mankind, and not even good for mankind.

To discover what can really be said about what is natural to mankind, and what, other than reason and civil society, " best suits his constitution ", Rousseau saw " two principles prior to reason " in human nature, one is an intense interest in our own well-being, and the other is a natural repugnance of seeing any sentient being, especially one like ourselves, perish and suffer.

A second phase of modernist political thinking begins with Rousseau, who questioned the natural rationality and sociality of humanity and proposed that human nature was much more malleable than had been previously thought.

On the other hand, Costanzo Preve ( 1990 ) has assigned four " masters " to Marx: Epicurus ( to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus, 1841 ) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty ; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy ; Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of property is labour ; and finally Hegel.

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were the most influential thinkers of this school, all postulating that individuals choose to enter into a social contract with one another, thus voluntarily giving up some of their natural freedom in return for protection from dangers derived from the freedom of others.

In his championship of the natural liberty and equality of all men, Antiphon anticipates the natural rights doctrine of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the Declaration of Independence.

Conceiving a strong attachment for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she furnished for him in 1756 in the valley of Montmorency a cottage which she named the Hermitage, and in this retreat he found for a time the quiet and natural rural pleasures he praised so highly.

Rousseau discusses two types of inequality, natural or physical and ethical or political.

Rousseau's natural man significantly differs from, and is a response to, that of Hobbes ; Rousseau explicitly points this out at various points throughout his work.