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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (UK: / ˈ r uː s oʊ /, US: / r uː ˈ s oʊ /; [1] [2] French: [ʒɑ̃ʒak ʁuso]; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher (), writer, and composer.. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational ...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius is a 2005 biography by Leo Damrosch, published by Houghton Mifflin.The book depicts the life of eighteenth-century philosopher, writer, composer, and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, documenting his unorthodox rise from obscure beginnings to show how the orphaned and unschooled Rousseau rose from meandering journeyman to become one of the ...
In contrast to enlightened self-interest is simple greed, or the concept of "unenlightened self-interest", in which it is argued that when most or all persons act according to their own myopic selfishness, the group suffers loss as a result of conflict, decreased efficiency and productivity because of lack of cooperation, and the increased expense each individual pays for the protection of ...
In his Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau explicitly credits Diderot's Encyclopédie article "Droit Naturel" as the source of "the luminous concept" of the general will, of which he maintains his own thoughts are simply a development. Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau's innovation was to use the term in a secular rather than theological ...
Coffeehouses were essential to the Enlightenment, for they were centers of free-thinking and self-discovery. Although many coffeehouse patrons were scholars, many were not. Coffeehouses attracted a diverse set of people, including the educated wealthy and bourgeois as well as the lower classes.
Theologian and linguist. Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self-rule. Thomas Hobbes: 1588–1679: English: Philosopher who wrote Leviathan, a key text in political philosophy.
In his work Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, Rousseau used a fictional Frenchman as a literary device to lay out his intent in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and his other systematic works. The character explains that Rousseau was showing the "great principle that nature made man happy and good, but that society depraves him and makes ...
For Rousseau, collective self-rule would increase freedom if the people to whom laws applied were also the ones prescribing them. [ 2 ] : 79 Rousseau, who objected to extreme wealth inequality, also argued that equality is essential for the attainment of liberty, and concluded that legislation ought to preserve equality.