Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Chief representative of the French Enlightenment; petty-bourgeois political thinker; philosopher of deism.

Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712, in Geneva, Switzerland, into a family of commoners. His father was a watchmaker. When Rousseau was 10 years old, his father lost a lawsuit and fled to Lyon, France, entrusting Rousseau to his uncle. From then on, Rousseau lived a life of poverty and vagrancy, successively working as an apprentice, a servant, a private secretary, a wandering peddler and a music scribe, experiencing firsthand the injustice and suffering of the people at the bottom of society. Rousseau did not receive any formal education and acquired a wealth of knowledge through self-study. Later, he went to Paris and met some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Condorcet, Voltaire, Montesquieu, d’Alembert and d’Holbach, and had close dealings with Diderot. He wrote some entries on music for the Encyclopédie compiled by Diderot. In 1750, Rousseau wrote Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in response to a call for essays from the Academy of Dijon. In April 1755, he published Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, which was praised by Engels as the “masterpiece of dialectic” at that time. In April 1756, Rousseau, tired of Parisian life, took refuge in the “Hermitage” not far from Paris, near Montmorency. During the following six years, Rousseau wrote The Social Contract, Emile, The New Heloise, Sensational Morality, or the Materialism of the Sage. During this period, his entry for Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Discourse on Political Economy, was issued in a single volume. Among them, The Social Contract is a work of political philosophy, Emile mainly discussed children’s education, and The New Heloise is a novel containing various aspects of Rousseau’s thought. In his later years in seclusion, Rousseau also wrote his Confessions and other works, of which Confessions a record of Rousseau’s life from his birth to the time he was forced to leave the Île de St.-Pierre in 1766, a period of more than 50 years of life experience, and repentance for the sins of the self.

Rousseau’s thought has its unique individuality. Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers of his time, who extolled science and art, reason and law, knowledge and logic, civilization and progress, Rousseau sharply opposed nature to civilization and called for a return to nature. By nature, he meant human nature that is not polluted by social environment and not governed by customs and prejudices, i.e., the innate equality, freedom, simplicity, conscience and friendliness of man. Rousseau believed that human nature was inherently good and that existing man was evil, and that if a new social environment and education suitable for the healthy development of human nature could be created for mankind, mankind would be able to realize the reversion to natural human nature at a higher stage. This dialectical thought of the negation of negation constitutes the starting point and logical clue of Rousseau’s ideological-theoretical system, on which his political philosophy, epistemology, natural religion and natural education are all constructed.

The most striking aspect in Rousseau’s thought is his political philosophy. According to Rousseau, in primitive society, man lived in a state of nature, and because there was no private property, people at that time were free and equal, with neither economic exploitation and differences in private property, nor political slavery and oppression, nor social and spiritual inequality. However, with the development of the productive forces of society, and especially with the emergence of private property, differences in private property arose, and the primitive equality was undermined, giving rise to social inequality. With the emergence of private property, in order to protect private property and individual freedom, it was necessary to conclude a contract and establish State institutions, and thus mankind established the State and the law through the conclusion of a social contract. People had entered into a social contract in order to protect their personal freedom, social equality and private property, but the reality of the contract had evolved in a way that was the opposite of what had been intended. The emergence of inequality was a step forward that brought mankind into civilization, but at the same time it was a step backward, destroying the original happy state of freedom and equality of mankind. Therefore, in the state of society, every step forward in civilization is at the same time a step deeper in social inequality: first of all, it is the conclusion of the social contract that establishes the difference between the rich and the poor in terms of private property; then it is the establishment of the State institutions of power that establishes the distinction between the strong and the weak; and lastly, it is the emergence of the tyrannical despotism that establishes the distinction between the master and the slaves. The purpose of the people in installing a tyrant and endowing him with violence was originally to protect their freedom and equality by force, but when the tyrant oppressed the people by force and force became the only pillar of the tyrant, and all the rights and duties no longer existed, the people had the right to overthrow the tyrant by force, to establish a new social contract, and to re-establish a new social equality. The new social contract should stipulate that everyone equally assigns his or her rights to the political community, abides by the contract without exception and agrees to submit to the “volonté générale” (general will), that is, the common will of the people. The State should be governed by the rule of law, and the law, as an embodiment of the “volonté générale”, should be made by the people. As a ruler, one cannot violate the law, otherwise it will inevitably lead to despotic tyranny. State power can be divided into legislative, executive and judicial powers, but the latter two are subordinate to sovereignty, which should always be directly in the hands of the people. Rousseau’s thought of equality and “people’s sovereignty” has an important position in the history of Western political thought, and had an important impact on Marxist political theory. Engels spoke highly of Rousseau’s political philosophy. He pointed out: “Already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a line of thought which corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx’s Capital, but also, in details, a whole series of the same dialectical turns of speech as Marx used: processes which in their nature are antagonistic, contain a contradiction; transformation of one extreme into its opposite; and finally, as the kernel of the whole thing, the negation of the negation.” In May 1778, Rousseau moved to Ermenonville and passed away in July of the same year.