Meditations on My Troubled Heart

Abstract

Abstract Born in Geneva, raised by an aunt after the death of his mother, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was, he tells us, largely educated by his solitary reading of Cicero and Romantic French novels. When he left Geneva in 1728, he became associated with Mme Warens, who influenced his (temporary) conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism. In 1748, he went to Paris, intending to make his fame as a musician. His opera, Le Devin du Village (1752), was not a great success, but he became a visible intellectual figure, and Diderot invited him to contribute to the Encyclopédie. Against the background of a theory of human nature, both The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) present severely critical descriptions of social luxury and political corruption. The Lettre aà d’Alembert (1758) charges opera and the theater with debasing public morality. As he saw it, social corruption arises from a ramified and entrenched division of labor that engenders dependency, passivity, and resentment. Rousseau’s major works present therapeutic programs for these ills. La Nouvelle Heloise (1761) is a psychological novel of domesticity and romance; émile (1762) presents an educational regimen that is intended to preserve autonomy; The Social Contract or Principles of Right (1762) and Considerations on the Government of Poland (1770) present a political solution, sketching a contractarian theory of political legitimation and organization.