A Discourse on Inequality - Softcover

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1909735078 ISBN 13: 9781909735071

Publisher: Aziloth Books, 2013

Synopsis

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the son of a Genevan watchmaker who became one of the foremost French writers and political theorists of the Enlightenment, penning such classics as 'The Social Contract' and 'Emile'. His 'Discourse on the Origin of Inequality' was written some eight years earlier, and takes as its theme the degradation of humanity through the corrupting influences of civilisation. Rousseau traces the origins of inequality and its increasing prominence over the historical period. His wide-ranging analysis covers a swathe of disparate topics, from compassion and sensitivity, through despotism and war, to private property, the origin of goodness and the perfectibility of humanity. The Discourse became hugely influential - it helped lay the philosophical foundations for the French Revolution, and inspired similar insurrections well into the nineteenth century.

About this title

About the Author

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in Geneva in 1712. Abandoned by his father at the age of ten he tried his hand as an engraver's apprentice before he left the city in 1728. From then on he was to wander Europe seeking an elusive happiness. At Turin he became a Catholic convert; and as a footman, seminarist, music teacher or tutor visited many parts of Switzerland and France. In 1732 he settled for eight years at Chambéry or Les Charmettes, the country house of Madame de Warens, remembered by Rousseau as an idyllic place in the Confessions. In 1741 he set out for Paris where he met Diderot who commissioned him to write the musical articles for the Encyclopédie. In the meantime he fathered five children by Thérèse Levasseur, a servant girl, and abandoned them to a foundling home. The 1750s witnessed a breach with Voltaire and Diderot and his writing struck a new note of defiant independence. In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts and the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité he showed how the growth of civilization corrupted natural goodness and increased inequality between men. In 1758 he attacked his former friends, the Encyclopaedists, in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles which pilloried cultured society. In 1757 he moved to Montmorency and these five years were the most fruitful of his life. His remarkable novel La nouvelle Héloise (1761), met with immediate and enormous success. In this and in Émile, which followed a year later, Rousseau invoked the inviolability of personal ideals against the power of the state and the pressures of society. The crowning achievement of his political philosophy was The Social Contract, published in 1762. That same year he wrote an attack on revealed religion, the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. He was driven from Switzerland and fled to England where he only succeeded in making an enemy of Hume and returned to his continental peregrinations. In 1770 Rousseau completed his Confessions. His last years were spent largely in France where he died in 1778.

Edition details

• Publisher: Aziloth Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1909735078
• ISBN 13: 9781909735071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 114