JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-1778), philosopher, novelist, composer-one of the foremost figures of the European Enlightenment--had an uncertain childhood. He was born in Geneva to French parents; his mother died a few days after his birth and he was abandoned by his father at the age of ten. After a few years of irregular schooling and apprenticeship" to an engraver, he fled Switzerland in 1728. Rousseau traveled Europe and eventually settled in Paris, where he worked as a music copyist, teacher and secretary, occasionally writing on music theory and composing. He became involved with Therese Le Vasseur, a semi-literate servant girl. The couple did not marry until 1768, but they had five children, all of whom Rousseau consigned to the foundling hospital, later writing in his autobiographical (and thoroughly unreliable) Confessions that he deeply regretted doing so.
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If humans are benevolent by nature, how do societies become corrupt? And how do governments founded upon the defense of individual rights degenerate into tyranny? These are the questions addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a strik- ingly original inquiry into much-explored issues of eighteenth-centu- ry (and subsequent) philosophy: human nature and the best form of government.
Rousseau takes an innovative approach by introducing a "hypothetical history" that presents a theoretical view of people in a pre-social condition and the ensuing effects of civilization. In his sweeping account of humanity’s social and political development, the author develops a theory of human evolution that prefigures Darwinian thought and encompasses aspects of ethics, sociology, and episte- mology. He concludes that people are inevitably corrupt as a result of both natural (or physical) inequalities and moral (or political) inequalities.
One of the most influential works of the Enlightenment, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality offers both a thought-provoking account of society’s origins and a keen criticism of unequal modern political institutions.
