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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Western Philosophers
18th-century philosophy
(Modern Philosophy)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Name: Jean- Jacques Rousseau
Birth: June 28, 1712 (Geneva, Switzerland)
Death: July 2, 1778 (Ermenonville, France)
School/tradition: Social contract theory
Main interests: Political philosophy,music, education, literature,
autobiography
Notable ideas: General will, amour-propre, natural goodness of
humanity
Influences: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Denis Diderot
Influenced: Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, the Romantic movement

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (June 28, 1712 - July 2, 1778) was a Genevan
philosopher of the Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the
French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth
of nationalism. Rousseau also made important contributions to music
both as a theorist and as a composer. With his Confessions and other
writings, he practically invented modern autobiography and encouraged
a new focus on the building of subjectivity that would bear fruit in
the work of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Freud. His novel Julie,
ou la nouvelle Hélo se was one of the best-selling fictional works of
the eighteenth century and was important to the development of
romanticism.

Contents
[hide]
1 Biography
2 Philosophy
2.1 Theory of Natural Man
2.2 Political theory
2.2.1 "The Social Contract"
2.3 Education
2.4 Religion
3 Legacy
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
7 Major works
8 Editions in English
9 Online texts
10 External links

[edit] Biography
Rousseau was born in Geneva (then an independent republic, today part
of Switzerland) and throughout his life described himself as a citizen
of Geneva. His mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died nine days after
his birth due to complications from childbirth, and his father Isaac,
a failed watchmaker, abandoned him in 1722 to avoid imprisonment for
fighting a duel. His childhood education consisted solely of reading
Plutarch's Lives and Calvinist sermons. In his childhood, Rousseau
often read in the tranquility of a public garden - which he would
later describe as the most serene part of growing up. After his
father's departure, Rousseau's uncle put him in the care of M.
Lambercier, a pastor at Bossey, near Geneva. According to Rousseau's
own account in Book I of the Confessions, his experience of corporal
punishment at the hands of the pastor's sister was important in the
formation of his sexuality.

Rousseau left Geneva on March 14, 1728, after several years of
apprenticeship to a notary and then an engraver. He then met Fran oise-
Louise de Warens, a French Catholic baroness thirteen years his elder
who would later become his lover. Under the protection of de Warens,
he converted to Catholicism which, according to his Confessions, he
did to provide himself with an education.

In 1742 Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des
Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he had
invented, based on a single line displaying numbers that represented
intervals between notes and dots and commas that indicated rhythmic
values. The system was intended to be compatible with typography. The
Academy rejected it as impractical and unoriginal, but a version of
the system remains in use in some parts of the world.

>From 1743 to 1744, he was secretary to the French ambassador in
Venice, whose republican government Rousseau would refer to often in
his later political work. After this, he returned to Paris, where he
befriended and lived with Thérèse Levasseur, a semi-literate
seamstress who, according to Rousseau, bore him five children, though
this number may not be accurate. All the children were deposited at a
foundling hospital soon after birth and would most likely have
perished soon afterwards, as the mortality rate for such children was
very high. Rousseau's abandonment of his children became a source of
embarrassment once he became known as a theorist of education and
child-rearing, and was used by enemies including Voltaire to attack
him. In his defense, Rousseau explained that he would have been a poor
father, and, implausibly, that the children would have a better life
at the foundling home.

The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris
While in Paris, he became friends with Diderot and beginning in 1749
contributed several articles to his Encyclopédie, beginning with some
articles on music. His most important contribution was an article on
political economy, written in 1755. Soon after, his friendship with
Diderot and the Encyclopedists would become strained.

In 1749, as Rousseau walked to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison,
he read in the Mercure de France of an essay competition sponsored by
the Académie de Dijon, asking whether the development of the arts and
sciences had been morally beneficial. Rousseau claimed that this
question caused him to have a moment of sudden inspiration by the
roadside, during which he perceived the principle of the natural
goodness of humanity on which all his later philosophical works were
based. As a consequence of this, he answered the competition question
in the negative, in his 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences",
which won him first prize in the contest and gained him significant
fame.

During this period he continued his interest in music and in 1752 his
opera Le Devin du Village was performed for King Louis XV. The same
year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their
performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona,
prompted the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of
French music against supporters of the Italian style. Rousseau was an
enthusiastic supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau
and others, making an important contribution with his Letter on French
Music.

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva where he reconverted to Calvinism
and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755 Rousseau
completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis
of Inequality Among Men. This began a troubled period in Rousseau's
personal relationships in which he gradually became estranged from his
former friends such as Diderot and Grimm and from benefactors such as
Madame d'Epinay. He also pursued an important but unconsummated
romantic attachment with Sophie d'Houdetot. Following his break with
the Encyclopedists, he enjoyed the support and patronage of the Duc de
Luxembourg, one of the wealthiest nobles in France.

Rousseau, in 1761 published the successful romantic novel Julie, ou la
nouvelle Hélo se (The New Heloise). In 1762 he published two major
books, first Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique (in
English, literally Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political
Right) in April and then mile, or On Education in May. Both books
criticized religion and were banned in both France and Geneva.
Rousseau was forced to flee arrest and made stops in both Bern and
M tiers in Switzerland, where he enjoyed the protection of Frederick
the Great of Prussia and his local representative, Lord Keith. While
in M tiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica
(Projet de Constitution pour la Corse).

A plaque commemorating the bicentenary of Rousseau's birth. Issued by
the city of Geneva on 28 June 1912. The legend at the bottom says
"Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays", and shows Rousseau's father gesturing
towards the window. The scene is drawn from a footnote to the Letter
to d'Alembert where Rousseau recalls witnessing the popular
celebrations following the exercises of the St Gervais regiment.
Facing criticism in Switzerland - his house in Motiers was stoned on
the night of September 6, 1765 - he took refuge with the philosopher
David Hume in Great Britain. Isolated at Wootton on the borders of
Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Rousseau suffered a serious decline in
his mental health and began to experience paranoid fantasies about
plots against him involving Hume and others. Rousseau's letter to
Hume, in which he articulates the perceived misconduct, sparked an
exchange which was published in and received with great interest in
contemporary Paris.

Rousseau fled back to France in 1767 under the name "Renou," although
officially he was not allowed to return before 1770. In 1768 he went
through a legally invalid marriage to Thérèse, and in 1770 he returned
to Paris. As a condition of his return, he was not allowed to publish
any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began
private readings in 1771. At the request of Madame d'Epinay the police
ordered him to stop, and the Confessions, was only partially published
in 1782, four years after his death. All his subsequent works were
also only to appear posthumously.

Rousseau continued to write until his death. In 1772, he was invited
to present recommendations for a new constitution for Poland,
resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was
to be his last major political work. In 1776 he completed Dialogues:
Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the
Solitary Walker. In order to support himself through this time, he
returned to copying music. Rousseau's final years were largely spent
in deliberate withdrawal from public life, however he did respond
favorably to an approach from the composer Gluck, whom he met in 1774.
One of Rousseau's last pieces of writing was a critical yet
enthusiastic analysis of Gluck's opera Alceste. While taking a morning
walk on the estate of the Marquis de Giradin at Ermenonville (28 miles
northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died on July
2, 1778.

Rousseau was initially buried on the Ile des Peupliers. His remains
were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, sixteen years after his
death and located directly across from those of his contemporary
Voltaire. The tomb was designed to resemble a rustic temple, to recall
Rousseau's theories of nature. In 1834, the Genevan government
reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny Ile Rousseau in
Lake Geneva. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-
Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

[edit] Philosophy

[edit] Theory of Natural Man
Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature.
Rousseau contended that man was good by nature, when in the state of
nature (the state of all other animals, and the condition humankind
was in before the creation of civilization and society), but is
corrupted by society. This idea has often led to the attribution to
Rousseau the idea of the noble savage, an expression first used by
Dryden in The Conquest of Granada (1672). Rousseau, however, never
used the expression himself and it does not adequately render his idea
of the natural goodness of humanity. Rousseau's idea of natural
goodness is complex and easy to misunderstand. Contrary to what might
be suggested by a casual reading, the idea does not imply that humans
in the state of nature act morally; in fact, terms such as 'justice'
or 'wickedness' are simply inapplicable to pre-political society as
Rousseau understands it. Humans there may act with all of the ferocity
of an animal. They are good because they are self-sufficient and thus
not subject to the vices of political society. He viewed society as
artificial and held that the development of society, especially the
growth of social interdependence, has been inimical to the well-being
of human beings.

In Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers
on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into
amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human
desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason.
In contrast, amour-propre is artificial and forces man to compare
himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to
take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. Rousseau was not the
first to make this distinction; it had been invoked by, among others,
Vauvenargues.

In "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" Rousseau argued that the arts
and sciences had not been beneficial to humankind because they were
not human needs, but rather a result of pride and vanity. Moreover,
the opportunities they created for idleness and luxury contributed to
the corruption of man. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had
made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty. He
concluded that material progress had actually undermined the
possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear
and suspicion.

His subsequent Discourse on Inequality tracked the progress and
degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern
society. He suggested that the earliest human beings were isolated
semi-apes who were differentiated from animals by their capacity for
free will and their perfectibility. He also argued that these
primitive humans were possessed of a basic drive to care for
themselves and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. As humans
were forced to associate together more closely by the pressure of
population growth, they underwent a psychological transformation and
came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of
their own well-being. Rousseau associated this new self-awareness with
a golden age of human flourishing. However, the development of
agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labor
led to humans becoming increasingly dependent on one another, and led
to inequality. The resulting state of conflict led Rousseau to suggest
that the first state was invented as a kind of social contract made at
the suggestion of the rich and powerful. This original contract was
deeply flawed as the wealthiest and most powerful members of society
tricked the general population, and thus instituted inequality as a
fundamental feature of human society. Rousseau's own conception of the
social contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent
form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality,
Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others,
which originated in the golden age, comes to undermine personal
integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence,
hierarchy, and inequality.

[edit] Political theory

A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay

[edit] "The Social Contract"
Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which
outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. Published in
1762, it became one of the most influential works of political
philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas
mentioned in an earlier work, the article Economie Politique, featured
in Diderot's Encyclopédie. Rousseau claimed that the state of nature
was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings
left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society
developed, division of labour and private property required the human
race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society,
man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while
at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double
pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to
Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and
abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both
preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the
authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees
individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also
ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the
authors of the law.

While Rousseau argues that sovereignty should be in the hands of the
people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and
government. The government is charged with implementing and enforcing
the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known
as magistrates. Rousseau was bitterly opposed to the idea that the
people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly.
Rather, they should make the laws directly. It was argued that this
would prevent Rousseau's ideal state from being realized in a large
society, such as France was at the time. Much of the subsequent
controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements
concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general
will are thereby rendered free.

[edit] Education
Rousseau set out his views on education in mile, a semi-fictitious
work detailing the growth of a young boy of that name, presided over
by Rousseau himself. He brings him up in the countryside, where, he
believes, humans are most naturally suited, rather than in a city,
where we only learn bad habits, both physical and intellectual. The
aim of education, Rousseau says, is to learn how to live, and this is
accomplished by following a guardian who can point the way to good
living.

The growth of a child is divided into three sections, first to the age
of about 12, when calculating and complex thinking is not possible,
and children, according to his deepest conviction, live like animals.
Second, from 12 to about 16, when reason starts to develop, and
finally from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develops into an
adult. At this point, Emile finds a young woman to complement him.

The book is based on Rousseau's ideals of healthy living. The boy must
work out how to follow his social instincts and be protected from the
vices of urban individualism and self-consciousness.

Rousseau's account of the education of Emile is, however, not an
account of education of a gender-neutral "child." The education he
proposes for Sophie, the young woman Emile is destined to marry, is
importantly different to that of Emile. Sophie (as a representative of
ideal womanhood) is educated to be governed (by her husband) while
Emile (as a representative of the ideal man) is educated to be self-
governing. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational
and political philosophy, it is essential to his account of the
distinction between private, personal relations and the public world
of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it
depends on the (naturalized) subordination of women in order for both
it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function
as Rousseau imagines it could and should.

The education proposed in mile has been criticized for being
impractical, and the topic itself (the education of children) has led
the text to be ignored by many studying Rousseau's more "political"
works. However, of particular interest to anyone interested in
Rousseau's intentions in mile is a letter he wrote to his friend
Cramer on October 13, 1764. In the letter, Rousseau answers the
criticism of impracticability: "You say quite correctly that it is
impossible to produce an Emile. But I cannot believe that you take the
book that carries this name for a true treatise on education. It is
rather a philosophical work on this principle advanced by the author
in other writings that man is naturally good" (sic).

[edit] Religion
Rousseau was most controversial in his own time for his views on
religion. His view that man is good by nature conflicts with the
doctrine of original sin and his theology of nature expounded by the
Savoyard Vicar in mile led to the condemnation of the book in both
Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. In the Social Contract he claims
that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens. This was
one of the reasons for the book's condemnation in Geneva. Rousseau
attempted to defend himself against critics of his religious views in
his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris.[1]

[edit] Legacy
Rousseau's ideas were influential at the time of the French Revolution
although, since popular sovereignty was exercised through
representatives rather than directly, it cannot be said that the
Revolution was in any sense an implementation of Rousseau's ideas.
Subsequently, writers such as Benjamin Constant and Hegel sought to
blame the excesses of the Revolution and especially the Reign of
Terror on Rousseau, but the justice of their claims is a matter of
controversy.

Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the
institution of private property, and therefore is sometimes considered
a forebear of modern socialism and communism (see Friedrich Engels and
Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings).
Rousseau also questioned the assumption that majority will is always
correct. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure
freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of
the will of the majority (see democracy).

One of the primary principles of Rousseau's political philosophy is
that politics and morality should not be separated. When a state fails
to act in a moral fashion, it ceases to function in the proper manner
and ceases to exert genuine authority over the individual. The second
important principle is freedom, which the state is created to
preserve.

Rousseau's ideas about education have profoundly influenced modern
educational theory. In mile he differentiates between healthy and
"useless" crippled children. Only a healthy child can be the rewarding
object of any educational work. He minimizes the importance of book-
learning, and recommends that a child's emotions should be educated
before his reason. He placed a special emphasis on learning by
experience. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centered Education and its
Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a
series of footnotes to Rousseau.

In his main writings Rousseau identifies nature with the primitive
state of savage man. Later he took nature to mean the spontaneity of
the process by which man builds his egocentric, instinct based
character and his little world. Nature thus signifies interiority and
integrity, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement which
society imposes in the name of progressive emancipation from
coldhearted brutality.

Hence, to go back to nature means to restore to man the forces of this
natural process, to place him outside every oppressing bond of society
and the prejudices of civilization. It is this idea that made his
thought particularly important in Romanticism, though Rousseau himself
is sometimes regarded as a figure of The Enlightenment.[2]

Rousseau had no impact on Thomas Jefferson and, indeed, little impact
on 18th century American thought, which was dominated by
Republicanism. However he did have some influence on several later
Transcendentalists such as theologian William Ellery Channing and poet
Henry David Thoreau.[3]

[edit] See also
Rousseau's educational philosophy
Liberalism
List of liberal thinkers
Political absolutism
Democracy
Romanticism
Socialism
Rousseau Institute
Totalitarianism

[edit] Notes
^ The full text of the letter is available online only in the French
original: Lettre à Mgr De Beaumont Archevêque de Paris (1762)
^ The case for Rousseau as an enemy of the Enlightenment is made in
Graeme Garrard, Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican
Critique of the Philosophes (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
^ "Rousseau, whose romantic and egalitarian tenets had practically no
influence on the course of Jefferson's, or indeed any American,
thought." Nathan Schachner, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography. (1957). p.
47. One admirer was lexicographer Noah Webster. Mark J. Temmer,
"Rousseau and Thoreau," Yale French Studies, No. 28, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1961), pp. 112-121 in JSTOR.

[edit] References
Bertram, Christopher (2003). Rousseau and The Social Contract. London:
Routledge.
Cooper, Laurence (1999).Rousseau, Nature and the Problem of the Good
Life. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cranston, Maurice (1982). Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work. New
York: Norton.
Cranston, Maurice (1991). The Noble Savage. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Cranston, Maurice (1997). The Solitary Self. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Damrosch, Leo (2005). Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius. New
York: Houghton Mifflin.
Dent, N.J.H. (1988). Rousseau : An Introduction to his Psychological,
Social, and Political Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dent, N.J.H. (1992). A Rousseau Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dent, N.J.H. (2005). Rousseau. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Farrell, John (2006). Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau.
New York: Cornell University Press.
Garrard, Graeme (2003). Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican
Critique of the Philosophes. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Gauthier, David (2006). Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lange, Lynda (2002). Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. University Park: Penn State University Press.
Melzer, Arthur (1990). The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of
Rousseau's Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pateman, Carole (1979). "The Problem of Political Obligation: A
Critical Analysis of Liberal Theory". Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Riley, Patrick (ed.) (2001). The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, Dave & Groves, Judy (2003). Introducing Political
Philosophy. Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-450-X.
Starobinski, Jean (1988). Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and
Obstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strauss, Leo (1953). Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, chap. 6A.
Strauss, Leo (1947). "On the Intention of Rousseau," Social Research
14: 455-87.
Strong, Tracy B.(2002). Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the
Ordinary (Lanham, MD. Rowman and Littlefield)
Wokler, Robert (1995). Rousseau. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[edit] Major works
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et les
arts), 1750
Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy, 1752
Le Devin du Village: an opera, 1752, scorePDF (21.7 MiB)
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours
sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes),
1754
Discourse on Political Economy, 1755
Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles, 1758 (Lettre à d'Alembert sur
les spectacles)
Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la nouvelle Hélo se), 1761
mile: or, on Education ( mile ou de l'éducation), 1762
The Creed of a Savoyard Priest, 1762 (in mile)
The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (Du contrat
social), 1762
Four Letters to M. de Malesherbes, 1762
Letters Written from the Mountain, 1764 (Lettres de la montagne)
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1770,
published 1782
Constitutional Project for Corsica, 1772
Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1772
Essay on the origin of language, published 1781 (Essai sur l'origine
des langues)
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, incomplete, published 1782 (Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire)
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, published 1782

[edit] Editions in English
Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1987.
Collected Writings, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly,
Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1990-2005, 11 vols. (Does
not as yet include mile.)
The Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Emile, or On Education, trans. with an introd. by Allan Bloom, New
York: Basic Books, 1979.
"On the Origin of Language," trans. John H. Moran. In On the Origin of
Language: Two Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France. London: Penguin
Books, 1980.
'The Discourses' and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor
Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings, trans.
Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[edit] Online texts
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Emile French text and English translation (Grace G. Roosevelt's
revision and correction of Barbara Foxley's Everyman translation, at
Columbia)
Mondo Politico Library's presentation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book,
The Social Contract (G.D.H. Cole translation; full text)
'Elementary Letters on Botany', 1771-3PDF (4.23 MiB) English
translation
A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences English
translation
Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy English translation
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men English
translation
Discourse on Political Economy English translation
The Creed of a Savoyard Priest English translation
The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right English
translation
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau English translation, as published
by Project Gutenberg, 2004 [EBook #3913]
Constitutional Project for Corsica English translation
Considerations on the Government of Poland English translation
Works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Project Gutenberg