Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Essential Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. He was a writer and political theorist of the Enlightenment. In 1750 he published his first important work A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) where he argued that man had become corrupted by society and civilisation. In 1755, he published Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and in The Social Contract (1762) he argued, Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. This political treatise earned him exile from his home city of Geneva and arguably inspired the French Revolution (his ashes were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris in 1794). He also wrote mile, a treatise on education and The New Eloise (1761). This novel scandalised the French authorities who ordered Rousseaus arrest. In his last 10 years, Rousseau wrote his Confessions. In Confessions he remembers his adventurous life, his achievements and the persecution he suffered from opponents. His revelations inspired the likes of Proust, Goethe and Tolstoy among others. Rousseau died on 2 July in France in 1778.

Peter Constantines honours include the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and Greeces Translators of Literature Prize. He translated Machiavellis The Prince for Vintage Classics.

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Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

Narcissus

Discourse on Political Economy

Pygmalion

Confessions

Constitutional Project for Corsica

Considerations on the Government of Poland

Essay on the Origin of Languages

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Published by Vintage 2013

Translation, compilation, and additional text copyright 2013 by Random House, Inc.,

Introduction copyright 2013 Leo Damrosch

Biographical note copyright 2013 by Peter Constantine

This edition published by arrangement with Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc.

First published by Random House Inc. in 2013

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His father, Isaac Rousseau, was a skilled watchmaker, and his mother, Suzanne, the daughter of a prominent Calvinist clergyman. Tragically, she contracted an infection and died a few days later. Jean-Jacques and his older brother, Franois, were cared for thereafter by their fathers sister, also named Suzanne.

Rousseau never went to school, but was taught to read and write at home. When he was ten his father withdrew from his life, leaving Geneva after a confrontation with a haughty patrician, and he was sent to board with a clergyman in the nearby village of Bossey. At thirteen it was time to begin work, and he was apprenticed to a young engraver who proved abusive. Rousseau in turn became lazy and dishonest, and at sixteen, on the spur of the moment, he ran away from Geneva for good.

In the cathedral town of Annecy, in the Savoy region to the south of the city, he made the most important acquaintance of his life. An intelligent, beautiful young woman named Mme de Warens, who had left her husband in Switzerland, took an interest in him and sent him to Turin for instruction in the Catholic faith. (At that time Turin, in the Italian Piedmont, was the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose western province was the French-speaking Savoy.) For a year Rousseau held several low-level jobs, and then resolved to go back to Annecy. Mme de Warens now took him under her wing, and he lived with her for the next nine years. He always called her Maman, as though she were the mother he had lost when he was born, and he was greatly alarmed when she initiated a sexual relationship.

In his autobiographical Confessions Rousseau would recall this period as idyllic, but actually he was lonely and depressed much of the time. He did manage to acquire some skill in music, and he began to read voraciously under the guidance of Mme de Warens and her circle of congenial priests. But eventually it became clear that he would have to move on, and he proceeded to Lyon, where he took a position as tutor to two small boys. The tutoring didnt go well, but he formed important friendships with several members of the family, and they helped him to make valuable contacts when in 1742 he moved to Paris, hoping to make a career as a musician.

Unexpectedly, Rousseau was offered a post as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, where he discovered administrative talents he didnt know he had and formed a passionate attachment to the emotional lyricism of Italian music. A year later there was a falling-out with his aristocratic employer, and he returned to Paris, where two significant relationships began. One was with the brilliant intellectual Denis Diderot, roughly the same age but well educated and already prominent, who was editing the immensely ambitious Encyclopdie