A Discourse on Inequality

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 leaving the city in 1728. From then on, he was to wander Europe seeking an elusive happiness.

At Turin, he became a Catholic convert. As a footman, seminarist, music teacher, or tutor, he visited many parts of Switzerland and France. In 1732, he settled for eight years at Chambery, 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 Héloïse (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.

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