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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an influential French philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. Rousseau was born on the eighteenth of June 1712 and died in 1778. During his lifetime, this philosopher brought about many new thoughts and ideas that help create the societies of most countries today. Some of his ideas helped contributed to concepts such as civilization being responsible for corrupting humanity’s nature, child development, and possibilities of origins of inequality amongst humans, social contract, and democracy.

Rousseau put urbanization, technology, and scientific advances at fault for morally corrupting humans. As is said by Robert Hooker, “For Rousseau, the natural moral state of human beings is to be compassionate; civilization has made us cruel, selfish, and bloodthirsty.” (The European Enlightenment) Rousseau also made the point that “civilization robbed us of our natural freedom. While semi-civilized humanity looked to itself for its values and happiness, civilized human beings live outside themselves in the opinions and authority of others. The price of civilization is human freedom and human individuality.” (Hooker, European) In addition, he believed that “man is good by nature and made bad only by institutions.” (Scruton, 205)

Jean Jacques Rousseau’s beliefs of child development were that children should be free to express their energies in order to develop themselves. “In the influential novel Emile (1762) Rousseau expounded a new theory of education, emphasizing the importance of expression rather than repression to produce a well-balanced, free-thinking child.” (Froebel Web Learning through Experience) “In Emile is an unstructured, almost stream-of-consciousness work in which Rousseau uses narrative and dialogue with a fictitious son (and daughter) to expound his theory of child development, pedagogy and sociology. He shows how upbringing and social environment shape a person’s personality and views.” (Glossary of People) This belief is in practice more often today as opposed to this thought being radical during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. It was too fundamental for some audiences; the book was banned in Switzerland and France.

In Rousseau’s A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind and is it Authorized by Natural Law? , Rousseau explains that there are two kinds of inequality among men and those are physical/natural, and moral/political. Natural inequality consists of differences in age, level of health, and physical strength. Physical inequality cannot be explained as to why it exists because it is from nature. But, Rousseau does attempt to explicate what is at the root of political inequality. “…because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorized by the consent of men… consists of the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honored, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience.” (Rousseau/Cole, Dissertation on the Origin) He goes on to explain that natural inequality does have a connection to political inequality because the young and the old are seen as weak and therefore are not able to make contributions to society and/or political issues.

Although Rousseau had many ideas and was influential on several different levels of thought, he is best known and most associated with the notion of social contract. Rousseau attempted to explain the invention of government as a contract between the citizens and the authorities that governed them. “The only reason human beings were willing to give up individual freedom and be ruled by others was that they saw that their rights, happiness, and property would be better protected under a formal government rather than an anarchic, every-person-for-themselves type of society. He argued, though, that this original contract was deeply flawed. The wealthiest and most powerful members of society ‘tricked’ the general population, and so installed inequality as a permanent feature of human society.” (Hooker, European) His Social Contract is offered as “the only possible excuse for…an extreme democracy.” (Scruton, 205) Scruton continues to say that “the original contract does not merely aggregate the wills of those who subscribe to it: it: it brings into existence a new order of volition.” (206)

The Social Contract in turn contributed to the conception of Western democracy. “In essence, Rousseau said that the people should have input on how their government is run.” (Barr, A More Perfect Union)

Rousseau was most definitely a profound thinker and one of the most notable philosophers to date. Not only did he express ideas that were thought to be drastic and extremely dissimilar, but those very ideas paved the way as to how we operate and think now in the 21st century.