THE LIFE OF JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

He serves at their long-suffering. The french change was effected when a hoi polloi reached the end of their sufferance of a monarchy and aristocracy seen as corrupt and self-serving and non as serving the needs of the people. The philosophy of Rousseau was an chief(prenominal) element in French revolutionary thought.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. His father was a watchmaker. In 1725 the watchword was apprenticed for five years to an engraver, but he ran outside(a) after a time. The priest of Cofignon introduce the boy to the Baronne de Warens, who would suppose prominently in his life. She influenced the boy to convert to Catholicism. In great gross he was received into the Church at Turin in a hospice for catechumens. He underwent a period of wandering and an unsettled reality before he rejoined Mme. de Warens in 1731. During this time he tried and true by reading to make up for the deficiencies in his earlier education. For two years he acted as tutor to the children of a M. de Mably before going to Paris in 1742, but he was immediately sent to Venice in 1743 as secretary to the bracing French ambassador, the Comte de Montaigu. The two did non get along, and Rousseau was dismissed for insolence. He returned to France. He met Voltaire for the first time in 1745 and wrote articles on medicinal drug for Dider

The French Revolution followed the American Revolution and presaged a number of other revolutions in the founding by following the prescriptions of Locke and Rousseau. The most important bearers of the newly developing ideology leading to the French Revolution were the radical " dwarfish men" of Western Europe. In some ways, these men believed in progress. A dichotomy could be seen in the midst of the industrial burgher and proletarian classes on the one hand and the aristocratic, mercantile classes on the other. Both developed ideologies which clashed with one another. For the first group, Rousseau was the most important thinker. He was already dead in 1789 when the impetus to Revolution reached a peak:

Sovereignty is no more than the role of the world(a) provide. The sovereign is only a collective being.

Rousseau makes a distinction between a particular will--any particular will--and the ecumenical will. A particular will tends toward partiality and will jib with the general will only part of the time. The general will, however, tends toward equality, take aim the many individual wills and finding some common ground. The general will determines the actions of the sovereign by giving the sovereign the function to act for what can be called the common good. The individual who does not agree with the general will on a apt(p) matter is still compelled under the social contract to contain the general will. This creates an interesting contradiction in that the individual will finds freedom in submitting to the larger freedom of the general will.

As noted, Locke and Rousseau are similar in the way they describe political sympathies as deriving its legitimacy from a social contract. The differences between the two may derive from the times in which they lived and the interests of the people in those different eras. Locke wrote at a time of social unrest and questioning, at a time when the long-standing sovereignty of kings as ordained by God was coming into question. Locke did
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