Essay on Jean Jacques Rousseau is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality essay paper on Essay on Jean Jacques Rousseau at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

Together with Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Kant among his contemporaries, Rousseau has exerted the most profound influence on modern European intellectual history, perhaps even surpassing anyone else of his day. No other eighteenth-century thinker contributed more major writings in so wide a range of subjects and forms, nor wrote with such sustained passion and eloquence. No one else managed through both his works and his life to excite or disturb public imagination so deeply. Almost alone among the seminal figures of the Enlightenment, he subjected the main currents of the world he inhabited to the most inspired censure, even while channeling their direction, and when French Revolutionary leaders later seized their opportunity to ignite the unity of political practice and theory, it was to his doctrines above all that they professed their allegiance.

Like most distinguished men in his world's republic of letters, Rousseau of course had many interests apart from politics. He was a much-admired composer and the author of a substantial and learned dictionary of music, a subject which perhaps claimed more of his attention throughout his life than any other. While a number of his most important early writings dealt with the arts and sciences and the philosophy of history, the main enthusiasm of his later years proved to be botany, to which he devoted a collection of letters that in translation was to prove a popular textbook in England. His Reveries of the Solitary Walker were to spark an explosion of Romantic naturalism throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century, while his New Heloise was the most widely read novel of his age. His Confessions, moreover, comprise the most important work of autobiography since that of St Augustine, and his Emile the most significant work on education after Plato's Republic. Yet it is as a moralist and political thinker that he achieved his greatest distinction.

His birthplace and early childhood were to leave deep impressions upon his life and the development of his thought. He was born in 1712, in Geneva, a small Calvinist country surrounded by large, predominantly Catholic, nations; a mountainous state protected from invasion by natural barriers and the political culture of its citizens; above all, a republic in the midst of duchies and monarchies. When Rousseau would later describe the Savoyard vicar of Emile as professing his faith to a benign god of Nature rather than Scriptures, on a hill overlooking a city, he conceived an image of man's direct communion with his maker such as could be shared by few of the inhabitants of the other cities he knew. In their opposition to arbitrary government and the privileges of a venal aristocracy, many of the philosophes of the eighteenth century regarded progressive monarchs as allies in the cause of reform. Rousseau, however, showed none of the confidence of his contemporaries in the prospects of enlightened absolutism. Whereas a radical commitment, tempered by fear of censorship, inspired Diderot, Voltaire, and others to publish their writings anonymously, he took every opportunity to sign his works "Citizen of Geneva", and ceased to do so only after he was convinced that his compatriots had irredeemably lost their way. No other figure of the Enlightenment was more hostile to the course that political civilization had taken and at the same time so proud of his political identity. . .

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom essay on Essay on Jean Jacques Rousseau at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at affordable price. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to Essay on Jean Jacques Rousseau and other relevant topics.