Rousseau

Biography:

Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Five generations before Rousseau, his ancestor Didier, a bookseller who may have published Protestant tracts, had escaped persecution from French Catholics by fleeing to Geneva in 1549, where he became a wine merchant.

On July 4, 1778, Rousseau was buried on the Île des Peupliers which became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers. On October 11, 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed near the remains of Voltaire. In May 1814, during the Bourbon Restoration, the remains of Rousseau and Voltaire were secretly retrieved from the Panthéon by some religious fanatics, and buried in a dumping ground near Paris; the remains are now untraceable.

Legacies, Contributions, Discoveries

Theory of Natural Human: The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

Stages of human development: Rousseau believed that the savage stage was not the first stage of human development, but the third stage. Rousseau held that this third savage stage of human societal development was an optimum, between the extreme of the state of brute animals and animal-like ‘ape-men’ on the one hand, and the extreme of decadent civilized life on the other. This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage, which Arthur Lovejoy conclusively showed misrepresents Rousseau's thought.