Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jurgen Oelkers, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472518873
• eBook ISBN: 9781441113535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, enlightenment philosopher and founder of 'natural education', is one of the most influential philosophers of education in the western world. In order to fully understand Rousseau's impact as a true educational thinker, Jurgen Oelkers argues that we must take into account his paradoxical style, unique intellectual biography and his turbulent and unconventional way of life. Combining historical analysis and contemporary ethical theory, this text serves as both an introduction to Rousseau's theories of education and a critique of his views, and shows how Rousseau was a pioneer in exploring educational issues within the context of his own philosophical problems in order to present innovative solutions.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

1

Citoyen De Genève: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28th, 1712 in Geneva and was also raised there.1 Unlike today, the city of Geneva was not part of Switzerland but an independent republic. Since 1309 the citizens of Geneva owned the right to rule themselves after the city had become a center of local commerce in the preceding century. The city then was small, not much more than three thousand inhabitants, but powerful. Later in the fourteenth century it came under the influence of the Duchy of Savoy while some leading Geneva families remained in power. A military pact of 1525 between Geneva and the two Swiss cantons of Berne and Fribourg secured mutual interests, which prevented the Duke of Savoy from occupying the city.

In 1528 the Canton of Berne converted to Protestantism, followed five years later by the ruling class of Geneva. On August 27th, 1535 the Genevan Grand Conseil (Council of Two Hundred) ended five hundred years of power of the Roman Episcopal Church by suspending Catholic Mass and confiscating the Church’s goods. The main person behind this conversion was the French preacher Guillaume Farel (1489–1565), who led the Reformation party in Geneva. One year later Farel, whose pseudonym was “Ursinus” from his voice when preaching, asked a young French theologian named Jean (John) Calvin (1509–1564) to come to Geneva and help to establish the new religion in which Rousseau was raised.

Calvin is the author of the Edits civils, which appeared in 1543 and constituted the Republic of Geneva. The city became finally independent after a battle called l’Escalade in December, 1602 when the besieging troops of the Duke of Savoy were beaten in one night. This still small but growing republic, which hosted many Protestant refugees from France and elsewhere in Europe, became the center of what was later called “Calvinism,” perhaps the first educational religion ever established. Calvin, himself not a native Genevan, not only founded in 1559 the two institutions of Higher Education in Geneva2 and wrote the catechism for Christian learning (brève instruction chrétienne), but also argued for a new type of teacher and a new relationship between believers.

Rousseau’s life and work are, in some ways, a manner of dealing with Calvinism as it was understood in the middle of the eighteenth century. These, of course, were not the original views of the sixteenth century’s religious reformers as Richard Muller (2000) reconstructed them. For Rousseau, Calvinism was more a habit of virtue than a religion. Due to this reason it was not Calvin’s theology that interested Rousseau but rather his theory of morals and his role as a lawgiver. While Rousseau did not write formal treatises on Calvin, evidently he was occupied with the basic moral themes of Calvinism. He re-thought these themes and they can be seen clearly in each of his important works.

Calvinistic rigor fascinated Rousseau, along with ancient stoicism. Following the banning and public burning of his own books, Rousseau dispensed with the citizenship of the Republic of Geneva in 1763, but not, however, his membership of Calvin’s church, which he had renewed in 1754. The first publication of John Calvin in 1532 was a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, a key text of political stoicism written in AD 55 or 56 which argued for moderation and against self-interest. Only after this commentary, Calvin, a humanist by education who studied in Paris at the Collège de Montaigu and completed his doctorate in law, turned his attention to religious problems.

Calvin was thrown out of Geneva in April, 1538 because the City Council thought his teachings were too rigid. But he was called back by new officials in 1541, after he had started to comment on books of the Bible while living in Strasbourg. The City Council changed its mind and later ratified Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinance of the Church of Geneva, which formulated the basic principles of “Calvinism.” One of their representatives was Rousseau’s father, Isaac Rousseau (1655–1747), citizen of Geneva3 and a master watchmaker. Rousseau grew up with these principles and the Calvinistic rules of life as they were exhibited within Genevan craftsmanship at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

At the time of Rousseau’s birth, Geneva was still a comparatively small city with scarcely more than 20,000 inhabitants. The relevance of social size is a key to Rousseau’s thinking. Big cities in France around 1720 were Lyon with more than 100,000 inhabitants and of course Paris with over half a million. The biggest city in Europe was London, which in 1760, when George III ascended the throne, had a population of over 750,000 inhabitants. In the mid-eighteenth century more than one-tenth of the British population resided in London, which became an economic and cultural capital4 while at the same time remaining in some parts a medieval mud hole. The death rate in the City of London was twice its birth rate throughout the eighteenth century.

In his writings Rousseau called himself Citoyen de Genève, to express his feelings of loyalty toward the city of his birth and his youth. For him the ideal republic was always Geneva despite the Calvinistic theocracy that really ruled the city. But for Rousseau size is a function of social order. During his lifetime he came to know big cities like Lyon, Paris, and London, and for him they were not all the right size for a good society. Rousseau’s assumptions about the limits of social progress have to do with his notions of social place and size. He was not alone in this view: many visitors coming to Geneva in the eighteenth century thought of the city as nothing short of an ideal republic.

Rousseau left Geneva in 1728 at the age of 16. As a young man he came back for occasional visits but then only once after he had left for Paris and become famous. Apart from that visit in 1754 he never saw Geneva again, although he always stayed in contact with the city’s life and remained an active participant in Genevan politics. For all these reasons Rousseau is not a French but a Genevan thinker who looked at the culture and history of France from the point of view of his city, its traditions and modes of life (Rosenblatt 1997). His ideas are not simply part of French Enlightenment, as most commentaries still see it, but must be understood against the background of a Calvinist city that formed his views in more ways than one. Not coincidentally, he called himself “a foreigner living in France” (Rousseau 2000, p. 396).

Rousseau’s dramatic life (Trousson 1988–1989; Cranston 1991, 1997; documents in: Le CD-Rom Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1999; latest English biographical study: Damrosch 2005) is characterized by an ascent outside the elite and by remaining an outsider for his whole life. He was an intelligent and creative stranger with a different outlook and the mental reserves of a man who never held any rank and had no power apart from his writings. His several patrons and more patronesses supported and even funded him but they did not make him servile. This life had its price. Rousseau’s striving for independence was as much a burden for him as his rise to fame; he never settled down and always feared the loss of control over his life. Many contemporaries thought of him as “crazy,” or “selfish,” or at least “difficult,” while he himself felt persecuted, the more so the longer he lived.5

Rousseau had attempted to gain control over his biography by writing his Confessions, which were published posthumously; indeed, these have largely determined his image ever since. Most biographers followed the trails Rousseau laid down and only recently have independent biographies appeared that do not use the data, metaphors, and interpretations Rousseau himself had chosen for his intellectual life after death. But still no interpreter can write about Rousseau without taking into account how he himself saw the drama of his life. In this respect he in fact controlled the interpretations of his life: “Since my name is certain to live on among men, I do not want the reputation it transmits to them to be a false one” (Rousseau 2000, p. 647).6

His fluctuating career7 alternated between Geneva, Savoy, and Paris, northern Italy and Switzerland, later also England and rural France, ever independently and restlessly. Rousseau’s way through life ended in solitude. Loneliness was not the plan but the result of Rousseau’s intellectual and physical wanderings. His life was without aim but full of ambitions and sentiments; the form of this life was very unusual and his manners were peculiar in many ways. Yet Rousseau was the ultimate author of his time, who fascinated the public with radical ideas on religion, philosophy, education, and politics. Part of his success was his view as an outsider: he was not a member of the Establishment and remained an observer at the edge of society throughout his life. He lived and thought outside social conventions.

At the age of 13, young Rousseau began an apprenticeship as an engraver, and three years later he left his trade and his home town. Only a few hours from Geneva, he met by chance a French Catholic baroness called Françoise-Louise de Warens (1699–1768), the first woman to change his life. Madame de Warens had annulled her marriage in 1726 and lived a free life on an estate called Annecy near Chambéry in Savoy.8 Rousseau met her on Palm Sunday, March 21st, 1728. Fifty years later he wrote: “This first moment determined my whole life and by an inevitable chain of events shaped the destiny of the rest of my days” (Rousseau 2000a, p. 89).

Some years later he became her lover and even converted to Catholicism for her.9 Rousseau called Madame de Warens “ma très-chère-maman” (Correspondance t. I, p. 99), but in fact she was both his mother, his educator, and his mistress. He was not in her service, but lived near and with her for 12 years. In a sense she was his true teacher because she introduced him to music and culture and tried to guide his studies. Apart from antique philosophy, stoic morals, and botany, music became Rousseau’s key intellectual profession. Some of the early biographers overlooked what music...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1: Intellectual Biography
• Part 2: Critical Exposition of Rousseau’s Work
• Part 3: The Reception and Influence of Rousseau’s Work
• Part 4: The Relevance of Rousseau’s Work Today
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright