An evaluation of the claim that Rousseau's Social Contract sacrifices Essay - 1

An evaluation of the claim that Rousseau's Social Contract sacrifices the individual to the collective - Essay Example His father got into a quarrel with a French captain, and at the risk of imprisonment, left Geneva for the rest of his life. Rousseau stayed behind and was cared for by an uncle who sent him along with his cousin to study in the village of Bosey. In 1725 Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver and began to learn the trade. Although he did not detest the work, he thought his master to be violent and tyrannical. He, therefore, left Geneva in 1728 and fled to Annecy. Here he met Louise de Warens who was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism which forced him to forfeit his Genevan citizenship (in 1754 he would make a return to Geneva and publicly convert back to Calvanism). Rousseau’s relationship to Mme. de Warens lasted for several years and eventually became romantic. During this time he earned money through secretarial, teaching and musical jobs.† (Delaney J. J. â€Å"Jean Jacques Rousseau† Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ... erous rebel, suspected of crime and insanity, and seeing, in his last months, the apotheosis of his enemy—how did it come about that this man, after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelly, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy, and altogether, add more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before? Here, if anywhere, the problem faces us: what is the role of genius in history, of man versus the mass and the state? (Durant, Will & Ariel. 1967. Rousseau and Revolution. Simon and Schuster. New York.3) Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a philosopher in the eighteenth century French sense, was not what would now be called a â€Å"philosopher†. Nevertheless, he had a powerful influence on philosophy, as on literature and tastes and manners and politics. Whatever may be our opinion of his merits as a thinker, we must recognize his immense importance as a social force. This importance came mainly from his appeal to the heart, and to what, in his day, was called â€Å"sensibility.† He is the father of the Romantic Movement, the initiator of systems of thought which infer non-human facts from human emotions, and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships as opposed to traditional absolute monarchies. Ever since his time, those who considered themselves reformers have been divided into two groups, those who followed him and those who followed John Locke, an English