Jean Jacques Rousseau

When a state fails to act in a moral fashion, it ceases to exert genuine authority over the individual.

- 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 in Geneva, Switzerland. His mother died shortly after his birth. When Rousseau was ten his father fled from Geneva to avoid imprisonment for a minor offense, leaving young Jean-Jacques to be raised by an aunt and uncle. He left Geneva at sixteen, wandering from place to place, finally moving to Paris in 1742. He earned his living during this period, working as everything from footman to assistant to an ambassador. Rousseau’s profound insight can be found in almost every trace of modern philosophy today. Somewhat complicated and ambiguous, his general philosophy tried to grasp an emotional and passionate side of man which he felt was left out of most previous philosophical thinking. In his early writing, Rousseau contended that man is essentially good, a “noble savage” when in the “state of nature” (the state of all the other animals, and the condition man was in before the creation of civilization and society), and that good people are made unhappy and corrupted by their experi