This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. His Emile expressed his opposition to the conventionality and formality of prevalent modes of child-rearing and education, and an untheological religion stressing the benignity of nature appeared in the “Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” His Discourse on the Arts and Sciences has strong primitivist implications, and his Social Contract proposes a kind of religious nationalism, emphasizes the need for emotional participation in civic affairs, and seems to laud the political virtues of a simple peasantry. Like Goethe’s Werther, it is a misunderstood young genius who appears in the Confessions. Here again is the youthful, hero-worshipping Jean-Jacques displaying an emotional immaturity that leads him into picaresque escapades in the company of transients and misfits, always ending in reunion with mother-surrogate Madame de Warens. His works contain a whole range of themes that were to become the staples of Romanticism. He had to make his own way and did so largely as a copier of music, spending considerable time in Paris, moving among the philosophes but remaining solitary in consequence of his irascible and sensitive nature.

He was born in Geneva: the opening pages of his Confessions which appear below, describe his family circumstances. He certainly was one of the most influential thinkers of modern times, and his works have been used as sources of stimulation or authority for an immense variety of social, political, and aesthetic positions. this minuet and bass, suppressing the words, and uttering it for my own as confidently as if I had been speaking to the inhabitants. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) has been accused of as well as credited with causing both the Romantic movement and the French Revolution (or whatever was good or evil in each).

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau