Essay Database

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. One Sunday evening in March 1728, when he was not yet sixteen, Rousseau found himself shut out of Geneva after a walk in the country. He had forgotten the time, and the city gates were closed when he reached them. This had happened to him twice before, and his master had beaten him for staying out all night. This time he decided he …

…to the quasi-totalitarianism of the Terror. However, Rousseau was not writing as a tactician of revolution. He did not pretend to tell how a people should go about becoming democratic. In fact, he confused this whole issue by identifying legislative with sovereign power, and by his negative attitude toward representative institutions. Primarily, he was writing a critique of the world as he knew it, of what later became to be known as the Old Regime.