Emile; or On Education

Auteur
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in Geneva in 1712. His remarkable novel La nouvelle Héloise (1761), met with immediate and enormous success. In this and in Émile, which followed a year later, Rousseau invoked the inviolability of personal ideals against the power of the state and the pressures of society. The crowning achievement of his political philosophy was The Social Contract, published in 1762. That same year he wrote an attack on revealed religion, the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. He was driven from Switzerland and fled to England where he only succeeded in making an enemy of Hume and returned to his continental peregrinations. In 1770 Rousseau completed his Confessions. His last years were spent largely in France where he died in 1778.

Texte du rabat

In his pioneering treatise on education, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents concepts that had influence on the development of pedagogy in the eighteenth century. Here, Rousseau asserts his main thesis that human beings are by nature good; it is only the distorting influences of civilization that have corrupted them.