Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1) Emile
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This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thesis that children are naturally good at birth violated the traditional Christian doctrine of origin sin. His argument that education should arise from children's natural instincts and impulses rather than trying to civilize and socialize them challenged traditional schooling. Rousseau's defenders see him as a pioneering thinker whose revolutionary...
2) Confessions
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In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyzes with...
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The once banned and burned treatise on the nature of education from the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract.
Considered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself to be the "best and most important" of all his writings, Émile set off a firestorm when it was first published in 1762. It was banned in Paris and burned in Geneva, but later served as the inspiration for a new national system of education during the French Revolution.
In...
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The aim of the Discourse is to examine the foundations of inequality among men, and to determine whether this inequality is authorised by natural law. Rousseau attempts to demonstrate that modern moral inequality, which is created by an agreement between men, is unnatural and unrelated to the true nature of man.
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"The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" is a one-of-a-kind autobiography. Up until its publication in 1782, only two autobiographies had ever been written, and both were written by devout religious saints. Highly scandalous yet witty in nature, calling Rousseau's work an "autobiography" is a loose categorization of the text, as many of the stories and tales have been proven false, yet Rousseau told the truth about the spirit of his life through...