ABSTRACT
Jean Jacqes Rousseau was born in Geneva, the son of a mad watchmaker, in 1712, and died in 1778. Having left school at the age of twelve, and failed to settle in any of the trades to which he had been apprenticed, he fled from Geneva to Savoy four years later, and began a life of wandering and exile which, apart from twelve years spent in Paris (1744-1756), continued to his death. For part of these early years he was supported by women who befriended him; for part of them he lived the life of a vagabond and earned a livelihood as best he could. In 1743 he became secretary to the French Ambassador to Venice, and appears to have served him well, but quarrelled because he received no salary. In 1750 he achieved fame through winning a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the question ‘Have the arts and sciences conferred benefits on mankind?’ Rousseau answered the question in the negative, contending that the arts and sciences create artificial wants and jeopardise the natural morality of unspoiled man. This theme was elaborated in his Discourse on Equality (1754), in which Rousseau argued that ‘man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad’.
