Jean-Jacques Rousseau(J. Qin)

I am Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva.  I was born on 28 June 1712, in the city of Geneva, to a family of the moyen order. My mother’s death, nine months after my birth, was the first of my misfortunes. My father, who moved away to Nyon to avoid a lawsuit, disowned me, as would my uncle several years later. In 1742, I went to Paris to become a musician and composer. After two years spent serving a post at the French Embassy in Venice, I returned in 1745. During my residence in Paris, I befriended Denis Diderot, contributing numerous articles to his encyclopedia. Thérèse Levasseur, my lover at the time, bore me numerous children, allof which I sent to an orphanage. In 1750 I published the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in which I condemned the arts and sciences.  This work won fame and recognition, and it laid much of the philosophical groundwork for my second essay, The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Despite this work being longer and more physiologically daring, it did not win the essay contest. Towards the end of I career, I wrote an autobiography of myself, titled Confessions, although this will not be published until after my death.

Human civilization has always been artificial, creating inequality, envy, and unnatural desires. Society corrupts a man, transforming one’s amour de soi into amour-propre. Amour-propre encourages man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labor and resulting dependency on one another has led to economic inequality. This has made the opinion of others essential to one’s self esteem. The state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. This is not to say that a civil society plagues humanity, and I do not advocate a return to the state of nature. When sovereignty is in the hands of the people, the general will of the people as a whole guarantees safety from subordination to the will of others, because the people collectively formulate the law.