Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born June 28th,1712 in Geneva, Switzerland. His mother died in labor and he was raised by his father, who taught him to believe that the city of Geneva was a republic as wonderful as Sparta or ancient Rome. Rousseau´s father married above his class and got in trouble with the authorities by brandishing the sword that his upper-class pretentions prompted him to wear, forcing him to leave Geneva to escape imprisonment. Jean-Jacques had to live with his mother’s family who treated him poorly and humiliated him, making him flee the city just as his father. At just 16 years old he left his family and went to live an adventurous life as a Roman Catholic in France and Sardinia.
While he traveled around the province of Savoy,
…show more content…
He implied that humans in the state of nature always acted morally, for him society´s negative influence on human centers on the transformation of “amour de soi” which means a positive kind of self-love, to “amour-propre” a kind of artificial pride forcing man to compare himself to others. In his work “Discourse of the Arts and Sciences”, Rousseau stated that arts and sciences had been harmful to mankind, due to the fact that they were not human needs, but a result of pride and vanity and the opportunities man created for luxury and amenities aided the corruption of society.
Jean Jacques continued to expand this theme in his later work “Discourse on Inequality”, in which he tracked with more details the progress and degeneration of mankind, he started with the first humans, describing them as solitary beings with capacity for free will and able to have compassion or pity. He also wrote that due to population growth man underwent a psychological transformation and that the development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property and the division of labor lead to a prosperous age but also to the