Switzerland/France, 1712–1778
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Genevan philosopher of feeling and the general will. His Social Contract and Emile reshaped politics and education in the Enlightenment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 14 lines
Every Jean-Jacques Rousseau passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
“Let's go dance under the elms: / Step lively, young lassies. / Let's go dance under the elms: / Gallants, take up your pipes.”
“All that time is lost which might be better employed.”
“Days of absence, sad and dreary, / Clothed in sorrow's dark array,—Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.”
“The supreme enjoyment is in satisfaction with oneself ; it is in order to deserve this satisfaction that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom.”
“What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?”
“As a general rule—never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies.”
“I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.”
“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”
“I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: Well, let them eat cake.”
“The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.”
“He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.”
“There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right.”
Where Jean-Jacques Rousseau lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You were wronged, and anger is giving you energy.
You are treating anger as information and fuel. The risk is letting the fuel choose the destination.
You open your phone for one minute and lose twenty.
You are noticing that choice is shaped by architecture. The risk is letting structure erase your agency.
A child asks a question and the true answer will frighten them.
You are protecting a capacity that is not finished forming. The cost is a trust that will be audited later, in full.
Lessons that quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Rousseau & the General Will — Freedom, chains, and the common good
Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau today
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1712–1778, from Switzerland/France — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 14 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Baruch Spinoza — Netherlands, 1632–1677
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Henry David Thoreau — USA, 1817–1862
- Immanuel Kant — Prussia, 1724–1804
Argues the same cases
Friedrich Nietzsche, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Buddha, Lao Tzu take positions on the same dilemmas as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.