Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712, to Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and Suzanne Bernard, who died nine days after Rousseau's birth. He was raised by his father and an aunt; Isaac's sudden departure when Rousseau was ten left him effectively orphaned. Apprenticed to an engraver and treated harshly, Rousseau ran away from Geneva at sixteen (March 1728) and began a wandering life across France and Italy. Through the patronage of Madame Françoise-Louise de Warens, a Swiss noblewoman, he converted to Catholicism at Turin (April 1728), returned to her at Chambéry and later Les Charmettes, and received an unsystematic but intense self-education in music, classical literature, and philosophy during his teens and twenties. Rousseau arrived in Paris in 1741 and attempted to make his way as a music theorist and opera composer. He invented a numerical musical notation system (rejected by the Académie des Sciences) and composed the successful opera Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer, 1752). He served briefly as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice (1743-44), an experience that deepened his political thinking. He met Denis Diderot in Paris in 1742, joined the Encyclopédie project as music editor, and seemed for a period to be a member of the philosophe circle. The break came with the 1750 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Rousseau's prize-winning response to the Dijon Academy's question whether progress in the sciences and arts had improved morals. His contrarian answer — that civilization corrupts rather than ennobles — shocked the philosophes and launched Rousseau's international reputation. The 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men extended the critique into a developmental account of how private property, civil society, and political inequality emerged from a hypothetical state of nature. These two Discourses establish the philosophical framework within which The Social Contract operates. Rousseau's personal life was turbulent. He began a lifelong relationship with Thérèse Levasseur, a Parisian laundress, around 1745; they had five children, all of whom were consigned to the Paris foundling hospital (Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés). Rousseau acknowledged this abandonment in the Confessions (published posthumously 1782) and presented himself as tormented by the decision; critics have noted the uncomfortable disjunction between his educational theorizing in Émile and his personal treatment of his own children. Thérèse remained with him for over thirty years; they married formally in a simple civil ceremony in 1768. The 1762 publication of Émile and The Social Contract, and the simultaneous condemnation and flight, marked Rousseau's transition from celebrated philosophe to persecuted fugitive. The years at Môtiers (1762-1765), England with Hume (1766-1767), and eventually France under an assumed name were productive but increasingly clouded by paranoia. Rousseau completed the Confessions (begun 1765, finished 1770), Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (Dialogues, 1772-1776), and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776-1778). He died suddenly at Ermenonville on July 2, 1778, age 66, under the patronage of the Marquis de Girardin. Rousseau's posthumous reputation has continued to fluctuate dramatically. In the 1780s he was widely read but still controversial. During the Revolution he was canonized; his remains were moved to the Panthéon in October 1794. In the 19th century he was claimed by Romantics (Shelley, Byron) and attacked by conservatives (Burke, de Maistre). In the 20th century he has been a central figure in every major school of political philosophy: criticized by liberals (Berlin), celebrated by republicans and participatory democrats, analyzed by Marxists, defended by communitarians, engaged by Rawlsians. His legacy remains actively contested.

How the Era Shapes the Book

The Social Contract emerges from the intellectual ferment of the late French Enlightenment, a period in which the philosophes were simultaneously expanding knowledge (the Encyclopédie), attacking the Catholic Church, and challenging absolutist political theory. Voltaire's anti-clerical writings, Diderot's materialism, d'Alembert's mathematical rationalism, and Montesquieu's comparative constitutional thought had made it possible to engage political foundations philosophically in ways that would not have been possible a generation earlier. But Rousseau's relationship to the philosophes was adversarial rather than collaborative. His 1750 Discourse launched his break with them by claiming that their project — the advancement of the sciences and arts — corrupted morals rather than improving them. By 1762 the break was complete: Voltaire mocked Rousseau publicly, Diderot and Rousseau had quarreled definitively, d'Alembert had distanced himself. The Social Contract is thus an Enlightenment work that rejects Enlightenment complacencies. It deploys Enlightenment methods (rational analysis, contract theory, critique of tradition) to reach Enlightenment-skeptical conclusions (civilization corrupts; representation is self-alienation; civil religion is necessary). The political setting of 1762 was that of declining absolute monarchy but not yet revolutionary challenge. Louis XV's reign (1715-1774) was a period of losing wars (the Seven Years' War ended disastrously for France in 1763, with the loss of most of France's overseas empire), financial strain, and institutional decay. The Parlements — regional high courts that claimed the right to register royal edicts — were asserting increasing political independence. Religious disputes continued (the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1764, partly because of their political entanglements). In this context, Rousseau's attack on the 'sovereignty of kings' was not an academic exercise but a politically charged intervention. The Paris Parlement's condemnation of The Social Contract reflected recognition of the threat. Geneva's condemnation was more personal but reflected similar dynamics. The Genevan republic was officially governed by its citizens but increasingly dominated by an aristocratic-patrician class. Rousseau's idealized Geneva in the treatise was the Geneva of his youth; the actual Geneva of 1762 was a narrowing oligarchy hostile to Rousseau's implicit democratic radicalism. The 1766 'Letters Written from the Mountain,' Rousseau's defense of his Genevan allegiance, explicitly addresses the tension between Geneva's constitutional forms and its aristocratic practice. The Geneva that condemned him was not the Geneva he had defended.