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Article: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778)
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
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ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES (1712
–
1778)
ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES
(1712
–
1778), French philosopher and writer. Rousseau is widely viewed as the greatest social, political, and pedagogical philosopher of the French Enlightenment. He gives education the task of transforming naturally self-loving egoists animated only by their own "particular wills" into polis-loving citizens with a civic "general will" ("the will one has as a citizen"). For Rousseau, the "Great Legislator" (more accurately the great civic educator) must "change the nature of man" by turning self-lovers into "Spartan mothers" (who ask not whether their own sons have survived battles but whether the "general good" of ...