Dec 25, 2009
The son of a poor Swiss watchmaker, Rousseau spent his youth in various apprenticeships and minor occupations and did not gain any notice he was thirty-seven. That year he won a prize for an essay on science, the arts, and social morality, awarded by the provincial academy at Dijon. Six years later he won wider attention with the publication of Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755), in which he contrasted the corruption of his contemporary society with the simplicity and goodness of humanity in a natural state.
Rousseau’s highly popular...
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