Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Introduction

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer, and not a psychologist in any modern sense: he wrote a century before psychology existed as a discipline, and his claims about development were philosophical arguments illustrated by a fictional pupil rather than empirical findings. He nonetheless belongs in the prehistory of developmental psychology, because Emile, or On Education (1762) gave European thought three ideas that later became psychological commonplaces — that childhood is a distinct stage of life with its own logic, that development proceeds through ordered phases, and that children learn more from experience than from instruction.

Rousseau's relevance to psychology rests almost entirely on that book and on its critics. He argued that human beings are naturally good and are corrupted by society, that education should protect rather than fill the child, and that moral development grows out of the sentiment of pity rather than from drilled duty. Later educators from Pestalozzi to Montessori and Dewey drew on these claims, and later researchers treated them as hypotheses to be tested, with mixed results.

Early Life and Education

Rousseau was born in Geneva, then an independent Calvinist republic, on June 28, 1712. His mother, Suzanne Bernard, died days after his birth, and he was raised by his father, Isaac, a watchmaker who read novels and Plutarch with him and who passed on a pride in Genevan citizenship. When Rousseau was about ten his father left the city after a quarrel, and the boy was placed with a Protestant minister and then apprenticed, first to a notary and then to an engraver.

He had almost no formal schooling. In March 1728, aged fifteen, he walked away from his apprenticeship and encountered Françoise-Louise de Warens at Annecy, a convert to Catholicism who supported and influenced him for years and with whom he eventually became lovers. He converted to Catholicism in Turin, worked as a servant, a music teacher, and a tutor, and read widely during winters at Les Charmettes near Chambéry. This self-directed, interrupted, and largely unsupervised formation is worth noting in a man who would later write about education: much of Emile reads like an argument for the kind of learning he believed he had missed.

Academic and Professional Career

Rousseau went to Paris in 1742 with a new system of musical notation, which the Academy of Sciences declined to adopt. He earned a living copying music, wrote articles on music for the Encyclopédie, composed the opera Le Devin du village, and served from 1743 to 1744 as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. Around 1745 he began his lifelong relationship with Thérèse Levasseur, a chambermaid; according to his own account they had five children, born between 1746 and 1752, all of whom were placed in the Paris foundling hospital for abandoned children, though some biographers have questioned whether the children were his.

Fame arrived in 1750, when he won the Academy of Dijon's prize with the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, arguing that the progress of the arts and sciences had corrupted morals. A second essay on the origin of inequality followed in 1755 and did not win. He returned to Calvinism and Genevan citizenship in 1754, quarrelled with Diderot and the other philosophes, and withdrew to Montmorency, where he wrote his three major books in quick succession: the novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), and in 1762 both The Social Contract and Emile.

Emile was condemned by the Parlement of Paris and criticised by the Archbishop of Paris; it was burned in both Paris and Geneva, largely on account of its "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," which rejected original sin and proposed a natural religion grounded in conscience rather than revelation. Rousseau fled, was expelled from Bernese territory, and eventually accepted David Hume's invitation to England, arriving in January 1766. He quarrelled with Hume within a year, returned to France under protection in 1767, and spent his last years writing the Confessions and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. He died at Ermenonville on July 2, 1778; accounts of the cause vary between a stroke and a hemorrhage. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon in 1794.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The natural child and the distinctness of childhood

Rousseau's central psychological claim is that the child is not an unfinished adult but a being with its own ways of feeling, thinking, and seeing, and that treating children as miniature adults damages them. He distinguished amour de soi, the natural and limited concern for one's own preservation, from amour-propre, the comparative and competitive self-regard that arises only in society and generates vanity, envy, and resentment. Much of Emile is designed to raise a boy in whom amour-propre has not yet taken hold.

Developmental stages

The book is organised into phases: infancy, a period of physical dependence and of learning through the senses; childhood roughly to age twelve, when the senses and the body should be trained and formal book learning withheld; pre-adolescence from about twelve to fifteen, a brief window of surplus energy and curiosity suited to useful, concrete inquiry and to manual trades; and adolescence from fifteen, when passions, moral sentiment, and social relations appear. The scheme anticipated, in rough outline, the staged accounts later offered by Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, though nothing in it was derived from observation of children in any systematic way.

Negative education

Rousseau's most distinctive prescription is negative education: in early childhood the tutor's job is not to teach virtue and truth but to keep error and vice out of reach, to let the child's own experience supply the lesson, and to protect curiosity from premature demands. Emile learns to read late, and the one book he is allowed is Robinson Crusoe; he learns about property by having a gardener tear up the beans he planted on someone else's land. The method is indirect: the tutor arranges circumstances so that the consequences of action teach what a lecture could not.

Compassion and moral development

Rousseau grounded morality in pitié, an innate reluctance to see another sentient being suffer, which he thought preceded reason and which education must extend through imagination rather than replace with rules. This placed sentiment rather than instruction at the origin of moral development, an emphasis that reappears in later work on empathy and prosocial behavior.

Major Publications

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750)
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755)
Julie, or the New Heloise (1761)
The Social Contract (1762)
Emile, or On Education (1762)
Confessions (published posthumously, 1782)
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (published posthumously, 1782)

Impact and Legacy

Rousseau helped make childhood a subject. His insistence that children have their own needs and timetable fed directly into the work of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori, and into the progressive education of John Dewey; the modern assumption that education should begin from the child rather than from the syllabus is largely his legacy. He also framed, in durable form, the argument about whether development is a matter of drawing out what is already there or of shaping from outside.

The criticisms are equally durable. The first is evidential: Emile is a novel, and its developmental stages were invented rather than observed. Rousseau had no data, no sample, and no method, and the stages he proposed are best read as a philosophical schema. His defenders reply that he never claimed otherwise — he wrote that he was showing the goal that must be set, not saying it could be reached — and that Piaget's empirically derived stages bear a rough resemblance to his, which is a remarkable outcome for an armchair argument.

The second concerns Book V, on the education of Sophie. Having argued that education should develop reason and independence, Rousseau prescribed for girls an education in charm, domesticity, and dependence, on the ground that women should please men. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was written substantially against this passage, and her argument is devastating precisely because it uses Rousseau's own premises: if human beings are naturally good and reason is what makes virtue possible, there is no reason to exempt half the species. She also argued that the submissiveness Rousseau recommended would produce not virtue but cunning, since a person trained only to obey cannot be moral. The passage is widely read today as a contradiction at the centre of his educational theory.

A third criticism targets the method itself. The freedom Emile enjoys is manufactured: an omniscient tutor arranges every circumstance so that the boy believes himself self-directing while being steered, a structure critics have described as manipulation in disguise. The arrangement also requires one tutor per child and near-total isolation from society, which makes it useless as a model for schooling. Modern evidence sharpens the point: reviews of instructional research have argued that minimally guided discovery learning is generally less effective than explicit instruction, while meta-analytic work finds that unassisted discovery underperforms but guided discovery with feedback and scaffolding does well. Defenders of Rousseau note that this conclusion is closer to his own model than it first appears, because the tutor in Emile supplies the very scaffolding that unassisted discovery lacks.

Finally, there is the biographical charge. Rousseau delivered five children to the foundling hospital, where infant mortality was extremely high, while writing the most influential book on child-rearing of his century. His defense in the Confessions was that he could not support them and that they would be better raised by the state as peasants and workers; critics, from Voltaire onward, treated the explanation as self-serving. A related correction is worth recording: Rousseau is often credited with the idea of the noble savage, but he did not use the phrase and did not present the state of nature as a historical golden age, describing it instead as a conjectural device for thinking about what in human nature is original.

Rousseau's standing in psychology is therefore that of a source of hypotheses rather than a source of findings. His claims about stages, sentiment, and experience-based learning have been productive, and several of them have survived only after being substantially corrected by evidence and by Wollstonecraft's argument.

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References

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). Émile, ou De l'éducation. Néaulme.