Philosopher · Early modern
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778 · Romantic naturalism and the general will
Born Calvinist, received into the Catholic Church at Turin in 1728, returned to Calvinism in 1754; his real creed is the Savoyard Vicar's natural religion.
Rousseau taught that man is born good and corrupted by society, that legitimate authority rests on a social contract in which each surrenders himself to the “general will,” and (through the Savoyard Vicar in Émile) a religion of conscience and feeling without dogma or Church. He is the father of Romanticism, of the Revolution's political theology, and of modern educational theory.
Why he matters: Maritain's Three Reformers names him, with Luther and Descartes, as a maker of the modern mind; his Pelagian anthropology, civil religion and general will stand behind 1789, and the Church's social teaching on authority and the person (Diuturnum Illud, Quadragesimo Anno) is written against him.
Where to be careful
His denial of original sin is the “Rousseauian naturalism” the Church rejects alongside Pelagianism (Trent, Session 5), his contract and general will are condemned as the origin of authority (Diuturnum Illud 1881), his civil religion expels the Church from public life, and Émile and the Social Contract were condemned by the Archbishop of Paris and placed on the Index.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.