Jean-Jacques Rousseau Section From Confessions The primary confession that Jean Jacques Rousseau makes in this excerpt from his work of literature entitled Confessions is the fact that he was inadvertently responsible for the death of his mother. Evidently, his mother died during or shortly thereafter giving birth to him, because the author writes, "I was born, a poor and sickly child, and cost my mother her life. So my birth was

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Personal Background Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28th 1712, in Geneva, a French-speaking city-state within Switzerland. He received little formal education and, in 1728, left Geneva to live an unsettled existence, travelling throughout Europe. Although mainly self-taught, Rousseau became a respected novelist, composer, musicologist, and botanist, in addition to his most commonly recognized contribution, as a moral, political and educational philosopher. He first came to prominence as a writer

" Rousseau on Political Representation, Democracy, Law, and the Need for Legislators: In Book II, Chapter 3, Rousseau expresses the position that a representative form of democratic government undermines a true democracy where each individual maintains his own point-of-view without aligning himself with any sub-group or political party, because: when factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the European theorists who has been cited as an inspiration for the Founding Fathers as they wrote the U.S. Constitution and created the American form of government. In some ways, however, they were using what Rousseau wrote as a beginning point and then finding a governmental form to refute some of Rousseau's concerns for what representative government might become if not controlled. The authors of

Martin Luther King can also allude to Rousseau in the formation of the concept of civil disobedience. As Scott notes, "Rousseau argues that civil society is based on a contractual arrangement of rights and duties which applies equally to all people, whereby natural liberty is exchanged for civil liberty, and whereby natural rights are exchanged for legal rights." Legal rights are a natural extension of natural human rights. If

For Smith, however, the development of a commercial and economic society leads to the existence of a social structure. This social structure is furthermore divided into three classes - the landowners, the capitalists and the laborers. This is considered by Smith to be the three great constituent that exist in every single civilized society. For him, the introduction of social structures like government and economic classes are the major causes