Emile, or On Education was considered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. On its first appearance in 1762 it was publicly burned.
As its title implies, Emile is a treatise on the nature of education but also on the nature of man. It tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society— how, in particular, the individual might retain what Ro...
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Emile, or On Education was considered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. On its first appearance in 1762 it was publicly burned.
As its title implies, Emile is a treatise on the nature of education but also on the nature of man. It tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society— how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity. Its opening sentence: “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society. He employs the novelistic device of Emile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does...
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