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Position:Home>General - Arts & Humanities > Your thoughts and feelings about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the general will?Question: Your thoughts and feelings about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the general will?
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He was one of the most original and important thinkers in history, and that is saying a lot. As a person he had personality problems - he was very self-indulgent, felt sorry for himself, wasn't very responsible to his family, and later in life became very paranoid. But he was extremely intelligent and for a man, unusually sensitive to emotion.So much so that he exalted feeling and imagination over reason and restraint. This had a powerful influence on the entire Romantic movement. Rousseau thought that people in the wild were better than people who lived in cities, and so he sparked a lot of interest in nature for its own sake and in the question of what exactly is human nature - and in particular is it born free? (He said it was.) |