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In 1712, in the municipal republic of Geneva, Switzerland, was born one of the west's most influential social critics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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Transcript

Lead: In 1712 in the municipal republic of Geneva, Switzerland was born one of the west's most influential social critics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Intro: A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Rousseau's aristocratic mother died in childbirth and he was raised and educated by his father, a restless artisan who preferred the upper class diversions of hunting, dancing, and dueling, to his watch-making duties. Rousseau's early education consisted mostly of readings from the ancient Roman author Plutarch. As an adolescent he was apprenticed first to a notary and then to a brutish and cruel engraver. He washed out with both. His downward social spiral was humiliating to him and to escape he converted, for a short time, to Catholicism. He arrived in Paris in 1742 filled with great hopes and ambition.

Many in the French capital in the mid-1700s considered it to be the center of the universe. There the philosophers, the leading European thinkers of the era - Voltaire, Diderot, and Montiesque - held forth in the glittering salons that made Paris the cultural arbiter of taste and enlightenment. At first Rousseau identified himself with these men and their followers. He struck up a correspondence and then a friendship with Diderot. He made generous contributions to the latter's epic Encyclopaedie, the immense multi-volume compendium of scientific and social knowledge, the Bible of the Enlightenment. On the occasion of a visit to Diderot, who at that time was in prison, Rousseau had a revelation that transformed him. Up to that time he believed, with his friends, that science and education, arts and culture, were beneficial to society. After his so-called reform he lost faith in progress and came to see that only primitive man was truly virtuous. Before science, before culture, before even government, there was the "noble savage." Next time: The General Will.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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