Early modern · 1712–1778
Who influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
Influences and legacy
Civilization corrupts; legitimacy lives in the general will — the French Revolution read him aloud.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was influenced by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and went on to influence Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, Leo Tolstoy and Claude Lévi-Strauss. That is 6 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Maurice Quentin de La Tour (Life time: 1788), Public domain See the whole map
Who was Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
A Genevan philosophe, writer and composer, Rousseau shaped the course of the Enlightenment, parts of the French Revolution and modern political and educational thought. His Discourse on Inequality traces inequality to private property, and The Social Contract sets out the basis of a legitimate political order.
His novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) helped launch Romanticism in fiction, and Émile, or On Education (1762) treats the place of the individual in society. His Confessions, published after his death, began the modern autobiography, and with the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker it brought a new turn to subjectivity and introspection.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Thomas Hobbes 1588–1679
- John Locke 1632–1704
Who did Jean-Jacques Rousseau influence?
4 thinkers on this map draw directly on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–1797
- Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
The line of teachers behind Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The longest documented line of influence ending at Jean-Jacques Rousseau runs 16 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Indirect influences
- Through Thomas Hobbes: Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, René Descartes
The second generation
- Through Immanuel Kant: Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Georg W. F. Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Bernard Bolzano, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Sanders Peirce, Gottlob Frege, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls
- Through Mary Wollstonecraft: John Stuart Mill
- Through Leo Tolstoy: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Contemporaries of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with no direct line between them.
- David Hume 1711–1776
- Denis Diderot 1713–1784
- Étienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714–1780
- Thomas Reid 1710–1796
- Émilie du Châtelet 1706–1749
- Hryhorii Skovoroda 1722–1794
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729–1781
Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 4 — #26 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 60
- Thinkers downstream
- 106
- Wikipedia languages
- 162 — #5 of 36 among early modern philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Questions about Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Who influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
- Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
- Who did Jean-Jacques Rousseau influence?
- Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, Leo Tolstoy and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
- When did Jean-Jacques Rousseau live?
- 1712–1778. The map files Jean-Jacques Rousseau under the early modern period.
- How rare is the Jean-Jacques Rousseau card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 162 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More early modern philosophers
- René Descartes 1596–1650
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Voltaire 1694–1778
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Niccolò Machiavelli 1469–1527
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716
- John Locke 1632–1704
- Blaise Pascal 1623–1662