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==Content worries==
The content of this article sticks pretty close to http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96jun/rousseau.html. Has proper permission been granted? ] 01:02 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

==Rousseau the composer==
Needs some mention of his work as a composer, but the article is so tightly written I'm not sure where to work it in without breaking it up. ''Le Devin du Village'' was wildly popular in France, and he was pretty well known for his music at the time. ] 22:38, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It would be also quite interesting who were his friends in Paris. --] 21:03, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Like Denis Diderot, but I am not so much into Biography to fix this. --] 21:05, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Antandrus, you're right: and in 1755-6, as a reaction to the immense (overwhelming) success due to his Discourses, he drew back from the mundane scene and for a while he chose to live off copying sheet music... he could'nt stand popularity. (and: he wrote some musical theory articles for the Enyclopédie, and a short ''] with some Observations on Melody''; and took part in the French-Italian opera controversy.)--] 21:32, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

==Anon edit==
An anon recently made some changes to the bio, particularly altering the order of some items; I've brought this back into line with my timeline of Rousseau's life, which comes from the Everyman editions of his various works. ] ] 17:42, 2005 July 26 (UTC)

==Comment about Noble Savage==
I have moved this criticism from the body of the article to the discussion page where it belonged instead of in a footnote (no. 17), where someone inserted it:

<blockquote>
This comment is untrue. An idea of the "noble savage" --thought it may have differed from that of the British--certainly existed in the French colonial context. For more information about French racial thinking, see ''The Libertine Colony'' by Doris Garraway, ''There are No Slaves in France'' by Sue Peabody, ''The Avengers of the New World'' by Laurent Dubois, ''The French Atlantic Triangle'' by Christopher Miller. For information about the relationship between the French and English colonial contexts, see ''Sentimental Figures of Empire'' by Lynn Festa.

</blockquote>
There is a misunderstanding here. The ''term'' "Noble Savage" is used now by scholars writing about French colonialism to refer to i''dealizing attitudes'' toward indigenous people. No one disputes that. However, the ''term'' "noble savage" was not used in French during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Although L'Escarbot did use the phrase: "The Savages are noble" as the heading of a chapter in his History of French Canada (c.1609), from where Dryden may have picked it up. The usual French term was and is: "''le bon sauvage''."

According to Ter Ellingson:<blockquote>A few recent articles in French (e.g., Trudel 1996: 7ff.; Duvernay-Bolens 1998: 143) have abandoned the long-established ''bon sauvage'' in favor of a new expression, ''noble sauvage''; and some German scholars use ''edle Wilde'', “Noble Savage,” in place of ''gute Wilde'', “good savage” (Bitterli 1976: 367 ff.; Sammer 1992: 932). Such cases seem obvious imitations of English usage, often arising in context of explicit references to English writers such as Berkhofer (1978 . . .) and Lovejoy and Boas . . .1935 ) in whose writings the “Noble Savage” plays a prominent role. Nor is it clear that the English-derived usage is moving toward a general acceptance in these languages, particularly in French; for many French languages continue to use ''bon sauvage'' (e.g.Todorov 1989; Doiron 1991; Guille-Escuret 1992), just as some (but perhaps fewer) German writers retain the term ''gute Wilde'' (e.g., Kohl 1981). Ellingson, ''The Myth of the Noble Savage'' (2001), p. 377 </blockquote>

In the book by Doris Garraway, ''The Libertine Colony'', the author explicitly states (in English) "I am going to use the term 'Noble Savage' to describe these settlers". She and the other writers cited above are using English, not French. See the wikipedia entry on ].

In any case, no scholar of Rousseau argues that he used either the term or the concept. On the contrary. He did not idealize primitive peoples as his detractors have claimed. The discussion about racist attitudes toward colonial subjugated peoples belongs somewhere else.

== Language and translation ==

Looking at all the discussions, it seems to me that there are and have been many, many misunderstandings because of the fact that most native English/American speakers have read Rousseau in English, and, moreover, that the basis for commentaries is formed by secondary sources. Seeing Damrosch, who indeed wrote a fine, but definitely not complete biography of Rousseau, ignores the hundreds of biographies written in French in the first place, and all the others written in dozens of other languages.
Checking your facts is done by turning firstly to primary sources, not secondary ones, and written in the original language - many things are lost in translation, or just translated wrongly - and then the secondary ones.
Checking facts when writing or commenting foreign personas is made easy by going to the Misplaced Pages-page in the relevant language.

== External links modified ==

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==His children?==
Cheers.—] <span style="color:green;font-family:Rockwell">(])</span> 08:34, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
I notice there is a lot here on Rousseau's child rearing and similar facts... but there is no mention he had 5 children with Therese who he abandoned to be orphans. Is there no criticism of this available? Should we not certainly include this in our assessment of him? What happened to his children? ] (]) 21:33, 19 November 2021 (UTC)


:Rousseau claimed that he went to the foundling hospital 10 years after he abandoned their first son, but it didn't have any records of the children. I believe he lied and never visited, he never wanted any of them in the first place. This would be an interesting exercise for French historical researchers, to look at the records and see what really happened. ] (]) 17:24, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
== External links modified ==


== Liberalism ==
Hello fellow Wikipedians,


Jean-Jacques Rousseau has historically been classified as a liberal.
I have just modified one external link on ]. Please take a moment to review ]. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit ] for additional information. I made the following changes:
The sources are under the article "]"; Another source: The history of European liberalism by Guido Ruggiero.
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081223221808/http://www.laphilosophie.fr/livres-de-Rousseau-texte-integral.html to http://www.laphilosophie.fr/livres-de-Rousseau-texte-integral.html


--] (]) 17:27, 29 December 2021 (UTC)RVD3
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=="the Antichrist" vs "an antichrist"==
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The current version of the page says his pastor described him as "the Antichrist". But the book cited just says "his onw pastor turned against him, and denounced him in public sermons as Antichrist", itself citing a book which writes "M. de Montmollin, whilst professing to withdraw from all public action against Rousseau, continued to excite, by his sermons and letters, the animosity of his parishioners against this "anti-Christ", inflicted upon the pious people of Neuchatel after he had been repudiated by all Christian states". Given that historically "antichrist" has not always been understood as referring to just one person, I think Misplaced Pages should say he was described as "an Antichrist" or just "Antichrist".] (]) 21:52, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
Cheers.—] <span style="color:green;font-family:Rockwell">(])</span> 16:15, 22 December 2017 (UTC)


== Rousseau's motto: ''Vitam impendere vero'' ==
== Copyright violation in "Stages of human development"? ==


From Juvenal's ''Satires''; cf. . Probably worth adding to the main page somewhere. --] (]) 17:12, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
An editor a source to one of the paragraphs in the ] section, which is for a Google Books listing of ''Western Thinker's in Political Science'' by Dr. Shrikant Yelegaonkar. The they provided is in Indonesian and/or Taiwanese, so it's really unclear what's being shown, but if you look at it , you can see our article and the book share quite a bit of text, including the same section heading. I'm not sure if the book, which was published in 2015, copied from Misplaced Pages, or our article copied from the book. Please, if someone who has more knowledge on this topic can look into it, I'd appreciate it. <span style="background-color: black">] ]</span> 02:50, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

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His children?

I notice there is a lot here on Rousseau's child rearing and similar facts... but there is no mention he had 5 children with Therese who he abandoned to be orphans. Is there no criticism of this available? Should we not certainly include this in our assessment of him? What happened to his children? 66.168.118.139 (talk) 21:33, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Rousseau claimed that he went to the foundling hospital 10 years after he abandoned their first son, but it didn't have any records of the children. I believe he lied and never visited, he never wanted any of them in the first place. This would be an interesting exercise for French historical researchers, to look at the records and see what really happened. 2402:8100:3197:7315:1943:D911:7460:2398 (talk) 17:24, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Liberalism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has historically been classified as a liberal. The sources are under the article "classical liberalism"; Another source: The history of European liberalism by Guido Ruggiero.

--RVD3 (talk) 17:27, 29 December 2021 (UTC)RVD3

"the Antichrist" vs "an antichrist"

The current version of the page says his pastor described him as "the Antichrist". But the book cited just says "his onw pastor turned against him, and denounced him in public sermons as Antichrist", itself citing a book which writes "M. de Montmollin, whilst professing to withdraw from all public action against Rousseau, continued to excite, by his sermons and letters, the animosity of his parishioners against this "anti-Christ", inflicted upon the pious people of Neuchatel after he had been repudiated by all Christian states". Given that historically "antichrist" has not always been understood as referring to just one person, I think Misplaced Pages should say he was described as "an Antichrist" or just "Antichrist".136.152.143.254 (talk) 21:52, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Rousseau's motto: Vitam impendere vero

From Juvenal's Satires; cf. . Probably worth adding to the main page somewhere. --RZiman (talk) 17:12, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

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