WORTHINGTON FINE ART GALLERIES

“Emile, ou de l’Education” par Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Published: City de Geneve. Tome IV. Amsterdam, chez Jean Neaulme, MDCCLXII- 1762 | Illustrated – frontispiece ‘Circe’ (C. Eisen, J.J.Pasquier) | Full Leather Binding, printed on laid paper, pages: 456 | Approx. Dimensions: 1 7″ H x 10″ W.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a major Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism . His political philosophy heavily influenced the French Revolution , as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought. His novel, Émile: or, On Education is a seminal treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel , Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse , was of great importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction.

Emile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “ best and most important of all my writings ”. Due to a section of the book entitled “ Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar ”, Emile would be banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762 . During the French Revolution , Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education. The work 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 as it leaves the hands of the Author 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 Ε mile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Ε mile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does contain some specific advice on raising children . It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education in Western culture to have a serious claim to completeness, as well as being the first Bildungsroman , having preceded Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by more than thirty years.