Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l'education [Emile]

Laurence Mall (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Ed. by Tim Unwin, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.04: French Writing and Culture: Eighteenth-Century and the Enlightenment, 1700-1800.
Vol. editors: Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Jenny Mander (University of Cambridge), Síofra Pierse (University College Dublin), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Domains

Education

Dates

First circulation or publication 1762

Places

Switzerland (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Recommended Reading

The Genevan

philosophe

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) considered

Emile or On Education

, composed in the 1750s and published in 1762, as “the best of [his] writings, as well as the most important” (Rousseau, 1995, p. 480). It ranks among the great works concerning the philosophy of education, regularly grouped with such classics as Plato’s

Republic

and John Locke’s

Some Thoughts Concerning Education

(1693). But this masterpiece is also an influential work in other disciplines: it is a study in philosophical anthropology, a significant piece of social criticism, as well as a very strange quasi-novel. Its influence was considerable, and it continues to offer stimulating intellectual challenges to modern readers.

In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau had sketched a

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2879 words

Citation: Mall, Laurence. "Émile, ou de l'education". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5382, accessed 22 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article