The 300th birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An introduction by the editor

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, on 28 June 1712, that is three hundred years ago. As an editor of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology it is my pleasure to have the opportunity to commemorate his 300th birthday with this special issue, added to the six issues of this year, 2012, as a small intellectual present to the readership of this journal. And perhaps it may also serve as a modest incentive to be less a-historical in our understanding of our disciplines. It must be said that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a complicated thinker: negative and full of paradoxes. Although in many respects an Enlightenment philosopher, he was against the Belief in Progress subscribed to by his contemporaries, he believed that arts and sciences had morally corrupted the common man. In contrast to Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau regarded the foundation of the State as the source of corruption, hate, envy and war; and finally even Rousseau’s pedagogy is negative: ‘‘child-raising is the difficult art of ruling without a mandate and of doing everything by doing nothing’’ (Rousseau, 1762/1763). The interpreters of his works radically differ in their evaluations: he is considered as ‘‘A restless Genius’’ (Damrosch, 2005) as well as ‘‘The Black sheep of Enlightenment’’ (Wåhlberg, 2011), to refer only to two out of the abundance of books on the person and the works of Rousseau. But at the same time all authors agree that Modern Western Thinking on child development, on education and on pedagogy are still to a certain extent Rousseauian. When Rousseau wrote his preface to Émile in 1762, he wrote: ‘‘The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in