IV.

Influence

Although Rousseau contributed greatly to the movement in Western Europe for individual freedom and against the absolutism of Church and State, his conception of the State as the embodiment of the abstract will of the people and his arguments for strict enforcement of political and religious conformity are regarded by some historians as a source of totalitarian ideology. Rousseau’s theory of education led to more permissive and more psychologically oriented methods of child care, and influenced the German educator Freidrich Froebel, the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and other pioneers of modern education. The New Eloise and Confessions introduced a new style of extreme emotional expression, concern with intense personal experience, and exploration of the conflicts between moral and sensual values. In these writings Rousseau profoundly influenced Romanticism in literature and philosophy in the early 19th century. He also affected the development of psychological literature, psychoanalytical theory, and 20th-century existentialism, particularly in his insistence on free will, his rejection of the doctrine of original sin, and his defence of learning through experience rather than analysis. The spirit and ideas of Rousseau’s work stand midway between the 18th-century Enlightenment, with its passionate defence of reason and individual rights, and early 19th-century Romanticism, which defended intense subjective experience against rational thought.