A day like today: Rousseau

source

In Geneva, Switzerland, there was a child who was orphaned at the age of 6 and a short time later his father was forced to leave the city. And the child was left helpless. He was adopted by a recording workshop and lived there until he was 16 years old.

One Sunday the young man went out for a walk and returned when the walls of the city had closed. Then, scared and afraid of punishment, he decided to flee.

Become a vagabond, was adopted by a young and wealthy widow who wanted to take the path of devotion. But the young man had other desires and took his protector through the paths of passion.

Later, he was known as a scholar and controversial writer, as a brilliant lecturer, as an implacable polemicist. The world then knew him as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and since France lived the eve of great upheavals, his word illuminated the revolutionary thought of the time.

"Man is born good but society corrupts him," said Rousseau. And that was the beginning to think that what had to be changed before Man, was the inhuman society in which we were all born.

Rousseau, the philosopher, the thinker, the "imaginator" of a better world that allowed better human beings, was born on a day like today, June 28, 1712.

And the world is still waiting for the birth of better societies.

source Bronze statue built in 1935 by the artist J. Pradier, located on Rousseau Island, in Geneva