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 but remain part of a corrupting collectivity. It has a famous 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.[4] He employs the novelistic device of Emile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but contains some specific advice on raising children.[5] It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education in Western culture to have a serious claim to completeness and as one of the first Bildungsroman novels.[6]
