Parenting & Family Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A grown man confessing he "long remained a child" is Rousseau doing what he does best: turning vulnerability into an argument. It reads like autobiography, but it’s also a preemptive strike. By framing himself as perpetually childlike, Rousseau claims a kind of moral alibi - not innocence exactly, but an explanation for his social missteps, impulsiveness, and the bruised sensitivity that runs through his self-portrait. It’s a strategic softening: if he is childlike, then the world’s harshness becomes the real scandal.

The line also smuggles in his larger philosophical wager: that adulthood, as society defines it, is less a maturation than a corrosion. In Rousseau’s universe, the child stands for unmanufactured feeling, spontaneity, and a self not yet trained to perform for other people. "Still one in many respects" refuses closure. He’s not describing a phase he outgrew; he’s defending a permanent stance against the adult world of status, calculation, and surveillance.

Context matters: Rousseau wrote amid the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason and polish, while personally living as an anxious outsider with a talent for antagonizing patrons and peers. So the sentence doubles as cultural critique. It suggests that what gets labeled childish - emotional intensity, stubborn sincerity, a refusal to smooth one’s edges - might actually be the last honest response to a society that rewards hypocrisy as maturity.