Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a watchmaker’s son from Geneva, arrived in Paris at thirty without a profession and became, through a prize essay arguing that the arts had corrupted morals, the most disputed writer in Europe. The Discourse on Inequality traced society’s evils to property; the Social Contract proposed a state founded on the general will; Emile reimagined education from the child’s side. Both were burned in Paris and Geneva in 1762, and he spent his last years in flight and in the Confessions. The Revolution claimed him, and so did the Romantics.