Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau is the most contradictory of the great philosophers. He wrote the most influential treatise on education and abandoned his own five children to a foundling hospital. He celebrated the natural goodness of mankind and quarrelled with every friend he had. He invented the modern autobiography and could not tell the truth about himself.

His central thought is that civilization corrupts. Humans in a hypothetical state of nature are not Hobbes's brutes; they are decent, self-sufficient, free. Society — property, inequality, the comparing gaze of others — is what makes us miserable. In The Social Contract he asks how a free society is even possible, and answers: only when each citizen surrenders themselves equally to the community, the collective sovereign expression of the common good.

The French Revolution carried his books like talismans. Romanticism inherited his cult of nature and feeling. Modern democratic theory still wrestles with the general will, which can sound either like the soul of self-government or like the seed of totalitarianism.