Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosophe whose works shaped modern political thought. Born in Calvinist Geneva, he lost his mother as an infant and ran away at fifteen, converting to Catholicism in Savoy under Madame de Warens. In Paris he befriended Diderot and wrote for the Encyclopédie; his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences won the Dijon prize in 1750.

His Discourse on Inequality (1755) argued that private property was the source of social inequality. In 1762 came The Social Contract, founding legitimate government on the people's general will, and Émile, a treatise on education. Both were condemned and burned, and an arrest warrant drove him out of France.

In England in 1766 his quarrel with David Hume became a public scandal. He finished his Confessions in 1770 and died at Ermenonville in 1778; published in 1782, they preceded his 1794 reburial in the Panthéon near Voltaire.