Rousseau's influence on the history of modern political thought is profound. As soon as they appeared, the Social Contract and Emile aroused the most virulent criticism. These works contained, it was said, subversive propositions against the authority of kings and the Church. The defence of freedom and equality was at the time perceived as revolutionary, as dangerous for hierarchical republics as for monarchies. To be sure, before the French Revolution the Social Contract (SC) was less widely read than other writings of Rousseau, such as his bestseller novel, Julie.¹ But in any case, the diversity of Rousseau's works, from his Dictionary on Music to his Confessions, from his opera The Village Soothsayer to his Letters on Botany, sparked immense interest all over Europe where Rousseau became, along with his foe Voltaire, one of the first ‘celebrities’.²

Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. He was the son of a well-read watchmaker, Isaac Rousseau, who had to raise him and his brother after their mother died giving birth to him. When Isaac Rousseau had to flee Geneva after a dispute with a nobleman, Rousseau was sent to a pastor's family and then became apprenticed to an engraver. As he tells us in his Confessions, he received no formal education but read a lot of classics – especially Plutarch. He later became a brilliant autodidact in many artistic and scientific fields, including chemistry and botany. Having to leave the small Calvinist republic at the age of sixteen when he failed to get back on time behind its locked walls at curfew, he was hosted in Annecy by Mme de Warens, whom he called maman and who provided him with spiritual ‒ and erotic ‒ guidance.³

After these happy years at Les Charmettes, Rousseau had to earn his living from tutoring and transcribing music. He decided to come to Paris and present a new system of musical notation to the Academy of Sciences (1742). His dreams of glory were unfulfilled, but he met great philosophers such as Condillac, d’Alembert and Diderot, who became his best friend. He also served as secretary to M. and Mme Dupin and took notes on Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in order to assist them in writing their criticism of the work. Diderot's imprisonment after the Letter on the Blind was the occasion of what he called in his Confessions his ‘illumination’. While walking to the Donjon of Vincennes to visit him, he read in a newspaper about an essay competition sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. In answer to the question of whether the development of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted public morals, Rousseau wrote provocatively. His Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, which won the prize in 1750, made a case against the pathologies of modernity and scientific progress praised by the Enlightenment's philosophes. By now a famous figure interested in both musical issues and political theory, he was asked by Diderot to contribute most of the articles on music and the article ‘Œconomie’ to the Encyclopedia. This contribution appeared in 1755 and was edited again independently a few years later under the title Discourse on Political Economy (1758).

In 1755, the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (DOI) was published, with its new insights into the evils of private property in Europe, the division of labour and arbitrary forms of government. It was written as an entry for another essay competition run by the Academy of Dijon. Even though Rousseau did not win this prize, with this he produced his first groundbreaking work of political philosophy, which was noticed all over Europe (Adam Smith, in particular, wrote an interesting review as soon as it was published⁴). But in the ensuing years, Rousseau moved away from the Encyclopédistes, decided to abandon his former way of life and left Parisian society.⁵ His intention was to dedicate his life to the truth (vitam impendere vero). Once he had retreated to Montmorency, a few miles away from Paris, the ermite could start his new life of intense writing. In a few years (1758‒1762), he published most of his masterpieces, the Letter to d’Alembert, Julie, Emile and the Social Contract. While often seizing the opportunity to sign himself ‘the Citizen of Geneva’, Rousseau built his intellectual system in a polemical dialogue with the French philosophes, whom he now attacked violently, rejecting their materialism, scientism and atheism.⁶

Rousseau's intellectual ambitions were extremely high and he was determined not to compromise with Parisian high society. After the quarrel with France's leading composer Rameau in his Letter on French Music (1753) and the huge success of his own opera Le Devin du Village, Rousseau refused the king's pension and fled aristocratic patronage. After a short sojourn as secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice (1743‒4), he decided to write a major book on political institutions (Les Institutions politiques). Only once in Montmorency under the protection of Mme d’Epinay could he settle to his task and start his plan for the SC – the first part of the Political Institutions – which was never completed. Like a modern Diogenes trying to demonstrate that civilization is regressive, Rousseau firmly believed that mankind was corrupt not because of original sin but because of social and political institutions. Having seen the excesses of luxury in Paris and the misery in the countryside, the vices hidden under the most exquisite politeness in the Republic of Letters, ‘the Citizen of Geneva’ intended to reveal the hypocrisy and corruption of French society and to avoid its dangerous contamination. When d’Alembert proposed bringing a theatre to his native town, he launched an attack against Enlightenment's culture and the art of stagecraft: the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater (1758) was the breaking point with his former companions.

After the publication of Emile and the SC (1762), considered as highly subversive books which provoked public fury, Rousseau had to flee France to avoid imprisonment. He came back to his home town but, having converted in his early years to Catholicism and reconverted to Calvinism in 1754, he was considered a religious heterodox. Geneva did not welcome him either. On the contrary, the authorities decided to ban his last books and to condemn the SC. Having repudiated his Genevan citizenship, Rousseau then spent the rest of his life as a fugitive. While writing several other masterpieces (the Letters Written from the Mountain, the ‘plans’ for Corsica and Poland, The Confessions, the Dialogues and the Reveries), he was the target of persecution and finally sank into paranoia after his eighteen-month stay in England and his quarrel with the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1766).⁷ While Hume had worked to find Rousseau a place to live in England and asked his friends at court to pursue a royal pension for him, the refugee imagined a plot and was persuaded that Hume wanted to dishonour him. Convinced that his former friends (Diderot, Grimm, d’Alembert, d’Holbach) had also turned against him and that Voltaire wanted to destroy his reputation by revealing that he had abandoned his children, Rousseau returned incognito to France, where he married his long-time companion Thérèse Levasseur and ended his life in total despair. He died in Ermenonville in 1778 after having completed his Confessions (published posthumously) and tried to justify himself in the Dialogues: Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. His Reveries, which he jotted down on playing cards while daydreaming, enjoying the company of plants and the study of botany, were left unfinished.

Rousseau's fame was to become tremendous in the ensuing years, mostly during the second period of the French Revolution when the Jacobins and Robespierre tried to apply the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and to promote the Cult of the Supreme Being. In 1794, his remains were transferred to the Pantheon where the ‘great men’ of the French Republic are buried. His work was constantly discussed – either admired or deeply attacked – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁸ Beyond romanticism and republicanism, Rousseau influenced socialism and Marxism because of his attack on private property as the cornerstone of civil society. He is still considered as one of the most lucid critics of modern liberal societies which suffer the ills of individualism and social injustice.