Rousseau’s Reveries are a useful antidote to this discontent, and provide, at least on the surface, a way to capture the “sweet sentiment of existence” and the accompanying happiness therewith.

By any reckoning, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is one of the most influential Western philosophers in history. No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas, whether acknowledged or not, have permeated Western counter-hegemonic, progressive thought — modern and postmodern — for the last 250 years. Change the conversation, ...

“I became a bit obsessed with this odd Frenchman who spent his life painting jungles he had never actually been to. Then I started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s A Social Contract,” says ...

He referred to his first and most important lover as “Mama.” All in all, the Geneva-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose three-hundredth birthday falls on June 28, was a hard man to admire.