Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Born in Geneva in 1712, Rousseau spent much of his life as a writer and composer moving through Europe before his political philosophy began reshaping Enlightenment thought. His Discourse on Inequality laid the blame for social division at the feet of private property, while The Social Contract sketched the framework for legitimate political order - ideas that would course through the French Revolution and beyond. In 1761 his sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise pushed fiction toward preromanticism; the following year Émile, or On Education, mapped where the individual belonged in society. Late in life he turned inward: his Confessions, finished in 1770 and published after his death in 1778, invented the modern autobiography, and the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker traced the kind of introspective subjectivity that would define writing for centuries. He died outside Paris at 65, having spent his final years alone and increasingly paranoid, but the architecture he built - political, educational, literary - never stopped bearing weight.