Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau in 1753, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Born	(1712-06-28)28 June 1712 Geneva, Republic of Geneva
Died	2 July 1778(1778-07-02) (aged 66) Ermenonville, France
Era	18th-century philosophy (Modern philosophy)
Region	Western philosophy
School	Social contract theory Romanticism
Main interests	Political philosophy, music, education, literature, autobiography
Notable ideas	General will, amour de soi, amour-propre, moral simplicity of humanity, child-centered learning, civil religion, popular sovereignty, positive liberty
Influences Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Descartes, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, Condillac, Diderot, Voltaire, d'Alembert
Influenced Kant, the French Revolution, Robespierre, Saint-Just, the Counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism, Hume, Paine, Burke, Smith, Wollstonecraft, , Fichte, Hegel, Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Durkheim, Skinner, Derrida, Althusser, de Sade, Sartre, Atatürk, Strauss, Bloom, Montessori, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dewey, Rawls, Babeuf, Dimitri Kitsikis
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (/ruːˈsoʊ/;French: [ʒɑ̃ʒak ʁuso]; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Francophone Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment in France and across Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the overall development of modern political and educational thought.

Rousseau's novel Emile, or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought.

During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.