He was a musician, poet, novelist and botanist, but above all, Rousseau was a philosopher who always denied being one. Rousseau's thesis - that civilisation corrupts and increases inequality - shocked his Enlightenment contemporaries and still challenges today.
Did Rousseau inspire the French Revolution? Romanticism? Psychoanalysis and Existentialism? This book presents a maverick thinker whose ideas revolutionised our understanding of childhood, education, government, language and much else.
