Summary
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most important political and moral thinkers of the eighteenth century. His works on inequality, education, freedom, and the general will became deeply influential in the intellectual world that preceded the French Revolution.
Historical role
He matters because he gave unusually powerful expression to problems of sovereignty, citizenship, moral corruption, and the relationship between political authority and collective self-rule. His thought was more radical and politically generative than that of many other Enlightenment figures, which is one reason later revolutionaries repeatedly invoked him.
Connections
Useful for linking the French Enlightenment, theories of sovereignty, citizenship, moral criticism of society, and the political language later used during the revolutionary era.