Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is one of the most renowned philosophers of the Enlightenment. The author of "The Social Contract" and "The Confessions" has been inspiring intellectuals for 250 years, from Kant to Marx, from Habermas to the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. For the latter, Rousseau questions the transition from nature to culture. The inventor of the term "bourgeois society" also encouraged his contemporaries to travel to distant lands to "study, not always stones and plants, but once in a while men and customs." The debate continues. In the face of past and emerging totalitarianisms, should we, with Rousseau, "meekly bear the yoke of public happiness," or, for example, take advantage of the debate on colonialism to question the potentially racist nature of Enlightenment writings... and thereby permit ourselves to throw Rousseau into the gutter?