Introducing Rousseau

"I am like no one else in the whole world..." Defiant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his Confessions, an autobiography of incomparable psychological insight. 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? Introducing Rousseau presents a maverick thinker whose ideas revolutionised our understanding of childhood, education, government, language and much else.