In this first single-volume English-language biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Damrosch mines the influential philosophers letters, memoirs, and writings to expose the eccentricities of a man who prefigured the modern mind. An autodidact who had not written anything of significance by age thirty, Rousseau was an unlikely candidate for becoming one of the most significant thinkers of the eighteenth century. Yet the power of his ideas is felt to this day in our political and social lives. The Social Contract had a direct influence on the Founding Fathers, his Confessions virtually created the genre of autobiography, and his ideas on child rearing have profoundly influenced modern educational theory.