Today marks the 300th birthday of one of history’s great
revolutionary thinkers – a man who changed the faces of
philosophy, musical composition and literature (not to mention
the inventor of the autobiographical form) – Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau’s effective articulations about
freedom and democracy made him one of the most important
architects of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement. His
enduring expressions paved the way for Romantic sentiment and
his vast and humane imagination helped to forever change the way
philosophers view humanity and society. In his famed treatise,
The Social Contract, he wrote that “Man is born free, and
everywhere in chains.” He felt that society was detrimental to
humans as it moved us from a healthy respect for sentience and
reliance on compassion to what he called amour-propre or pride
and fear. An Original Manuscript Page by Rousseau; Recreated on
a Journal Cover Pictured on the cover of our Rousseau, Julie
blank journal is a manuscript excerpt of Ro