A Genevan writer, philosopher and musician of French origin. Connected for a time with Denis Diderot, he contributed to the sections of the Encyclopaedia devoted to music. His Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) set out the central theme of his philosophy: human beings are born naturally good and happy; it is society which corrupts this balance. He extended his thesis in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality amongst Men (1755), which would have a major influence on modern political thought. His epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) imagined solutions to conflicts and extolled the benefits of a return to natural life. His major work, The Social Contract (1762), analyses the foundational principles of political law. Rousseau felt that only an essential convention (a contract) could legitimise political authority and enable the general will of the people to exercise its sovereignty. He proposed a ‘natural order,’ which reconciled individual liberty with the demands of life in society. He thus went further than Montesquieu and Voltaire in the defence of liberty and equality between human beings. The inspirer of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a fundamental text of the 1789 French Revolution, and then Robespierre, he also had a significant influence on three German philosophers: Kant, Hegel and Fichte.