Description:There is no need to recommend the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the greatest of all critics of inequality, the purest social contract theorist of the eighteenth century (and simultaneously the deepest critic of contractarianism after Hume), the greatest writer on civic education after Plato, the most perceptive understander of mastery and slavery after Aristotle and before Hegel, the finest critic of Hobbes, the most important predecessor of Kant, the most accomplished didactic novelist between Richardson and Tolstoy, the greatest confessor since Augustine, the author of paradoxes ("the general will is always right" but "not enlightened") that continue to fascinate or infuriate.