His father was a watch-maker in Geneva; he ran away from home and became a vagabond, and remained that all his life. He never had any property; as for friends, he had them only for short periods, because he quarreled with everyone. Among the occupations he followed in youth was that of a footman, which ought to have barred him from rising in eighteenth century France. But he wrote ballets, operas, comedies, and won an entrée to the salons of the great. Here is another “pure” artist; and did you ever hear of him in that “pure” capacity? Did you know that Jean-Jacques had written ballets, operas and comedies? Could you name one of these works? Unless you are a specialist in literary history, you could not; and if Rousseau had followed that easy career, and kept his entrée to the Paris salons, you would never have heard his name. It was only when he became a propagandist that he earned world fame, and it is as a propagandist that we know him. He was thirty-seven years old when Diderot, editor of the great “Encyclopedia,” the Bible of the new learning in France, was put into prison for writing an atheistical pamphlet. Rousseau went to visit him and, while thus wrought up, he fell to thinking about the depraved state of society, and the causes thereof; he wrote an essay, and so was launched upon his career as maker of intellectual dynamite. He was pursued by the authorities, until he acquired a persecution complex; before he died he became convinced that everyone he knew was in a conspiracy to destroy him. His first important book was “The Social Contract,” a study of the state and its authority. What is the basis of sovereignty? What right has the state to command my obedience? The answer of Rousseau’s time was that God had appointed a king to rule you, and if you disobeyed this king you were hanged, drawn and quartered, and later on roasted to eternity. Rousseau’s thesis was that the basis of sovereignty is popular consent; the state is made by the general will, and lacking such sanction, no sovereignty exists. The opening words give the keynote of the book: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A study of history and anthropology convinces us that the first part of this statement is false; but that did not keep the words from becoming a revolutionary slogan. The next important book was “The New Heloise,” a love story written in the form of a series of letters. French women were rebelling against being sold in marriage; their natural desire to marry the man of their own choice was reaching a point dangerous to the old convention. To be sure, Heloise obeyed her parents and married according to their command; but her sufferings were so moving that she was more effective as an inspirer of revolt than if she had herself revolted.