Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778 · Swiss-French · Enlightenment
Known for: Wrote the greatest treatise on education while abandoning all five of his own children to foundling homes
Passionate, paranoid, and contradictory. He argued civilization corrupts natural human goodness, wrote The Social Contract and Emile, and helped inspire the French Revolution.
He abandoned all five of his children to foundling homes while writing the era's greatest work on education—history's most spectacular case of 'do as I say, not as I do.'
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