#10: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is something immediately recognizable about Rousseau’s restlessness. Born in Geneva in 1712, he spent much of his life challenging the polished confidence of modern civilization. His writing asked whether society, for all its refinements, might also corrupt people. That idea gave his work an emotional charge that many readers still feel. Rousseau wrote about education, inequality, politics, music, and freedom, but he is often remembered for one particularly unsettling suggestion: human beings may be born with a kind of natural goodness, then deformed by social arrangements that reward vanity, dependence, and competition.
