Timeline
Jean Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract, published 1762
The Social Contract's famous opening declaration - "Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains" - seems to express perfectly the radical individualism of the coming age, culminating in the American and French Revolutions.
Rousseau is famous for emphasising the importance of human feeling rather than reason.
Whatever the complexities of his philosophy, he came to be seen as the passionate proponent of liberty and freedom who rediscovered human nature and the validity of moral law within.
Kant, the great German philosopher of reason, had a bust of Rousseau in his study and praised the Frenchman for having taught him to respect the "commn man".