Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the philosophical foundations of modern democracy, argued that civilization corrupts natural human goodness, and inspired the French Revolution. He also abandoned all five of his children to foundling hospitals, feuded with every friend he ever had, and spent his final years in paranoid isolation convinced the world was conspiring against him.

This episode traces Rousseau from his chaotic childhood in Geneva through the writings that reshaped political philosophy, the scandalous Confessions, and the spectacular personal contradictions of a thinker whose ideas about human nature could not survive contact with his own.

• Rousseau's abandoned childhood and the wandering years that shaped his outsider philosophy
• The Social Contract, Emile, and the ideas about freedom and education that inspired revol ...