Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the foundational modern text on raising and educating children while surrendering all five of his own newborns to an eighteenth-century foundling hospital. This episode maps the intersection between that turbulent, deeply flawed life and the ideas that scaffolded the French Revolution, the Romantic movement, and modern democratic theory. It begins in Geneva in 1712 with the death of his mother days after his birth, nights spent reading Plutarch with his watchmaker father, an abusive apprenticeship, and the evening at fifteen when he found the city gates locked and simply walked away into a life of wandering.

The conversation follows his years as a servant, tutor, and demeaned secretary to a French ambassador in Venice, then the 1749 epiphany on the road to Vincennes when an essay prompt convinced him that the art ...