Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Swiss writer, philosopher and composer who was an important influence in the development of political, social, economic, and educational thought during the Enlightenment. His works include A Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract, foundations of modern political and social theory; Emile, or On Education, an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society; his novel, Julie, or the New Heliose, a huge best seller that prefigured romanticism; and his Confessions, the first modern autobiography. Rousseau was raised in unusually difficult and volatile circumstances, which persisted throughout his life even as he achieved renown, and no doubt contributed to the originality and honesty in his thinking. Will and Ariel Durant wrote that he was “born poor, losing his mother at birth and soon deserted by his father, afflicted with a painful and humiliating disease, left to wander for twelve years among alien cities and conflicting faiths, repudiated by society and civilization, repudiating Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopédie and the Age of Reason, driven from place to place as a dangerous rebel, suspected of crime and insanity, and seeing, in his last months, the apotheosis of his greatest enemy.” In spite of these disadvantages, he “triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution… and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before”.