Americans may not see the name “Jean-Jacques Rousseau” printed on their ballots when they vote, but the Genevan philosopher is there nonetheless. A little more than 250 years ago, Rousseau identified corrupt institutions as the source of mankind’s alienation and anxiety. Our benevolent nature had been twisted against itself very early on, as early as the first development of private property.

Property, commerce, government, religion, and social status set us at war with our own hearts as well as with one another. The only remedy for this cruel condition, Rousseau proposed, would be for human beings to take conscious political command of their social environment, subjecting every institution to the general will. To allow people to rediscover their inherent goodness and capacity to act politically, to remind them of who they should really be and what they could do, was the task of a wise outsider, a lawgiver—a philosopher very much like Rousseau. Guided by his counsel, a people could throw off the chains of its own social order.

The particular form that the Rousseauistic impulse has taken in the radical movements of the last two and a half centuries has varied from one place and time to the next. But the core has remained the same, whether Jacobins were renaming the months of the year and replacing Christianity with a cult of Reason in revolutionary France or communists were seizing the means of production in Russia or China in the first half of the twentieth century.