While Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert were curtsying to kings or empresses, Rousseau raised against existing governments a cry of protest that was destined to be heard from one end of Europe to the other. While the philosophes, already embedded in the status quo, called only for piecemeal reform of particular ills, Jean-Jacques attacked the whole economic, social, and political order, and with such thoroughness that no remedy seemed possible but revolution.
