The Commissars are coming

Two hundred and thirteen years ago at the age of 50 Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, a self‐taught music teacher turned prize winning essayist, formulated a theory which ‘taking men as they are and laws as they might be’ would result in a legitimate and valid form of government. This work was to be not only his crowning achievement, but the source of inspiration for generations of political reformers who desired to socialise the regimes under which they lived.