Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau was an 18th century idol of the Hippie movement.

He advocated a return to the “state of nature”, which unlike Thomas Hobbes) he considered superior to modern civilization.

While Hobbes, in Leviathan (here) advocated the authoritarian state on the claim that life without it is “nasty, brutal, and short”, Rousseau advocated a very different kind of authoritarianism, arguing that civilization itself is what’s nasty. He was a sort of precursor both to Utopian Socialism and the Transcendentalist movement.

In The Social Contract, Rousseau actually planted the seeds for French Revolution, the very sort of thing Hobbes was trying to prevent.

He also was a sort of personal mess. His longest-term relationship was paying a specific prostitute regularly, and then when he got her pregnant having the children sent off to an orphanage, which he claimed was the best way to grow up…apparently his own aristocrat parents had disappointed him.