The present study is written with the above perspectives in mind. Its aim is to offer a new angle on Kleist's complex dialogue with the discourses of Enlightenment by reexamining his investment in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Alongside the likes of Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Kant, Rousseau stands as a truly pivotal figure in eighteenth-century European thought. Today, he is perhaps best known as a social theorist and author of controversial philosophical and political treatises in which he both put into question the Enlightenment faith in human moral progress—Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse), Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse)—and outlined a radical model for a new form of constitutional government (Social Contract). In his own time, however, Rousseau was famed for his vast intellectual scope—few, if any, of his luminous contemporaries could match the sheer range of his interests and achievements. His epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise was a literary sensation that electrified the reading public and became an international best-seller. Emile, or, On Education was arguably the most significant and influential pedagogical text of the century. His Confessions created the terms for modern autobiographical writing, while the Reveries of the Solitary Walker prompted a surge in Romantic naturalism across Europe. He was also a musicologist of some repute, publishing a comprehensive dictionary of music in 1767, and a successful composer—his comic opera The Village Soothsayer was performed in 1752 at the court of Louis XV at Versailles, while his “lyric scene” Pygmalion almost single-handedly launched the new genre of the melodrama and was praised by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit as a “kleine[s], aber merkwürdig Epoche machende[s] Werk.”