Burns’s legend still has it that he was a “heaven-taught ploughman”, as Henry Mackenzie put it, although in recent years, and during conferences in 2009, the year of his 250th birth anniversary, scholars have tried to show the range of the Scottish Bard’s encyclopaedic knowledge. Taking the term “Encyclopaedia” in its historic dimension, this article shall focus on Burns’s elective affinity with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A musician, a lover of nature and a figurehead of the age of sensibility, an opponent of absolute monarchy, and as such an outspoken personality (what Michel Foucault would call a parresiast), prone to self-dramatising, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher in which Burns found much to identify with and to draw upon to build his own poetic persona.