This paper examines the kind of genealogical project Rousseau undertakes in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. It explains what it is for Rousseau to discover the “origins” of inequality and examines the normative implications of such an account, especially the relation his genealogical claims have to his critique of society. After arguing that the Discourse singles out l'amour propre as the psychological source of inequality, the paper reconstructs Rousseau's account of the origin of inequality and its criteria for judging the legitimacy of inequalities. It also highlights similarities among Rousseau's use of genealogy and later genealogical projects, such as Nietzsche's.

The argument of Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages is intimately connected with that of his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men. The origin of political society is inseparable from the origin of language, which, in turn, is inseparable from the origin of reason. That so much of the Essay is concerned with music leads us to wonder what music has to do with reason, politics, and language. These two books share what is a regular feature of Rousseau's manner of writing—presenting what seem to be logical foundations as temporal origins. In emphasizing the priority of melody to harmony in music, the Essay on the Origin of Languages articulates the necessarily melodic, and hence temporal, character of thinking, which proves to be the key to understanding both why Rousseau must write as he does and what it means for language to be musical.

This paper explores the contrast between two conceptions of the general will to be found in Rousseau's work, especially in the Social Contract. The first of these identifies the general will with the decisions of the sovereign people as they legislate together; the second conceives of the general will as a transcendent fact about the society which may or may not be reflected in actual legislative decisions. Though these conceptions may be capable of reconciliation in Rousseau's own work, the tension remains and is reflected both in Rousseau's own ambivalence towards democracy and in the different ways his thought has been received and adapted in philosophy and politics.

In his Plan for a Constitution for Corsica, Rousseau recommends a series of institutional arrangements and psychological incentives designed to generate certain salutary opinions and behaviors on the part of the citizens. However, he also indicates in several ways that it is not only impossible to control such outcomes absolutely or permanently, but also undesirable insofar as a static people tends to be a languorous people. This essay argues that the model of citizenship that emerges in Corsica is more dynamic and less thoroughly choreographed than is often recognized. Rousseau suggests that what it takes to attach citizens to the collective good over the long term requires not only a specific form of socialization, but also that the people are capable, to some degree, of transcending their socialization. The goal of Rousseau's legislative art is not to form a people that can remain on “autopilot,” but rather to cultivate a form of reflection and judgment that is rooted in and animated by healthy attachments and proper conditioning of the passions. The puzzle becomes the relationship between these two sides of the legislative art.

Rousseau first glimpsed the principle of the natural goodness of man in the so-called “Illumination of Vincennes,” and he made it his mission as an author to persuade his readers of the truth of that vision. Rousseau must persuade his readers that they are deceived by what they see before their own eyes and that they must learn to see anew—through his eyes. In order to educate his reader, Rousseau consistently uses rhetorical and literary techniques that are meant to change the reader's perspective. His use of these techniques is particularly pervasive in Emile. The present analysis examines Rousseau's education of the reader of his pedagogical treatise, especially through comparisons he draws between his imaginary pupil, Emile, and actual children that are meant to persuade the reader of the truth of what first appears to be imaginary and the falsity of what the reader previously believed was real.

This article presents a reading of the Confessions as a spiritual drama. Rousseau tells the story of a man (himself) who, like the rest of civilized humanity, fell away from natural goodness as he was socialized. Yet unlike the rest of us, Rousseau managed to make at least a partial return to nature. In fact, the Confessions gives us two stories of return: one by the man whose life is recounted and one by the narrator who is doing the recounting. (These are of course the same man, presented in two aspects.) Yet the two stories share a common core: in each case the return occurs by means of a journey by the self to the self. This teaching regarding the sufficiency of the self has resonated with many, particularly in our own time: with Rousseau began the vindication of man as godlike not in his power but in his being.

Rousseau speaks of his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as an informal record of conversations of his soul with itself in its quest for his—our—naturel purged of artifice and convention. In the course of these conversations he addresses many of the problems that he explores in his other writings: man's place in the scheme of things, hence God, divine justice, immortality; freedom; the contrasts between the active, citizen life and the circumscribed, solitary life; what we owe to our fellows and what we owe to ourselves; amour-propre, shame, and amour de soi; the conditions for individual happiness, its kinds, and how they might (or might not) compose with public happiness. However, in the Reveries he addresses these problems from an explicitly nonpolitical perspective. While he says that he did not reduce his reflections—meditations, reveries—about them to a system, his account of them is remarkably comprehensive and carefully crafted.