Although equality lies at the heart of his political theory, Rousseau also argues that physical and natural inequalities are inescapable and significant. How can people who are naturally unequal become political equals? This chapter considers three possible mechanisms by which political equality could “substitute” for inequality – through education, by convention, and via deliberate opacity – and supports the third. Drawing on the account of a range property made famous by John Rawls, the opacity mechanism enables political equality among those with sufficient judgment to serve as citizens (relegating others to the status of subjects) but does not peer closely into disparities among them. However, unlike other social-contract accounts, the justification for opacity in Rousseau’s thought rests on his distinctive concern for the destructive potential of amour-propre.

Chapter 6 examines Rousseau's claim that human societies are artificial and that recognizing this is crucial to understanding how theories of social pathology can ascribe non-arbitrary standards of healthy functioning to institutions. The most important sense in which society is made by us is expressed in the claim that institutions are grounded in conventions. The upshot of this claim is that a kind of self-consciousness is intrinsic to social life, namely, collective acceptance of the authority of the rules governing social institutions, which, in the most fundamental institutions, includes a shared conception of the good that explains their "point," part of which consists in promoting the freedom of social members. Because acting in accordance with such a conception is constitutive of activity in institutional life, the functions of institutions – including a conception of their healthy functioning – are accessible, if imperfectly, to the agents on whose activity those functions depend.

Alexander Somek uses Rousseau’s famous notion of ‘amour-propre’ – ‘that form of self-infatuation which is mediated by shining in the eyes of others’ ’ as a key towards mediating between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. Somek’s defence of what he calls ‘cosmopolitan amour-propre’ against the prominent contemporary alternative of ‘constitutional patriotism’ leads him to a discussion of the Janus-faced dimensions of international peer review mechanisms for human rights compliance, and, similar to Fox-Decent’s argument for a ‘fiduciary criterion’ of legitimacy, to an emphasis on the importance of those outsiders ‘legitimately excluded from the constituency’.