Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history ofphilosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophyand moral psychology and on account of his influence on laterthinkers. Rousseau’s own view of most philosophy andphilosophers was firmly negative, seeing them as post-hocrationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms oftyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modernindividual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion. Theconcern that dominates Rousseau’s work is to find a way ofpreserving human freedom in a world where people are increasinglydependent on one another to satisfy their needs. This concern has twodimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter hasgreater importance. In the modern world, human beings get their verysense of their identity and value from the opinion of others, whichRousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individualauthenticity. In his mature work, he principally explores two routesto achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political oneaimed at constructing institutions that permit and foster theco-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where theythemselves are sovereign; the second is a project for childdevelopment and education that nurtures autonomy and avoids thegenesis of the most destructive forms of self-interest. However,though Rousseau believes the co-existence of human beings in relationsof equality and freedom is possible, he is consistently andoverwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from a dystopiaof alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addition to hiscontributions to philosophy, Rousseau was active as a composer and amusic theorist, as the pioneer of modern autobiography, as a novelist,and as a botanist. Rousseau’s appreciation of the wonders ofnature and his stress on the importance of feeling and emotion madehim an important influence on and anticipator of the romanticmovement. To a very large extent, the interests and concerns that markhis philosophical work also inform these other activities, andRousseau’s contributions in ostensibly non-philosophical fieldsoften serve to illuminate his philosophical commitments andarguments.

• 1. Life
• 2. Conjectural history and moral psychology
  • 2.1 Morality
• 3. Political Philosophy
  • 3.1 The idea of the general will
  • 3.2 The emergence of the general will: procedure, virtue and the legislator
  • 3.3 Rousseau’s claim to reconcile freedom and authority
  • 3.4 Representation and government
  • 3.5 Civil religion and toleration
• 4. Language
• 5. Education
• 6. Place in the history of philosophy
• Bibliography
  • Principal works by Rousseau
  • Works about Rousseau
  • Biographies of Rousseau
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in the independent Calvinist city-stateof Geneva in 1712, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, andSuzanne Bernard. Rousseau’s mother died nine days after hisbirth, so Rousseau was raised and educated by his father until the ageof ten. Isaac Rousseau was one of the small minority of Geneva’sresidents who enjoyed the rank of citizen of Geneva, and was thereforea member of the city’s nominally sovereign assembly.Jean-Jacques was to inherit this status. According to his ownsubsequent accounts, the haphazard education that he received from hisfather included both the inculcation of republican patriotism and thereading of historians of ancient republicanism, such as Plutarch.After his father fled this city to avoid arrest, Jean-Jacques was putin the care of a pastor at nearby Bossey and subsequently apprenticedto an engraver. Rousseau left Geneva at the age of sixteen and cameunder the influence of a Roman Catholic convert noblewoman,Françoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens. Mme de Warensarranged for Rousseau to travel to Turin, where he converted to RomanCatholicism in April 1728. He spent some time working as a domesticservant in a noble household in Turin, and during this time a shamefulepisode occurred in which he falsely accused a fellow servant of thetheft of a ribbon. This act marked him deeply and he returns to it inhis autobiographical works.

Rousseau then spent a brief period training to become a Catholicpriest before embarking on another brief career as an itinerantmusician, music copyist and teacher. In 1731 he returned to Mme deWarens at Chambéry and later briefly became her lover and thenher household manager. He remained with Mme de Warens through the restof the 1730s, moving to Lyon in 1740 to take up a position as a tutor.This appointment brought him within the orbit of both Condillac andd’Alembert and was his first contact with major figures of theFrench Enlightenment. In 1742 he travelled to Paris, having devised aplan for a new numerically-based system of musical notation which hepresented to the Academy of Sciences. The system was rejected by theAcademy, but in this period Rousseau met Denis Diderot. A brief spellas secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice followed beforeRousseau moved to Paris on a more permanent basis from 1744, where hecontinued to work mainly on music and began to write contributions totheEncyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.

In 1745 Rousseau met Thérèse Levasseur, a barelyliterate laundry-maid who became his lover and, later, his wife.According to Rousseau’s own account, Thérèse borehim five children, all of whom were deposited at the foundlinghospital shortly after birth, an almost certain sentence of death ineighteenth-century France. Rousseau’s abandonment of hischildren was later to be used against him by Voltaire.

In 1749, while walking to Vincennes to visit the briefly-imprisonedDiderot and idly reading a newspaper, Rousseau came across theannouncement of an essay competition organized by the Academy ofDijon. The Academy sought submissions on the theme of whether thedevelopment of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted publicmorals. Rousseau later claimed that he then and there experienced anepiphany which included the thought, central to his world view, thathumankind is good by nature but is corrupted by society. He enteredhisDiscourse on the Sciences and Arts (conventionally knownas theFirst Discourse) for the competition and won firstprize with his contrarian thesis that social development, including ofthe arts and sciences, is corrosive of both civic virtue andindividual moral character. TheDiscourse was published in1751 and is mainly important because Rousseau used it to introducethemes that he developed further in later work, especially the naturalvirtue of the ordinary person and the moral corruption fostered by theurge to distinction and excellence. TheFirst Discourse madeRousseau famous and provoked a series of responses to which he in turnreplied.

Music remained Rousseau’s primary interest in this period, andthe years 1752 and 1753 saw his most important contributions to thefield. The first of these was his operaLe Devin du Village(The Village Soothsayer), which was an immediate success (andstayed in the repertoire for a century). The second was hisparticipation in a controversy known as the “querelle desbouffons”, that followed the performance in Paris ofPergolesi’sLa Serva Padrona by a visiting Italiancompany and which pitted the partisans of Italian music against thoseof the French style. Rousseau, who had already developed a taste forItalian music during his stay in Venice, joined the dispute throughhisLetter on French Music and the controversy also informedhis (unpublished)Essay on the Origin of Languages.Rousseau’s emphasis on the importance of melody and thecommunication of emotion as central to the function of music was inopposition to the views of Rameau, who stressed harmony and therelationships between music, mathematics, and physics. Rousseau wentso far as to declare the French language inherently unmusical, a viewapparently contradicted by his own practice inLe Devin.

Rousseau’s conversion to Catholicism had rendered him ineligiblefor his hereditary status as a citizen of Geneva. In 1754 he regainedthis citizenship by reconverting to Calvinism. In the following yearhe published hisDiscourse on the Origin and Foundations ofInequality among Men (often referred to simply as theDiscourse on Inequality or as theSecond Discourse).Once again this was in response to an essay competition from theAcademy of Dijon. Though he did not win the Academy’s prize asecond time, theDiscourse on Inequality is a far moreaccomplished work, and in it Rousseau begins to develop his theoriesof human social development and moral psychology. With theDiscourse on Inequality, the distance between Rousseau andtheEncyclopédiste mainstream of the FrenchEnlightenment thought became clear. This rift was cemented with his1758 publication of theLetter to d’Alembert on theTheater, in which he denounced the idea that his native citywould benefit from the construction of a theater. In Rousseau’sview theater, far from improving the population, tends to weaken theirattachment to the life of the political community.

The years following the publication of theDiscourse onInequality were the most productive and important ofRousseau’s career. He withdrew from Paris and, under thepatronage of, first Mme d’Epinay and then the Duke and Duchessof Luxembourg, worked on a novel,Julie, ou La NouvelleHéloïse, and then onEmile andTheSocial Contract.Julie appeared in 1761 and was animmediate success. The novel is centred on a love triangle betweenJulie, her tutor Saint Preux and her husband Wolmar. The work is castin epistolary form, and is an important supplementary source for theinterpretation of Rousseau’s social philosophy, containing, asit does, such elements as a vision of rural community and the presenceof a manipulative genius who achieves the appearance of naturalharmony through cunning artifice, and who thus anticipates both thetutor inEmile and the legislator ofThe SocialContract. Both works appeared in 1762, marking the high point ofRousseau’s intellectual achievement.

Unfortunately for Rousseau, the publication of these works also led topersonal catastrophe.Emile was condemned in Paris and bothEmile andThe Social Contract were condemned inGeneva on grounds of their religious heterodoxy, a condemnation thatRousseau responded to in hisLetters from the MountainsPartly in response to the hostile attitude of the Genevan authorities,Rousseau renounced his citizenship in May 1763. He was forced to fleeto escape arrest, seeking refuge first in Switzerland and thentravelling to England at the invitation of David Hume in January1766.

Rousseau’s stay in England was marked by his increasing mentalinstability and he became wrongly convinced that Hume was at thecenter of a plot against him. He spent fourteen months inStaffordshire where he worked on his autobiographicalConfessions, which also contain evidence of his paranoia inits treatment of figures like Diderot and the German author FriedrichMelchior, Baron von Grimm. He returned to France in 1767 and thenspent much of the rest of his life working on autobiographical texts,completing theConfessions but also composing theDialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques andTheReveries of the Solitary Walker. He also completed hisConsiderations on the Government of Poland in this period. Inlater life he further developed his interest in botany (where his workproved influential in England via his letters on the subject to theDuchess of Portland) and in music, as he met and corresponded with theoperatic composer Christoph Gluck. Rousseau died in 1778. In 1794 theFrench revolutionaries transferred his remains to the Panthéonin Paris.

2. Conjectural history and moral psychology

Rousseau repeatedly claims that a single idea is at the centre of hisworld view, namely, that human beings are good by nature but arerendered corrupt by society (see Melzer 1990; Cohen 2010, chapter 4).Unfortunately, despite the alleged centrality of this claim, it isdifficult to give it a clear and plausible interpretation. One obviousproblem is present from the start: since society, the supposed agentof corruption, is composed entirely of naturally good human beings,how can evil ever get a foothold? It is also hard to see what“natural goodness” might be. In various places Rousseauclearly states that morality is not a natural feature of human life,so whatever sense it is that human beings are good by nature, it isnot the moral one that the casual reader would naturally assume. Inorder, therefore, to address this puzzling central claim, it is bestto look first at the details of Rousseau’s moral psychology,especially as developed in theDiscourse on Inequality and inEmile.

Rousseau attributes to all creatures an instinctual drive towardsself-preservation. Human beings therefore have such a drive, which hetermsamour de soi (self love).Amour de soi directsus first to attend to our most basic biological needs for things likefood, shelter and warmth. Since, for Rousseau, humans, like othercreatures, are part of the design of a benevolent creator, they areindividually well-equipped with the means to satisfy their naturalneeds. Alongside this basic drive for self-preservation, Rousseauposits another passion which he termspitié(compassion).Pitié directs us to attend to andrelieve the suffering of others (including animals) where we can do sowithout endangering our own self-preservation. In some of hiswritings, such as theDiscourse on Inequality,pitié is an original drive that sits alongsideamour de soi, whereas in others, such asEmile andtheEssay on the Origin of Languages, it is a development ofamour de soi considered as the origin of all passions.

In theDiscourse on Inequality Rousseau imagines amulti-stage evolution of humanity from the most primitive condition tosomething like a modern complex society. Rousseau denies that this isa reconstruction of history as it actually was, and FrederickNeuhouser (2014) has argued that the evolutionary story is merely aphilosophical device designed to separate the natural and theartificial elements of our psychology (for a contrasting view seeKelly 2006). At each step of this imagined evolution human beingschange their material and psychological relations to one another and,correspondingly, their conception of themselves, or what Rousseaucalls the “sentiment of their existence.” According tothis narrative, humans live almost entirely solitary lives in theoriginal state of the human race, since they do not need one anotherto satisfy their material needs. The human race barely subsists inthis condition, chance meetings between proto-humans are the occasionsfor copulation and reproduction, child-care is minimal and brief induration. If humans are naturally good at this stage of humanevolution, their goodness is merely a negative and amounts to theabsence of evil. In this story, human beings are distinguished fromthe other creatures with which they share the primeval world only bytwo characteristics: freedom, and perfectibility. Freedom, in thiscontext, is simply the ability not to be governed solely by appetite;perfectibility is the capacity to learn and thereby to find new andbetter means to satisfy needs. Together, these characteristics givehumans the potential to achieve self-consciousness, rationality, andmorality. Nevertheless, it will turn out that such characteristics aremore likely to condemn them to a social world of deception,dissimulation, dependence, oppression, and domination.

As human populations grow, simple but unstable forms of co-operationevolve around activities like hunting. According to Rousseau, the mostimportant transitional moment in human history occurs at a stage ofsociety marked by small settled communities. At this point a change,or rather a split, takes place in the natural drive humans have tocare for themselves: competition among humans to attract sexualpartners leads them to consider their own attractiveness to others andhow that attractiveness compares to that of potential rivals. InEmile, where Rousseau is concerned with the psychologicaldevelopment of an individual in a modern society, he also associatesthis new psychological feature with sexual competition and the moment,puberty, when the male adolescent starts to think of himself as asexual being with rivals for the favours of girls and women.

Rousseau’s term for this new type of self-interested drive,concerned with comparative success or failure as a social being, isamour propre (love of self, often rendered as pride or vanityin English translations).Amour propre make the need to berecognized by others as having value and to be treated with respectcentral to the felt interests of each human being . The presentationofamour propre in theDiscourse onInequality—and especially in his note XV to thatwork—often suggests that Rousseau sees it as a wholly negativepassion and the source of all evil. Interpretations ofamourpropre centered on theDiscourse on Inequality (which,historically, are the most common ones (for example Charvet 1974)),often focus on the fact that the need for recognition always has acomparative aspect, so that individuals are not content merely thatothers acknowledge their value, but also seek to be esteemed assuperior to them. This aspect of our nature then creates conflict aspeople try to exact this recognition from others or react with angerand resentment when it is denied to them. More recent readings of boththeDiscourse on Inequality, and especially ofEmile, have indicated that a more balanced view is possible(Dent 1988, Neuhouser 2008, but see McLendon 2019 for pushback).According to these interpretations,amour propre is both thecause of humanity’s fall as well as the promise of itsredemption because of the way in which it develops humans’rational capacities and their sense of themselves as social creaturesamong others. Although Rousseau held that the overwhelming tendency,socially and historically, is foramour propre to take ontoxic and self-defeating (‘inflamed’) forms, he also heldthat there are, at least in principle, ways of organizing social lifeand individual education that allow it to take on a benign character.This project of containing and harnessingamour propre findsexpression in bothThe Social Contract andEmile. Insome works, such as theSecond Discourse, Rousseau presentsamour propre as a passion that is quite distinct fromamour de soi. In others, includingEmile, hepresents it as a form thatamour de soi takes in a socialenvironment. The latter is consistent with his view inEmilethatall the passions are outgrowths or developments ofamour de soi.

Althoughamour propre has its origins in sexual competitionand comparison within small societies, it does not achieve its fulltoxicity until it is combined with a growth in materialinterdependence among human beings. In theDiscourse onInequality, Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture andmetallurgy and the first establishment of private property, togetherwith the emergence of inequality between those who own land and thosewho do not. In an unequal society, human beings who need both thesocial good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth,etc. become enmeshed in social relations that are inimical both totheir freedom and to their sense of self worth. Subordinates needsuperiors in order to have access to the means of life; superiors needsubordinates to work for them and also to give them the recognitionthey crave. In such a structure there is a clear incentive for peopleto misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attaintheir ends. Thus, even those who receive the apparent love andadulation of their inferiors cannot thereby find satisfaction fortheiramour propre. This trope of misrepresentation andfrustration receives its clearest treatment in Rousseau’saccount of the figure of the European minister, towards the end of theDiscourse on Inequality, a figure whose need to flatterothers in order to secure his own wants leads to his alienation fromhis own self.

2.1 Morality

Amour de soi,amour propre andpitiéare not the full complement of passions in Rousseau’s thinking.Once people have achieved consciousness of themselves as socialbeings, morality also becomes possible and this relies on the furtherfaculty of conscience. The fullest accounts of Rousseau’sconception of morality are found in theLettres Morales andin sections of theConfession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,a part ofEmile. In the most primitive forms of humanexistence, before the emergence ofamour propre,pitié balances or restrains self-interest. It is, tothat extent, akin to a moral sentiment such as Humean sympathy. But assomething that is merely instinctual it lacks, for Rousseau, agenuinely moral quality. Genuine morality, on the other hand, consistsin the application of reason to human affairs and conduct. Thisrequires the mental faculty that is the source of genuinely moralmotivation, namelyconscience. Conscience impels us to thelove of justice and morality in a quasi-aesthetic manner. As theappreciation of justice and the desire to act to further it,conscience is based in a sentiment of love for the well-orderedness ofa benign God’s plan for the world. However, in a world dominatedby inflamedamour propre, the normal pattern is not for amorality of reason to supplement or supplant our natural proto-moralsympathies. Instead, the usual course of events in civil society isfor reason and sympathy to be displaced while humans’ enhancedcapacity for reasoning is put at the service, not of morality, but ofthe impulse to dominate, oppress and exploit. (For recent discussionof Rousseau on conscience and reason, see Neidleman, 2017, ch. 7.)

A theme of both theDiscourse on Inequality and theLetter to d’Alembert is the way in which human beingscan deceive themselves about their own moral qualities. So, forexample, theatre audiences derive enjoyment from the eliciting oftheir natural compassion by a tragic scene on the stage; then,convinced of their natural goodness, they are freed to act viciouslyoutside the theater. Philosophy, too, can serve as a resource forself-deception. It can give people reasons to ignore the promptings ofpitié or, as in Rousseau’s essayPrinciplesof the Right of War, it can underpin legal codes (such as the lawof war and peace) that the powerful may use to license oppressiveviolence whilst deadening their natural feelings of compassion.

3. Political Philosophy

Rousseau’s contributions to political philosophy are scatteredamong various works, most notable of which are theDiscourse onInequality, theDiscourse on Political Economy,TheSocial Contract, andConsiderations on the Government ofPoland. However, many of his other works, both major and minor,contain passages that amplify or illuminate the political ideas inthose works. His central doctrine in politics is that a state can belegitimate only if it is guided by the “general will” ofits members. This idea finds its most detailed treatment inTheSocial Contract.

InThe Social Contract, Rousseau sets out to answer what hetakes to be the fundamental question of politics, the reconciliationof the freedom of the individual with the authority of the state. Thisreconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to apoint where individuals can no longer supply their needs through theirown unaided efforts, but rather must depend on the co-operation ofothers. The process whereby human needs expand and interdependencedeepens is set out in theDiscourse on Inequality. In thatwork, the a decisive moment of Rousseau’s conjectural historyinvolves the emergence of endemic conflict among thenow-interdependent individuals and the argument that the Hobbesianinsecurity of this condition would lead all to consent to theestablishment of state authority and law. This establishment amountsto the reinforcement of unequal and exploitative social relations thatare now backed by law and state power. In an echo of Locke and ananticipation of Marx, Rousseau argues that this state would, ineffect, be a class state, guided by the common interest of the richand propertied and imposing unfreedom and subordination on the poorand weak. The propertyless consent to such an establishment becausetheir immediate fear of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail toattend to the ways in which the new state will systematicallydisadvantage them.

The Social Contract aims to set out an alternative to thisdystopia, one in which, claims Rousseau, each person will enjoy theprotection of the common force whilst remaining as free as they werein the state of nature. The key to this reconciliation is the idea ofthe general will: that is, the collective will of the citizen bodytaken as a whole. The general will is the source of law and is willedby each and every citizen. In obeying the law each citizen is thussubject to his or her own will, and consequently, according toRousseau, remains free.

3.1 The idea of the general will

Rousseau’s account of the general will is marked by unclaritiesand ambiguities that have attracted the interest of commentators sinceits first publication. The principal tension is between a democraticconception, where the general will is simply what the citizens of thestate have decided together in their sovereign assembly, and analternative interpretation where the general will is the transcendentincarnation of the citizens’ common interest that exists inabstraction from what any of them actually wants (Bertram 2012). Tothese can be added a general will as the will of individual citizenstowards the common good (Canon 2022). All of these interpretationsfind some support in Rousseau’s texts, and all have beeninfluential. Contemporary epistemic conceptions of democracy oftenmake reference to Rousseau’s discussion in Book 2 chapter 3 ofofThe Social Contract. These accounts typically takeCondorcet’s jury theorem as a starting point, where democraticprocedures are conceived of as a method for discovering the truthabout the public interest; they then interpret the general will as adeliberative means of seeking outcomes that satisfy the preferences ofindividuals and render the authority of the state legitimate (see forexample, Grofman and Feld 1988). The tension between the“democratic” and the “transcendental”conceptions can be reduced if we take Rousseau to be arguing for theview that, under the right conditions and subject to the rightprocedures, citizen legislators will be led to converge on laws thatcorrespond to their common interest; however, where those conditionsand procedures are absent, the state necessarily lacks legitimacy. Onsuch a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an aposteriori philosophical anarchism. Such a view holds that it ispossible, in principle, for a state to exercise legitimate authorityover its citizens, but all actual states—and indeed all statesthat we are likely to see in the modern era—will fail to meetthe conditions for legitimacy.

Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly generalit must come from all and apply to all. This thought has bothsubstantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau argues that the lawmust be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannotname particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within thestate. Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens,though guided by a consideration of what is in their own privateinterest, to favor laws that both secure the common interestimpartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive. For this to betrue, however, it has to be the case that the situation of citizens issubstantially similar to one another. In a state where citizens enjoya wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is agreat deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree ofeconomic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impactof the laws will be the same for everyone. In such cases it will oftennot be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the generalwill merely by imagining the impact of general and universal laws onhis or her own case.

3.2 The emergence of the general will: procedure, virtue and the legislator

In TheSocial Contract Rousseau envisages three differenttypes or levels of will as being in play. First, individuals all haveprivate wills corresponding to their own selfish interests as naturalindividuals; second, each individual, insofar as he identifies withthe collective as a whole and assumes the identity of citizen, willsthe general will of that collective as his or her own, setting asideselfish interest in favor of a set of laws that allow all to coexistunder conditions of equal freedom; third, and very problematically, aperson can identify with the corporate will of a subset of thepopulace as a whole. The general will is therefore both a property ofthe collective and a result of its deliberations, and a property ofthe individual insofar as the individual identifies as a member of thecollective. In a well-ordered society, there is no tension betweenprivate and general will, as individuals accept that both justice andtheir individual self-interest require their submission to a law whichsafeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violenceand personal domination that would otherwise hold sway. In practice,however, Rousseau believes that many societies will fail to have thiswell-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if privateindividuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and thereforerefuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which thecollective interest requires. Another mode of political failure ariseswhere the political community is differentiated into factions (perhapsbased on a class division between rich and poor) and where one factioncan impose its collective will on the state as a whole.

The Social Contract harbors a further tension between twoaccounts of how the general will emerges and its relation to theprivate wills of citizens. Sometimes Rousseau favors a proceduralstory according to which the individual contemplation of self interest(subject to the constraints of generality and universality and underpropitious sociological background conditions such as rough equalityand cultural similarity) will result in the emergence of the generalwill from the assembly of citizens (see Sreenivasan 2000). In thisaccount of the emergence of the general will, there seems to be nospecial need for citizens to have any specifically moral qualities:the constraints on their choice should be enough. However, Rousseaualso clearly believes that the mere contemplation of self interestwould be inadequate to generate a general will. This may partlyconcern issues of compliance, since selfish citizens who can will thegeneral will might still not be moved to obey it. But Rousseau alsoseems to believe that citizen virtue is a necessary condition for theemergence of the general will in the first place. This presents himwith a problem for which his figure of the legislator is one supposedsolution. As a believer in the plasticity of human nature, Rousseauholds that good laws make for good citizens. However, he also believesboth that good laws can only be willed by good citizens and that, inorder to be legitimate, they must be agreed upon by the assembly. Thisputs him in some difficulty, as it is unlikely that the citizens whocome together to form a new state will have the moral qualitiesrequired to will good laws, as those citizens will have beenpsychologically shaped by unjust institutions. The legislatortherefore has the function of inspiring a sense of collective identityin the new citizens that allows them to identify with the whole and bemoved to support legislation that will eventually transform them andtheir children into good citizens. In this story, however, the newcitizens at first lack the capacity to discern the good reasons thatsupport the new laws and the lawgiver has to persuade them bynon-rational means to legislate in their own best interests.

The figure of the legislator is a puzzle. Like the tutor inEmile, the legislator has the role of manipulating thedesires of his charges, giving them the illusion of free choicewithout its substance. Little wonder then that many critics have seenthese characters in a somewhat sinister light. In both cases there isa mystery concerning where the educator figure comes from and how hecould have acquired the knowledge and virtue necessary to perform hisrole. This, in turn, raises a problem of regress. If the legislatorwas formed by a just society, then who performed thelegislator’s role for that society, and how was that legislatorformed? How did the tutor acquire his education if not from a tutorwho, in turn, was educated according to Rousseau’s program by anearlier tutor? At least in the case of the legislator, Rousseau mightpoint to some actual historical examples such as the Spartan,Lycurgus, to argue that the idea is not entirely divorced fromreality, but this seems a weak straw to clutch at.

3.3 Rousseau’s claim to reconcile freedom and authority

What then of Rousseau’s key claim that freedom and authority canbe reconciled in his ideal republic through obedience to the generalwill? The opening words ofThe Social Contract themselvesrefer to freedom, with the famous saying that “Man is born free,but is everywhere in chains”. This ringing declaration, however,is almost immediately followed by a note of paradox, as Rousseaudeclares that he can make this subjection “in chains”legitimate. The thought that Rousseau’s commitment to freedommight not be all that it first appears is strengthened by otherpassages in the book, most notably his notorious declaration in Book 1chapter 7 ofThe Social Contract that those subject to thegeneral will are “forced to be free.”

The value of freedom or liberty is at the center of Rousseau’sconcerns throughout his work , though he uses the term in variousdifferent ways (Simpson 2006). He regards the capacity for choice, andtherefore the ability to act against instinct and inclination, as oneof the features that distinguishes humans from animals species andmakes truly moral action possible. In theDiscourse onInequality, for example, he characterizes animals in essentiallyCartesian terms, as mechanisms programmed to a fixed pattern ofbehavior, in contrast to humans, who are not tied to any particularmode of life and can reject the promptings of instinct. This makespossible both the development of the human species and also its fallfrom grace, since individuals can ignore benign impulses (such aspitié) if they wish to. The freedom to act contrary tothe “mechanism of the senses”, and the power of willingand choosing is, for Rousseau, something entirely outside the laws ofthe physical world and is therefore not subject to scientificexplanation. Rousseau also takes this freedom to choose to act as thebasis of all distinctively moral action. InThe SocialContract the connection between freedom of choice and morality iscentral to his argument against despotic government, where he writesthat the renunciation of freedom is contrary to human nature and thatto renounce freedom in favour of another person’s authority isto “deprive one’s actions of all morality” (SC1.4).

In Book I chapter 8 ofThe Social Contract, Rousseautries to illuminate his claim that the formation of the legitimatestate involves no net loss of freedom, but in fact, he makes aslightly different claim. The new claim involves the idea of anexchange of one type of freedom (natural freedom) for another type(civil freedom). Natural freedom involves an unlimited right to allthings, an idea that is reminiscent of Hobbes’s “right ofnature” inLeviathan. Since all human beings enjoy thisliberty right to all things, it is clear that in a world occupied bymany interdependent humans, the practical value of that liberty may bealmost nonexistent. This is because any individual’s capacity toget what they wants will be limited by their physical power and thecompeting physical power of others. Further, inevitable conflict overscarce resources will pit individuals against each other, so thatunhindered exercise of natural freedom will result in violence anduncertainty. The formation of the state, and the promulgation of lawswilled by the general will, transforms this condition. With sovereignpower in place, individuals are guaranteed a sphere of equal freedomunder the law, with protection for their own persons and security fortheir property. Provided that the law bearing equally on everyone isnot meddlesome or intrusive (and Rousseau believes it will not be,since no individual has a motive to legislate burdensome laws) therewill be a net increase in freedom compared to the pre-politicalstate.

Rousseau makes a further claim in the same chapter ofThe SocialContract, namely that in conditions of civil society the citizenachieves “moral freedom,” by which he means obedience to alaw that one has prescribed to oneself (for discussion see especiallyNeuhouser 1993). Although this latter claim is presented almost as anafterthought, it is the form of freedom most directly responsive tothe challenge Rousseau had set for himself two chapters earlier, whichinvolved finding “a form of association” in which eachcitizen would “obey only himself.” Naturally, this raisesthe question of whether the citizen does in fact obey only himselfwhen he obeys the general will. On the face of it, this claim looksdifficult to reconcile with the fact of majorities and minoritieswithin a democratic state, since those citizens who find themselvesoutvoted would seem to be constrained by a decision with which theydisagree. Rousseau’s solution to this puzzle is found muchlater, in Book 4 chapter 3 ofThe Social Contract, where heargues that those who obey laws they did not vote for remain bound bya will that is their own, since the democratic process has enabledthem to discover the content of a general will in which they share.Many commentators have found this argument unconvincing.

Rousseau’s invocation of three types of freedom (natural, civil,and moral) in the text ofThe Social Contract can appearconfusing. The picture is further complicated by the fact that he alsorelies on a fourth conception of freedom, related to civil freedom butdistinct from it, which he nowhere names explicitly. This is“republican freedom” and consists, not in my being subjectto my own will, but rather in the fact that the law protects me frombeing subject to the will of any other particular person in the mannerthat a slave or a serf is. To find Rousseau’s explicitendorsement of this idea, we have to look not toThe SocialContract, but rather to some of his unpublished notes and to hisLetters from the Mountains. Yet the concept is clearlyimplicit in the notorious “forced to be free” passage inBook 1 chapter 7, since he there explains that when each citizen isconstrained to obey the general will, he is thereby provided with aguarantee against “all personal dependence”.

3.4 Representation and government

One feature of Rousseau’s political philosophy that has provedleast persuasive to later thinkers is his doctrine of sovereignty andrepresentation, with his apparent rejection of “representativegovernment”. At the center of Rousseau’s view inTheSocial Contract is his rejection of the Hobbesian idea that apeople’s legislative will can be vested in some group orindividual that then acts with their authority but rules over them.Instead, he argues that to hand over one’s general right ofruling oneself to another person or body is a form a slavery, and thatto recognize such an authority would amount to an abdication of moralagency. This hostility to the representation of sovereignty alsoextends to the election of representatives to sovereign assemblies,even where those representatives are subject to periodic re-election.Even in that case, the assembly would be legislating on a range oftopics on which citizens have not deliberated. Laws passed by suchassemblies would therefore bind citizens in terms that they have notthemselves agreed upon. Not only does the representation ofsovereignty constitute, for Rousseau, a surrender of moral agency, thewidespread desire to be represented in the business of self-rule is asymptom of moral decline and the loss of virtue.

The practical difficulties of direct self-rule by the entire citizenbody are obvious. Such arrangements are potentially onerous and mustseverely limit the size of legitimate states. It is noteworthy thatRousseau takes a different view in a text aimed at practical politics:Considerations on the Government of Poland. Nevertheless, itis not entirely clear that the widespread interpretation of Rousseauas rejecting all forms of representative government is correct. One ofthe key distinctions inThe Social Contract is betweensovereign and government. The sovereign, composed of the people as awhole, promulgates laws as an expression of its general will. Thegovernment is a more limited body that administers the state withinthe bounds set by those laws, and which issues decrees applying themin particular cases. If the laws are conceived of as the peoplesetting a constitutional framework for society, with thegovernment’s decrees comprising the more normal business of“legislation,” then the distance between a Rousseauianrepublic and a modern constitutional democracy may be smaller than itat first appears. In effect, while the sovereignty of the people maybe inconsistent with a representative model, the executive power ofthe government can be understood as requiring it. Such a picture gainscredibility when the details of Rousseau’s views on governmentare examined. Although a variety of forms of government turn out to betheoretically compatible with popular sovereignty, Rousseau issceptical about the prospects for both democracy (where the peopleconduct the day to day running of the state and the application of thelaws) and monarchy. Instead, he favors some form of electivearistocracy: in other words, he supports the idea that the day-to-dayadministration should be in the hands of a subset of the population,elected by them according to merit.

Two important issues arise in relation to Rousseau’s account ofrelations between sovereign and government. The first of theseconcerns his political pessimism, even in the case of thebest-designed and most perfect republic. Just as any group has acollective will as opposed to the individual private will of itsmembers, so does the government. As the state becomes larger and morediffuse, and as citizens become more distant from one another bothspatially and emotionally, so the government of the republic will needa proportionally smaller and more cohesive group of magistrates if itsrule is to be effective. Rousseau thinks it almost inevitable thatthis group will end up usurping the legitimate sovereign power of thepeople and substituting its corporate will for the people’sgeneral will. The second issue concerns how democratic Rousseauenvisaged his republic to be. He sometimes suggests a picture in whichthe people would be subject to elite domination by the government,since the magistrates would reserve the business of agenda-setting forthe assembly to themselves. In other cases, he endorses a conceptionof a more fully democratic republic. (For competing views of thisquestion see Fralin 1978 and Cohen 2010.)

Although Rousseau rejects Hobbes’s view of the sovereign asrepresenting or acting in the person of the subject, he has a similarview of what sovereignty is and its relation to the rights of theindividual. He rejects the idea that individuals associated togetherin a political community retain some natural rights over themselvesand their property. Rather, such rights as individuals have overthemselves, land, and external objects, are a matter of sovereigncompetence and decision. Individual rights must be specified by thesovereign in ways that are compatible with the interests of all in ajust polity, and Rousseau rejects the idea that such rights could beinsisted on as a check on the sovereign’s power.

Rousseau’s commitment to the freedom and equality of citizens ismarred and limited to the fact that he envisages those citizens asexclusively male: women are subject to the authority of the state buthave no voice in the determination of the general will. While it istempting for the modern reader simply to excuse this as reflective theprejudices of Rousseau’s own times, his works are marked attimes by a rather extreme misogyny which characterizes women asnecessarily inauthentic and fated to live in a world of appearance anddeception. Rousseau’s insistence in Book I of theSocialContract that the apparently slavish nature of some people mightbe the consequence of their unjust subjection rather than ajustification for it, is not a thought that he extends to thesubjection of women. Rousseau’s inconsistencies and the tensionbetween his liberatory philosophy and his exclusion of women was notednot long after his death by Mary Wollstonecraft and has been thesubject of feminist critique in modern times (Fermon 1997,Rousselière 2021, but see Rosenblatt 2002).

3.5 Civil religion and toleration

The final full chapter ofThe Social Contract expoundsRousseau’s doctrine of civil religion. Contemporary readers werescandalized by it, and particularly by its claim that true (originalor early) Christianity is useless in fostering the spirit ofpatriotism and social solidarity necessary for a flourishing state. Inmany ways the chapter represents a striking departure from the mainthemes of the book. First, it is the only occasion where Rousseauprescribes the content of a law that a just republic must have.Second, it amounts to his acceptance of the inevitability of pluralismin matters of religion, and thus of religious toleration; this is insome tension with his encouragement elsewhere of cultural homogeneityas a propitious environment for the emergence of a general will.Third, it represents a very concrete example of the limits ofsovereign power: following Locke, Rousseau insists upon the inabilityof the sovereign to examine the private beliefs of citizens. Thetenets of Rousseau’s civil religion include the affirmation ofthe existence of a supreme being and of the afterlife, the principlethat the just will prosper and the wicked will be punished, and theclaim that the social contract and the laws are sacred. In addition,the civil religion requires the provision that all those willing totolerate others should themselves be tolerated, but those who insistthat there is no salvation outside their particular church cannot becitizens of the state. The structure of religious beliefs within thejust state is that of an overlapping consensus: the dogmas of thecivil religion are such that they can be affirmed by adherents of anumber of different faiths, both Christian and non-Christian.

Despite Rousseau’s concern for religious toleration both in thechapter and elsewhere, modern readers have often been repelled by onestriking note of intolerance. Rousseau argues that those who cannotaccept the dogmas can be banished from the state. This is because hebelieves that atheists, having no fear of divine punishment, cannot betrusted by their fellow citizens to obey the law. He goes evenfurther, to suggest the death penalty for those who affirm the dogmasbut later act as if they do not believe them.

4. Language

Rousseau’s writings on language and languages are contained intwo places, the unpublishedEssay on the Origin of Languagesand in a section of theDiscourse on the Origins ofInequality. In theEssay, Rousseau tells us that humanbeings want to communicate as soon as they recognize that there areother beings like themselves. But he also raises the question of whylanguage, specifically, rather than gesture is needed for thispurpose. The answer, strangely enough, is that language permits thecommunication of the passions in a way that gesture does not, and thatthe tone and stress of linguistic communication are crucial, ratherthan its content. This point enables Rousseau to make a closeconnection between the purposes of speech and melody. Such vocabularyas there originally was, according to Rousseau, was merely figurativeand words only acquire a literal meaning much later. Theories thatlocate the origin of language in the need to reason together aboutmatters of fact are, according to Rousseau, deeply mistaken. While thecry of the other awakens our natural compassion and causes us toimagine the inner life of others, our purely physical needs have ananti-social tendency because they scatter human beings more widelyacross the earth in search of subsistence. Although language and songhave a common origin in the need to communicate emotion, over time thetwo become separated, a process that becomes accelerated as a resultof the invention of writing. In the south, language stays closer toits natural origins and southern languages retain their melodic andemotional quality (a fact that suits them for song and opera).Northern languages, by contrast, become oriented to more practicaltasks and are better for practical and theoretical reasoning.

In Part I of theSecond Discourse, Rousseau’s focus isslightly different and occurs in the context of a polemic againstphilosophers (such as natural law theorists like Condillac) whoattribute to primitive human beings a developed capacity for abstractreasoning. Rousseau proposes need as the cause of the development oflanguage, but since language depends on convention to assign arbitrarysigns to objects, he puzzles about how it could ever get started andhow primitive people could accomplish the feat of giving names touniversals.

5. Education

Rousseau’s ideas about education are mainly expounded inEmile. In that work, he advances the idea of “negativeeducation”, which is a form of “child-centered”education. His essential idea is that education should be carried out,so far as possible, in harmony with the development of thechild’s natural capacities by a process of apparently autonomousdiscovery. This is in contrast to a model of education where theteacher is a figure of authority who conveys knowledge and skillsaccording to a pre-determined curriculum. Rousseau depends here on histhesis of natural goodness, which he asserts at the beginning of thebook, and his educational scheme involves the protection anddevelopment of the child’s natural goodness through variousstages, along with the isolation of the child from the domineeringwills of others. Up to adolescence at least, the educational programcomprises a sequence of manipulations of the environment by the tutor.The child is not told what to do or think but is led to draw its ownconclusions as a result of its own explorations, the context for whichhas been carefully arranged. The first stage of the program starts ininfancy, where Rousseau’s crucial concern is to avoid conveyingthe idea that human relations are essentially ones of domination andsubordination, an idea that can too easily by fostered in the infantby the conjunction of its own dependence on parental care and itspower to get attention by crying. Though the young child must beprotected from physical harm, Rousseau is keen that it becomesaccustomed to the exercise of its bodily powers and he thereforeadvises that the child be left as free as possible rather than beingconfined or constrained.

From the age of about twelve or so, the program moves on to theacquisition of abstract skills and concepts. This is not done with theuse of books or formal lessons, but rather through practicalexperience. The third phase of education coincides with puberty andearly adulthood. The period of isolation comes to an end and the childstarts to take an interest in others (particularly the opposite sex),and in how he is regarded. At this stage the great danger is thatexcessiveamour propre will extend to exacting recognitionfrom others, disregarding their worth, and demanding subordination.The task of the tutor is to ensure that the pupil’s relationswith others are first mediated through the passion ofpitié (compassion) so that through the idea of thesuffering others, of care, and of gratitude, the pupil finds a secureplace for the recognition of his own moral worth where hisamourpropre is established on a non-competitive basis. The finalperiod of education involves the tutor changing from a manipulator ofthe child’s environment into the adult’s trusted advisor.The young and autonomous adult finds a spouse who can be anothersource of secure and non-competitive recognition. This final phasealso involves instruction into the nature of the social world,including the doctrines of Rousseau’s political philosophy.

In addition to Rousseau’s theory of education for an individual,he also addresses the topic of mass education for citizens, primarilyin theDiscourse on Political Economy and inConsiderations on the Government of Poland. There, his stressis on the formation of patriotic citizens, committed to the generalwill and the law, and on education as being one of the primaryresponsibilities of magistrates. He deplores class segregation ineducation and argues for the desirability of common institutions forall, either free or at an affordable charge.

6. Place in the history of philosophy

In the course of his work, Rousseau engaged intellectually with a widerange of predecessors and contemporaries, and was deeply influenced byancient writers, perhaps especially Plato. The most immediateinfluences on his political philosophy include Montesquieu, Hobbes,Locke, Mandeville and Diderot. Hobbes’s conception of sovereignpower, duly transmuted by Rousseau’s rejection of the notion ofrepresentative sovereignty, clearly marks theSocialContract, and Rousseau sometimes claimed that all he was doingwas to restate Locke, though this has often been read with someperplexity (Brooke 2009). Among the contemporary philosophers whoengaged closely with Rousseau’s work was Adam Smith, whofamously reviewed theDiscourse on Inequality for theEdinburgh Review (Griswold 2018). Rousseau’s thinkinghas had a profound influence on later philosophers and politicaltheorists, although the tensions and ambiguities in his work havemeant that his ideas have been developed in radically incompatible anddivergent ways. In modern political philosophy, for example, it ispossible to detect Rousseau as a source of inspiration for liberaltheories, communitarian ideas, civic republicanism, and in theories ofdeliberative and participatory democracy. Hostile writers haveportrayed Rousseau as a source of inspiration for the moreauthoritarian aspects of the French revolution and thence for aspectsof fascism and communism.

Rousseau’s most important philosophical impact was on ImmanuelKant. A portrait of Rousseau was the only image on display inKant’s house, and legend has it that the only time that Kantforgot to take his daily walk was when readingEmile.Instances of direct influence include Kant’s idea of thecategorical imperative, the third formulation of which in theGroundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (the so-called formulaof the kingdom of ends) recalls Rousseau’s discussion of thegeneral will inThe Social Contract. Ironically, Kant’sdetachment of the idea of universal legislation from its context inthe particularity of single society reverses Rousseau’s ownapproach, since Rousseau had, in preparatory work forThe SocialContract rejected the idea of a general will of the human race asthat notion appeared in Diderot’s article “NaturalRight” in theEncyclopédie. Rousseau’sinfluence can also be seen in Kant’s moral psychology,especially in work such asReligion Within the Limits of ReasonAlone, in Kant’s own thinking about conjectural history,and in his writings on international justice which draw onRousseau’s engagement with the work of the Abbé St.Pierre.

The cases of Hegel and Marx are more complex. Hegel’s directreferences to Rousseau are often uncomplimentary. In thePhilosophy of Right, while praising Rousseau for the ideathat will is the basis of the state, he misrepresents the idea of thegeneral will as being merely the idea of the overlap between thecontingent wills of private individuals. In theEncyclopediaLogic he demonstrates an awareness that this was notRousseau’s view. Hegel’s discussion of the master-slavedialectic and the problem of recognition in thePhenomenology ofSpirit also draws on Rousseau, in this case on the notion ofamour propre and the ways in which attempts to exact respectand recognition from others can be self-defeating. Karl Marx’sconcerns with alienation and exploitation have also been thought tobear some kind of relationship to Rousseau’s thinking on relatedtopics. Here the evidence is more indirect, since the references toRousseau in Marx’s work are few and insubstantial.

In contemporary political philosophy, it is clear that the thinking ofJohn Rawls, especially inA Theory of Justice reflects theinfluence of Rousseau and Rawls himself referred to his two principlesof justice as an effort to “spell out the content of the generalwill” (Cohen 2010, p.2; Brooke 2015). A good example ofRousseau’s influence is the way in which Rawls uses the deviceof the “original position” to put self-interested choiceat the service of the determination of the principles of justice. Thisexactly parallels Rousseau’s argument that citizens will bedrawn to select just laws as if from an impartial perspective, becausethe universality and generality of the law means that when consideringtheir own interests they will select the measure that best reflectstheir own interests. Echoes of Rousseau’s contractualism arealso found in the work of the later Frankfurt School, most notably inHabermas and Honneth.

Bibliography

Principal works by Rousseau

The standard French edition of Rousseau isOeuvrescomplètes (5 volumes), Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond(eds.), Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995.

A major work that is not included in theOeuvrescomplètes in a satisfactory form isPrincipes du droitde la guerre published together withÉcrits sur lapaix perpetuelle, Bruno Bernardi and Gabriella Silvestrini (eds),Paris: Vrin, 2008. (This volume is part of a series of texts, studiesand commentaries that are invaluable for extending our understandingof Rousseau’s work.)

The most comprehensive English edition of Rousseau’s works isCollected Writings (13 volumes), Roger Masters andChristopher Kelly (eds.), Dartmouth: University Press of New England,1990–2010. The individual works below are included in each ofthese editions.

Accessible English translations of major works include:

• The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, VictorGourevitch (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997.
• The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings,Victor Gourevitch (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997.
• The Social Contract and Other Political Writings, QuintinHoare (trans.) and Christopher Bertram (ed.), London: Penguin,2012.(This volume includes the English translation of thereconstruction by Bernardi et al ofPrinciples of the Right ofWar.)
• 1751,Un Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts(Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts; FirstDiscourse).
• 1755,Un Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondemens del’Inégalité parmi les Hommes (A Discourseon the Origin of Inequality; Second Discourse).
• c. 1753–61,Essai sur l’Origine de Langues(Essay on the Origin of Languages).
• 1755,De l’économie politique (ADiscourse on Political Economy).
• 1755,Lettre sur la Musique Française (Letteron French Music).
• 1758,Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur lesSpectacles(Letter to d’Alembert on theTheater).
• 1761,Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse.
• 1762,Émile, ou de l’Éducation(Emile, or On Education).
• 1762,Du Contrat Social (The SocialContract).
• 1764,Lettres Ecrites de la Montagne (Letters fromthe Mountains).
• 1764–5,Project de Constitution pour la Corse(Project for a Constitution for Corsica).
• 1764–6,Les Confessions (TheConfessions).
• 1770–1,Considérations sur le Gouvernement dePologne (Considerations on the Government ofPoland).
• 1772–6,Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues(Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues).
• 1776–8,Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire(The Reveries of the Solitary Walker).

Works about Rousseau

• Berman, M., 1970,The Politics of Authenticity, New York:Atheneum.
• Bertram, C., 2004,Rousseau and The Social Contract,London: Routledge.
• –––, 2012, “Rousseau’s Legacy in TwoConceptions of the General Will: Democratic and Transcendent.”,Review of Politics, 74: 403–419.
• Brooke, C., 2009, “‘Locke en particulier les atraitées exactement dans les mêmes principes quemoi’: revisiting the relationship between Locke andRousseau”, in Miqueu, C. and Chamie, M. edsLocke’sPolitical Liberty: Readings and Misreadings, Oxford: VoltaireFoundation.
• –––, 2015, “Rawls on Rousseau and theGeneral Will”, in Farr, J. and Williams, D.L. eds,TheGeneral Will After Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Canon, J.S., 2022, “Three General Wills in Rousseau”,Review of Politics, 84: 350–371.
• Cassirer, E, 1954,The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,trans. P. Gay, Bloomington: Indiana.
• Charvet, J., 1974,The Social Problem in the Philosophy ofJean-Jacques Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Cohen, J. 2010,Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dent, N.J.H, 1988,Rousseau: An Introduction to hisPsychological, Social and Political Theory, Oxford:Blackwell.
• –––, 1992,A Rousseau Dictionary,Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2005,Rousseau, London:Routledge.
• Douglass, R., 2015,Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free-will andthe Passions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fermon, N., 1997,Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman, andNation, Hanover, NH: Weslyan University Press.
• Fralin, R., 1978,Rousseau and Representation, New York:Columbia.
• Gauthier, D., 2006,Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Griswold, C.L., 2017,Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith APhilosophical Encounter, London: Routledge.
• Grofman, B. and Feld, S.L., 1988, “Rousseau’s GeneralWill: A Condorcetian Perspective”,American PoliticalScience Review, 82: 567–76.
• Kelly, C.J., 2003Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’sLife to the Truth, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• –––, 2006, “Rousseau’s‘Peut-etre’: Reflections on the Status of the State ofNature”,Modern Intellectual History, 3:75–83.
• Masters, R.D., 1968,The Political Philosophy ofRousseau, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• McLendon, M.L., 2019,The Psychology of Inequality:Rousseau’s Amour Propre, Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.
• Melzer, A.M. , 1990,The Natural Goodness of Man On the Systemof Rousseau’s Thought, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.
• Neidleman, J., 2017,Rousseau’s Ethics of Truth,London: Routledge.
• Neuhouser, F., 1993, “Freedom, Dependence and the GeneralWill”,Philosophical Review, 102: 363–95.
• –––, 2008,Rousseau’s Theodicy ofSelf-Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2014,Rousseau’s Critique ofInequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• O’Hagan, T., 1999,Rousseau, London:Routledge.
• Roosevelt, G.G., 1990,Reading Rousseau in the NuclearAge, Philadelphia: Temple.
• Rosenblatt, H., 2002, “On the Misogyny of Jean-JacquesRousseau: The Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context”,French Historical Studies, 25: 91–114.
• Rousselière, G., 2021, “Rousseau’s Theory ofValue and the Case of Women”,European Journal ofPhilosophy, 29: 285–298.
• Scott, J.T., 2021,Rousseau’s Reader: Strategies ofPersuasion and Education, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.
• Shklar, J.N., 1969,Men and Citizens: A Study ofRousseau’s Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Simpson, M., 2006,Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom,London: Continuum.
• Spector, C., 2019,Rousseau, Cambridge: PolityPress.
• Sreenivasan, G., 2000, “What is the General Will?”,Philosophical Review 109: 545–81.
• Starobinski, J., 1988,Transparency and Obstruction,trans A. Goldhammer, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Williams, D.L., 2014,Rousseau’s Social Contract,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wokler, R., 1995,Rousseau, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
• –––, 2014,Rousseau, the Age ofEnlightenment, and Their Legacies, Bryan Garsten (ed.) Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Biographies of Rousseau

• Cranston, M., 1982,Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work ofJean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754, London: Allen Lane.
• –––, 1991,The Noble Savage: Jean-JacquesRousseau, 1754–1762, London: Allen Lane.
• –––, 1997,The Solitary Self: Jean-JacquesRousseau in Exile and Adversity, London: Allen Lane.
• Crocker, L.G. 1974,Jean-Jacques Rousseau-the Quest1712–1758, New York: Macmillan.
• –––, 1974,Jean-Jacques Rousseau TheProphetic Voice 1758–1778, New York: Macmillan.
• Damrosch, L., 2005,Jean-Jacques Rousseau: RestlessGenius, New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jason Swadley Canon, Robin Douglass,Charles Griswold, Christopher Kelly, Jason Neidelman, John Scott andDavid Lay Williams for their advice on updating this entry. Theeditors would like to thank Gintautas Miliauskas (Vilnius University)for notifying us about several typographical errors in this entry.