ABSTRACT
Drawing on formal similarities between the Confessions and The Second Discourse, I explore how the first part of the work illustrates Rousseauian naturalism, while the second part evokes the corruption that comes with social life. The Confessions grounds Rousseau’s claims about the goodness of existence and the innocence of the human spirit, and illuminates the meaning of Rousseuaian freedom and perfectibility; it also provides a vivid depiction of how vice and alienation are often the unfortunate outcomes of social and political existence. Ultimately, however, Rousseau’s autobiography moves beyond his prior writings to explore new conceptions of morality and the nature of the self. Taken as a whole, the Confessions can be understood as an expansion of the Rousseauian system that offers an affirmative course in what he calls ‘sensitive morality.’ Rousseau’s new tangible ethics prefigure Romanticism’s minimalism, Foucauldian ‘technologies of the self,’ and contemporary interest in self-care.
