ABSTRACT
The question of Rousseau’s relation to Hobbes has recently come under new historical and philosophic scrutiny. My aim is not to settle the complex question of Rousseau’s relation to Hobbes, but to indicate some deeper points of intersection and divergence that recent commentators have tended to neglect. Beginning with what Rousseau says about Hobbes in the Second Discourse and The Social Contract, I present the latter as in part a self-conscious correction of Hobbes’s own civil science, based on a new and fuller understanding of our natural powers and, with it, the possibilities of human language. Rousseau’s purpose, I argue, is less a remaking of the social order on grounds consistent with a lasting peace, as with Hobbes, than providing a normative standard, consistent with human nature, by which actual societies can be rightly appraised.
