Introduction

In 1766, a learned cleric, Dom Cajot, published a work entitled Les Plagiats de M. J-J. Rousseau de Genève sur l’Éducation, in which he denounced Rousseau as ‘only a shameless and unskilful plagiarist of Seneca and other ancient writers’. It was a hasty, harsh and superficial judgement and it related to only part of Rousseau’s work. The remedies Rousseau proposes are twofold. First, there is the familiar Stoic injunction : the cultivation of the ‘inner self. Rousseau, the Man of Nature, disregards prejudices and vanities and follows ‘true’ instinct. The education of Émile closes the entries to vice and enables him to develop himself in every respect as a virtuous and independent man and to emerge into society as essentially a Stoic, unassailable by surrounding vice. The ancient Stoic placed the Golden Age in a long-lost past and regarded the increase of evil among the generality of men as inevitable: virtue is only for an élite.