ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to question the claims that Rousseau wrote in response to commercial society and that a major concern of Smith in his most important works was to repudiate Rousseau. It suggests that how people might rebuild and reclaim our scholarly endeavors by a comparative procedure that can begin with a discussion of Rousseau and Smith but should end with an invitation to absorb them into the larger framework of studying comparative Enlightenments, Scottish and French. Underlying the questionable view that Rousseau was responding to commercial society is ahistorical thinking, a failure to study texts in context. Possibly the most revealing entry on the list of Rousseau's books that the Scots ignored was Du Contract Social. Time and again the Scots of the Enlightenment criticized the theory of the social contract, but they publicly said nothing about Rousseau's outstanding work in that genre.
