ABSTRACT
Rousseau's revolution, preshaping and initiating the ethnological revolution, consists of refusing forced identifications, whether of a culture with that culture, or of an individual member of a culture with a character or social function that this same culture tries to impose on him. For Rousseau was not only an acute observer of peasant life, an impassioned reader of travel books, a knowledgeable analyst of exotic customs and beliefs. To Rousseau we owe the discovery of this principle, the only one on which to base the sciences of man. Yet it was to remain inaccessible and incomprehensible as long as there reigned a philosophy which, taking the Cogito as its point of departure, was imprisoned by the hypothetical evidences of the self; and which could aspire to founding a physics only at the expense of founding a sociology and even a biology. Rousseau's precious moment gives us access to the very core of his works.
