ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-68) was still a major author during Kierkegaard’s lifetime and one of several French thinkers who influenced a Danish Romanticism that, because of its Gallic components, was distinctive from the standard German version. Yet the fact of the matter is that Rousseau is a very minor presence in Kierkegaard’s writings. In the Kierkegaardian corpus, there is only one brief mention in the formal authorship (in Fear and Trembling of 1843) and an additional six in the journals and notebooks between 1847 and 1850, and all of which mention Rousseau simply to make a Kierkegaardian point.
