ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the increasing distance between Rousseau and Diderot over issues like materialism and political theory. Objecting to Diderot’s view, Rousseau’s article ‘Economy’ traces the origin of social and political obligation in the social contract. The reciprocal duties of equals are not associated to what we owe to the ‘human race’ but rather to what we owe to the political body under the aegis of the ‘general will.’ Diderot also became Rousseau’s main target in Chapter 2 of Book I of the Geneva Manuscript. Where Diderot seemed to naturalize the theory of social instinct developed by Shaftesbury, Rousseau actually returned to Hobbes: to him, the absence of a natural society of the human race condemned Diderot’s theory to inconsistency. Finally, neither materialism nor atheism suffice to understand the order of nature. In the ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,’ Rousseau describes as absurd the refusal to call for an organizing intelligence, or to deny the immortality of the soul and the existence of a free will.
