ABSTRACT

This chapter shows that a fairly consistent scheme of political ideas emerges from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s works. There is a kind of unity which results from the activity of a powerful and original mind, dominated by well-defined intellectual preoccupations. The apparent impossibility of achieving his ideal for human life and conduct in the existing condition of society convinced him of the necessity for thinking out afresh their political foundations. Rousseau’s history of the progress of inequality is the history of the consequence of the abandonment of the ethical ideal of nature. The idea of Natural Man provided his original inspiration, and it is certainly his most persistently reiterated principle. Natural Man was no longer an ideal conception of the highest capacity of man, but a reflection of the nostalgia of a corrupt civilization for an imagined state of primitive innocence. The conception of natural man provides Rousseau with an ideal, a standard by which to measure social and political institutions.