ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is, in the first instance, to consider further the issue of the development and consolidation of ‘the social spirit’ (SC IV: 8, 305, OC III: 465) to which Rousseau attaches so much importance as a condition for the emergence and maintenance of a just and humane civil community. As will be seen below, his discussion of ‘civil religion’, in the last chapter of SC from which the reference to ‘the social spirit’ is taken, which I have not so far discussed, is also centrally concerned with this issue and thus is treated here too. Finally, I shall look at Rousseau’s excursions into ‘applied politics’ as contained in his essays on Poland and Corsica to see how these works may deepen our understanding not only of the significance Rousseau attaches to the cultivation of the social spirit but also of how the general principles of legitimacy and justice argued for in SC may need to be qualified or compromised in the face of the recalcitrant facts of an actual social and political situation. By doing this we may hope to round out a sense of the scope and limits of Rousseau’s political thinking overall.
