ABSTRACT
To qualify for the honor of having anticipated Kant, Rousseau must be lifted entirely out of his French context, his determination to ground moral criticism in a science of humankind overlooked or treated as a mistake, until at last one arrives at Kant, for whom the autonomy of moral philosophy means that anthropology and other scientific studies have no direct bearing on ethics. This chapter attempts to restore Rousseau to those scientific debates of his era in which he participated. The Rousseau who will emerge contradicts both the figure unjustly maligned or neglected by historians of science and the man praised by Kantians for all the wrong reasons. Physical evidence indicates that the degeneration of the varieties of the human species should not be measured. Domestication and "degeneration" are the same, and the most domesticated and "degenerate" of all creatures are humans.
