Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Providence,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, No. 3, March 2000.

Excerpt:

Kant held that Rousseau and Newton had revealed the ways of  Providence: “After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified, and Pope’s  thesis is henceforth true.”  Rousseau discussed Providence and Pope’s thesis that “Whatever  is, is right” most fully in a long letter which he wrote to Voltaire in  1756, about a year after the publication of the Discourse on Inequality (1755), at a time when he is likely also to have done work on the Essay on the Origin of Languages. These three writings, the Discourse–together with Rousseau’s Replies to the criticisms of it by the Genevan  naturalist Charles Bonnet writing under the pseudonym Philopolis,  and  by the Master of the King’s Hunt Charles-George Le Roy writing in  the name of Buffon–the Essay, and the Letter to Voltaire, form a  unit:  they consider the natural order and man’s place in it  more  specif  ically than do any of his other writings. The Discourse is the only one  of them the  publication of which Rousseau himself initiated. The Letter to Voltaire differs from the other writings in this group by  discussing man’s place in the natural world in theological terms.

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