Victor Gourevitch, “‘The First Times’ in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11, no. 2 (1986)

Excerpt:

Rousseau had begun the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality with the conjecture or abstraction of isolated, self-sufficient beings—one hesitates to call them men—and gone on to show how difficult, indeed how impossible it is to conceive why or how such beings would establish any contacts, let alone languages and communities.  He had thus created the impression that language, together with all of man’s other most distinctive attributes, may be altogether accidental.  Nothing in the Essay on the Origin of Languages so much as suggests that possibility.  On the contrary.  It begins on a most emphatically traditional note.

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