Commentary

• ‘The First Times’ in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages

  - 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… More

• Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature

  - Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature,” Interpretation 16, no.1 (1988).
  Excerpt: Heinrich Meier’s important new edition of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men invites us to rethink Rousseau’s account of the state of nature, and more particularly of what he calls the “pure”… More

• Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  - Jonathan Marks, Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
  From the publisher: In Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Marks offers a new interpretation of the philosopher’s thought and its place in the contemporary debate between liberals and communitarians. Against… More