Other Works

• Essay on the Origin of Languages

  - Recommended Translation: ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages,’ in Rousseau: The Discourses and other early political writings, ed. and trans. by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 247-299.
  Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages (Essai sur l’origine des langues) was first published posthumously in 1781. Rousseau wrote that he had originally intended to include this work in the his Second Discourse but that he finally decided to omit… More

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