¹ In addition to the passages from the two Discourses cited below, consider the famous beginning of the Confessions: “I wish to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself” (Confessions [C hereafter], 5). In Emile, Rousseau declares the purpose of that book is to make “natural man … known” (Emile [E hereafter], 41). The Reveries, too, begin by asking “what am I?” (Reveries of the Solitary Walker [R hereafter], 1). My argument for the centrality of the problem of self-knowledge assumes substantial overlap between Rousseau's inquiries into the nature of man and his inquiries into his particular self; Rousseau seems to justify that interpretive assumption in the remark from the Confessions just cited, as well as in the remark of Rousseau's Frenchman in the Dialogues that “a man had to portray himself to show us primitive man like this” (Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues [D hereafter], 214. See also Masters, Roger, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], vii)Google Scholar. My argument for the centrality of the problem of self-knowledge does not, in my view, conflict with Arthur Melzer's argument that the natural goodness of man is the unifying principle of Rousseau's thought (Melzer, , The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 15)Google Scholar. A principle is not the same as a problem, and I believe some of Rousseau's overarching concerns can be most clearly understood by considering the principle of natural goodness as one part of the problem of self-knowledge. Rousseau citations refer to the following translations: “Preface to a Second Letter to Bordes,” “Last Reply,” Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (hereafter FD), and Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (hereafter SD), in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Confessions (hereafter C) in The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995); Constitutional Project for Corsica, in The Plan for Perpetual Peace, On the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith R. Bush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005); Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (hereafter D), trans. Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990); Emile, or on Education (hereafter E), trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979); “Geneva Manuscript,” in On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978); Reveries of the Solitary Walker (hereafter R), trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992); Of the Social Contract (hereafter SC) in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In the case of Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires (hereafter ES) translations are my own, based on the French text in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969).

² Todorov, Tzvetan, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Cosman, Carol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 181Google Scholar; Marks, Jonathan, Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cooper, Laurence, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999), 4Google Scholar; Smith, Jeffrey A., “Natural Happiness, Sensation, and Infancy in Rousseau's Emile, ” Polity 35 (2002): 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is an important difference between Cooper's and Marks's views of Emile, in that Marks believes Rousseau's understanding of nature is teleological, whereas Cooper does not (Cooper, Rousseau, xi; Marks, Perfection and Disharmony, 3). I agree with Marks on this point, and thus refer to the capacities to be developed as natural. I should make clear that the “Emilist” arguments of Cooper and Marks are not subject to the critique I will make of Todorov, as both Cooper and Marks recognize limitations of the Emilist project that escape Todorov's notice: see Cooper, Rousseau, 172–81; Marks, Perfection and Disharmony, 70. All of these authors, in their emphasis on Emile, however, seem to me rightly to correct Leo Strauss's overemphasis of the Second Discourse (Strauss, , Natural Right and History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], 264)Google Scholar.

³ Marks, Perfection and Disharmony, 38–51.

⁴ Todorov, , Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. Scott, John T. and Zaretsky, Robert D. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 18Google Scholar.

⁵ Cooper, Rousseau, 173. Leo Strauss almost makes the same error when he remarks “It is in giving himself completely to [the feeling of existence] that civilized man completes the return to the primitive state of nature on the level of humanity” (Natural Right and History, 292, emphasis added). Strauss corrects himself, however, on the next page, when he describes the solitary walker's “bad conscience,” a point I will emphasize below (Natural Right and History, 293).

⁶ ibid.

⁷ Melzer, Natural Goodness, 90.

⁸ Like Melzer and Todorov, Allan Bloom fails to mark the distinction in levels between the citizen, on the one hand, and Jean-Jacques and Emile, on the other, when he describes Emile as standing “somewhere between the citizen of the Social Contract and the solitary of the Reveries” (Bloom, , “Introduction” to Emile [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 28)Google Scholar. Attention to the problem of self-knowledge allows us to grasp the “vertical” dimension of Rousseau's thought that these commentators overlook.

⁹ Strauss, Natural Right and History, 255; Bloom, “Introduction,” 28; Melzer, Natural Goodness, 3.

¹⁰ Starobinski, Jean, Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xii, 254Google Scholar; Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Balinski, Rebecca (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 66Google Scholar; Melzer, Natural Goodness, 90.

¹¹ In his Confessions, Rousseau blamed the antiphilosophic remarks of the Second Discourse on Diderot's influence (C, 326 n).

¹² Cooper, Rousseau, 25; Melzer, Natural Goodness, 104.

¹³ Melzer, Natural Goodness, 235.

¹⁴ Ibid., 233.

¹⁵ I say the first major Rousseauvian character to feel this tension: Jonathan Marks has rightly pointed to the importance of “the state reached by most savage peoples”—who “oscillate” between the goods of solitude and those of society—that Rousseau highlights in the Second Discourse (Marks, Perfection and Disharmony, 61; SD, 167). As Marks implies, however, the self-knowledge of these savage peoples, while superior to that of natural man or the citizen, is deeply flawed, in that they allow themselves to change in ways that will lead them beyond their happy state “without thinking of it” (Perfection and Disharmony, 63; SD, 164). They will have to become bourgeois in order to learn to defend savagery: “It may be that the man of the frontispiece, who returns to savage life after experiencing civilized life, is in a better position to understand how a mean between individualism and collectivism can be preserved in the face of the inevitable and not in itself undesirable cultivation of the human faculties” (Perfection and Disharmony, 63–64).

¹⁶ This remark from the Dialogues indicates another problem with Todorov's schematization of Rousseau's thought in Frail Happiness: Todorov lists the citizen as a way forward from the problem of the bourgeois, whereas Rousseau clearly understands the citizen to precede the bourgeois in his one-way account of human history (Todorov, Frail Happiness, 18).

¹⁷ I do not mean to suggest that the only purpose of Rousseau's celebration of the citizen was to teach self-knowledge to the bourgeois; as Arthur Melzer points out, Rousseau also avowed the political intention of encouraging citizenship in those few European peoples for whom it remained an option (Melzer, Natural Goodness, 271; D, 213).

¹⁸ Cooper, Rousseau, xiii-xiv. In describing Emile and the solitary walker as exemplary types because of their highly cultivated faculties, I follow the teleological reading of Rousseau suggested by Marks and Smith, in opposition to the nonteleological reading offered by Strauss. Marks points to the following passage from Emile as strong evidence of Rousseau's teleological understanding of nature: “[Natural man] would have to be seen wholly formed: his inclinations would have to have been observed, his progress seen, his development followed. In a word, natural man would have to be known” (E, 41; Marks, Perfection and Disharmony, 38). It is thus only in man's development—not in his origins—that his nature is fully revealed and the “enjoyment of one's whole being” is possible (Smith, “Natural Happiness,” 93–94, 100–101; contrast Strauss, Natural Right and History, 266).

¹⁹ Marks, Perfection and Disharmony, 1.

²⁰ Ibid., 7.

²¹ Ibid., 76.

²² Ibid., 76.

²³ Denise Schaeffer, “The Utility of Ink: Rousseau and Robinson Crusoe,” The Review of Politics 64 (2002): 122.

²⁴ Ibid., 132.

²⁵ Cooper, Rousseau, 120.

²⁶ Ibid.; see also Maloy, J.S., “The Very Order of Things: Rousseau's Tutorial Republicanism,” Polity 37 (2005): 250Google Scholar.

²⁷ Cooper, Rousseau, 160–72.

²⁸ Ibid., 162.

²⁹ Cooper, Rousseau, 80–105.

³⁰ Todorov, Imperfect Garden, 104.

³¹ Cooper, Rousseau, 168.

³² Smith, “Natural Happiness,” 112.

³³ Neither Cooper nor Marks nor Smith gives serious attention to Emile and Sophie, which is problematic, given how much weight they put on Emile. Todorov, who stakes even more on Emile than they do, mentions it only as a warning against “facile optimism” rather than a text that sheds new light on Emile as a whole (Todorov, Imperfect Garden, 205).

³⁴ Strauss, Natural Right and History, 292.

³⁵ Of course, Jean-Jacques makes comparisons among pleasures in the passage just cited; comparisons among pleasures, however, are not the same as amour-propre-laden comparisons among men.

³⁶ Cooper, Rousseau, 120, 172.

³⁷ Joseph H. Lane, “Reverie and the Return to Nature: Rousseau and the Experience of Convergence,” Review of Politics 68 (2005), 493; John T. Scott, “Rousseau's Quixotic Quest in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire,” in The Nature of the “Rêveries,” ed. O'Neal, John C., Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (SVEC); 2008:3; pp. 139–52Google Scholar.

³⁸ Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, 353.

³⁹ Cooper, Rousseau, 27.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 11.

⁴¹ Michael Davis points out the ambiguity of this passage: “One is tempted to conclude that he is talking about sexual desire… . This temptation ought and ought not to be resisted” (Davis, , The Autobiography of Philosophy: Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999], 204Google Scholar). On this view, Rousseau is both pointing to sexual desire as the fundamental mark of our imperfection, but also leaving his exact fault unspecified: we know we are imperfect and would conduct ourselves badly with the ring of Gyges, but we might not know how our imperfection will manifest itself until we actually put on the ring.