2022/01/10 by Emma Planinc · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought #Political Theory and Influence #European Political History Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s1479244321000688
openalex publication_date 2022/01/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Rousseau claims that the lawgiver must “persuade without convincing,” binding this legislative communication to the “first language,” which would, Rousseau writes, “persuade without convincing, and depict without arguing.” Drawing on a wide range of contextual sources, I show that this first language of Rousseau's is figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which William Warburton claimed were “the uniform voice of nature” in his Divine Legation of Moses . More importantly, I demonstrate that Rousseau was himself using this lost ancient language to provide a figuration of his own: the “illusory image” of natural man. Through the Second Discourse , men could be persuaded that they were by nature free, preparing the way for a social contract in which they could legitimately give themselves law. This is an image that I argue has been effectively persuasive up to the present day—and our politics, like Rousseau's, thus seemingly rests on figurative foundations.