A Provisional Reading of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Abstract

AbstractRousseau speaks of his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as an informal record of conversations of his soul with itself in its quest for his—our—naturel purged of artifice and convention. In the course of these conversations he addresses many of the problems that he explores in his other writings: man's place in the scheme of things, hence God, divine justice, immortality; freedom; the contrasts between the active, citizen life and the circumscribed, solitary life; what we owe to our fellows and what we owe to ourselves; amour-propre, shame, and amour de soi; the conditions for individual happiness, its kinds, and how they might (or might not) compose with public happiness. However, in the Reveries he addresses these problems from an explicitly nonpolitical perspective. While he says that he did not reduce his reflections—meditations, reveries—about them to a system, his account of them is remarkably comprehensive and carefully crafted.