The outsider: Outsider rhetoric and truth-seeking in The Profession of Faith

Abstract

Efforts to identify oneself as an “outsider” are an increasingly visible feature of the democratic political environment, and perhaps no political thinker has utilized outsider rhetoric to greater effect than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That said, virtually no attention has been paid to the important role that such rhetoric plays in a work that Rousseau believed to be the “best and most useful” of the Eighteenth Century— The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. In this article I attend to the vicar's use of outsider tropes, focusing in particular on how they serve to legitimate an account of truth-seeking which would otherwise be rejected by the vicar's skeptical audience. I also show how the vicar's understanding of the conditions necessary to proper truth-seeking are different from Rousseau's own. This argument, if successful, illustrates the intrinsically rhetorical character of The Profession as well as calling attention to the presence of an important though neglected rhetorical strategy. In achieving these dual aims, this essay contributes both to the growing literature on The Profession and highlights neglected aspects of Rousseau's own rhetorical strategies.