Rousseau's Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold
co Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not a professional philosopher. He never pretended that he was. His great claim was that he alone had been "the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart."' It was an art that did not demand great logical rigor or systematic exposition of abstract ideas. Rousseau did not even aspire to these accomplishments. He did not think that perfect consistency was really very important. What did matter was always to be truthful.2 By truthfulness he meant what we generally tend to call sincerity, and in his case it involved an overriding will to denounce the social world around him. It made him one of the greatest of the nay-sayers. His denial was comprehensive, embracing civilization as a whole. And in his tone of undeviating contempt for all he saw around him, he was singularly consistent. Moreover, if he was the very prototype of the "homme revolte," he was not without a deep sense of order, and his ideas found expression in a form of social criticism that was both formal and traditional in its structure.3