Rousseau's "Mission" and the Intention of his Writings

The radical content, doctrinaire form, and rhetorical style of Rousseau's works leads one to suspect that he wrote them not merely to state the truth but to change the world. Indeed, he stated explicitly that he wrote with such a sense of mission. One will never succeed in determining what that mission was, however, unless one first understands his view of history and of the European world he was trying to influence. He believed that history was a process of decay and that the ancien re~gime was irreversibly corrupt. He proclaimed his radical doctrines because they could no longer do any harm in an utterly decadent world, and because they might do some good by keeping a spark of freedom alive in despotic Europe and by slowing the decay of the few remaining republics

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• To Persuade without Convincing

  Colm J Kelly, Christopher Kelly•American Journal of Political…•1987

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