Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This chapter tracks the changing fortunes of a fundamental opposition between more Stoic and more Augustinian perspectives on human life, showing that as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, the patterns of Augustinian anti-Stoicism had often found expression in a more secular, Epicurean register. What Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempts, more strenuously than any other thinker of the period, is an extraordinary synthesis of Epicurean, Augustinian, and Stoic argumentative currents. In common with the modern Epicureans, Rousseau uses claims about self-love to illuminate all areas of human behaviour in modern times. But by presenting that self-love as inflamed amour-propre, Rousseau tilts sharply towards the more critical Augustinians than towards those Epicurean writers who were making their apology for commercial society.