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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.

AbstractDespite a recent resurgence of interest in friendship and a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with Rousseau, scholars have neglected Rousseau's conception of friendship. The work that does exist emphasizes friendship's ability to inculcate virtue, and moors Rousseau to the classical notion that friendship catalyzes ethical improvement. However, Rousseau lowers the aim of friendship by decoupling it from the process of moral learning and putting limits on the degree of intimacy between friends. The argument is made in four steps. First, Rousseau's theory of friendship differs from its relevant predecessors in both origin and end. Second, the effort to ground friendship in pity bounds emotional intimacy, since pity introduces elements of character difference as well as sameness. Third, Rousseauan friendship fails to catalyze virtue and is successful instead in providing consolation. Finally, the essay considers the function of friendship in a Rousseauan polity.

Among Jean-Jacques Rousseau's chief preoccupations was the problem of self-interest implicit in all social relationships. A person with divided loyalties (i.e., to both himself and his cohorts) was, in Rousseau's thinking, a divided person. According to John Warner's Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations, not only did Rousseau never solve this problem, he believed it was fundamentally unsolvable: social relationships could never restore wholeness to a self-interested human being. Warner traces his argument through the contours of Rousseau's thought on three distinct types of relationships—sexual love, friendship, and civil or political association. Warner concludes that none of these, whether examined individually or together, provides a satisfactory resolution to the problem of human dividedness located at the center of Rousseau's thinking.