Time and alienation in Rousseau

Abstract

This essay is primarily concerned with demonstrating Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s personal and political struggle against the particularizing, limiting measure of time. That Rousseau's autobiographical and literary writings reveal a lament and rebellion against time is not a new insight but we will extend this line of inquiry into Rousseau's theoretical political work. There woven in more subtle threads, we find the same unifying priority: an attempt to defeat time and to grant man—either in the immediacy of the moment of self-alienation or in the pure abstractness of the General Will— eternality.