Abstract

In this article I argue that, in Rousseau’s Second Discourse, are present both a subjective and an objective idea of alienation: in addition to the well-known subjective alienation resulting from self-love, there is also an idea corresponding to objective alienation: the social order, instead of being properly understood by subjects as their creation, contingent and transformable, takes on the appearance of a natural necessity. This idea of alienation, which I analyze in §4, rests as much on a critical-analytic genealogy (which I retrace in §2), as on what we might today call a critique of ideology, which I deal with in §3.