Discours sur l’inégalité , central as it is to Rousseau’s political theory, has in recent years received perhaps even closer scholarly attention for its philosophy of history, for instance in Asher Horowitz’s

Rousseau: Nature and History (Toronto, 1986), and above all for its philosophical or historical anthropology, most notably in Michèle Duchet’s

Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971); Victor Goldschmidt’s

Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris, 1974); and Arthur M. Melzer’s

The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago, 1990). I have attempted to deal with the several contexts of Rousseau’s argument at some length in my

Rousseau’s 'Discours sur l’inégalité’ and its Sources , now destined for publication by the Centre international d’étude du dix-huitième siècle in Ferney-Voltaire. Differing perspectives on his account of mankind’s savage nature, and on his claims about apes and orang-utans, can be found in Arthur O. Lovejoy, 'Rousseau’s Supposed

Essays on the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948); Gourevitch, 'Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature’,

Interpretation,

16 (1988); Francis Moran III, 'Natural Man in the

Second Discourse ’,

অজানা পৃষ্ঠা