Journal of the History of Ideas,

54 (1993); and my 'Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited’,

Daedalus,

107 (1978). Jacques Derrida’s

De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967) embraces one of the subtlest treatments available of the

Essai sur l’origine des langues .

Notable discussions of the argument of the

Contrat social

range from Andrew Levine’s sympathetic Kantian perspective in

The Politics of Autonomy (Amherst, Mass., 1976), passing through John W. Chapman’s balanced

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