The Critique of Enlightenment Politics and Public Opinion in Rousseau’s Dialogues

Among Rousseau’s major works, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues remains the most neglected and is often dismissed as evidence of his paranoia. This paper argues that the conspiracy and persecution described in the Dialogues should not be read as the product of persecutory delusions or mere personal quarrels with the philosophes. Rousseau exposes in the Dialogues their hidden ambition to manipulate public opinion and turn enlightenment into a strategy of social domination. For him, the philosophes’ project depended on the complicity of the public, whose amour-propre made it both victim and accomplice of the philosophes. Through its two interlocutors, the Dialogues presents two fragile ways to resist this tyranny of opinion: either through direct experience or through intellectual honesty and favorable circumstances. Reinterpreted thus, the work stands as Rousseau’s penetrating critique of Enlightenment politics and the moral psychology of public opinion.