Professor Ellis’s scrupulous collation of the texts of the two books and her adroit use of the Old and New Testaments and the Platonic dialogues reveal for the first time that not only is the Social Contract an “appendix” to Emile, as Rousseau says it is, but also that the two together constitute a Rousseauist version of Plato’s Republic and Symposium transfigured by Judeo-Christian and biblical tradition. Though Rousseau himself, in the pedagogical novel, invites such a study by including an aesthetic profession of faith and by warning the reader more than once that he is using the language of symbolic expression, Rousseauist criticism has, beyond noting the presence of a few symbols in Emile, produced as yet no systematic inquiry into the emblematic conveyance of ideas therein. In this illuminating study of two literary milestones in the history of our civilization, a noted Rousseau scholar examines for the first time the nature of, and the inspiration for, the symbolic language that informs Rousseau’s two great masterworks.
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