Written in often difficult circumstances, the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau maintain a complex relationship to philosophy the eighteenth century. Like his more famous contemporaries, the author of the Emile and Written letters of the Mountain show an enthusiastic defender of the religious tolerance and freedom of thought.

After Voltaire and Condillac, it does not fail to criticize the elaborate abstract systems since Descartes.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives us however more contrasted image of the Age of Enlightenment: it attacks the irreligion of the philosophers as to the ideology of the progress, which is incarnated in an Encyclopedia in which it collaborated in its beginnings, by writing the article devoteds to with the music. It expresses the most vigorous reservations towards modern theories of the political representation, to which it opposes the virtuous face of the ancient Cities.

But the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau exceeds this polemical standpoint. He invents the kind of the autobiography in the Confessions, then subverts it in the Daydreams of the solitary walker. He places the inalienable right at freedom in the middle of the political thought. And according to Claude Levi-Strauss, the Speech on the origin of the inequality among the men founds anthropology. The modern man, by reading these texts, learns that the fact is not the right and that it can know itself only while deviating from his state present.