Redeeming love - Rousseau and eighteenth-century moral philosophy

This essay employs Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) as a vehicle to explor e love in eighteenth-century French moral philosophy and theological ethics . The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variousl y and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and th e private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth c entury, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doi ng so he probed and articulated the tension between and the harmony of life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models o f private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institut ions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion.