Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were two of the foremost figures of the European Enlightenment. They made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. For some time there was a popular, if crude, notion that the two were in some sense opposites or even enemies. This crude reading of Smith as the advocate of liberalism, commercial society and progress as contrasted to Rousseau's advocacy of republicanism, the noble savage and a return to nature invited the unwary reader to see Smith as the champion of selfishness and progenitor of capitalism, in stark opposition to Rousseau as the champion of egalitarianism and the intellectual forefather of socialism. Fortunately the turn towards contextual and textual scholarship in the history of ideas has put paid to these stereotypes and has allowed the much more complex and rich connection between these thinkers to emerge. We are no longer dealing with caricatures where these two great thinkers are used as emblems for later intellectual developments, but we are still in the early stages of the exploration of their relationship. The present volume advances the analysis of their ideas by exploring a series of shared themes and preoccupations that can be traced in their writings.

This introduction sets the scene for the collection of essays that follows by briefly describing some of the biographical and textual elements of the Smith–Rousseau connection, and then providing a brief sketch of some of the recent scholarly work on the relationship between the two thinkers.

Rousseau and Smith: Some Context and Connections

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Adam Smith (1723–90) were near contemporaries, but they never corresponded and probably never met one another. It is just possible that they met in Paris in late December 1765 or early January 1766, but the evidence seems to point against such a meeting (see Rasmussen 2008: 53–4). They did, however, have many mutual acquaintances and interlocutors among Europe's ‘republic of letters’. Smith befriended a number of the leading philosophes during his stay in Paris in 1766 – Dugald Stewart, Smith's first biographer, singles out ‘Turgot, Quesnai, Morellet, Necker, d’Alembert, Helvetius, Marmontel, Madame Riccoboni’ (Life: 302–3) – and most of these figures knew Rousseau as well.