Paul de Man's original solution to the question of the relation of Rousseau's political to his autobiographical writings has not received the attention it deserves, in large part because his work on Rousseau's political writings has been less read – ignored by readers of de Man unfamiliar with the political dimension of Rousseau or unable to accept that a political dimension in de Man could be anything but guilty and repressed; and ignored by most writers on Rousseau's political theory, presumably as the analysis of a literary critic. Fewer still have attempted to relate the two sides of Rousseau's work in the light of de Manian discussions making allegory and irony the figural modes of political and autobiographical texts respectively. Most solutions tend to reconcile the two dimensions according to by-now-classical patterns laid down by Jean Starobinski and Ernst Cassirer, the first tending to make the systematic texts into disguised confessional works that illuminate the psychology of their writer, and the second finding in the autobiographical works the empirical evidence on which the theory is built and from which it does not quite manage to detach itself. The newly transcribed Textual Allegories – which reveals de Man's decision in Allegories of Reading to substitute a chapter on Rousseau's autobiographical texts for drafted chapters on Julie and Nietzsche that were to follow the chapter on The Social Contract in the first version – brings out the importance of the neglected relation in de Man's reading of Rousseau.