Failure for Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not merely a sense of inadequacy; the celebrated opener of the Social Contract makes this clear: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Failure is the basis on which Rousseau's social, political, and personal thought rests. Yet his interpretation of failure is as complex as are his ideas about freedom. A disjunction between facts and the concrete, on the one hand, and a utopian vision, on the other, galvanizes Rousseau's political and social thought. He states that he only fully articulated the first principles of his work in his autobiographical writings, at the end of his life, when he linked his anthropological and sociopolitical thought to his own life-writing. These principles define the freedom not just to change or to reform thought, but to inaugurate a sense of self and society different from what came before.

Within a sequence of autobiographical texts (including messages and letters), we see the principle of transformation in society commanded by Rousseau's fatal diagnosis of culture, the way he engages not only with questions about rights and facts, and differing conceptions of authority, but also with freedom in relation to contemporary society.