There is enormous and unabated interest in Smith's thought partly because he remains—rightly or wrongly—the most important touchstone for the liberal, free-market project. But it is also because his work is so rich and therefore capable of bearing multiple interpretations. In fact, Smith studies is a surprisingly large and competitive field, with its own journal: in 2003 the quantity of secondary literature on Smith could be realistically described as “enough to sink a small boat” (Margaret Schabas, “Adam Smith's Debts to Nature,” in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, ed. De Marchi and Schabas [Duke University Press, 2003], 1) and today it is even larger. Here are three new books to add to that growing literature; all are important additions.

Rousseau first glimpsed the principle of the natural goodness of man in the so-called “Illumination of Vincennes,” and he made it his mission as an author to persuade his readers of the truth of that vision. Rousseau must persuade his readers that they are deceived by what they see before their own eyes and that they must learn to see anew—through his eyes. In order to educate his reader, Rousseau consistently uses rhetorical and literary techniques that are meant to change the reader's perspective. His use of these techniques is particularly pervasive in Emile. The present analysis examines Rousseau's education of the reader of his pedagogical treatise, especially through comparisons he draws between his imaginary pupil, Emile, and actual children that are meant to persuade the reader of the truth of what first appears to be imaginary and the falsity of what the reader previously believed was real.

This article presents a reading of the Confessions as a spiritual drama. Rousseau tells the story of a man (himself) who, like the rest of civilized humanity, fell away from natural goodness as he was socialized. Yet unlike the rest of us, Rousseau managed to make at least a partial return to nature. In fact, the Confessions gives us two stories of return: one by the man whose life is recounted and one by the narrator who is doing the recounting. (These are of course the same man, presented in two aspects.) Yet the two stories share a common core: in each case the return occurs by means of a journey by the self to the self. This teaching regarding the sufficiency of the self has resonated with many, particularly in our own time: with Rousseau began the vindication of man as godlike not in his power but in his being.

Rousseau speaks of his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as an informal record of conversations of his soul with itself in its quest for his—our—naturel purged of artifice and convention. In the course of these conversations he addresses many of the problems that he explores in his other writings: man's place in the scheme of things, hence God, divine justice, immortality; freedom; the contrasts between the active, citizen life and the circumscribed, solitary life; what we owe to our fellows and what we owe to ourselves; amour-propre, shame, and amour de soi; the conditions for individual happiness, its kinds, and how they might (or might not) compose with public happiness. However, in the Reveries he addresses these problems from an explicitly nonpolitical perspective. While he says that he did not reduce his reflections—meditations, reveries—about them to a system, his account of them is remarkably comprehensive and carefully crafted.