It is well established that the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were significantly shaped by his critical engagement with themes and arguments from the Stoic and the Augustinian traditions. Although Alasdair Maclntyre could write in 1983 that a “general blindness to the importance of the continuing influence of Augustinianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” had meant that “books of the highest importance about Rousseau tend with few exceptions to ignore the importance of any reference to Augustine,” the situation is considerably changed today. Maclntyre's words served to introduce Ann Hartle's study of Rousseau's Confessions, in which she systematically compared the autobiographical techniques Rousseau used with those in Augustine's work of the same name; Patrick Riley's volume, The General Will before Rousseau, showed how the most important concept in Rousseau's political theory had first been elaborated for use in the theological arguments of the previous century by French Augustinian writers - including the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld (who may have coined the term), the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche, and the Calvinist Pierre Bayle - as they sought to elucidate the Pauline claim that “God wills all men to be saved.”