The success of Rousseau’s political vision depends on citizens placing the common interest above their private interest whenever the two conflict. Rousseau says very little about how citizens could be motivated to do so in the Social Contract, however, which gives rise to questions about how the text relates to his other works. This chapter challenges liberal-egalitarian interpretations of Rousseau that draw on Emile to extract a model of modern citizenship for the Social Contract and instead argues that the Discourse on Political Economy is the most informative text for understanding the theory of republican citizenship required to make the Social Contract project viable. In doing so, it elucidates the moral psychology underpinning Rousseau’s proposals for cultivating political virtue, before responding to the objection that this cannot have been what he had in mind for his native Geneva, which he claimed to have taken as the model for the Social Contract.

This chapter challenges the view that The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) is concerned with analyzing modern commercial society – a view that is especially prominent amongst those who turn to Adam Smith to help identify the malaises of capitalist societies today and their potential remedies. The chapter proceeds by, first, examining what both Adam Smith and Smith scholars mean by commercial society, and whether this concept has any place in TMS; second, assessing whether TMS should be read as response to other theorists of modern commercial society (Bernard Mandeville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau); and, third, analyzing whether Smith’s reflections on moral corruption, inequality, and prudence in TMS should be associated with commercial society. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on why many Smith commentators superimpose the concept of commercial society onto TMS, speculating that this can be partially explained by the broader tendency in much recent scholarship to read TMS and the Wealth of Nations as forming a coherent whole, rather than as independent works that mostly address distinct questions.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the volume and sets out its overarching goals: to bring On the Citizen out of the shadow of Leviathan and to show that it is a valuable and distinctive philosophical work in its own right. We proceed by outlining the publication history of On the Citizen and charting its reception history in early-modern European thought, before turning to consider some of the distinctive methodological features and challenges that the text raises for understanding Hobbes’s philosophy. The chapter finishes by summarizing the main contributions of all subsequent chapters.