A Master of the Art of Persuasion: Rousseau’s Platonic Teaching on the Virtuous Legislator

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the legislator, that highly virtuous human type who designs foundational laws for the polity, is in many ways the core element of his civic republicanism. that this should be so, however, is perhaps not readily evident. After all, Rousseau is clear that republican legitimacy is conferred by a social contract, to which all the people equally consent. And surely this need for popular consent stands in some tension with the presence of a vastly superior individual – one of the “images of authority,” as Judith Shklar has memorably put it,¹ in Rousseau’s political thought. Still, Rousseau is