POLITICAL MOTIVES OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU'S "NEW HELOISE"

La Nouvelle Heloise offers both implicit and explicit elements for understanding Rousseau's political thought. The former include comments "about the method" of analysing man and society, some telling remarks on nature and its relation to artifice and convention, as well as some deep insights into the function of civilisation. The latter consist of remarks more obviously "political" on equality, on the inanity of aristocratic prejudice, on "corrupted" society, and on "republican" values such as patriotism, ethic virtue, limited private property, "the good citizen's" rectitude and honesty, those authentic values, that is, which express a notion of human nature compatible with a correct vision of politics.