Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the
...cole normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First they
gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas but
also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and
characters. A new way of coming to terms with Rousseau's theoretical rigour beneath his
apparent reveries and sentimental flights of fancy was here put to work. Second we are now
discovering that the ?late Althusser's' theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break
with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy ?for
Marx' were being worked out well before 1985 ? in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve
years earlier which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void the accident the
take and the necessity of contingency.
