Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau’s political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory - Paul Johnson

The fourth concept Rousseau popularized was in some ways the most pervasive of all. When society evolves from its primitive state of nature to urban sophistication, he argued, man is corrupted: his natural selfishness, which he calls amour de soi, is transformed into a far more pernicious instinct, amour-propre, which combines vanity and self-esteem, each man rating himself by what others think of him and thus seeking to impress them by his money, strength, brains and moral superiority. His natural selfishness becomes competitive and acquisitive, and so he becomes alienated not only from other men, whom he sees as competitors and not brothers, but from himself.5 Alienation induces a psychological sickness in man, characterized by a tragic divergence between appearance and reality.

The idea of the individual had always, of course, been present in Mosaic religion, since it was inherent in the belief that each man and woman was created in God’s image. It had been powerfully reinforced by the sayings of Isaiah. With Ezekiel it became paramount, and thereafter individual accountability became of the very essence of the Jewish religion.

It was part of Rousseau’s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. ‘I feel too superior to hate.’ ‘I love myself too much to hate anybody.