{vii} Translator’s Note

With the exception of The State of War—my translation of which is new to this edition, and whose textual basis is given in the headnote to that work—the translations contained in this volume are based on the excellent Oeuvres Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Volume 3 (Paris: Pléiade, 1964). My translations of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Discourse on Political Economy, and On the Social Contract—earlier versions of which appeared in the first edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings—have been revised in light of generous and invaluable suggestions offered by David Wootton, all of which I have considered with enormous gratitude and most of which I have adopted. Any errors or infelicities that remain are my own.

Square brackets [ ] enclose editorial annotations, most of which were provided for this edition by David Wootton; square-bracketed items embedded in the text typically provide the term translated by the rendering that immediately precedes the bracketed item, but occasionally they offer a clarifying editorial comment. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, angle brackets < > enclose passages added or revised by Rousseau in the 1782 edition.

D.A.C.