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If the twentieth century, in the wake of Freud's compelling reading of Sophocles, has been known as the 'age of Oedipus', the eighteenth century could be called the age of Socrates. The Enlightenment witnesses, in Raymond Trousson's words, a 'prise de conscience “socratique”'. From Voltaire and Diderot toMoses Mendelssohn, many of the great figures of eighteenth-century philosophy found themselves identified with the Athenian Sage. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not escape this identification. Both his supporters and his detractors were quick to understand his life and works through the prism of Socrates. Rousseau himself, however, displays a much more ambivalent attitude towards the ancient philosopher. Socrates thus appears in Rousseau's early works as a figure of anti-philosophy. Through his celebration of Socratic ignorance he opposes himself to the contemporary encylopedists and simultaneously anticipates the later anti-Enlightenment appropriation of Socrates. He subsequently disavows his enthusiasm for Socrates in favour of the civic virtue of Cato and the moral superiority of Christ. As well as illuminating the wider role that antiquity > played in the formulation of his philosophy, Rousseau's equivocal relationship to Socrates sheds light on his reaction to the central precepts of the Enlightenment while elucidating his moral, political and theological outlook.
