Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One's Life to the Truth, Christopher Kelly, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 182

Christopher Kelly's latest book makes an important contribution to the study of Rousseau. Kelly investigates Rousseau's attitude towards authorship in the light of his motto, “consecrating one's life to the truth.” He maintains that for Rousseau this motto implies the need for two kinds of authorial responsibility: “it meant both publicly taking responsibility for what one publishes and only publishing those things that would be of public benefit” (1). Kelly then uses this two-pronged conception of responsible authorship to investigate Rousseau's understanding of the practices of citizenship and of philosophy.