Friedrich Schiller headed his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man with an epigraph from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie: ‘if it is reason which makes man, it is feeling which guides him’ (Schiller 2001a: 86). Quotation is always excerpted, yet here the elided context of Schiller's allusion to Julie begs re-contextualisation. In this passage, Rousseau is not merely contrasting philosophy with feeling or sentiment, but is actually pointing to a strong affinity between the two modes. Claire addresses Saint Preux, a character whom Rousseau often uses as a mouthpiece for his own positions, and asserts ‘while teaching us to think, you have learned sensibility from us, and no matter what your English philosopher says, such schooling is as good as the other; if it is reason that makes man, it is sentiment that guides him’ (Rousseau 1997: 262). Whereas Schiller maintains a distinction between politics and aesthetics, for Rousseau the two modes intertwine. Political philosophy contains fantastic and lyrical elements, and literature ‘judges’ philosophy.

Why was Rousseau so central for Romantic writers? The journals, letters and literary texts of William Wordsworth, William Godwin and Mary Shelley contain few references to German Idealism (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of course, is the significant caveat), subtle allusions to Adam Smith, and the occasional oblique tribute to Thomas Hobbes. By contrast, Romanticism's dialogue with Rousseau is profuse and overwhelming. Rousseau is a crucial nervous centre for Romantic writers. Notably, he wasn't unique within the larger line of Enlightenment revisions of Aristotelian sociability, which all increasingly promoted a new individualism through a focus on private feeling. What is arguably different about Rousseau is that his writings can be plotted on a spectrum of discourses that range from Julie, a fiction, works of opera, theatre, autobiography and semi-autobiographical fragments, to hybrid texts like Emile, and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and also political theory, the best known of which being The Social Contract. An important clue to Rousseau's influence can be found in the relationship between these aspects of his output and in the conflicted outlook which they produce in conjunction.