Living Well is the Best Revenge: Rousseau’s Reveries and the (non) Problem of Forgiveness

This paper examines how, in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau presents his anger and the vengeance he claims to have achieved in his later years as a means of demonstrating his moral superiority over his alleged adversaries. It aims to describe the rhetorical mode that Rousseau utilized in this text so as to be able to claim to have been avenged and yet still be lauded as a paragon of virtue and, even, of philosophical calm. The text therefore represents a conceptual departure from the ideas regarding anger and acceptable manifestations thereof that Rousseau had expressed in his earlier works and that have recently been examined in detail by Rousseau scholars, most notably Patrick Coleman.