«L’aiguillon de la nécessité». Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la normativité du ‘physique’

Although the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not usually taken into account in the historiographical reconstruction of the concept of necessity in the early modern period, a closer reading of his work reveals a particular attention to the question of the necessity, which becomes a key element in understanding Rousseau’s original conception of freedom. This article aims to show how the intellectual dream consisting in guaranteeing moral freedom through physical necessity profoundly influenced the evolution of Rousseau’s dialectic between necessity and freedom, from the « ghost writing » La Morale sensitive ou le Matérialisme du sage, until Émile et Sophie ou Les solitaires, true Romanesque application of the philosophical reflection on necessity.