Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

Jean le Rond d’Alembert appears in Rousseau’s discussion of citizenship as an unusually clear-sighted writer: his article on Geneva distinguishes the different orders of people living in the town and identifies which of them compose the Republic. Rousseau also directs readers to his Letter to M. d’Alembert for fuller treatment of a subject he only touches on in the present work.

The distinction between citizen and townsman

Rousseau argues that familiar usage confuses a town with a city and a townsman with a citizen. Houses make a town, he maintains, but citizens make a city; citizenship is therefore not merely a name for everyone who lives within a town’s boundaries. He notes that Jean Bodin had made the mistake of treating citizens and townsmen as one class.

Against that confusion, Rousseau singles out Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s article on Geneva. It clearly distinguishes four orders of people living in the town—or five if foreigners are counted—and observes that only two compose the Republic. The distinction supports Rousseau’s larger insistence that residence and political membership are not interchangeable.

A rare example in Rousseau’s account

Rousseau says that, to his knowledge, no other French writer has understood the real meaning of the word citizen. He contrasts d’Alembert’s careful account with the French habit of familiarly adopting the title: in Rousseau’s judgment, it is often used to express a virtue rather than to identify a political right. D’Alembert’s article matters in this argument not as a record of his own political career, but as a precise account of who belongs to Geneva’s Republic.

A reference to another work

Elsewhere, Rousseau calls attention to a subject he has treated at greater length in his Letter to M. d’Alembert. The reference marks the limited scope of the discussion at hand: rather than developing the topic there, he points readers to the separate work. Together, the two mentions present d’Alembert both as an author whose description of Geneva clarifies political membership and as the named addressee of a work in which Rousseau pursued another subject more fully.