A história filosófica contra Rousseau

The aim of the article is to show how philosophical history, as conceived in the Enlightenment, was used as a kind of weapon against the conjectural method as delineated by Rousseau in the second Discourse. A prime example of such a strategy is William Robertson’s History of America, in which the savage American is taken as a type for natural man that, as such, is part of a general theory of the development of society through stages. The theoretical and critical qualities of Robertson’s work did not escape Edmund Burke, its first and prominent reader.