Rousseau's three revolutions

Rousseau's relation to the French Revolution - and in particular his status as the Revolution's precursor or predictor or progenitor - has been often examined. Yet almost no sustained attention has been given to what is arguably Rousseau's most significant and explicit statement on revolution and its role in civilization's development. This paper calls attention to this statement and argues for its key significance on three fronts: first, for how it organizes Rousseau's conjectural history of civilization in the secondDiscourse; second, for the insight it offers into the processes of Rousseau's pre-Hegelian philosophy of history; and third, for the normative political implications of its standard for measuring the relative progress of inequality in a given society at a given time.