UZZLED CONTRADICTION, fierce hatred, as well as enthusiastic agreement have greeted Rousseau's work in the 200 years since it made history. This possibly unprecedented response has made history in its own right. It is well known that Rousseau's sharpest, bitterest opponent was none other than Voltaire himself, who after the appearance of the Second Discourse accused Rousseau of wanting to walk again on all fours, and after the appearance of Nouvelle Heloise went so far as to call him the most despicable madman he had ever known. In 1765 Voltaire repeated this judgment and added to it his apprehension that Rousseau might have succeeded in linking his name to that of Philosophy, thus, we are to assume, degrading and defiling it. Even if we regard Voltaire in his hatred for Rousseau as spokesman for the classically educated and traditional eighteenth century, the influence of his arguments and attacks well into our own century nonetheless shows that Rousseau has certainly remained offensive, as Egon Friedell's crisp pronouncement in his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit so clearly shows: "The basic motive of all his writing is to cause a sensation at all costs and to discredit by any means everything pure, rich, and wholesome. There is no doubt that in doing this he is not mentally normal, but rather is tossed about among three or four fixed ideas which he is able in the intoxication of his inspired dialectic to spin out into the most brilliant mirages."2 The vehemence and tenacity of these judgments do not so readily incline us nowadays to inquire into their concrete causes; we are more interested in discovering comprehensive causes in Rousseau as well as in his critics for this hatred, in understanding him as an epoch-making scandalizer. Our inquiry is supported by the almost unparalleled success of Rousseau's work since the eighteenth century. As early as 1953 Arnold Hauser formulated this success precisely: "The depth and breadth of Rousseau's influence are immeasurable. He belongs to that small group of great minds, like Marx and Freud, who within a generation change the lives of millions, many of whom have never even heard their names."3