7. MISUNDERSTANDING ROUSSEAU: THE ENIGMAS OF ROUSSEAU: JUDGE OF JEAN-JACQUES Christopher Kelly Given Rousseau’s fame both during his life and now, one would think that the last work that he completed would be an object of great attention. Indeed, both the Confessions and the Reveries were eagerly read when they appeared in the decade after his death even though both are incomplete. These two works were quickly recognized as masterpieces of French literature even in their unfinished state. His Considerations on the Government of Poland (completed in 1772) was also fairly quickly published, both in his collected writings and a separate edition. There were, however, two significant works that were published along with these that did not attract the same attention. These works con- tinued to appear in editions of Rousseau’s collected writings but were not published in separate editions until well into the twen- tieth century. There is no evidence that many people read them in the first hundred and fifty years they were available. The first of these is the Essay on the Origin of Languages. After a long pe- riod of neglect by all but a few scholars, this work was brought to attention by Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie in 1967. Since then, it has been studied just about as much as any of Rous- seau’s works. The other work is Rousseau: Judge of Jean-Jacques: