Rousseau : Otium et Paresse

Abstract

This article develops how Rousseau, moving away from the classical Roman notion of otium (with its privileges and ostentation), proposes an alternative way of conceiving and cultivating leisure. In the second Discourse, Rousseau starts with recalling an anthropological narrative of the natural man as being fundamentally idle. But it is in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire that he achieves his radical personal project of leisure as laziness, in the forms of far niente, reverie and, later, botany. These solitary (in)activities, well established, can then be opened to a shared experience of friendship, a small circle of lovers of plants.