This new study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes his articles on music for the Encyclopedie as its starting point and suggests that, although neglected by most writers on Rousseau, they provide a unique insight into his early thinking on aesthetics, affectivity and desire. Before denouncing the arts in the First Discourse or offering an ideal of self-sufficient solitude in the Second Discourse, Rousseau celebrates the voice as the vehicle for the most intense and passionate moments of human experience.

In the light of these Encyclopedie articles, Michael O'Dea discusses not only the later musical writings, culminating in the Essai sur l'origine des langues, but also the Lettre a d'Alembert, La Nouvelle Heloise, and the Confessions, Dialogues and Reveries. He shows that Rousseau never entirely loses sight of his early aesthetic ideal even when rejecting desire and the arts and arguing that women must be confined to the domestic sphere.

Rousseau's personal retreat into fantasy is in part a means of reconciling these conflicting tendencies.