In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment—<I>society </I>as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice—was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new <I>society</I> as an evolving field of interdependence, <I>Abandoned to Ourselves</I> traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau's encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau's most famous trope, the “general Will.” As <I>Abandoned to Ourselves</I> weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory.