"Locke en particulier les a traitées exactement dans les mêmes principes que moi": revisiting the relationship between Locke and Rousseau

At the end of the sixth of the Lettres écrites de la montage, Rousseau announces, with reference to the Gontrat social, that 'Locke en particulier les a traitées exactement dans les mêmes principes que moi'. This is a claim that has puzzled many of his commentators, who believe that Locke has done no such thing. This article argues that while the major pillars of Rousseau's political philosophy are indeed largely Hobbesian, this claim of Rousseau's can be substantially vindicated by paying attention to the way in which his political thinking is most distinctively Lockean in precisely the two areas which concern the argument of the Lettres écrites de la montagae most: religious toleration (as Pierre-Maurice Masson once argued in 1916), and the relationship between legislative and executive power.