Thread by @Ne_pas_couvrir

I omitted Rousseau here on purpose looking for a loose thread.
Fun fact, Rousseau’s role as a librarian-secretary in the 1740s placed him in direct contact with aristocratic libraries, which, by the mid-18th century, often included esoteric works. The Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684) was commonly found in well-stocked French libraries, and Pico della Mirandola’s works were widely accessible. Aristocratic libraries, likely including those of the Dupins, contained esoteric works due to the 18th-century fascination with occultism, fueled by cheap printing and Parisian dealers. Rousseau’s task of indexing such collections makes it highly likely he handled these texts in the 1740s and thus influenced Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762).

Another is that Rousseau, in the 1740s, was closely associated with the Dupin salon as secretary and tutor; that salon was a key Parisian intellectual hub. The exposure is also plausible here, considering prevalence of such ideas in 1740s Parisian intellectual circles.

At any rate, Hegel’s reference to volonte generale shows he read Rousseau closely, but his dialectic absolutely and clearly metaphysical, and draws a direct line to Böhme’s mystical, esoteric framework. At any rate, it's enough to link Hegel to Böhme here. The esoteric links are many. To wit, Hess himself has many more branches not discussed in the thread.

A draft Rousseau entry for the Esoteric Left so far, while I chase down threads:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), he traces humanity's fall from natural freedom to the moment "The first man, who after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, this is mine," inaugurating property and with it structural dependence and conflict. This act becomes a social rupture that, at a structural level, mirrors Luria's shevirat ha-kelim, an original wholeness shattering into contending fragments.

Rousseau presents property as the wellspring of inequality and a condition that anticipates the Hess and Marxian concept of alienation, itself a secular echo of Kabbalah's exile of divine sparks after shevirat ha-kelim. In the Social Contract (1762), the general will offers collective self-legislation able to re-knit citizens into civic unity, provided extremes of wealth are curbed.

Rousseau likely encountered Christian Kabbalistic texts (e.g., Kabbala Denudata, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin) while cataloging aristocratic libraries for the Dupin family (1745–1747) and engaging with their Parisian salon, a key intellectual hub where such ideas may have circulated. He may have concealed their influence, presenting their rupture-and-repair logic in secular Enlightenment terms.

Rousseau's narrative feeds the esoteric-left pattern of fracture and restoration, which Kant refines into moral autonomy, Fichte radicalizes into ethical striving, and Hegel integrates into Geist, drawing the cosmic dialectic from Böhme's Ungrund but grounding its political embodiment in Rousseau's volonté générale, a doctrine of popular sovereignty that channels the dialectic into the ethical State's institutional form.

Rousseau’s association with the Dupin family spans a range of years, but here’s a summary:
1743: Initial contact and possible informal work as a tutor or assistant.
1745–1747: Formal employment as a librarian-secretary, with significant access to the library and contributions to intellectual projects.
Up to 1751: Extended association, though his active secretarial role ended around 1747, with his departure around 1751.