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This thesis will read Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a political realist. There are several aspects to this political realism that intersect each other in Rousseau's writings. Political scientists most commonly understand realism as a principle that governs the treacherous and mutually suspicious relationships between states. Thanks to some fine works by Kenneth Waltz, Stanley Hoffman, and others,1 we now accept that Rousseau indeed has something meaningful to say on international politics. Realism is also frequently associated with Thomas Hobbes and a certain notion of sovereignty that is absolutist and overridingly concerned with (collective and individual) self-interest and self-preservation that justifies and legitimates the political state.2 Rousseau's own Hobbism is well noted not only for the use of the fiction of state of nature but for the domestic analogy of man and state, which according to some authors may have been an inspiration for the political ideas found in the Social Contract. 3 Above all, I argue that Rousseau's realism lies in a certain understanding of the political that, as with Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt, asserts its reality and autonomy as well as skepticism of metaphysical, moral, cultural, religious norms that claim their conceptual anteriority.4 Rousseau's political realism encompasses all these elements: a privileged ontic status of the political, an absolutist notion of sovereign authority, and a quintessentially pluralistic international politics. They are welded together in original ways in Rousseau

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