Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) occupies a prominent place in the Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Rawls there often refers to his own thought and to the ways in which it was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau. Indeed, the influence of Rousseau on Rawls is extensive and yet for the most part unappreciated by historians of political thought. There are two important and related ways in which Rawls’s theory can be thought of as Rousseauian: (1) like Rousseau, Rawls believes that persons have a natural psychological need for recognition and for self-respect, that the denial of the former negates the possibility of the latter, and that these psychological needs are most effectively satisfied by egalitarian political institutions. And (2) like Rousseau, Rawls thinks that even the best-designed set of institutions must be supplemented by civic virtue; not the immersive patriotic virtue of the ancients, of course, but a modern, pluralism-compatible kind of virtue, the kind of virtue that conscientiously privileges the common good of the political community over the inevitable and ineradicable factional interests present within it.