It was part of Rousseau’s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions.”I feel too superior to hate.” “I love myself too much to hate anybody.” “Never have I known the hateful passions, never did jealousy, wickedness, vengeance enter my heart…anger occasionally but I an never crafty and never bear a grudge.”
In fact he frequently bore grudges and was crafty in pursuing them. Men noticed this. Rousseau was the first intellectual to proclaim himself, repeatedly, the friend of all mankind. But loving as he did humanity in general , he developed a strong propensity for quarreling with human beings in particular.
One of his victims, his former friend Dr Tronchin of Geneva, protested: “How is it possible that the friend of mankind is no longer the friend of Men, or scarcely so?”
…
Being an egoist, Rousseau tended to equate hostility to himself with hostility to truth and virtue as such. Hence nothing was too bad for his enemies…
from Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, 1988
Apropos, of course, of nothing!