This article discusses Francesco Toto’s book, L’origine e la storia, highlighting its positive and problematic aspects. It first summarises the structure and content of the theses set out in it, and then, through a brief foray into Rousseau's texts, attempts to discuss the author's central thesis, according to which in Rousseau there is a ‘homogeneity’ between origin and history. The thesis presented in this article tends to defend the duplicity of the relationship established by Rousseau between nature and history. This duplicity manifests itself problematically in the idea of history as a negation of origin and in the idea that history is a genetic development from nature itself.
