Volume 37, Number 6 · April 12, 1990
Rousseau in the Revolution
By Jean Starobinski, Translated by David Bellos
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ESSAY
Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution
by Carol Blum
Cornell University Press, 302 pp., $11.95 (paper)
A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
edited by François Furet, edited by Mona Ozouf
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 1063 pp., $85.00
La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen
by Stéphane Rials
Hachette, Collection Pluriel, 770 pp., fr54
L'An I des droits de l'homme
by A de Baecque, by L.M. Vovelle, by W. Schmale
Presses du CNRS, 240 pp., fr85
Les Déclarations des droits de l'homme et du citoyen
by Christine Fauré
Payot, 387 pp., fr140
The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Volume II: The Political Culture of the Revolution
edited by Colin Lucas
Pergamon Press, 482 pp., $100.00
La Révolution des droits de l'homme
by Marcel Gauchet
Gallimard, Bibliothèque des Histoires, 341 pp., fr140
Rousseau was the great critic of his own society and he made his case against it brilliantly and provocatively. In place of the evil that he denounced he put forward his vision of a just society and a happier world with an eloquence admired even by his opponents. He conquered hearts that were waiting to be won; he ravished souls that were ready to worship new gods. He put his case in such powerful language as to make it seductive to a wider public, giving it a prestige unequaled in modern times. Of all other social critics, only two come to mind who can even be compared to Rousseau, and they too were persuasively eloquent: Tolstoy (himself a self-declared Rousseauist) and Nietzsche.
Review, 4990 words
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