Volume 16, Number 5 · March 25, 1971
Make Your Own Rousseau
By Alan Ryan
The Politics of Authenticity
by Marshall Berman
Atheneum, 384 pp., $8.95
The Social Contract
by Robert Ardrey
Atheneum, 416 pp., $10.00
The invocation of historical figures in support—or derogation—of current political positions is a curious cultural trick. The dangers of anachronism are obvious, and what does a sentence gain in any case by beginning 'As Rousseau said…'? The question is an old one, but banal as it is, both Ardrey and Berman provoke it. Both are greatly preoccupied with Rousseau, though both are even more preoccupied with the present. Professor Berman's book belongs to the history of ideas, and it is explicitly about Montesquieu and Rousseau for almost all 300 pages. But Ardrey, too, owes Rousseau far more than his title; for him Rousseau is the Enemy; he represents everything Ardrey detests—sentimentality, egalitarianism, a blind and herbivore ignorance of evolution's brutal truths.
Review, 3529 words
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