Volume 11, Number 10 · December 5, 1968
The Old New Man
By Peter Gay
The Political Philosophy of Rousseau
by Roger D. Masters
Princeton, 464 pp., $12.50
Rousseau and the Spirit of Revolt
by William H. Blanchard
Michigan, 300 pp., $8.50
La nouvelle Héloïse: Julie or the New Heloise
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated and abridged by Judith H. McDowell
Pennsylvania State, 421 pp., $8.95
The Social Contract
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated and introduced by Maurice Cranston
Penguin, 188 pp., $1.25
Rousseau is the most exasperating of thinkers: the man keeps breaking in. Obviously the question of how much and what kind of biographical information is relevant to interpreting a system of ideas is a general one: it must be asked about austere metaphysicians as much as about passionate prophets, about Spinoza as well as Nietzsche, Even Hegel was human. Philosophers live in a society, at a certain period; they embody, enlarge, or repudiate an intellectual tradition; they are private men with private aspirations and private tragedies—and all these somehow contribute to what is normally taught in the textbooks as their 'system.' All good history of ideas must in the end be social history.
Review, 2970 words
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