Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Interpretation from Within (review)

474 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the thrust of Vico's thought nor as containing the fundamental difference between Vico and Descartes's positions. Vico's objections to Cartesianism, as he states them in his Autobiography , are that Descartes's philosophy excludes the possibility of a Christian moral philosophy : "N6 la sua metafisica frutt6 punto alcuna morale comoda alia cristiana religione." Even Father Malebranche, Vico says, was unable to extract such from Descartes's position. Descartes in his Discours, Vico says, disapproves the philosophical importance of the study of language, orators, historians, and poets: "in cui egli disappruova gli studi delle lingue, degli oratori, degli storici e de'poeti.'" Vico's opposition to Descartes is with the basic spirit of Descartes's position, not with whether the Cartesian method provides an adequate conception of the unity of scientific knowledge. Descartes's conception of knowledge fails to provide a philosophy of the human world. Vico is concerned with how man is to understand himself. On this question the Cartesian view gives no guidance. Descartes's method is designed to replace the need for rhetorical and poetic knowing, but it is not true that Vico wished simply to reverse this and replace the method of scientific rationality with a rhetorical-poetic method. The "barbarism of reflection" occurs when men bend all their efforts in the direction of this logical-objectiveknowing. Then man loses touch with his own nature. He loses touch with the kind of knowledge present for him in his own senses, imagination (fantasia), memory (memoria), and inventiveness (ingegno). s These powers are, in fact, presupposed by the Cartesian method itself, since it is a product of the human world. The rational conception of the object presupposes a society, a human place or topos, a sensus communis from which the logical concept is formed and in terms of which it is employed. Descartes himself seems aware of this in an odd sense, when he remarks in the Discours that his work can be approached as a histoire or fable, and in his letter to the translator of the Principles, where he says that his work should be read through first as a roman. An understanding of how such forms of thought give us access to ourselves or to the powers of logical and conceptual thought is not to be found in Descartes. That of which Descartes's method disapproves, and of which it can give no account, is just the point at which Vico begins. Vico understands that knowledge of the human is the primary task of philosophy and that such self-knowledge can never be reached by the methodology of logical concepts. DONALD PHILLIPVERENE Pennsylvania State University Stephen Ellenburg. Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Interpretation from Within. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976. Pp. 335. Rousseau's emotional, moral and intellectual formulation of individual liberty, egalitarianism , and popular sovereignty has excited prominent figures since the days of Robespierre and Kant. Today more is being written about him than ever before. Politics and passion, morals and artistry, are inextricably entwined in the vibrant, human message left us by the Citoyen de Gendve. His words ring out still: Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. The first man who fences in his own plot of ground and says "This is mine" is the cause of civil society, with its countless ills. The estate of the wealthy steals the bread of my children. The state, set aflame by civil wars, is reborn from its ashes. "More nonsense has been written about Rousseau," Professor Ellenburg tells us, "than about any other major political theorist" (p. 28). In this book, eschewing the psychologic approach, that of intellectual sources, or of historical effects, the author prefers "an inter- " See Autobiografia, pt. 1. 5See Scienza nuova, par. 819. BOOK REVIEWS 475 pretation from within." Rousseau is for him a political philosopher of "obstinate intensity and extraordinary originality" (p. 24) for whom moral commitment and political integrity are indistinguishable, individual liberty and public action inseparable. Ellenburg confesses to being mesmerized by the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and to sharing Rousseau's view that true citizenship and the modern state are incompatible. Paradoxes of The...