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476 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Emile is not a manual for modern parents ~. 235). Natural religion in Emile and civil religion in The Social Contract are lessons of political purpose (p. 236). A citizen is both sovereign and subject (p. 249). The lawgiver is entitled to deceive men so that they bear with docility the yoke of the public welfare (p. 252). Here Ellenburg criticizes Rousseau, who "attempted, without success, to deny the authoritative character of the lawgiver's task" (p. 252-53). When a citizen finds that his vote does not correspond to the general will, this proves that he has made a mistake. (Were there not, similarly, confessions of "mistakes" in the Moscow Trials of the 1930s?) No citizen may be denied the right to speak and vote. One may add that women, as noncitizens, enjoy no such rights, and Sophie's education will not be Emile's. Ellenburg calls the inequality of women "'a surprising blind spot of Rousseau's" (p. 306). Rousseau's political writings, in the opinion of this reviewer, lend themselves to different interpretations in that isolated passages or provisions contain something for everyone--anarchist , totalitarian, federalist, aristocrat, revolutionary, republican. Which is the real Rousseau ? The one who preferred the corv~e to taxes, or the one who advocated luxury taxes, a system of taxation compounded for the wealthy, with the poor tax-free? The author of the DIScourse on Inequality, who blamed private property as the source of society's ills, or the Rousseau for whom, five years later in his Discourse on Political Economy, property was "the most sacred of all the rights," "the foundation of civil society"? Is this inconsistency or paradox? The Discourse on Political Economy has so often, as in this book, been relatively slighted, despite its practical suggestions that have proved feasible, such as those related to proportionate taxation. Did not Rousseau's political philosophy benefit from his polarity, his realization that the tensions must be resolved between solitude and society (Polin), nature and culture (Crocker), the individual and the collectivity, anarchic freedom and the common good? Ellenburg admits that a "political philosopher as intricate, important, and occasionally exasperating as Rousseau must always occasion contrasting interpretations, if only because there are alternative approaches to his thought" (p. 29). The book includes (in its notes) a valuable analysis of the leading writings on Rousseau, an index of names and subjects, and an excellent bibliography, to which might he added Victor Goldschmidt's Anthropoiogie et politique: Les principes du syst~me de Rousseau (1974); the section on Rousseau in Cioranescu's Bibliographic de la litt~rature francaise, Kingsley Martin's French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century for its chapter on Rousseau and democracy, cited four times in the notes; and also G. D. H. Coles's The Social Contract and Discourses, his own translation with an introduction. Whether or not one agrees with Professor Ellenburg's stimulating interpretation, his thorough study constitutes, I think, "an original comprehensive work of political theory" (p. 31). Thanks to it, we gain new "respect for the complexities of perennial questions raised sharply by Rousseau" (p. 31). LEOlqORACOHEN ROSENFIELD University of Maryland Antonio Verri. Lord Monboddo: Dalla metafisica all'antropologia. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1975. Pp. 169. L. 3,800. Professor Verri's book must be recommended as a work of capital importance in the history of philosophy, not merely because it documents so well a neglected figure--which might be a doxographical undertaking leaving everything where it was-but because it places us simultaneously in the center of eighteenth-century controversies and those of the present day. There is no need to try to suggest that Monboddo was equal in stature to those great contemporaries of his, but it is a question of seeing the individual case as representative of the movement of ideas, and in particular of the passage "from metaphysics to anthropology" -the most peren- BOOK REVIEWS 477 nialand the most polyvalent of allevolutionary processes. Professor Verri'spredecessors in the fieldof Monboddo studiesshould not be underrated, but even the most recent of them, such as E. L. Cloyd or Lia Formigari, acquire a wider significancefrom Verri'sdramatic sense of the dialectic contrast between...

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