Thomas Reid's Inquiry: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case For Realism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 371 l'homme sauvage knows as little of it or of natural rights as any other beast. Rousseau and Burke are further distinguished from the "political empiricists" (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Condillac), since neither could accept the Lockean psychology of a sensing and reflecting tabula rasa, the scientific optimism of progress in politics, or the utilitarian view of the state as mere human contrivance for satisfying easily known human needs. For both, the state had the lofty function of providing for moral improvement. On specific concepts, Cameron shows that the independence and natural liberty of Rousseau's l'homme sauvage is not unlike the absolute, abstract liberty Burke relegated to "theory," and Burke's belief that moral liberty requires civil order and control of the passions mirrors Rousseau's that good civil institutions free one from subjection to another's will and our own lower nature. The case is made similarly for comparing Burke's "rational freedom" with the prescription that some may be "forced to be free," except that Rousseau's prescription involves external coercion. Burke's love of tradition, customs, the wisdom of the community, and slow and small changes is matched by Rousseau's endorsement of patriotism and public spirit, his reverence for ancient lawgivers, his counsel of reforms for Corsica and Poland. For Rousseau, of course, political obligation was a major philosophical problem. His selection of le contrat social to explain the origin and to defend the legitimacy of government, as well as his insistence upon non-representable sovereignty, are not followed by Burke. As Cameron demonstrates, Burke rejected the social contract approach as well as prescriptive and divine right of kings theories of legitimacy. It seems fair to say that legitimate government was for him not a philosophical but a practical problem. Cameron suggestively likens Burke's image of government to a language: an ongoing fluid mixture of natural and artificial (conventional) elements. But if one accepts Cameron's analysis of Rousseau as moving away from the social contract approach to an emphasis on the General Will--an institutionalized process of expressing the public interest--Rousseau is once again brought nearer to Burke. Cameron's work does not exhaust the possibilities for comparison. Rousseau and Burke both had reservations about democracy: for Rousseau it was too perfect for human beings; for Burke nothing was more shameless. Similarly, each appears to have favored elective aristocracy as the best form of government. Cameron concludes that while their personal and professional lives, the political climates in which they wrote, and their writing styles themselves certainly differed, Rousseau and Burke shared dissatisfactions, with their age, recognized common problems , and often made similar intellectual efforts to solve those. If Cameron's rewarding study will not suffice to dissuade us from approaching Rousseau and Burke by way of the French Revolution, it may at least prevent us from self-confidently locating these two at opposite ends of the spectrum of political thought. JOHN P. BURKE University of Washington Thomas Reid's Inquiry: The Geometry o[ Visibles and the Case Jor Realism. By Norman Daniels. Forewordby Hilary Putnam. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1974. Pp xix q- 147. $14.95) This is the first recent book to appear on Thomas Reid, the eighteenth-century founder of "common sense" philosophy,. It is a welcome addition tothe modest but encouraging revival of interest in Reid over the last few years which has also included republication of his major works.1 Daniels' study is readable and convincing. In addi1 Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Baruch Brody (Cam- 372 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tion to putting Reid's philosophy in an interesting historical perspective, the book has a useful account of Reid's attack on Berkeley's theory of concepts and of Reid's own alternative to Berkeley's empirical idealism. Although the book begins by addressing itself to what might seem to be a topic of limited interest (Reid's discovering of a non-Euclidean Geometry) there is much here of interest to anyone who is concerned with eighteenth-century empiricism and metaphysics generally. Daniels begins by...