Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Introduction by David Lay Williams, and: Rousseau, le chemin de ronde by Jean-François Perrin, and: Penser l’homme: treize études sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau ed. by Claude Habib and Pierre Manent (review)

The chief merit of David Lay Williams’s Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Introduction lies in the way it confronts the many tensions of a work notorious for the extent of disagreement (and outright hostility) generated over its purported meaning. While Williams’s reading offers a reliable guide to the conflicting interpretations, it also situates Du contrat social within the context of Rousseau’s thinking and its philosophical legacy. Due to its chapter-by-chapter commentaries, literary students will know exactly where to find elucidations on the state, sovereignty, and legislation, and Rousseau’s prescriptions for government, representation, and political institutions. A systematic overview of the general will, Rousseau’s challenging and most enduring contribution to political doctrine, is fittingly provided in a separate appendix. Yet, such is Rousseau’s voluntarism that this political master concept cannot be understood solely in political terms. Since there are several wills at work in Du contrat social, a wider metaphysical and moral vision is required to inform the substantive import of the general will, as Williams’s brief remarks on goodness indicate. The claim that ‘la volonté constante de tous […] est la volonté générale’ (Du contrat social, IV, 2), echoes Émile and points back to the intrinsic limitations that threaten to weaken or dissolve moral agency. Thus, if citizens must be ‘forced to be free’ (pp. 55–56), this is in order that they be not subject to their own arbitrary whims any more than to those of others. For future editions of this useful book, one hopes the index will signpost significant predecessors such as Machiavelli and Montesquieu much less selectively, and eliminate the intriguing but redundant entry for Charlie Parker (p. 307).

Connecting the image and idea of man’s original goodness with the recovery of both from the oblivion of modernity, Jean-François Perrin’s Rousseau, le chemin de ronde bears a perplexing title. Given its central concerns, Rousseau, théâtre de mémoire, an alternative intimated by the book’s back cover, might have proved more appropriate, since Rousseau is here recast as a Platonist for whom knowledge is essentially memory. Inside the book’s covers, chapters on ars memoriae and cura sui cover ground that will be familiar to specialists. Of greater originality is the analysis of Rousseau’s semantic and conceptual innovations, which also entail, consistently with the focus on memory, a recovery of lost or forgotten meaning. ‘Rousseau avait affaire à de l’impensé et de l’indicible’, writes Perrin (p. 63), who persuasively demonstrates how this writer and thinker of genius overcomes the limitations of eighteenth-century lexicon and thought in order to (re)discover the language of nature and the nature of man. Perrin begins by establishing Rousseau’s ‘souci prosodique’ (p. 31), at times evident down to the last syllable of the text, before turning to the transformation of the language of feeling and emotion epitomized by the concept of natural pity. Rousseau here contravenes the canons of le bon usage, redefining older specialized terms such as ‘identifier’ (from Scholastic logic) and ‘identification’ (mystical theology) to generate a network of meanings (‘intérêt’, ‘transport’, ‘force expansive’) not recognized by contemporary dictionaries. Elsewhere, the treatment of memory and childhood associations of feelings in the Confessions introduces new syntagmatic units, such as ‘dispositions secrètes’ and ‘affections secrètes’, resulting in a dynamic and recursive identity...