The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study (review)

370 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Social Thought o~ Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study. By David Cameron . (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Pp. vi + 242. $11.50) "Poor Burke is the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew." This "witty and rather malicious paradox" from Edward Gibbon's Autobiography opens D~vid Cameron's excellent study with the author noting that it could be applied equally well to Rousseau. Indeed, many students of the period think it applies to Rousseau with greater justice. Despite the fact that Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have been objects of much critical study in the last 200 years, both remain figures of some paradox. Whether it is one of Rousseau's enigmatic expressions we encounter, or an apparently neolithic Burkean opinion, we consider few modern political thinkers more arresting or exasperating. David Cameron's fresh scholarly work illuminates the social thought of the two, dispelling some of the paradox without destroying our interest. Skeptics of comparative studies ought to be mollified by the author's early methodological considerations . His thesis that failure to acknowledge the many significant similarities in the social thinking of Rousseau and Burke has distorted their actual views is confirmed with ample research. Yet, Cameron never loses sight of the genuine differences which are familiar to students of political philosophy. It is the fate of some heretics to exchange an initial, massive cloak of scandalous heterodoxy for a modest smock of acceptability, and it is to these fortunate heretics that Cameron belongs. His presentation of and assault upon the "critical orthodoxy" --the fashion of treating the eighteenth-century contemporaries as political opposites --are swift and effective. He shows that the established interpretation has some roots in Burke's own attitude toward Rousseau--a Rousseau he viewed through the events and rhetoric of the French Revolution--but springs as well from some recent Procrustean scholarship. Vaughan, Sabine, Greenleaf, Cobban and Osborn are cited as critics who earlier suggested the comparability of Rousseau and Burke (heretics relish the company of precursors!), but Cameron's heresy transcends these earlier relaxations of faith; his careful analysis deserves, if anything does, to become the new orthodoxy. He situates Rousseau and Burke outside what are loosely if usefully termed the rationalist and empiricist traditions, places both on a path toward idealism while conceding neither ventured as far as Kant or Hegel, and even minimizes their budding "idealism" in his conclusion. It seems he is more comfortable in finding their identities in what they were not, for he shows that each was concerned to dissociate his philosophy from that of the philosophes without thereby becoming anti-rationalist. Instead , they were alike in "attacking the apparently imperial ambitions of the rational faculty." Cameron argues that here, and in general, the customary critical antithesis has been nourished by exaggerating the concern of one thinker while ignoring a similar concern of the other, by confusing differences of emphasis for differences of substance, and by uncritically following Burke's flawed understanding of Rousseau. Cameron reaches his interpretation by analyzing the writings of Rousseau and Burke, then relating these to the thought of their contemporaries (against whom they reacted) and to the political events they witnessed. Both opposed natural-right doctrines but had difficulty disengaging from the idiom of that school. Burke took the rights and individuals entertained by that school to be pale abstractions, irrelevant to the civil rights and citizens of an actual society. Rousseau's rejection of the antithesis of state and citizen, and his notion of the General Will combining sovereign and subject, make it impossible to associate him with the natural-rights theorists. Burke held to the historical mutability of human nature, and his belief in a divine moral order makes him at most an adherent (not a theorist, as often claimed) of classical natural law. Rousseau's "natural man" is an animal whose mutable nature is changed by immersion in society. If there is a divine moral order for Rousseau, 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...