Instinct and Intimacy: Political Philosophy and Autobiography in Rousseau by Margaret Ogrodnick (review)

humanities 383 how these notions related to the transformed millennialism which shaped the reform crusades and the civil religion of the early republic. As the Irish became more American, Wilson shows, they began to share some of the unattractive attitudes of many Americans. They were generally active champions of the democratic cause, but many also began to exhibit an indifference to the economically marginalized, women, and non-whites. Wilson sees the racism as nationalism: the preservation of the democratic republican experiment in America taking precedence over other moral demands. But it is also the case that Irish Americans, while not wanting to give up their self-perceived status as history's greatest victims, now wanted to be seen as `white' and not too different from other free Americans. United Irishmen, United States concludes by looking at the place of the United Irishmen in America in the shaping of Irish nationalism. From very early in the nineteenth century they promoted migration, organized societies devoted to Irish patriotism, arranged nationalist demonstrations and parades, and defended Catholic immigrants against attacks from Orangemen and Loyalists in America. We have here the beginnings of a story which continued almost into the present day: how Irish nationalist struggles were played out in America and how Irish American support for Irish nationalism was increasingly out of touch with the actual situation in Ireland. (ARTHUR SHEPS) Margaret Ogrodnick. Instinct and Intimacy: Political Philosophy and Autobiography in Rousseau University of Toronto Press. x, 238. $50.00 This book employs a psychoanalytic reading of Rousseau's autobiographical writings in order to shed light on his political thought. Margaret Ogrodnick rejects interpretations that seek to understand Rousseau as he understood himself. Instead, she adopts the supposition that `he may not have been aware of the psychoanalytical sources and implications of what he wrote.' Two features of Rousseau's thought seem to invite this approach. First, all interpreters must confront his notorious paradoxes and apparent inconsistencies. Second, Rousseau expresses universal issues in personal terms and invests personal problems with general significance. It is tempting to use the second feature to resolve the problems posed by the first by appealing to Rousseau's peculiar personality as the source of contradictions in his writings. Interpretations that reduce Rousseau's thought to his psychology are common, but it should be stressed that Ogrodnick shuns simple psychological reductionism. Rather, her claim is that a psychoanalytic reading gives access to the genuinely important issues with which Rousseau 384 letters in canada 1999 wrestles. This claim is rooted in the indisputable fact that Rousseau's autobiographical writings stand at the origin of the modern view of a self constituted by its unique individuality and inner life. Hence, Ogrodnick's interpretation must be judged in relation to alternatives which also focus on philosophic and political issues. These interpretations can be classified in terms of their accounts of the relative status of nature and morality. Rousseau regularly praises natural independence , contrasting it with the dependence of social life. He also praises civic virtue, contrasting it with the vices of corrupt sophisticates. Clearly he regards both natural independence and civic virtue as superior to the society he observes, but how do these two things stand in relation to each other? One pair of approaches argues that he never resolves the tension between the two, either because he was not a good enough thinker to do so or because he was a great thinker who exposes an unresolvable dilemma of human existence. Another pair argues that he resolves the tension in favour of one or the other of the alternatives, towards a proto-Kantian preference for the moral or an insistence on the claims of the natural life. Unlike these, Ogrodnick insists on the potential harmony between our deepest natural instincts and a newly understood basis of moral life. In her presentation our deepest natural instincts find their fulfilment in the intimacy of a private life shared with friends and lovers. A sound politics entails transferring or extending this intimacy of sharing, affection, and compassion to public life. She distinguishes this politics of intimacy from the endorsement of public as opposed to private life by Arendt, the failure of contemporary liberals to...