Eighteenth-Century Studies

Dennis C. Rasmussen
Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (review)
Eighteenth-Century Studies - Volume 42, Number 3, Spring 2009, pp. 473-475

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Project MUSE - Eighteenth-Century Studies - Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (review) Project MUSE Journals Eighteenth-Century Studies Volume 42, Number 3, Spring 2009 Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (review) Eighteenth-Century Studies Volume 42, Number 3, Spring 2009 E-ISSN: 1086-315X Print ISSN: 0013-2586 DOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0061 Reviewed by Dennis C. RasmussenUniversity of Houston David Lay Williams, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Pp. xxxiii, 306. $25.00. David Lay Williams has provided us with a carefully researched and capably argued study of the influence of Platonism on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- the most thorough and systematic study to date. Yet this book is much more than just a study of Rousseau or his relationship to Plato and Platonism: of the eight chapters, the first two are devoted to the context that was set for Rousseau's intellectual development by Hobbes, Locke, and a variety of modern Platonists and materialists, and the last two trace Rousseau's influence on the thought of Kant, Marx, and Foucault. This broad approach allows Williams to demonstrate both Rousseau's originality and the way in which he drew on previous thinkers and traditions. His main thesis is that "Platonism" pervades Rousseau's thought -- indeed, that Rousseau is "among the greatest and most consistent Platonists of the modern era" (94)--and that...