Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith: A Philosophical Encounter by Charles L. Griswold (review)

In this intricate, careful, and compelling book, Griswold stages an extended encounter between two towering figures of Enlightenment thought: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. While Rousseau and Smith were known to each other, they had nothing like the "encounter" that Rousseau and David Hume had, for example. Smith commented on Rousseau's views, particularly those found in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in his 1756 "Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review" as well as in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Rousseau shows up in Smith's correspondence with Hume, but beyond that there was little actual interaction between the two philosophers. However, Griswold's work is not to focus on the history of a relationship but to show what can be learned about the respective views of Rousseau and Smith by bringing those views into sustained dialogue.

More specifically, the main purpose of staging an encounter between Rousseau and Smith is to illuminate their respective views on what Griswold broadly calls "the question of the self." As Griswold elaborates, this question is itself a "complex web" composed of interlacing strands of thought on several topics: "what we are by nature (in particular whether sociability is natural or acquired), who we have become, whether we can know ourselves or each other, how best to articulate the human condition, what it would mean to be free, and whether there is anything that can be done to remedy our deeply imperfect, if not degraded condition" (xvii). Many of these questions are obvious ones to ask of Rousseau's writings, but one of the achievements of Griswold's book is to show just how aptly they are asked of Smith's writings as well. Building on his own excellent work on Smith in Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, as well as the scholarship that book has helped to foster, Griswold shows that Smith was just as keenly interested as Rousseau in questions of the self, self-knowledge, intersubjectivity, sociability, illusion, self-deception, and hypocrisy—despite taking often strikingly different positions on these questions and topics.

This review cannot do justice to the intricate conversation Griswold stages between these two figures on these topics. In each of the five chapters, Griswold focuses on a strand in the complex of questions about the self, moving between the writings of Rousseau and Smith, and then concluding the chapter with a dialectical exchange that often moves beyond the published writings. The goal is not to answer a question or resolve a dispute, and there is no declared winner in the exchange. The goal is rather to deepen, explore, and complicate the question at hand. This lack of resolution may be unsatisfying to some readers, but it is both truer to the questions Griswold is examining, and more germane to a broader goal of the book.

This broader goal, which begins to appear as the dialectic advances into further complexity, seems to be to provide a case study in how and why conflict and disagreement occur and continue. As Griswold reveals, Rousseau and Smith are not just in disagreement about substantive philosophical questions; they also disagree in large-scale metaphilosophical ways. Rousseau tends to think in "starkly binary terms"—seeing any opacity as utter impenetrability, and any artifice as total fabrication (254), whereas Smith tends to think in terms of spectra and degrees—looking for practical, commonsense, "good enough" solutions to real problems. But it is not clear how much more can be said to sharpen these metaphilosophical differences. Indeed, if Hume were asked to comment on these differences, he might say that Griswold has uncovered a temperamental and sentimental difference in the philosophies of Rousseau and Smith, where the differences in their respective views on "human life and … happiness" are best explained by the different sentiments of the sect to which each belongs (Hume, "The Epicurean," n. 1). What we might say, following Griswold's own comments...