La morale sensitive de Rousseau: Le livre jamais écrit by Marco Menin (review)

Stories of lost, incomplete, or unwritten works stir both scholarly and unscholarly imaginations. Stephen Greenblatt won a National Book Award for his account of the detective work leading to discovery by papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini, in 1417, of the long-lost manuscript of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Jane Austen fans find irresistible attempts at completing Lady Susan or Sanditon. Umberto Eco reached the best seller lists with a murder mystery centered on the missing second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Shakespeare scholars dream of finding a copy of The History of Cardenio. Among the items on Rousseau scholars’ dream list of lost texts is “Le morale sensitive,” the focus of Marco Menin’s thorough new book.

In little more than a decade after his “illumination” of October 1749, Rousseau published the two Discourses, an opera, the Letter to d’Alembert, Julie, Emile, The Social Contract, and other works, some of which were published only posthumously. In this period, he also planned significant works that he did not complete, for various reasons. These included a play, “The Death of Lucretia”; a long work, Political Institutions, from which The Social Contract was excerpted; and a sequel to Emile. Perhaps the most intriguing of Rousseau’s works from this period was “La Morale sensitive, ou le Matérialisme du sage.” Rousseau gives a tantalizing page-long description of this project in the Confessions, where he says that it was one of several works in progress when he left Paris for the countryside in 1756, near the height of his fame. He claims that it would be one of his most useful works, offered to mankind in order to show how to “put or maintain the soul in the condition most favorable to virtue” through attention to the circumstances in which one lives, the external environment.¹ In spite of Rousseau’s sense of the importance of this work, “distractions,” including writing Julie and Emile, prevented him from making progress on the project, and he abandoned it around 1759. Rousseau later referred to the work again, noting that a rough draft that was among his papers in 1762, when he was forced leave France following the issue of a warrant for his arrest. When his papers were sent to him a few months later, the draft was missing. Beyond these brief mentions, virtually no trace of a work that Rousseau regarded as extremely important can be found.

It is hardly surprising that scholars have speculated about what the finished book would have been and what the manuscript of the draft would tell us if it were suddenly found. Perhaps such a discovery would settle well-established scholarly disputes of such questions as Rousseau’s concept of natural goodness, or his understanding of the relation between freedom and necessity or between virtue and happiness. Marco Menin sets the stage for his own work by tracing scholarly treatment of “La Morale sensitive” from Étienne Gilson in 1932, through many of the most prominent Rousseau interpreters of the last century (including Burgelin, Starobinski, and others), to the most recent generation of scholars. Menin’s own treatment is the most thorough account to date of this book that was never written.

How does one go about reconstructing a lost or unwritten book? Menin makes use of three different types of information: first, Rousseau’s direct mentions of the “Morale sensitive” in the Confessions and on one of the playing cards on which he jotted notes for the Reveries; second, references to the “Morale sensitive” in works by other authors with whom Rousseau was certainly or probably familiar; and third, Rousseau’s published and unpublished writings that address issues that were to be considered in the “Morale sensitive.” Each of these approaches has its own hazards, but Menin mostly navigates through them skillfully. Most importantly, he never loses sight of the details of Rousseau’s one precise statement about the book. His explorations of earlier and contemporary philosophic and medical...