A Tale of Two Rousseaus

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. For a succinct summary of the main difference in English and French receptions of Rousseau, read the preface to Jürgen Oelkers’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2014).

2. Prior to Edward Duffy, Irving Babbitt, Henri Roddier, and Jacques Voisine had written about Rousseau’s impact on British Romanticism, but much of Rousseau’s English inheritance remained and remains unwritten.

3. Percy Bysshe Shelley has received the largest share of attention. Monika Lee’s Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (1999) and Cian Duffy’s Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (2009) address the relationship of Shelley’s writing to Rousseauvian ideas and influences.

4. Rousseau describes the revelation thus: “I was going to see Diderot, at that time a prisoner in Vincennes; I had in my pocket a Mercury of France which I began to leaf through along the way. I fell across the question of the Academy of Dijon which gave rise to my first writing. If anything has ever resembled a sudden inspiration, it is the motion that was caused in me by that reading; suddenly I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of lively ideas presented themselves at the same time with a strength and a confusion that threw me into an inexpressible perturbation; I feel my head seized by a dizziness similar to drunkenness. A violent palpitation oppresses me, makes me sick to my stomach; not being able to breathe anymore while walking, I let myself fall under one of the trees of the avenue, and I pass a half-hour there in such an agitation that when I got up again I noticed the whole front of my coat soaked with tears without having felt that I shed them. Oh Sir, if I had ever been able to write a quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, how clearly I would have made all the contradictions of our social system seen, with what strength I would have exposed all the abuses of our institutions, with what simplicity I would have demonstrated that man is naturally good and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked. Everything that I was able to retain of these crowds of great truths which illuminated me under that tree in a quarter of an hour has been weakly scattered about in my three principal writings.” (“Second Letter to Malesherbes, Jan. 12, 1762,” Confessions and Correspondence 575).

5. As Stacy Schiff observes, “Rousseau stands squarely if unsystematically at the root of democracy, autobiography, Romanticism, child-centered education, even psychoanalysis” (n. pag.).

6. Democracy was not the only ideal, however. In some instances, as in the case of large populations, Rousseau favored monarchical government: “We have established by abstract reasoning that monarchy is suitable only for large states, and if we examine it in itself we shall find the same thing” (Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract 106) and “Monarchy is only suitable, therefore, to very prosperous nations” (112).

7. While Rousseau is justly depicted as a sexist commentator whose pronouncements about women tend toward the regressive and reactionary, his inadvertent empowerment of women through the character, Julie, who possesses rational intellect, virtue, wisdom, and divine agency undoubtedly contributed to the advancement of women’s equality, even while his overt statements opposed such equality.

8. Alfred Cobban reads Rousseau as a “reactionary utopist” (198); Judith Shklar acknowledges conservative elements—“Rousseau’s preference for peace, stability, and resignation is incompatible with any sort of social activism” (30)—yet she also writes that he was “neither a traditionalist nor a revolutionary of any sort” (30).

9. See Donald L. Maddox’s “Shelley’s Alastor and the Legacy of Rousseau.”