Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment

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Foreword

The late Judith N. Shklar, doyenne of American Rousseau studies, liked usually to stress Rousseau’s “modernity,” viewing him as a proto-Freudian and pre-Proustian psychologist and group psychologist diagnosing early modern mental illnesses (such as alienation, resentment, and nostalgia). But even she, who saw Rousseau as an eloquent homme revolté railing against misery and inégalité, always insisted too that the “citizen of Geneva” was the “heir of Plato”—not in detailed imitation, but in sheer radical boldness—for if Plato had insisted on sublimated love (philo-sophia) for quasi-mathematical “eternal moral verities” and on the rule of the wise, “golden” few, Rousseau had been no less startlingly innovative in insisting that natural egoists with self-loving “particular wills” must be transformed by “denaturing” education (supplied by Moses or Lycurgus or Numa) into citizens with a civic “general will” like that of the “Spartan mother” in Émile (who asks not whether her sons have survived but whether the city still lives). For Shklar, then, Plato and Rousseau, though separated by whole universes, shared what one wag has called “polis envy.” In fact, she merely pointed to Rousseau’s Platonism, leaving it to others to prove what she only claimed. (Perhaps she thought that Hendel’s magisterial Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist [Oxford, 1934] had done enough to indicate a Platonic provenance for some of Rousseau’s concerns.)

But the point is that, since 1934, we have had no comprehensive, careful “reading” of Rousseau as Plato-shaped. It is, therefore, a matter of the first importance in Rousseau scholarship that David Williams has now brilliantly undertaken the first serious study of Rousseau’s Hellenophilia in seven decades. The wait has been long, but it is now justified by the results: Williams’s book will immediately become the “standard” text and will join the company of Shklar and Hendel and Starobinski and Cassirer as a work that responsible Rousseau students need to know. Moreover, because Rousseau is arguably the greatest and boldest political philosopher of modernity—rivaled only by Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel—a freshly illuminating study of him matters.

As Williams shows very effectively, it is “no accident” that Rousseau revered (among his immediate French intellectual ancestors) especially Malebranche and Fénelon—for the oratorian priest and the archbishop had done most to convey Plato into early modern France. Malebranche’s argument that we know only “ideas,” which are seen “in God,” that we cannot know the reality of a physical world or even of other minds, is obviously a form of hyper-Platonic “idealism” that would appeal to the Rousseau who thought that “materialism” (á la Holbach or Helvétius) was fatal to “morals” and to becoming “what one ought to be.” Hence, it is not surprising that in Rousseau’s early Le Persifleur the spiritual heroes are not just Locke but “Plato and Malebranche.” And Fénelon, even more hyper-Platonic, was of even greater significance to Rousseau: the Archbishop of Cambrai’s reverence for the Greco-Roman polis, for subordinating “self-love” to “disinterested” love of le bien général, led him to write the great didactic novel Telemachus, Son of Ulysses—the story of the denaturing transformation of Ulysses’s son from a thoughtless egoist into a responsible statesman (through the ministrations of Minerva), which Rousseau so loved and admired that he made it the only modern book recommended to Émile (after his own transformative education) when he reaches adulthood at the end of Rousseau’s greatest single work. (And Williams shows, too, that Rousseau’s admiration for Leibniz—in the Lettre à Voltaire sur la providence—is also grounded in modern Platonism, for Leibniz did for German Platonism what Malebranche and Fénelon did for the French version.)

But if Rousseau had only been “influenced” by Malebranche and (especially) Fénelon, making a minor contribution to the great “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” that dominated French thought from the seventeenth century to the death of Benjamin Constant, he would now be thought of as a secondary embroiderer of French-Platonic themes. In fact, however—as David Williams shows so fully and carefully—Rousseau’s social thought makes “Platonism” central from 1750, from the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, which made his reputation, in which Rousseau treats Socrates as a civic saint and martyr who willingly sacrificed himself (as a victim of judicial murder) for the general good of the Athenian polis. (Rousseau’s Greek heroes are usually Spartan, and at his hands the self-sacrificing Socrates is more Spartan than Athenian.) Moreover, if Rousseau began his career as political theorist with a Spartanized Socratic Platonism, he later crowned The Social Contract and Government of Poland with yet another encomium of “the general good of the body politic” that owes much to Plato’s notion in book 5 of the Republic that in a body politic, the particular good of any “member” (such as a finger) must lovingly subordinate itself to le bien général—a theme then taken over by St. Paul in I Corinthians 12 and by Pascal in the Pensées before finally reaching Rousseau himself. (Not only does Williams show how much sheer Platonism there is in Rousseau’s published works, but he also—through a first-ever contextual integration of Rousseau’s marginalia to Plato’s texts left behind in Britain when Rousseau gave up his Hume-provided refuge and returned to France—shows that Rousseau was constantly reading and interpreting Plato’s words throughout the 1760s, his most important decade.)

It would have been praiseworthy enough if David Williams had only revealed, often for the first time, the full weight of Platonism in Rousseau: but, meritoriously, Williams reminds us that no less a figure than Immanuel Kant called Rousseau “the Newton of the moral world” who had taught him to “honor mankind,” and that the same Kant had made crucial use of Rousseau’s central idea—“the general will one has as a citizen”—in many of his most important political and moral writings. But while some appreciators of the Rousseau-Kant rapport have pointed out Kant’s use of volonté générale in the 1797 Metaphysik der Sitten, no earlier commentator has shown remotely so fully how Kant used Rousseauean notions in his precritical works before 1781. Indeed, one of the glories of Williams’s new study is a first-ever (once again) full appreciation of Rousseau’s significance for Kant over a thirty-year period. Nothing to match this superb chapter has ever appeared in Kant-Studien, or in the Annales de la société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or even in Ernst Cassirer’s Kantianizing reading of Rousseau in Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe. For a Plato-Rousseau scholar to throw so much light on Kant on the two-hundredth anniversary of his death (1804) is an unlooked-for bonus that makes an already valuable book absolutely invaluable—the more so because Williams rightly resists the famous claim of Lewis White Beck that Kant’s practical philosophy is “deepened Rousseau.” To have got the Rousseau-Kant rapport exactly right is a welcome added attraction crowning an already splendid effort.

In short, David Williams’s study of Rousseau’s Platonism is the one we have been awaiting since the days of Hendel and Cassirer, and Williams can be rightly glad to find himself in that exalted company.

Patrick Riley

Oakeshott Professor of Political Science and Moral Philosophy

The University of Wisconsin–Madison

December 2004

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