Last week (June 28th) marked the 300th birthday of the brilliant, maddening political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, giving rise to speculation about his thoughts on the contemporary scene, his mixed legacy, and continuing charms. Terry Eagleton asks what Rousseau would make of our “selfish age”:
What would this giant of Geneva have thought of Europe 300 years on from his birth? He would no doubt have been appalled by the drastic shrinking of the public sphere. His greatest work, The Social Contract, speaks up for the rights of the citizenry in the teeth of private interests. He would also be struck by the way the democracy he cherished so dearly is under siege from corporate power and a manipulative media. Society, he taught, was a matter of common bonds, not just a commercial transaction. In true republican fashion, it was a place where men and women could flourish as ends in themselves, not as a set of devices for promoting their selfish interests.
Laurie Fendrich explains Rousseau’s appeal – he, the misogynist critic of the arts – to her, a woman who loved painting:
By what perverse twist of fate would this painter read and reread Rousseau’s famous Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater (1758), which not only castigates the arts as destabilizers of people’s innate goodness (by encouraging vanity, competition, needless sophistication, and by introducing troubling ideas to people who don’t need them), but includes a lengthy foray into why women are equipped by nature—which culture can never override—to be the more modest of the sexes? Why would someone who went to college during the high point of the Sexual Revolution take to a philosopher who explains romantic love as an invention of women to keep straying males by their sides after the hot sex is over and the babies come along?
And at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram provides a solid overview of Rousseau’s achievement for the uninitiated.
The Dish 