Jean-Jacques: The Early Life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1712-1754
Cranston, Maurice
...
...Harry G. Summers, Jr., SteveTesich, Charlie Kitire ll, George Nash, Frank Mankiewicz, Geroge Roche, Raymond Aron, Peter Brimelow, Richard Grenier, and many others...
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...It was also this year, 1743, in Venice that led him, he declares in the Confessions, to the momentous conclusion "that everything is radically connected with politics and that however one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature of its government made it...
...Hammett, Adin K. Woodward, Robert Lekachman, Leo Rosten, Arthur Laffer, Jerome F. Donovan, Cal...
...Three years of beatings, deprivations, and constant humiliations were all Rousseau could take, and just three months before his sixteenth birthday he fled Geneva, to commence the journeys and sojourns and visits which would culminate in JEAN-JACQUES: THE EARLY LIFE OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 1712-1754 Maurice Cranston / W. W. Norton/ $22.45 Robert Nisbet 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 his arrival in Paris and the beginning of his lustrous career as writer...
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...Is it any wonder, it will be exclaimed, that Rousseau should have spent so much of his life in preoccupation with equality and its necessary political conditions...
...To those who are fond of seeking developmental-psychological explanations for major ideas in an individual's life, Cranston's chapters, especially the early ones, will be a gold mine...
...Increasing personal difficulties with the ambassador led Rousseau to depart Venice in 1744 and return to Paris, though with a detour through Geneva, the first visit since his flight from the apprenticeship, and a reunion with his father, though with calculated avoidance of his father's second wife...
...de Warens...
...He had already composed the essence of his answer to the question, and Diderot forced himself to listen to Rousseau's almost ecstatic disquisition on how the major effects of the arts and sciences had been to corrupt man...
...Happily, Maurice Cranston' is indeed a bold mind...
...It seemed not to bother Rousseau that he was exclaiming before the man who had made it possible for him to earn money and renown by writing articles for the Encyclopedia in which the value of the arts and sciences was stressed...
...Alexander Ha ig, Tom Waif e, James Jackson Kilpatrick, George Gilder, Jack Paar, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Will, J. Peter Grace, Maj...
...This volume, the first in what will eventually be a two-volume study of Rousseau's entire life, begins with its subject's birth in Geneva in 1712 and .takes us down to publication of the celebrated Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and, in the same year, 1754, Rousseau's return to the Geneva he had so extravagantly praised in the foreword to the Discourse...
...Intellectual exchange was necessarily THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.O...
...To begin a fascinating odyssey into that wonderful world of words...
...This article-now offered as a reprint-is must reading for teachers, principals, administrators, or just parents concerned about the education their children are receiving...
...Paul Laxalt, Joseph A. Cal ifano, Garry Trudeau, David E. Davis, P.J...
...Non-Marxian preoccupation with such matters as the self, volition, consciousness, participatory power, and instant utopia in the form of monastic commune is hardly compatible with doctrines of a philosopher who flatly declared in Capital that "individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests...
...Where are those political eccentrici ties and sexual aberrations which Adam B. Ulam is Gurney Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University...
...The consecration to political Robert Nisbet is Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at Columbia University and Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...All Rousseaus in the Western mind are given biographical basis in this volume...
...But the worst lay still ahead...
...O'Rourke, William M.H...
...Almost immediately he made friends of such luminaries as Fontenelle, then nearing a hundred, Condillac, Mably, Diderot, and others who lighted up the Parisian and indeed the European scene...
...The result was forced move from the great house and its environs down to considerably meaner circumstances in the part of Geneva where the artisan class generally lived...
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...He is indeed, then, many things, all of them apposite to the prevailing trends of this final part of the twentieth century...
...It's for those who wish to add precision and eloquence to their speech and writings...
...Over and beyond his literary genius, Dostoyevsky's life story will always intrigue us by the political martyrdom of his youth, and then the gambling passion and intolerant nationalism of his later years...
...Hayakawa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger, Clayton Fritchey, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Midge Decter, James 0. Wilson, David Brinkley, Woody Allen, Joseph Coors, Irving Kristol, Henry Fairlie, Alan Abel son, Char lion Heston, Senator Jake Garn, Edwin J. FeuIner, Jr., Gertrude HImmelfarb, James Hitchcock, Gen...
...Such a combination of naturalism and mechanistic determinism is unlikely to captivate many Western intellectuals in our age of overriding subjectivism...
...As Cranston observes, she "had none of the brains or the culture of Mme...
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...ten-labeled "hopeless" by the professional social workers-how to read and write...
...The collectivism of the general will, the absoluteness of the social compact with its abnegation of all individual rights, and the pervasive concern with government as the shaper of morality are accompanied by a preoccupation with the individual, with individual consciousness, sentiment, self-awareness, and self-exaltation without parallel in his time...
...Anti there is finally the essential Rousseau of dedication to equality and to war on all forms of inequality...
...That Rousseau could have access to the glittering world of the philosophes, which they could not, only added to their devotion to him as egalitarian and potential revolutionist...
...Rousseau himself admits that he wasted his time when Who reads The American Spectator...
...In an incident involving an army captain, Isaac Rousseau fell afoul of the law and chose to flee Geneva and settle elsewhere, soon after remarrying and living off an inheritance from his late wife that had been intended for Jean-Jacques and his brother...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, IN 47402 "Please rush me reprints of "Marva Collin@ nd American Public Education...
...Rousseau tells us in the Confessions that, although she was employed at the most menial labor and was almost totally devoid of conventional charms, she came of a good family...
...A bold mind is required for any biographical study of Rousseau, given his extreme complexity...
...Theri3se was an illiterate laundry maid who lived in the same hotel that Rousseau had taken after his return to Paris...
...Cranston's entire chapter on Rousseau in Venice is a gem...
...From Cranston we gain a clear view of the progress in Rousseau's mind of a strain of thought that would make him unique in the Enlightenment: first, awareness of what Rousseau came passionately to believe to be the intrinsic baseness of culture in such a society as he lived in, a society filled with "hypocrisy," as Rousseau saw it...
...0 Payment enclosed City Cl Bill me later State Zip X3NX . 33 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 It's sophisticated...
...From this sprang the larger interest in comparative political institutions and the resolve someday to write a large, work on the subject...
...This was the period, of course, in which in addition to the articles he wrote on music and politics for the Encyclopedia, he was composing the aforementioned essay on the corrupting effects of the arts and sciences and then the masterful discourse on the origins of inequality, also in response to a prize-offer by the Academy of Dijon...
...Marva Collinsthe lady upsetting the NEA, the Chicago Tribune, and the assorted fat cats of our bloated educational bureaucracy...
...second, the foundation of this repugnant form of culture and society in the "fatal deflection" of man's moral and mental progress out of the state of nature from equality to inequality-the true source of all Just as his own contemporaries, so the modern biographer finds it difficult to feel entirely comfortable with Ivan Turgenev...
...He was born in patrician elegance in the most fashionable part of Geneva...
...Such a relationship could only be surprising to those familiar with Rousseau's sexual life up to this point, one in which conquests of the well born and fashionable were not infrequent...
...The dilemma is well expressed by Leonard Schapiro in his perceptive work Turgenev: His Life and Times (1978), when he states that new materials about the great writer still leave him something of an enigma, though they do not change his "familiar picture" as "weak, uncommitted politically and unhappy about it, critical of the radicals but an admirer of their courage and honesty, humane and unpompous...
...and there was also the ardor of his special kind of love for the beautiful and well-read Mme...
...Kenneth Adel man, Tom Stoppard, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patrick Buchanan, Albert Shanker, Lewis Lapham, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, Jude Wanniski, Jack Kemp, William Rusher, Richard M. Nixon, William E. Simon, Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Thomas J. Lescher, Norman Mailer, Clare Boot he Luce, Gerald R. Ford, Melvin Lasky, Nelson Polsby, Roger Milliken, Randolph Richardson, Thomas Sowell, Sidney Hook, Jim Fallaws, Edith Efron, Gen...
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...Whatever feelings were generated in Rousseau's mind by this development in life could only have been exacerbated when at age 13 he was put in contractual apprenticeship to an engraver who, from Rousseau's account in the Confessions, was of uncommonly loutish and tyrannical disposition...
...The whole experience of Venice and return to Paris "sowed the seed of indignation," Rousseau wrote in the Confessions, "in my soul against our stupid civil institutions, in which the real public interest and genuine justice are always sacrificed...
...He also lacks the prophetic quality Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn deems essen THESAURUS AT PLAY THE LAST WORD IN WORD GAMES TURGENEV LETTERS: VOLUMES 1 AND 2 Edited and translated by David Lowe Ardis Publishers / $25.00 each Adam B. Ulam THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Reprint Department P.O...
...In the beginning the tie between Diderot and Rousseau was very close, though they would later get on a collision course as the result of the maturer Rousseau's gradual estrangement from the critical rationalism of the Enlightenment and from the arts and sciences generally as he would set forth his sensational discourse on them...
...What lay ahead of course was more than a decade for the writing of such world-shaping books as The Social Contract, Emile, and the Nouvelle Ht loTse, not to mention those such as the Confessions which would be published after his death...
...To his wide-ranging and painstaking research the author has added the perspicacity and intuitive judgment of the natural biographer...
...Thus, in scarcely more than a year, the dominant themes of Rousseau's political philosophy were put iii place: the ideal political community on the one hand and on the other the abiding imperfections of the social order in which Rousseau lived...
...that brought in him a new awareness of the hypocrisies, duplicities, and exploitations inherent in not only government but society generally...
...It was shortly after his return to Paris that Rousseau first met, became attracted to, and finally formed a life-liaison with, TMrise...
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...community and its corporate legitimation that we find in The Social Contract and the Discourse on Political Economy springs from the same mind that gave us Emile and the Nouvelle HHloise, each a monument to subjectivism and egocentricity...
...In the April 1983 Issue of The American Spectator, Rita Kramer reported on Mrs...
...The uses of power, in great contexts and small, would preoccupy Rousseau for the rest of his life...
...the senior Rousseau's earnings as artisan were not up to it...
...Marx presents increasing difficulties to those in whom a concern for freedom and for the legitimacy of authority ranks high...
...Leonard Garment, Michael KInsley, Tom Winter, Nathan Gazer, John O'Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, Antonio Martino, Colin Welch, Robert Btei berg, Herb Stein, Roger Starr, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, Jeffrey Hart, David Packard, Robert Nisbet, James R. Schlesinger, Thomas Murphy, Suzanne Garment, Roger Rosenblatt, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bart Iey, David Stockman, Dixie Lee Ray, Richard Allen, Ernest Lefever, Sen...
...Even if there were not the iron relationship between MarxismLeninism and such totalitarian behemoths as the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Albania, among others, not to forget insurrectionary forces fighting to establish Marxist despotism, the name of Marx would suffer from other and almost equally profound faults...
...In 1749 Diderot was imprisoned for intellectual offenses, and Rousseau became his regular visitor in the prison at Vincennes, frequently walking there from his own home in Paris...
...B O O K R E V I E W S The possibility becomes ever stronger that Rousseau will replace, indeed is already replacing, Marx as the premier eminence among intellectuals in the nontotalitarian parts of the world...
...Against theirs, Turgenev's life might seem almost banal, devoid of those spiritual wrestlings and personal dramas to which the other two made the whole world their witness...
...This reprint Is especially timely In wake of President Reagan's renewed effort to Improve standards...
...and third, a prevision of the emancipatory and redemptive kind of political order he would describe a little later in his article on political economy in the Encyclopedia and then the historic Social Contract...
...A. C. Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, Elliott Abrams, Lewis Lehrman, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Shmuel Moyal, Hunting ton Cairns, Anne Armstrong, Norman Pod horetz, Jeff MacNelly, Doris Grumbach, Ernest van den Haag, Paul McCracken, Brock Yates, Ray Price, James Wechsler, James Glassman, John Roche, John Chamberlain, William Satire, Neal Kozodoy, Henry Salvatori, David Meiselman, Martin Peretz, Charles Horner, Edward Banfield, Victor Lasky, Vincent Allen, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rastow, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Hugh Kenner, Frank Shakespeare, William Proxmire, Patrick Cosgrave, Jean-Frangois Revel, Luigi Barzini, Tom Charles Huston, Clay La Force, John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans, Dana Andrews, Richard Whalen, Richard Lugar, Henry Regnery, Charles Peters, John Lukacs...
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...He was then 31 and more and more determined to find his true identity and mission in the world...
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...Marx, in one burst of admiration for Darwin's theory of natural selection, likened his own Capital to Darwin's Origin of the Species, declaring that the latter provided him "with a basis in natural science for class struggle in history...
...de Warens...
...She called him "petit" and he called her "maman," and that relationship lasted to its eventual ending though not, we are told, without a considerable amount of sexual perturbation on the part of the young Rousseau, for "maman" was comely indeed and only around ten years older than he...
...In a newspaper he bought to scan while walking the familiar route to the prison, he saw an advertisement placed by the Academy of Dijon in which announcement of a prize was made for the best essay addressed to the question: "Has the progress of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or purify morals...
...Now Rousseau was obliged to live with an uncle from his mother's side of the family, and from the beginning the uncle made it clear to Rousseau that while he was permitted to live with his relatives, he must understand that he was of baser birth and lower class...
...de Warens...
...Cranston writes: "In disappointment, Rousseau passed from nursing his own grievances to more general reflections on the injustice of established social system...
...0 proponents of this genre would have us believe constitute the main interest a modern reader has concerning the lives of famous men and women...
...Rousseau claims for Thdrese, on the other hand, that she had a sound store of common sense, which enabled her to give him good advice in difficult situations and sometimes to protect him from the dangers to which his own passionate and impulsive nature exposed him...
...When, as Cranston relates in the very final part of his book, Rousseau went back to Geneva in 1754, which he had apostrophized in the discourse on the origin of inequality, it was with the certain knowledge, albeit still in large part unconscious, that his identity had been established and his mission in the world clarified...
...His return to Paris was not accompanied by the same kind of exhilaration that had attended his first arrival in the city...
...During the decade that followed his return to Paris, Rousseau established himself thoroughly in the intellectual life of the city and also became, as Robert Darnton has recently highlighted in his valuable study of the intellectual underground in Paris, a veritable demigod in the estimations of the penniless and generally unscrupulous hacks who made up Paris's Grub Street...
...That work never came to being, but what did, as a direct result of his meditations on it, was The Social Contract among other works of political nature...
...Such elegance, however, was made possible for the young Rousseau solely by his mother's wealth and high-born status in Genevan society...
...The last is entirely credible, all things considered...
...If a writer as traditional in his approach as Mr...
...she was, indeed, in the opinion of most of those who knew her, moronic...
...The determinism, mechanism, and calculated indifference to the individual and to individual will in history which once thrilled Western intellectuals in quest of a secular god have less and less appeal in this final quarter of the twentieth century...
...Box 11246, Station H Nepean...
...Perhaps it was the year in Venice...
...ALSO: Ronald Reagan, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ben Wattenberg, Peregrine Worsthorne, S.1...
...C ranston's treatment of the early years seems to me exemplary, and I find him particularly good on the "sentimental education" -that was Rousseau's boon for the years with the remarkable Mme...
...Rousseau, though, is made to order for this age...
...On the clear evidence of this book, Cranston is engaged in writing a biographical study of Rousseau's life and works superior in all respects to any I have seen or know...
...Beyond that Cranston is a spectacularly tenacious and wide-ranging researcher...
...Rousseau relates in the Confessions that when he reached Vincennes to see Diderot he was "in a state of excitement bordering on delirium...
...He tells us that it was on one of these walks that he had an illumination comparable to Paul's on the way to Damascus...
...Rousseau's mother died two days after his birth from puerperal fever, and although Rousseau lived with his father and two aunts for five years in the mansion, standard of living began to decline...
...also a learned mind, not only on Rousseau but on Western thought generally...
...Through friends Rousseau shortly became engaged by the newly appointed French ambassador to Venice, to serve as secretary and attach...
...And how especially disappointing to find a great Russian writer so sensible and unwhimsical in his behavior...
...Annecy, Turin, Chambery, Les Charmettes, and Lyons all pass before our eyes as stops in Rousseau's travel from Geneva to the city of his intellectual dreams, Paris...
...Cranston's final chapters deal admirably with the often confused and confusing interrelations between the course of Rousseau's thought during this period and his personal relationship with others in Paris...
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...He tells us that the relatively intimate observation he was privileged to have of Venice kindled interest in comparing it more or less systematically with his native Geneva...
...George S. Patton, ill, Fred Ikle, Philip Crane...
...Rousseau's father was an artisan, sprung from that class, and Rousseau was never allowed to forget it...
...The foremost of the great triad, Tolstoy, attracted worldwide attention not only because of his imperishable masterpieces, but also (and probably in his, lifetime more so) because of his Promethean struggle against practically every established institution of his day...
...That he did precisely this during his year in Venice would appear to be the unanticipated consequence of immersion in the political affairs of the ambassador, a man Rousseau did not like...
...I I city I Zip L he tried to improve her mind...
...Maurice Cranston will in due time write of this Rousseau, and on the basis of this extraordinary, illuminating biography of the young Rousseau, we can take great pleasure in anticipating the second and final volume of the biography...
...He has worked in the archives and collections of Rousseauian material in half a dozen countries, and in order to get a fresh start with the all-important Confessions, has gone to not only the draft of this book preserved in Geneva but that contained in the Palais Bourbon, presented by Rousseau's wife after his death...
...In any event Th6risse would give Rousseau the special kind of sexual satisfactions he desired, would give him several children (all to be deposited in due time in an orphanage), and companionship at least of a sort for the rest of his life...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 meager, for she could barely read and couldn't write...
...Schapiro feels constrained, though ever so gently, to reprove his hero, then it is no wonder that the adherents of the sensationalist genre of biographical writings find Turgenev an unpromising subject...
...human vices...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
