The Noble Savage, by Maurice Cranston
Tiittleton, James W.
was worldwide overcapacity. This might take the form of severance payments, relocation assistance, extra training grants, extra unemployment insurance, regional economic aid, and funds for retooling...
...This life is so well researched, richly detailed, and illuminating that the wait will be well worth it...
...Rousseau of course insulted her for undertaking to put him into her debt...
...One of those was Sophie, the comtesse d'Houdetot, with whom he promptly fell in love and would have seduced, no doubt, had she not been the lovesick mistress of Jean-Francois St-Lambert...
...Global subsidies and central planning conducted with all the rationality and cool disregard of political pressure we see in the European Community —this is the sort of neoliberalism that makes Taft conservatism look futuristic in comparison...
...Funds for retooling or upgrading machinery...
...The climax of this volume occurs with the publication of Emile, in which Rousseau, once again a Protestant, had included the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Priest," an essay repudiating revelation...
...There was equal love on both sides, even if it was not reciprocal...
...In a series of ghostwritten "autobiographies," he added and subtracted from reality at will...
...The first, The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, covered the years 1712-54, during which the engraver's apprentice grew up in Geneva as a Protestant and ran away at sixteen to become a wandering footman, an interpreter, a tutor, the kept lover of several women, a Catholic convert, and finally the common-law husband of an illiterate domestic, Th6rese Levasseur...
...But nobody can complain that Reich's positions on them contradict any of his other premises...
...The great Ferrari road cars (and more than one expert will question the adjective) were no more than an outgrowth of Ferrari's infatuation with what writer Robert Daley called "the cruel sport...
...Tersely and accurately, Cranston summarizes Rousseau's political ideas and attempts to rescue him from the most common accusation against him—that he provides the rationale for revolutions against the state and endorses totalitarianism (in subordinating the citizen to the "general will...
...32.50 James W. Tuttleton 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 whole common force, the person of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and still remain as free as before...
...As one observer put it, his pride was "so adroit" that it knew "how to disguise itself under the name of elevated feelings...
...And so, perhaps, the mandarins won't be working for the government of the United States, but for some supranational body...
...We were both drunk with love, she for her lover, I for her...
...Enzo Ferrari, called it Commendatore or it Cavaliere by his admirers and sycophants, died at the age of 90 in 1988, but not before making his the best-known name in the world of cars, with the possible exception of Ford—a company that thought so much of Ferrari's operation that it once tried unsuccessfully to buy it...
...Thus, as Cranston shrewdly observes, it was easier for Rousseau to be "the friend of humanity" than the friend of individual men and women...
...How can a model lineup that ranges in price from around $85,000 (a simple Mondial t) to as much as $600,000 (the staggeringly fast F-40) have such mass appeal...
...Rousseau's withdrawal to a life of ascetic simplicity makes for a biography without much compelling dramatic action, but Cranston compensates with a generous presentation of fact and quotation that illuminates Rousseau's inner life and his relations with the illustrious of Paris, whom he had ostensibly spurned...
...Mandarins in the central government will supervise and scrutinize companies, selecting those to be rewarded because they add enough value and those to be eased into death because they don't...
...It is at this point that Professor Cranston's superb second volume picks up...
...As it was, he was reduced to a platonic affair which he idealizes in the Confessions: I am wrong to speak of an unrequited love—mine was in a way returned...
...our sighs, our sweet tears mingled . . . yet even at the height of our dangerous intoxication, she never forgot herself for a moment...
...Or maybe "subsidies would be pooled and parceled out to where they could do the most good, as the European Community has begun to do regionally...
...de Luxembourg, a bewitching woman with the reputation of a grande horizontale, he was her slave...
...Rousseau would go on to England, where he wrote the Confessions, and ultimately return to France in 1770...
...Or yet again, "subsidies might come from a common fund established jointly by all nations...
...After all, Ferrari was the most famous man in all of motordom...
...de Pompadour, and announced that he would henceforth support himself as a humble music copyist...
...Emile assumed that, since the mind of a child is a Lockean tabula rasa, the innocent should be given an education in the senses, free from the corruptions of society...
...But most of all it's a grim warning of where the intellectual in politics can end up when he takes his ideology into the library with him...
...Reich would finance his economic nationalism with more taxes upon higher incomes, and he would prevent businesses from eluding the cost of nationalism by curbing immigration, which, he fears, puts pressures on the wages of the least skilled...
...Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity are the slogans of Rousseau's ideal state, which revolution is permitted to create...
...with Diderot the rupture involved the arid rationalism of the Encyclopedie...
...Marriage, Rousseau felt, is to be postponed until the youth has learned the true power relation between men and women: women are predominant in society because, concealing their voracious sexual appetites through modesty and reserve, they civilize young men into learning the arts that please them...
...And Lord Acton, in his Lectures on the French Revolution, remarked that Rousseau gave "the first signal of universal subversion...
...From the moment he became involved with the Alfa Romeo racing effort in the 1920s, he livedfor the day when a team of cars bearing his name would dominate international Formula One racing...
...If, as Cranston points out, this claim sounds paradoxical, Rousseau argues that the citizen surrenders his rights and possessions to the volonti angrale, or "general will," which is said to aim at the impartial good...
...Officials at the Ferrari factory in the town of Maranello, a suburb of Modena in Italy's Emilia-Romagna, gave no help when Yates sought access to records...
...She bore him five children—all of whom he consigned in turn to a foundling hospital...
...The answer is to be found in the determination of Enzo Ferrari himself . . . but it was not a determination to build great automobiles for customers...
...The Ferrari team owns the longest and most distinguished record in Grand Prix racing history...
...With Voltaire he quarreled over Genevan politics...
...d'Epinay, who generously offered Rousseau the Hermitage, a cottage on her estate...
...In 1759, despite his avowed asceti- cism, Rousseau accepted the invitation of the marechal-duc de Luxembourg to live on his estate at the chateau of Montmorency—largely because, he notes in the Confessions, the moment he saw Mme...
...Cranston is properly critical of Rousseau's endorsing the tutor's use of deceit and humiliation on the grounds that, if the student has suffered, he will be more likely to sympathize with the sufferings of others...
...Forget the legends spread by the Ferraristi: that old Enzo spent nights laboring to build the world's greatest road cars...
...T rue, Reich does hastily remind I himself of his own observation that we now live in a global, not a national, economy: As the borders of cities, states, and even nations no longer come to signify special domains of economic interdependence...
...This task he left exclusively to talented and beleaguered subordinates, who toiled in an office environment that could have taught the Medicis a few things about staff morale...
...Yates has filled the stoup of Ferrari holy water from the coldest well he could find, yet a surprisingly sympathetic portrait emerges...
...Persons close to Ferrari were reluctant to speak for the record, though many were willing to serve as unnamed sources...
...Indeed, it is remarkable how many of the rich and famous took the long and inconvenient ride out to the Hermitage to see him...
...Formula One is the rulebook name for Grand Prix racing, an annual global "league" that is unquestionably the world's most expensive and most technologically advanced, and which confers the World Driving Championship...
...You may not hear a model number or name, such as 348th or Testarossa, but you will hear the name Ferrari more than any other...
...economic sacrifice and restraint exercised within a nation's borders is less likely to come full circle than it was in a more closed economy...
...Convinced by his own theories about inequality, the self-styled moralist retired to the country, distanced himself from the skepticism of the encyclopidistes, renounced the dissipations of fashionable life at the court of Louis XV and Mme...
...Perhaps a "GATT for direct investment" will be entrusted with the task of "setting out the rules by which nations could bid for high-value-added investments by global corporations...
...Cranston's biography is based on a new and thorough investigation of the letters, journals, and memoirs of Rousseau and those who knew him...
...Petulant and egotistical, he continually made life difficult for those who tried to befriend him...
...and everywhere he is in chains...
...The series dates from 1950, and a two-car team today requires something on the order of $20 million a year if it is to be competitive...
...Reich likes them, I don't...
...0 would have been possible had it not been for the radical chic of the wealthy Mme...
...More important, he was an intimate of Diderot, Duclos, Grimm, Voltaire, and d'Alembert, who had likewise undertaken to challenge all received tradition and authority...
...And it's an awfully sharp turn away from the realism and unsentimentality of Reich's analysis of the world economy...
...This would seem to be a simple enough task...
...setting the level at which the necessary rewards for hard work cross the line into unconscionable wealth that must be taxed away...
...Just take Ferrari for what he was, and you can't help but feel affection for the old reprobate...
...He was an accomplished intriguer but not an adroit self-promoter, though his orchestrated press conferences became something of a legend...
...It was during this time that he wrote Emile, a treatise on the education of children...
...He would, for example, claim to have been ENZO FERRARI: THE MAN, THE CARS, THE RACES Brock Yates/Doubleday/465 pp...
...As he put it in the Discourse on Inequality, "The duty of your sex will always be to govern ours...
...But "public subsidies to firms that undertook within the nation's borders high-value-added production...
...Not that Ferrari himself ever quite decided who he was...
...As he said to Mme...
...This might take the form of severance payments, relocation assistance, extra training grants, extra unemployment insurance, regional economic aid, and funds for retooling or upgrading machinery toward higher-value-added production...
...Rousseau became an odd celebrity among fashionable parisiennes, who indulgently pampered his genius...
...In Enzo Ferrari, Brock Yates, editorat-large for me at Car and Driver, has set out in search of Ferrari the man...
...How is it that old Ferraris, many with shaky underpinnings, which by rights shouldn't have survived for thirty or forty years, can sell for as much as $4.2 million...
...He threatened his publishers, accusing them of injustices where none existed and airing imaginary grievances to friends and acquaintances...
...No, Enzo Ferrari made icons of himself and his cars by means of a brutish, zealous, and unstinting commitment to racing...
...de Crequi, "Where luxury is universal, it is by simplicity that a man distinguishes himself...
...Reich is forgetting his earlier strictures against the free movement of the most important of all factors of production—labor...
...Ferrari was neither the smartest engineer in automotive history (he was not even an engineer) nor the greatest stylist (if he ever so much as sketched a car, the incident has gone unrecorded), and he was certainly not a great racing driver (he was adequate, but no more...
...Some, including Luigi Chinetti, the man who made Ferrari cars a staple in the United States, shed valuable light on the subject . . . though the word subject seems inappropriate to this kingly enigma...
...6 6Elerrari" is the name most people r will give you if you ask them their dream car...
...But, in my judgment, Cranston's heart is not in it, and —since this is a conventional biography rather than a history of ideas—there is no extended critique of the historical effects of Rousseau's revolutionary doctrines...
...Reich is attached to central planning and state direction of industry as to a religion learned in childhood...
...How is it that a single automobile marque holds such a narcotic desirability for persons who will never, ever be able to afford one...
...W hen it came to doing it his way, Ferrari made Frank Sinatra look like a fence-straddler...
...Many years ago, Irving Babbitt remarked that "In the name of feeling, Rousseau headed the most powerful insurrection the world has ever seen against every kind of authority...
...He is able constantly to document the discrepancies between what Rousseauactually said and did and the (unacknowledged) mendacities of the Confessions...
...Two-and-a-half hundred pages of denunciations of "vestigial thinking" in order to arrive at this the sort of policies that have made New Brunswick and Calabria what they are today...
...Immigration restriction, taxes, a lavish welfare state—well, it would be a dull world if we all felt the same way about topics like these...
...It is to be hoped that Cranston's third volume will address the question of whether these judgments are to be sustained...
...As for myself, I protest that if sometimes I was misled by my senses and tried to make her unfaithful, I loved her too much to wish to possess her...
...A reviewer of the first volume of Cranston's life complained that he had made Rousseau seem "almost normal...
...in his native Italy, when he was not a pariah (as when his cars were suffering a losing racing season) he was a national monument...
...From its entry onto the Grand Prix stage in 1952, Ferrari's participation was essentially continuous, entering nearly 500 races and becoming the only constructor ever to win more than 100...
...Thus, in 1756 he moved in and established his reputation as the hermit of genius...
...deciding which industries' requests for "infrastructure" will be met and which won't...
...Free movement of all factors of production across national boundaries," he declares, "ultimately will improve every-ones lot...
...d'Houdetot was the model for Julie in La Nouvelle Helorse (1761), an exaltation of swooning romantic love that contradicted all of Rousseau's avowed philosophical principles, as well as his prejudices about the corrupting effect of fiction on virginal innocence...
...Since Protestants were then being executed for heresy, this attack on Christianity brought down on Rousseau the wrath of the authorities...
...Here Cranston's second volume ends...
...As to his mind, Cranston remarks that "those readers who cannot imagine Rousseau as anything other than thoroughly paranoid must wait for the third volume of his biography, which will trace the last tormented years of his life...
...But seeking the truth about Ferrari poses problems...
...There is no space here to discuss The Social Contract (1762), his last important work of the period, which begins with the ringing declaration: "Man is born free...
...22 William Jeanes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 41...
...Of the 103 victories it had recorded through 1990, 93 came in Ferrari's lifetime...
...Regional economic aid...
...The social contract is to be understood as a "form of association which will defend and protect with the THE NOBLE SAVAGE: JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 1754-1762 Maurice Cranston/University of Chicago Press/424 pp...
...When it comes time to write his conclusions, all of his own arduous research demonstrating the waning control of national governments upon economic and financial activity is forgotten, and the old dogmas flood back into his mind...
...Yet none of his simplicity of life James W. Tirttleton is professor of English at New York University...
...Rousseau attained fame by attacking the rich in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men (1754), which took Paris by storm...
...More specifically, he seeks to cut through three generations of automotive blather and a wealth of self-serving prose issued by William Jeanes is editor-in-chief of Car and Driver magazine Ferrari himself...
...Cranston concedes that a like objection may be raised against this second volume, which only mildly anticipates Rousseau's eventual insanity...
...When a warrant was issued for his arrest, he fled to Neuchatel...
...There can thus be no question that Mme...
...Rousseau comes across as sentimental and gushing, yet rude, suspicious, and hypochondriacal—above all, he was un homme de sensibilite...
...rri his is the second of a three-volume 1 life of Rousseau by Maurice Cranston, professor of political science at the London School of Economics...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
