The Solitary Self

...KENNETH MINOGUE teaches political science at the London School of Economics...

...As Cranston writes: In keeping with his philosophy of the simple life, he tried to find happiness in the society of simple people...

...Rousseau was thus at the root of the fatal modern obsession with personal authenticity...

...Here, in The Solitary Self, his scholarship and lively wit bring a lost world to life...

...We are all, as the cliché has it, bundles of contradictions, but Rousseau took incoherence into a whole new dimension...

...Fortunately his friend Sanford Lakoff has put together the notes for the last chapter and used some of Cranston's other writings to round off the picture of Rousseau...

...Explanation in biography, as in history," Cranston wrote in an earlier volume, "se trouve dans les details...

...His persecutors were the citizens of Geneva, the lawyers of the French parlement, and other oligarchic authorities...

...Here were the two great philosophers of their period, both cutting against the grain of the Enlightenment, both celebrities in the dominant French world of the time, each respectful of the other...

...He was a kind of epistolary flirt, and most of the women he liked stayed loyal for life...

...Yet almost the only people who were nice to him — certainly the only women he fell in love with—came from the upper strata of society...

...There were always influential friends and much kindness, especially in high places, but Rousseau was too much a celebrity all over Europe to be able to find the solitude he claimed to crave...

...his passions often overflowed into weeping, and his life is a saga of disillusionment with friendships from which he often demanded too much...

...Cranston served on the editorial board of The American Spectator, and readers will be familiar with his remarkable gift for lucid and sympathetic analysis of complex thinkers...

...This means that his biographer can often follow day by day, the story of a life filled with conflict, and Cranston is able to cross-cut from one point of view to the other...

...He had become the catalyst for that vague sense of discontent with European life which eventually burst forth in the French Revolution...

...Most of our thoughts and hesitations will have vanished into thin air, the telephone calls forgotten, the faxes faded...

...Nietzsche wrote about the superman but was sickly of body, feeble in love, and knew little of war...

...His most famous utterance—"Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains"—appeals to just this pattern...

...Besides, however much he might vow to keep silent, he would soon pick up his pen, and then his troubles would begin anew...

...At levels both shallow and profound, Rousseau initiated the passionate mass political activism that has made modern times so "interesting" in the Chinese sense...

...His most famous work, The Social Contract, breathed the spirit of classical republicanism, and turned into a philosophical idiom his patriotic pride in Geneva and his admiration for the longevity of ancient Sparta...

...They wept as they read his inspiring words—but it did not stop them from using the guillotine...

...One way he earned his living was as a music copyist, and he often kept copies of his own letters, many drafted with great care...

...Johnson loathed him...

...But he failed to do so...

...Expelled from France for the heterodox religious opinions of Emile, Rousseau found himself in 1762 living in the village of MOtiers, near Neuchatel, in Switzerland...

...He claimed in The Confessions "that I am like no one in the whole world...

...Philosophy and reality fitted together no better when it came to politics...

...The American Spectator • June 1997 73 At this stage of his life, Rousseau was doomed to wander from one jurisdiction—fortunately there were many in the Europe of his time —to another, because he was always at the mercy of shifts in parochial politics...

...74 June 1997 • The American Spectator...

...He judged modern society in terms of an ideal, found it wanting, and historicized this idea as "nature," thus turning human history into the familiar pattern of decline and fall...

...Although they had never had the affair that Mme...

...A celebrity in his lifetime, Rousseau became no less than a cult soon after his death, and many of the French revolutionaries idolized him...

...Man was (in some sense) by nature good, but had been corrupted by society...

...I tell you plainly that you are nursing a viper in your bosom...

...and he felt ill...

...This is a service later generations will not be able to perform for us...

...His Discourse on the Origins of Inequality argued that modern Europeans had lost the integrity and sincerity of their less self-conscious ancestors in the state of nature...

...No wonder many French revolutionaries carried his works, like a little red book, in their pockets...

...As Cranston points out, Rousseau did indeed have enemies...

...Is it not amusing," he wrote to an ally in his campaign against the oligarchy in his native Geneva, "that it should be I who has to make reparations for the affronts I have received...

...He was suffering from social isolation and a urinary complaint which led him to affect an eccentric form of Armenian dress...

...The lives of the philosophers generally show that heads in the clouds are attached to feet of clay...

...Rousseau changed the direction of European self-criticism away from morals and religion towards society and culture...

...R ousseau was both supremely passionate and devastatingly rational...

...Yet he always stops short of being an entirely absurd figure...

...In a Europe of monarchies, Rousseau argued, the only legitimate government was one that expressed the general will of the people themselves...

...They loathed him because he taught his readers that their discontents resulted not from their own character but from a bad social system, which could be transformed by a politically engineered change of lifestyle...

...Yet Rousseau could be very charming, and he was (like Hume) a great success with women...

...But perhaps the most notable gap between reality and philosophical aspirations is the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...They were too dull...

...Womenfriends, of whom Rousseau had many, advised him to end his wanderings from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and settle in England where he would be free from persecution, even though (as he remarks in The Confessions) he "had no natural love for England...

...In his last wandering days, Rousseau and his mistress actually lived at times among the unspoiled rustics whom in principle he so much admired...

...A Letter-Perfect Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity Maurice Cranston foreword by Sanford Lakoff University of Chicago Press 247 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY Kenneth Minogue I t is well known that a philosopher with a toothache is no more stoical than the average man...

...But a jokey piece of mockery by Hume's friend Horace Walpole offended Rousseau, by suggesting that he actually welcomed persecution...

...de Boufflers, with her singular liking for sleeping with philosophers, seems to have hoped for," as Cranston writes of one friendship, "they behaved like former lovers—sparring, bickering, and quarreling but still somehow concerned about each other's happiness...

...It is a great sadness that Cranston died just before completing the work...

...Both in Switzerland and in England, it ended in tears—in Switzerland the natives actually stoned the house Rousseau was living in...

...His last years, from 1762 to his death in 1778, are the subject of the third volumeof Maurice Cranston's masterly biography...

...the cold weather depressed him...

...Love-hate relations were Rousseau's meat and drink...

...It is typical of his destiny that he was admired by the French Court, treated considerately by Frederick the Great of Prussia, and given a pension by George III of Britain...

...A century before, Pascal had remarked that all the troubles of the world resulted from the fact that human beings could not sit still...

...Je suis froid," he wrote in a letter to Rey [his publisher], "je suis triste, je pisse mal...

...Rousseau took his native Geneva as being in many ways the model of republican virtue he presented in The Social Contract, yet this book was banned there and he himself threatened with arrest...

...In England he fell into a degree of resentment little short of paranoia, even fearing that he would be arrested by the British authorities...

...There is no doubt he was a dangerous man, and conservatives such as Burke and Dr...

...Hume was keen to help...

...Rousseau however was one of the world's great letter writers at a time when thoughtful communication flourished...

...Voltaire devoted much time to undermining him, writing to d'Alembert that the "monster" had brought all his troubles on himself and adding: "Personally I regard him simply as the dog of Diogenes, or rather as a dog descended from a bastard of that dog...

...Against the fashionable society of his time, which was inordinately proud of being civilized, Rousseau juxtaposed an ideal of natural sincerity and simplicity...

...Hume had himself been warned by Holbach that helping Rousseau was a dangerous business: "You do not know your man...

...In his epistolary novel La Nouvelle Heloise he seemed to be liberating passion from the constraints of duty, just as in his musical disputes with Rameau he championed melody and feeling against classical disciplines...

...He was often indignant at the way in which his friends could not forgive him for the sufferings they had caused him...

...His touchiness about being helped financially was a source of continuing misunderstandings, and they culminated in the saddest episode of his later life: the quarrel with David Hume...

...In these fascinating three volumes, Cranston has brought us as close as anyone will ever get to understanding the paradoxical genius in whose shadow we still, for good and ill, live our lives...

...Misunderstandings arose from the white lies told by Hume to conceal how much Rousseau was being helped...

...Geneva wouldn't have him, he alienated people in Neuchatel, and the authorities at Berne were determined he should go...