In our hyperpolitical quarrels about higher education, we gesture sometimes at the great books and the enduring greatness of their authors, such as Aristotle, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But we neglect the scholarship that helps us understand such authors better.
Eve Grace and Christopher Kelly, the editors of Letters from Rousseau, acknowledge their debt to such scholarship, particularly the 52 volumes of R. A. Leigh’s Correspondance Complète. Robert Wokler, who completed the project after Leigh died, observes that this “utterly formidable” publication required an “indulgence for the rigors of scholarship that no university or research council would be likely to extend today.”
Today, that problem remains, along with heightened skepticism about humanities scholarship and intense pressure to demonstrate its contemporary relevance. It is therefore worth thinking about Leigh’s kind of work and, also, of Grace and Kelly’s. They help deepen our understanding of Rousseau, to whose writings we attribute permanent worth.
Those who want to encounter Rousseau’s writings directly must learn French. But even scholars often first encounter texts through translations. Even when they are capable of reading in the original language, but, like me, read at a malnourished snail’s pace, they get from good translations clues about where to dig in. Kelly, a professor emeritus of political science at Boston College and the author of two books on Rousseau, co-edited the Collected Writings. Grace, the author of superb articles and chapters on Rousseau, co-edited, with Kelly, volume nine, Letter to Beaumont, Letters Written from the Mountain, and Related Writings.
Translations like Grace and Kelly’s are undervalued. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, the only English-language standard edition of Rousseau’s works, for example, is out of print. May it soon find a new publisher. Meanwhile, we should be grateful to Grace and Kelly, and to Cornell University Press’s Agora Editions, for providing the first significant collection of Rousseau’s letters in English since Charles Hendel’s 1937 Citizen of Geneva. Hendel wrote too early for Leigh’s work on the correspondence and did not, as Grace and Kelly do, always present letters in their entirety. Of the well over 2,000 extant letters Rousseau wrote, Kelly and Grace provide 181 that they consider to be “of particular importance to understanding his thought.”
Their introduction is superb concerning what the letters are and aren’t. Why, they ask, are Rousseau’s private letters of more than autobiographical interest? Rousseau told one correspondent, who broached the subject of printing their correspondence, that “a man who writes such follies does not write them to be printed, not even to be reread.”
And yet Rousseau wrote many letters, Grace and Kelly explain, “with a view to possible publication.” Among these are the “so-called ‘Moral Letters’ to Sophie d’Houdetot, the letter to Voltaire on providence, the letters to Malesherbes, the letter to Franquières, and the botanical letters to Madeleine-Catherine Delessert.” All but the last are included here.
To see what they mean, consider the “Moral Letters.” Yes, these six letters, prompted by Madame d’Houdetot’s request for “rules of morality for [her] use,” are tailored to the addressee, with whom Rousseau was infatuated. Although Rousseau says they are “not made to see the light of day,” he also suggests, in the first letter, that he would publish them if she were to consent. The letters go into matters, particularly the conscience, that are central to Rousseau’s thought, and easily meet the standard Grace and Kelly set of being important to understanding it.
So also, Rousseau’s 1756 letter to Voltaire, which, Rousseau says, “was not intended for publication.” But he circulated it to at least a few friends. When one of them wanted to publish it, he consented, on the condition that Voltaire agreed. The letter was eventually printed without the consent of either. In Leigh’s judgment, Rousseau “never gave up the intention of including it one day in an authoritative edition of his works.” Even more than the “Moral Letters,” the letter to Voltaire illuminates Rousseau’s major works. Indeed, the Rousseau scholar and translator, Victor Gourevitch, has argued that it is “Rousseau’s most authoritative discussion of religious issues,” a major work in itself.
The four autobiographical letters to Malesherbes, while they are not as important as the Confessions or Reveries, arguably deserve the lavish praise of the literary critic, Saint-Beuve: Rousseau wrote “nothing more beautiful.” Rousseau also suggests, in the Confessions, that they deserve special attention as “in some way the summary” of that work and, in any case, “perhaps the only thing I have written with ease in my whole life.” Finally, the first of the letters includes a marvelous statement of the connection between Rousseau’s “indomitable spirit of liberty” and its surprising main source, a “laziness” to which the “slightest duties of civil life are unbearable.”
Rousseau knew, after he became famous, that even letters he had no intention of publishing or circulating, might be published or circulated by others, or read by the police.
Such letters are well-known, though Grace and Kelly provide faithful and readable translations. But, they explain, Rousseau wrote even less well-known letters with uncommon care. They share Rousseau’s testimony, from the Confessions, that “even writing letters on the most trivial subjects [cost him] hours of fatigue.” Leigh bears that out. “Most of Rousseau’s letters,” he says, “even the most trivial, passed through several stages before assuming the form of the text received by the addressee.” Moreover, Rousseau knew, after he became famous, that even letters he had no intention of publishing or circulating, might be published or circulated by others, or read by the police. In short, Grace and Kelly say, although the letters often deal with “personal matters” and are genuinely meant for their recipients, they “should not be regarded simply as the casual and sincere expression of whatever was on his mind.”
One cannot, in a review, do justice to the many ways this volume can deepen the understanding of Rousseau’s readers. I’ll mention just two.
First, the letters help us understand how to read Rousseau better. The second Letter to Malesherbes is famous—Rousseau-scholar-famous, at any rate—for claiming that his “three principal writings,” the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and Emile, are “inseparable and together form the same whole.” That suggests one way of getting at the elusive unity of Rousseau’s paradox-packed thought. Less famous is Rousseau’s letter to his friend, Paul-Claude Moultou, which declares that the Letter to Beaumont, an open letter easy to dismiss as a polemic, is “the third and last time that I have given my profession of faith in my writings” and “the one in which I have spoken most openly.” The Letter to Beaumont—a public declaration in epistolary form—isn’t in this collection, but Rousseau directs us to attend to it more closely than one otherwise might.
Readers of Rousseau’s Emile will find much of interest in these collected letters. One correspondent had claimed that “it is impossible to make an Emile,” the eponymous subject of Rousseau’s seeming treatise on education. Rousseau denies that Emile is a “true treatise on education.” It is instead “a rather philosophic work” concerning the natural goodness of man and the origin of his vices. Yet that observation, which might lead one to believe that Rousseau had no serious ambition to reform education, should be coupled with several letters in which Rousseau offers detailed advice to correspondents. “Although Sophies and Emiles are rare,” he says in one, “a few of them are nonetheless being brought up in Europe.”
Second, and speaking of ambitions for reform, the letters illuminate Rousseau’s interest in politics beyond philosophical utopias. Rousseau despairs at times, announcing, in a 1767 letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau, that he doesn’t think that “a form of government which puts the law above man” is attainable and that “arbitrary despotism” is the only passable alternative. But just a few years prior, Rousseau had rejected a correspondent’s view that it was impossible to give “a good founding to the Corsicans.” Rousseau had been enlisted by a Corsican, who falsely claimed to represent the island’s head of state, to write a constitution, and he worked on it in earnest. Rousseau disagrees, at least in part, with his correspondent’s pessimistic estimate, denies that one should avoid “getting mixed up in human affairs,” and affirms a duty to attempt to help where there is “hope of succeeding,” though he concedes that French interference may make his efforts meaningless, as it did. Rousseau’s interest in and uncertainty about Corsica’s future occasions one of the most charming lines in the correspondence, encompassing Rousseau’s public spiritedness and solitary pleasures: “While waiting for what will happen, one must groan softly, and go collect plants.”
Although the Mirabeau letter comes after the Corsican episode, it doesn’t represent Rousseau’s final abandonment of reform. In 1771, at the behest of Polish noblemen, Rousseau completed a work on the government of Poland.
But Rousseau’s deep interest in and engagement with practical politics is most pronounced in letters to correspondents from his home city, Geneva, which eventually burnt his books and promised to arrest him if he showed his face there. In a letter to one of his supporters, Rousseau finally concludes that Geneva “will never be anything but a den of tyrants” and suggests that its remaining lovers of freedom go into exile. But his hopes to help Geneva persisted through much of his career. His willingness to live with something less than perfection, a necessary characteristic of the reformer, is evident in a previous letter to that same supporter, whom he urges to seek Voltaire’s help. Voltaire, living just outside of Geneva, was Rousseau’s bitter enemy. But Rousseau could see that, in the immediate context, Voltaire might be one of the good guys.
Geneva brings me to the sole quibble I have with this book. It is stingy with explanatory notes. Here is one example. In a 1762 letter to Marcet de Mézières, whom Grace and Kelly accurately describe as a “Genevan watchmaker and friend of Rousseau’s father,” Rousseau mentions “the Pictet affair,” which is an important part of the letter’s context. But they do not explain that affair. Pictet, one learns from Maurice Cranston’s biography of Rousseau, was a “leading citizen” of Geneva, then in hot water because he had written a widely circulated letter sharply criticizing the Genevan authorities for their actions against Rousseau. Eventually, he was “put on trial, fined, and suspended” for a year from his membership in one of Geneva’s governing bodies. This information, as well as the knowledge that Marcet de Mézières was much involved in Rousseau’s defense at the time and in the political opposition, is helpful in interpreting the letter. I assume that the editors, in a publishing environment unfriendly to 600-page academic books, had to choose between more letters and more notes. One cannot fault them for their choice, but it sometimes, as in this case, leaves readers adrift.
Despite this minor drawback, Letters from Rousseau does a major service for Rousseau scholars and for anyone who aspires to extend and deepen his encounter with one of the greatest and strangest figures in the history of Western thought.