{"id":121595,"date":"2025-09-05T10:46:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T10:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121595\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T10:46:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T10:46:11","slug":"rousseaus-republic-of-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121595\/","title":{"rendered":"Rousseau\u2019s Republic of Letters \u2013"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n

Eve Grace and Christopher Kelly, the editors of Letters from Rousseau<\/a>, acknowledge their debt to such scholarship, particularly the 52 volumes of R. A. Leigh\u2019s Correspondance Compl\u00e8te.<\/a> Robert Wokler, who completed the project after Leigh died, observes that this \u201cutterly formidable\u201d publication required an \u201cindulgence for the rigors of scholarship that no university or research council would be likely to extend today.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s kind of work and, also, of Grace and Kelly\u2019s. They help deepen our understanding of Rousseau, to whose writings we attribute permanent worth.<\/p>\n

Those who want to encounter Rousseau\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Translations like Grace and Kelly\u2019s are undervalued. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, the only English-language standard edition of Rousseau\u2019s 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\u2019s Agora Editions, for providing the first significant collection of Rousseau\u2019s letters in English since Charles Hendel\u2019s 1937 Citizen of Geneva<\/a>. Hendel wrote too early for Leigh\u2019s 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 \u201cof particular importance to understanding his thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their introduction is superb concerning what the letters are and aren\u2019t. Why, they ask, are Rousseau\u2019s private letters of more than autobiographical interest? Rousseau told one correspondent, who broached the subject of printing their correspondence, that \u201ca man who writes such follies does not write them to be printed, not even to be reread.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet Rousseau wrote many letters, Grace and Kelly explain, \u201cwith a view to possible publication.\u201d Among these are the \u201cso-called \u2018Moral Letters\u2019 to Sophie d\u2019Houdetot, the letter to Voltaire on providence, the letters to Malesherbes, the letter to Franqui\u00e8res, and the botanical letters to Madeleine-Catherine Delessert.\u201d All but the last are included here.<\/p>\n

To see what they mean, consider the \u201cMoral Letters.\u201d Yes, these six letters, prompted by Madame d\u2019Houdetot\u2019s request for \u201crules of morality for [her] use,\u201d are tailored to the addressee, with whom Rousseau was infatuated. Although Rousseau says they are \u201cnot made to see the light of day,\u201d 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\u2019s thought, and easily meet the standard Grace and Kelly set of being important to understanding it.<\/p>\n

So also, Rousseau\u2019s 1756 letter to Voltaire, which, Rousseau says, \u201cwas not intended for publication.\u201d 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\u2019s judgment, Rousseau \u201cnever gave up the intention of including it one day in an authoritative edition of his works.\u201d Even more than the \u201cMoral Letters,\u201d the letter to Voltaire illuminates Rousseau\u2019s major works. Indeed, the Rousseau scholar and translator, Victor Gourevitch, has argued<\/a> that it is \u201cRousseau\u2019s most authoritative discussion of religious issues,\u201d a major work in itself.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cnothing more beautiful.\u201d Rousseau also suggests, in the Confessions, that they deserve special attention as \u201cin some way the summary\u201d of that work and, in any case, \u201cperhaps the only thing I have written with ease in my whole life.\u201d Finally, the first of the letters includes a marvelous statement of the connection between Rousseau\u2019s \u201cindomitable spirit of liberty\u201d and its surprising main source, a \u201claziness\u201d to which the \u201cslightest duties of civil life are unbearable.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s testimony, from the Confessions, that \u201ceven writing letters on the most trivial subjects [cost him] hours of fatigue.\u201d Leigh bears that out. \u201cMost of Rousseau\u2019s letters,\u201d he says, \u201ceven the most trivial, passed through several stages before assuming the form of the text received by the addressee.\u201d 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 \u201cpersonal matters\u201d and are genuinely meant for their recipients, they \u201cshould not be regarded simply as the casual and sincere expression of whatever was on his mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

One cannot, in a review, do justice to the many ways this volume can deepen the understanding of Rousseau\u2019s readers. I\u2019ll mention just two.<\/p>\n

First, the letters help us understand how to read Rousseau better. The second Letter to Malesherbes is famous\u2014Rousseau-scholar-famous, at any rate\u2014for claiming that his \u201cthree principal writings,\u201d the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and Emile, are \u201cinseparable and together form the same whole.\u201d That suggests one way of getting at the elusive unity of Rousseau\u2019s paradox-packed thought. Less famous is Rousseau\u2019s letter to his friend, Paul-Claude Moultou, which declares that the Letter to Beaumont, an open letter easy to dismiss as a polemic, is \u201cthe third and last time that I have given my profession of faith in my writings\u201d and \u201cthe one in which I have spoken most openly.\u201d The Letter to Beaumont\u2014a public declaration in epistolary form\u2014isn\u2019t in this collection, but Rousseau directs us to attend to it more closely than one otherwise might.<\/p>\n

Readers of Rousseau\u2019s Emile will find much of interest in these collected letters. One correspondent had claimed that \u201cit is impossible to make an Emile,\u201d the eponymous subject of Rousseau\u2019s seeming treatise on education. Rousseau denies that Emile is a \u201ctrue treatise on education.\u201d It is instead \u201ca rather philosophic work\u201d 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. \u201cAlthough Sophies and Emiles are rare,\u201d he says in one, \u201ca few of them are nonetheless being brought up in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second, and speaking of ambitions for reform, the letters illuminate Rousseau\u2019s interest in politics beyond philosophical utopias. Rousseau despairs at times, announcing, in a 1767 letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau, that he doesn\u2019t think that \u201ca form of government which puts the law above man\u201d is attainable and that \u201carbitrary despotism\u201d is the only passable alternative. But just a few years prior, Rousseau had rejected a correspondent\u2019s view that it was impossible to give \u201ca good founding to the Corsicans.\u201d Rousseau had been enlisted by a Corsican, who falsely claimed to represent the island\u2019s head of state, to write a constitution, and he worked on it in earnest. Rousseau disagrees, at least in part, with his correspondent\u2019s pessimistic estimate, denies that one should avoid \u201cgetting mixed up in human affairs,\u201d and affirms a duty to attempt to help where there is \u201chope of succeeding,\u201d though he concedes that French interference may make his efforts meaningless, as it did. Rousseau\u2019s interest in and uncertainty about Corsica\u2019s future occasions one of the most charming lines in the correspondence, encompassing Rousseau\u2019s public spiritedness and solitary pleasures: \u201cWhile waiting for what will happen, one must groan softly, and go collect plants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the Mirabeau letter comes after the Corsican episode, it doesn\u2019t represent Rousseau\u2019s final abandonment of reform. In 1771, at the behest of Polish noblemen, Rousseau completed a work on the government of Poland.<\/p>\n

But Rousseau\u2019s 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 \u201cwill never be anything but a den of tyrants\u201d 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\u2019s help. Voltaire, living just outside of Geneva, was Rousseau\u2019s bitter enemy. But Rousseau could see that, in the immediate context, Voltaire might be one of the good guys.<\/p>\n

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 M\u00e9zi\u00e8res, whom Grace and Kelly accurately describe as a \u201cGenevan watchmaker and friend of Rousseau\u2019s father,\u201d Rousseau mentions \u201cthe Pictet affair,\u201d which is an important part of the letter\u2019s context. But they do not explain that affair. Pictet, one learns from Maurice Cranston\u2019s biography of Rousseau, was a \u201cleading citizen\u201d 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 \u201cput on trial, fined, and suspended\u201d for a year from his membership in one of Geneva\u2019s governing bodies. This information, as well as the knowledge that Marcet de M\u00e9zi\u00e8res was much involved in Rousseau\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In our hyperpolitical quarrels about higher education, we gesture sometimes at the great books and the enduring greatness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":["post-121595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}