Book Review: New Translations of Jean Jacques Rousseau Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, by Helena Rosenblatt, Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings, by Christopher Bertram and Quentin Hoare and The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by John T. Scott

• Author: Jason Neidleman
• Published date: 01 August 2014
• Date: 01 August 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591714535034
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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concert might provide fruitful terrain for differentiating a political conception
of reason from a social conception of reason. Throughout this work, Laden is
very sensitive to these issues. In particular, his examination of the norms of
conversation in the second part of the book contains a careful exploration of
the ways in which social privilege and power differentials can marginalize
participants in conversations. Nevertheless, if political theorists are going to
follow Laden’s advice and ground our understanding of reasoning in our
ordinary practices (and I think we should do this), then it stands to reason that
different types of human activities may give rise to different types of reason-
ing. This is to say that while Laden has offered us a very detailed and compel-
ling social picture of reasoning, his book also stands as an invitation to
political theorists to develop a similarly political picture of reasoning. And
while such a picture would share many of the features of reasoning that Laden
outlines in this path-breaking work, it would also foreground the role of con-
testation, violent and nonviolent action, political domination and acts of
resistance, and negotiation and reconciliation into its account of how people
reason politically. Laden’s work would provide an exemplar of how political
theorists could go about constructing a political account of reasoning that
does not fall into the trap of reducing all reasoning to coercion, while remain-
ing sensitive to the role that power and contestation plays in the multiplicity
of ways that we publicly reason.
New Translations of Jean Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, by Helena
Rosenblatt. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011.
Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings, by Christopher Bertram and
Quentin Hoare. London: Penguin, 2012.
The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by John T. Scott. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Reviewed by: Jason Neidleman, University of La Verne
DOI: 10.1177/0090591714535034
The 2012 tercentenary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth fittingly occasioned
a wave of events to commemorate, celebrate, and expand the legacy of the
renowned writer, moralist, and peripatetic. Most noteworthy among these
were the new edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes, directed by Raymond
Trousson and Frédéric Eigeldinger and the countless events and colloquia

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centered in Geneva but held around the world. Of particular interest for read-
ers of Political Theory will be three new translations of Rousseau’s most
important political writings: Helena Rosenblatt’s Discourse on the Origins
and Foundations of Inequality among Men, published as part of Bedford/St.
Martin’s Bedford Series in History and Culture; Christopher Bertram and
Quentin Hoare’s Of The Social Contract and Other Political Writings, pub-
lished by Penguin Classics; and John T. Scott’s The Major Political Writings
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published by the University of Chicago Press.
As these outstanding translations attest, interest in Rousseau’s political
theory remains intense. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that
many of Rousseau’s most basic political views are as anathema to us as they
were to his contemporaries (though not always the same views and not always
for the same reasons). Rousseau, to take a few examples, could not conceive
of dividing sovereignty, of running power through a system of representation,
of exercising popular sovereignty in a large state; he could not conceive of
political parties (much less a political opposition), and, while he was careful
to protect religious minorities, he insisted that citizens take an oath of loyalty
to the civil religion. In spite of all this, Rousseau continues to be studied in a
way that his many illustrious contemporaries are not. Grimm, Helvetius,
d’Holbach, d’Alembert, Condillac, and even Diderot are not studied the way
that Rousseau is. It is enough to make one wonder whether Conor Cruise
O’Brien was missing something when he called Rousseau “a noxious force
within Western culture,” whose sustained influence could only be attributed
to “the malignant magic of the grand charlatan.”1 On the contrary, political
theorists continue to find in Rousseau the clearest, most nuanced account of
the fundamental principles of democracy and, perhaps more importantly, the
fundamental problems animating democratic politics.
The enduring interest in Rousseau might be best explained by his own
description of himself: “Everyone has a vocation on this earth,” Rousseau
wrote to Jean Ribotte in 1761. “Mine is to tell the public difficult but useful
truths.”2 And, while readers continue to disagree about the veracity of
Rousseau’s arguments, their utility can hardly be doubted.
The first difficult truth Rousseau chose to tell was that the civilization of
which modern Europeans were so proud had been mostly degrading to human
goodness and virtue. This was the radical,...