Avi Lifschitz

Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and Interpretation from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been cast as a champion of the Enlightenment and a beacon of Romanticism, a father figure of radical revolutionaries and totalitarian dictators alike, an inventor of the modern notion of the self and an advocate of stern ancient republicanism. This book treats his writings as an enduring topic of debate, examining the diverse responses they have attracted from the Enlightenment to the present. Such notions as the general will were, for example, refracted through very different prisms during the struggle for independence in Latin America and in social conflicts in Eastern Europe, or modified by thinkers from Kant to contemporary political theorists. Beyond Rousseau’s ideas, his public image too travelled around the world. The book examines engagement with Rousseau’s works as well as with his self-fashioning: especially in turbulent times, his defiant public identity and his call for regeneration were admired or despised by intellectuals and political agents.

Genesis for Historians: Thomas Abbt on Biblical and Conjectural Accounts of Human Nature

Summary Natural sociability and the basic features of human nature stood at the centre of Thomas Abbts confrontation with conjectural history, the popular eighteenth-century mode of reconstructing the evolution of human culture. Abbt (1738–1766) criticised conjectural histories due to their arbitrary character, and opted for a synthetic approach consisting of both sacred and secular history. He suggested that the anthropology of Genesis should be accepted as the starting point for a conjectural history, since it left ample room for further questions and speculations. Yet his own perspective on human nature and its evolution remained naturalistic, as attested by his divergent interpretations of the confusion of tongues at Babel. Attempting to shed new light on the lesser-known elements of Abbts work, the essay links his views on the Bible and conjectural history to his debate with Moses Mendelssohn over the constitution and destination of man. In this debate, both Mendelssohn and Abbt dealt with the contemporary controversy over the natural or artificial character of sociability, self-interest, and fellow-feeling.

The Man Who Flattened the Earth, Mary Terrall. Chicago University Press, Chicago (2002), (£27.50), ISBN: 0-226-79369-5

connection, it would appear, was two-way. Not only was Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France widely read across the Channel (it had apparently sold 10,000 copies by the end of 1791), but: ‘there is indication that Burke actually borrowed [his critique of abstraction] from French sources with whom he was in contact, a debt he partly acknowledged’ (p. 68). Burke was undoubtedly a complex thinker, but it would be interesting to know more about how these Catholic angophobes could apparently have so much in common with a Protestant defender of 1688. None of this is intended as a criticism of the book itself. Its exploration of this neglected topic is long overdue and the result is based on detailed research, as well as being engagingly written. McMahon succeeds in his aim, set out in the Introduction, of moving beyond the ‘great thinkers’ approach to intellectual history and his book is testimony to the value and importance of doing so. This book will not put an end to the debate surrounding the relationship between philosophie and the Revolution, but no-one from now on will be able to suggest that a knowledge of either can be complete without an understanding of the views of the Enlightenment’s enemies.