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A rousseau dictionary
History of European Ideas, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 5 5 9 ~ 3 9 , 1995
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Copyright @ 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599195 $9.50 + 00
Pergamon
BOOK REVIEWS
A Rousseau Dictionary, ed. by N.J.H. Dent (Blackwell, Oxford, 1992), xvii + 279 pp., £37.50 H.B., £14.95 P.B. The project of setting out his ideas in dictionary form would have appealed to Rousseau, who himself completed a Dictionary of Music, started a Dictionary of Botany and helped Diderot work out the plans of his great Encyclopedic. Dr Dent, who teaches philosophy at the University of Birmingham, is a man of wide culture, and has been able to do justice to all of Rousseau's interests. Rousseau always insisted that despite the paradoxes, his writings added up to a 'system', and it is one of the merits of Dr Dent's book that it brings out the systematic nature of Rousseau's thought within the seemingly arbitrary order of alphabetical sequence. Rousseau argued that his system was built on a single principle, namely that everything which comes from Nature---or G o d - - i s good, while all evil in the world is the result of men's corruption in society. This is what set Rousseau at odds both with the philosophers of his time, who believed in progress, and the priests, who believed in original sin. It underlay his immensely influential theory of education, which was designed to elicit natural talent while sheltering the pupil from social contacts and conventional learning. It inspired his religious teaching, according to which God is better worshipped in natural solitude than in gatherings of the faithful. It also provided the basis of Rousseau's aesthetics, according to which art is the true voice of natural feeling. On the other hand, Rousseau maintained that neither morals nor politics could be experienced in the state of nature, since both belonged essentially to the corrupt realm of society. Hence the pessimism of his conclusions: that even the best republic would degenerate into a despotism, and that the virtue which was needed to make men live well together was extinguished by the amour propre which living together generated. A number of words, such as 'freedom', 'conscience', 'will', 'nature' and 'virtue' provide the entry to Rousseau's manner of thinking and Dr Dent is at his best in the elucidation of these concepts. He also gives an account of some concepts which were unknown to Rousseau but which figure prominently in all the commentaries--words such as 'alienation' and 'paranoia', so that this dictionary will serve as a guide not only to Rousseau's work but to the enormous body of criticism which has grown up around that work. Maurice Cranston London School o f Economics
559
~ )
Copyright @ 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599195 $9.50 + 00
Pergamon
BOOK REVIEWS
A Rousseau Dictionary, ed. by N.J.H. Dent (Blackwell, Oxford, 1992), xvii + 279 pp., £37.50 H.B., £14.95 P.B. The project of setting out his ideas in dictionary form would have appealed to Rousseau, who himself completed a Dictionary of Music, started a Dictionary of Botany and helped Diderot work out the plans of his great Encyclopedic. Dr Dent, who teaches philosophy at the University of Birmingham, is a man of wide culture, and has been able to do justice to all of Rousseau's interests. Rousseau always insisted that despite the paradoxes, his writings added up to a 'system', and it is one of the merits of Dr Dent's book that it brings out the systematic nature of Rousseau's thought within the seemingly arbitrary order of alphabetical sequence. Rousseau argued that his system was built on a single principle, namely that everything which comes from Nature---or G o d - - i s good, while all evil in the world is the result of men's corruption in society. This is what set Rousseau at odds both with the philosophers of his time, who believed in progress, and the priests, who believed in original sin. It underlay his immensely influential theory of education, which was designed to elicit natural talent while sheltering the pupil from social contacts and conventional learning. It inspired his religious teaching, according to which God is better worshipped in natural solitude than in gatherings of the faithful. It also provided the basis of Rousseau's aesthetics, according to which art is the true voice of natural feeling. On the other hand, Rousseau maintained that neither morals nor politics could be experienced in the state of nature, since both belonged essentially to the corrupt realm of society. Hence the pessimism of his conclusions: that even the best republic would degenerate into a despotism, and that the virtue which was needed to make men live well together was extinguished by the amour propre which living together generated. A number of words, such as 'freedom', 'conscience', 'will', 'nature' and 'virtue' provide the entry to Rousseau's manner of thinking and Dr Dent is at his best in the elucidation of these concepts. He also gives an account of some concepts which were unknown to Rousseau but which figure prominently in all the commentaries--words such as 'alienation' and 'paranoia', so that this dictionary will serve as a guide not only to Rousseau's work but to the enormous body of criticism which has grown up around that work. Maurice Cranston London School o f Economics
559