Journal of the History of Philosophy

482 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Nonetheless, readers familiar with recent Rousseau scholarship will not learn much that is new from this book. Despite the originality of her focus and method, Ansart-Dourlen's Rousseau turns out to be just the Rousseau of his existentialist commentators--from Burgelin through Gouhier and Starobinski. In the final analysis, this book provides not so much a new reading of the Rousseauean corpus as a new framework for presenting what has now become a standard line of Rousseau scholarship. Accordingly, much of the work of philosophical investigation is taken for granted. AnsartDourlen seems more intent to explicate and organize Rousseau's positions than to examine their conceptual underpinnings. She deftly pours old wine into new bottles. But those of us who are unhappy with the old wine, no matter how impressive its presentation, will ultimately be disappointed. ANDREW LEVINE University of Wisconsin-Madison The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. By David Brion Davis. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Pp. 576. $17.50) Many of us have been brought up on the view that it is a simple logical consequence from the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence or from the Declaration of the Rights of Man that slavery is unnatural and immoral and hence ought to be eliminated. Davis shows that the matter is much more complicated, as is indicated by the fact that of the original thirteen colonies, only Vermont, in its constitution, "moved from a ringing statement that 'all men are born equally free and independent and have certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights' and to a 'therefore' that specifically prohibited slavery" (p. 76). The problem, as Davis sees it at the outset, is not why everybody in liberal England and revolutionary America and France was not against slavery and the slave trade but rather why an oppostion to slavery began to surface around 1770. In the synopsis he gives here of his earlier study, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), Davis shows that slavery had been justified by Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Christian theology, and many philosophers , including John Locke, "the last major philosopher to seek a justification for absolute and perpetual slavery" (p. 45). There was always a conflict between treating a slave as property and recognizing that he had human qualities. Philosophers and theologians could rationalize the situation and leave the slave world intact. Since slavery had been going on in the Western world for over 2,500 years, the more interesting question is, What led anybody to oppose it? "The emergence of an international antislavery opinion represented a momentous turning point in the evolution of man's moral perception, and thus in man's image of himself" (p. 42). This opinion was due to the Enlightenment analysis of slavery by Montesquieu, to the radical religious views of some of the millenarian sects, to the attitude of the Quakers, and to the views of some of the New Awakening evangelical preachers, such as John Wesley. The radical millenarians tended to be so opposed to existing society that they withdrew from it and had little effect in the antislavery struggle. The Quakers and evangelicals were more of this world and could agitate within it. Enlightenment theorists such as Montesquieu, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith made the avantgarde intellectuals weigh the age-old institution of slavery against the general laws or principles that promoted human happiness. In his opening chapter, "What the Abolitionists Were Up Against," Davis shows that it was not just a matter of informing the world that all men by nature, or by God, are supposed to be free. Modern slavery, centering in the Western Hemisphere (more in the Caribbean than in the North American colonies), was the keystone of a very important agricultural world. Sugar, and later, cotton and tobacco were found to be best cultivated by plantation growing; and BOOK REVIEWS 483 African slavery provided the ideal work force. The instant elimination of slavery would ruin this arrangement, which was important not only to the planters but to the entire economies of France, England, and the United States. Moreover, in much of the Caribbean the slaves and mulatto offspring...