Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau: The Jean-Jacques Problem

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University of Pennsylvania Press, Mar 5, 2021 - Philosophy - 296 pages

Why did Rousseau fail—often so ridiculously or grotesquely—to live up to his own principles? In one of the most notorious cases of hypocrisy in intellectual history, this champion of the joys of domestic life immediately rid himself of each of his five children, placing them in an orphans' home. He advocated profound devotion to republican civic life, and yet he habitually dodged opportunities for political engagement. Finally, despite an elevated ethics of social duty, he had a pattern of turning against his most intimate friends, and ultimately fled humanity and civilization as such.

In Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau, Matthew D. Mendham is the first to systematically analyze Rousseau's normative philosophy and self-portrayals in view of the yawning gap between them. He challenges recent approaches to "the Jean-Jacques problem," which tend either to dismiss his life or to downgrade his principles. Engaging in a comprehensive and penetrating analysis of Rousseau's works, including commonly neglected texts like his untranslated letters, Mendham reveals a figure who urgently sought to reconcile his life to his most elevated principles throughout the period of his main normative writings. But after the revelation of the secret about his children, and his disastrous stay in England, Rousseau began to shrink from the ambitious philosophical life to which he had previously aspired, newly driven to mitigate culpability for his discarded children, to a new quietism regarding civic engagement, and to a collapse of his sense of social duty. This book provides a moral biography in view of Rousseau's most controversial behaviors, as well as a preamble to future discussions of the spirit of his thought, positing a development more fundamental than the recent paradigms have allowed for.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Explaining the Discarded Children ca 17461778
19
Reforms Relapses and the Soul of the Author ca 17491762
51
The Question of Civic Devotion ca 17541762
73
A Lover of Peace or a Vile Insurgent? Confronting the Genevan Patriciate ca 17621768
87
The Revenge of Voltaire and the Autobiographical Turn ca October 1762 February 1765
116
Social Duty and the Varieties of Solitude ca 17561778
123
Conclusion
148
Notes
161
Index
225
Acknowledgments
229
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About the author (2021)

Matthew D. Mendham has taught at Hillsdale College, Christopher Newport University, Emory University, and the University of Notre Dame.

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