Abstract

Rousseau asserted that "all my ideas fit together, but I can hardly present them simultaneously"; when defending his writings against the charge of contradictoriness, he complained that it was not he, but rather his readers, who could not think systematically. Melzer's admirable effort to support Rousseau's self-description as a systematic philosopher discredits the common view of Rousseau as a confused visionary rebelling against "system" of all kinds. His book is indispensable to forming a just estimation of Rousseau as a seminal philosophical writer of the Western tradition, one to whom Kant, Fichte, and Hegel acknowledged deep indebtedness. Failure to appreciate the unity of Rousseau's thought has been partly due, Melzer notes, to the unsystematic style of Rousseau's writings, none of which presents the "system" as a whole, but which nonetheless are "inseparable... and explain themselves each by the others." Interpreters have so often regarded Rousseau's thought as incoherent and contradictory because they have been misled by the apparent independence of each writing, thus "mistaking fragments for completed wholes".