قراءات إضافية
SVEC: Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth
century.
مجموعات الأعمال والكتب النقدية وكتب السير الذاتية العامة
Indispensable to Rousseau scholarship today are two major publishing
ventures of the past forty years, the Pléiade edition of his Œuvres complètes, compiled by B. Gagnebin, M.
Raymond, and others (Paris, 1959–95), and the Voltaire Foundation edition of his
Correspondance complète, by R. A. Leigh
(Geneva and Oxford, 1965–98). Each is drawn from the original manuscripts and is
richly documented with editorial notes, illustrating Rousseau’s sources and
parallel passages across his writings. The long-awaited fifth volume of the
Pléiade Œuvres complètes embraces most of his
works on music and language, including the Dictionnaire
de musique and other texts never before published with a
scholarly introduction or footnotes, although its fine edition of the Essai sur l’origine des langues by Jean Starobinski
has been available for some time separately (Paris, 1990) and the same text was
even earlier accorded extensive annotation by Charles Porset (2nd edn, Bordeaux,
1970). Of Rousseau’s principal works incorporated in the Pléiade edition,
perhaps only the Discours sur les sciences et les
arts is presented with more compelling command of its sources
elsewhere, by George Havens (New York, 1946). Equally noteworthy is the edition,
including a German translation, of the Discours sur
l’inégalité by Heinrich Meier (Paderborn, 1984). The extensively
annotated translation of Rousseau’s Collected
Writings (Hanover, NH, 1990– ) currently in progress under the
general supervision of Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly, when finished,
should provide the best, and in several instances the first, editions of his
works for English readers. Of the major writings, including the Discours sur l’inégalité, the Contrat social, the Confessions, and the Rêveries, there are numerous, often fine, translations into English,
including those contained in the series of Texts in the History of Political
Thought (Cambridge University Press) and the World’s Classics series (Oxford
University Press). Leigh’s edition of the Correspondance
complète, in fifty-two volumes, is one of the most remarkable
works of modern scholarship in any field—its annotation majestic, its powers of
resuscitating Rousseau’s world, and even the spontaneity and refinement of the
composition of his ideas, unsurpassed.
This correspondence, and Rousseau’s own Confessions, have helped make it possible for Raymond Trousson
and Maurice Cranston to produce perhaps the finest biographies of Rousseau in
any language (Paris, 1988 and 1989; and London, 1983, 1991, and 1997), although
Cranston did not survive to complete his third volume. Jean Guéhenno’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Eng. trans., 2 vols, London,
1966) and Lester Crocker’s Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (2 vols, New York, 1968 and 1973) form substantial and
notable biographies as well. Ronald Grimsley’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Study of Self-Awareness (2nd edn,
Cardiff, 1969) offers a particularly sensitive treatment of the development of
Rousseau’s personality through his writings, while Kelly’s Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The ‘Confessions’ as Political
Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1987) shrewdly interprets the
autobiography in the light of Rousseau’s principles.
Among English-language commentaries on his thought in different
genres, Ernst Cassirer’s The Question of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (2nd edn, New Haven, Conn., 1989), Judith Shklar’s
Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social
Theory (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1985), and C. W. Hendel’s more
comprehensive Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist
(2nd edn, Indianapolis, 1962) excel, Hendel’s work in particular being among the
most subtly detailed accounts of Rousseau’s philosophy in any
language. Of comparable quality,
showing equal mastery of Rousseau’s writings across several disciplines, is
Timothy O’Hagan’s Rousseau (London and New
York, 1999). In French, the most remarkable treatments of his thought are
probably Bronisław Baczko’s Rousseau: Solitude et
communauté, originally published in Polish (Paris 1974), Pierre
Burgelin’s La Philosophie de l’existence de J. J.
Rousseau (2nd edn, Paris, 1973), and Starobinski’s classic study,
dating from 1957, now available in English, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago, 1988), which is
dazzling in its images of Rousseau’s inner experience and metaphors of opaque
reflection.
John Hope Mason, in The Indispensable
Rousseau (London, 1979), offers English readers a skilful
single-volume commentary, interwoven with selections from almost all of
Rousseau’s major writings, while N. J. H. Dent, in A
Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford, 1992), provides a well-conceived
thematic treatment of Rousseau’s works, with useful pointers in each case to the
pertinent secondary literature. The massively authoritative Dictionnaire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris,
1996), published under the direction of Trousson and Frédéric Eigeldinger, is
comprised of 700 entries by almost one hundred authors, addressed to writings,
subjects, places, and persons. The Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, based in
Geneva, has since 1905 produced a journal of remarkable erudition, the Annales, and for those who find that they can never
have enough of Rousseau, there is a computer-generated Collection des index et concordances of his writings still in
progress (Geneva and Paris, 1977– ), under the general supervision of Michel
Launay and dedicated colleagues at the University of Nice and elsewhere.
Scholars who consult the two volumes thus far published of the Bibliography of the writings of Rousseau to 1800 by
Jo-Ann McEachern (Oxford, 1989 and 1993) will be richly
rewarded.
دراسات عن الفكر السياسي والاجتماعي لروسو
Still the most authoritative interpretation of Rousseau’s political
works in their historical context is Robert Derathé’s Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (2nd edn, Paris,
1970), which offers a richly detailed account of the jurisprudential background
to his philosophy. Masters, in The Political Philosophy
of Rousseau (Princeton, NJ, 1968), provides one of the
best-documented and most closely argued readings of Rousseau’s political and
educational writings, in so far as they form parts of a systematic doctrine
which unfolds from the first Discours, while
in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Écrivain politique
(1712–1762) (Cannes and Grenoble, 1971), Launay, writing from an
essentially Marxian perspective, also shows a profound command of major and
minor texts alike. Grace Roosevelt’s Reading Rousseau in
the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, 1990) offers a fresh assessment of
Rousseau’s reflections on war and international relations within the wider
context of his political and educational writings.
Among significant treatments of the Discours
sur les sciences et les arts, either independently or in
connection with Rousseau’s other writings which spring most immediately from it,
are Mario Einaudi’s The Early Rousseau
(Ithaca, NY, 1967); Victor Gourevitch’s ‘Rousseau on the Arts and Sciences’,
Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1972);
Havens’s ‘The Road to Rousseau’s Discours sur
l’inégalité’, Diderot Studies,
3 (1961); and Hope Mason’s ‘Reading Rousseau’s First Discourse’, SVEC 249 (1987). The Discours sur l’inégalité, central as it is to Rousseau’s
political theory, has in recent years received perhaps even closer scholarly
attention for its philosophy of history, for instance in Asher Horowitz’s
Rousseau: Nature and History (Toronto,
1986), and above all for its philosophical or historical anthropology, most
notably in Michèle Duchet’s Anthropologie et histoire au
siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971); Victor Goldschmidt’s Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de
Rousseau (Paris, 1974); and Arthur M. Melzer’s The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s
Thought (Chicago, 1990). I have attempted to deal with the
several contexts of Rousseau’s argument at some length in my Rousseau’s ‘Discours sur l’inégalité’ and its
Sources, now destined for publication by the Centre international
d’étude du dix-huitième siècle in Ferney-Voltaire. Differing perspectives on his
account of mankind’s savage nature, and on his claims about apes and
orang-utans, can be found in Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Rousseau’s Supposed
Primitivism’, in Lovejoy, Essays on the History of
Ideas (Baltimore, 1948); Gourevitch, ‘Rousseau’s Pure State of
Nature’, Interpretation, 16 (1988); Francis
Moran III, ‘Natural Man in the Second
Discourse’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 54 (1993); and my ‘Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures:
Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited’, Daedalus,
107 (1978). Jacques Derrida’s De la
grammatologie (Paris, 1967) embraces one of the subtlest
treatments available of the Essai sur l’origine des
langues.
Notable discussions of the argument of the Contrat social range from Andrew Levine’s sympathetic Kantian
perspective in The Politics of Autonomy
(Amherst, Mass., 1976), passing through John W. Chapman’s balanced Rousseau—Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York, 1956),
Zev Trachtenberg’s discriminating Making Citizens:
Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture (New York, 1993), and John
Plamenatz’s judicious Man and Society, vol.
ii (2nd edn, London, 1992). Patrick Riley’s Will and
Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)
offers an especially salient treatment of Rousseau’s conception of the general
will as part of a tradition of political voluntarism, while Richard Fralin’s
Rousseau and Representation (New York,
1978) attempts to bring the heady political principles of Rousseau down to earth
in their application to actual states. By contrast, Baczko’s Lumières de l’utopie (Paris, 1978) raises them
skywards again in its commentary on The Government of
Poland; as does James Miller’s Rousseau:
Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven, Conn., 1984), which identifies
Rousseau’s alpine visions of Genevan democracy with his naturalistic reverie;
and Paule-Monique Vernes’s La Ville, la fête, la
démocratie: Rousseau et les illusions de la communauté (Paris,
1978), which locates images of fraternal assembly throughout his political
writings in general, including the Lettre à d’Alembert
sur les spectacles. Among the more striking commentaries on the
political significance of theatre in that work is Patrick Coleman’s Rousseau’s Political Imagination: Rule and Representation in
the ‘Lettre à d’Alembert’ (Geneva, 1984).
On Rousseau’s influence upon the course of the French Revolution, the
documents and notes of volumes 46 to 49 of the Leigh edition of the Correspondance complète (which ends not with the
death of Rousseau but with that of Thérèse Levasseur in 1801) provide at least
as much illumination as any of the separate works, among which the fullest
treatment can be found in Roger Barny’s L’Éclatement
révolutionnaire du rousseauisme (Paris, 1988), with more broadly
sketched perspectives in Carol Blum’s Rousseau and the
Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French
Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1986) and Joan McDonald’s Rousseau and the French Revolution: 1762–1791
(London, 1965).
دراسات تقييمية لأعمال روسو الأخرى وعلاقاته الفكرية ومصادره
On Rousseau’s philosophy of education in Emile, Dent’s treatment of amour-propre in that work in Rousseau: An Introduction to his
Psychological, Social and Political Theory (Oxford, 1988) is
compelling, while Peter D. Jimack’s La Genèse et la
rédaction de l’Emile in SVEC
13 (1960) is specially informative on the stages of Emile’s composition. Pierre-Maurice Masson, the greatest
Rousseau scholar of his day, remains a
towering presence in his treatment of Rousseau’s Christian and natural theology
in La Religion de Rousseau (3 vols, Paris,
1916), although Ronald Grimsley’s more modest Rousseau
and the Religious Quest (Oxford, 1968) is also helpful. On
Rousseau’s ideas of sexuality, Allan Bloom’s Love and
Friendship (New York, 1993) addresses the miraculous
metamorphosis of sex into love by way of the imagination, while Joel Schwartz’s
The Sexual Politics of Rousseau (Chicago,
1984) identifies two distinct lines of argument about sexual difference in his
writings, a subject further pursued from a critical theorist’s perspective by
Judith Still in Justice and Difference in the Works of
Rousseau (Cambridge, 1993). Henri Guillemin, in Un homme, deux ombres (Jean-Jacques – Julie –
Sophie) (Geneva, 1943), offers a lyrical account of Rousseau’s
passion for Sophie d’Houdetot.
Jean-Louis Lecercle provides a particularly sensitive reading of
La Nouvelle Héloïse in Rousseau et l’art du roman (Paris, 1969), and the
novel is also subjected to close analysis by Lionel Gossman, in ‘The Worlds of
La Nouvelle Héloïse’, SVEC 41 (1966), and by James F. Jones, in La Nouvelle Héloïse: Rousseau and Utopia (Geneva,
1977). Jones, in turn, offers a commentary on Rousseau’s most distressed work,
described as particularly inspired by his stay in England, in Rousseau’s ‘Dialogues’: An Interpretive Essay
(Geneva, 1991). Françoise Barguillet, in Rousseau ou
l’illusion passionnée: Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire
(Paris, 1991), and Marc Eigeldinger, in Jean-Jacques
Rousseau et la réalité de l’imaginaire (Neuchâtel, 1962), address
mainly the overarching form and specific imagery, respectively, of Rousseau’s
last major work, the Rêveries, while Marcel
Raymond, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La quête de soi et la
rêverie (Paris, 1986), investigates that text’s illuminations of
Rousseau’s character.
Despite a rapidly growing number of treatments of particular themes
within and around his philosophy of music, there is still much scope for
original research in this field, and room for a major study of Rousseau’s ideas
on music as a whole, to supplant Albert Jansen’s formidable Rousseau als Musiker (Berlin, 1884) and enlarge
upon Samuel Baud-Bovy’s musicologically well informed but less theoretically
focused Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la musique
(Neuchâtel, 1988), especially now that most of his writings on the subject are
accessible as separate volumes of the principal modern editions of his works, in
both French and English. Philip Robinson’s Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s Doctrine of the Arts (Berne, 1984) is particularly
helpful on the Dictionnaire de musique and
certain musical themes throughout
Rousseau’s writings in general, which are also treated at some length in the
fourth chapter and appendix of my Rousseau on Society,
Politics, Music and Language: An Historical Interpretation of his Early
Writings (New York, 1987). Michael O’Dea in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion and Desire
(London and New York, 1995) considers how the passionate inflections of the
human voice described in Rousseau’s early texts on music were articulated in the
transports of imagination of his fictional and autobiographical works. On the
subject of botany, excellent as is the commentary of Gagnebin in his edition of
Rousseau’s Lettres
sur la botanique (Paris,
1962), Jansen’s Rousseau als Botaniker
(Berlin, 1885), of which some fragments have been translated into English by Sir
Gavin de Beer in ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Botanist’, Annals of Science, 10 (1954), remains the touchstone for all
serious students. Perhaps the most remarkable and meticulous treatments of
Rousseau’s Swiss inheritance, preoccupations, and anxieties are those of F.
Eigeldinger’s ‘Des pierres dans mon jardin’: Les années
neuchâteloises de J. J. Rousseau et la crise de 1765 (Geneva,
1992); François Jost’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau Suisse:
Étude sur sa personnalité et sa pensée (2 vols, Fribourg, 1961);
and Helena Rosenblatt’s Rousseau and Geneva
(Cambridge, 1997).
Yves Touchefeu’s L’Antiquité et le
christianisme dans la pensée de
Rousseau (Oxford, 1999) provides a finely balanced account of
Rousseau’s interpretation of classical and Christian sources. For Rousseau’s
debt to Machiavelli, Maurizio Viroli’s Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and the ‘Well-ordered Society’ (Cambridge, 1988) is
particularly helpful, as is the treatment of his confrontation of Hobbes in
Howard Cell’s and James MacAdam’s Rousseau’s Response to
Hobbes (Berne, 1988). I
have assessed his appreciation of Pufendorf in my ‘Rousseau’s Pufendorf: Natural
Law and the Foundations of Commercial Society’, History
Of Political Thought, 15 (1994). Henri Gouhier’s Rousseau et Voltaire: Portraits dans deux miroirs
(Paris, 1983) is masterful in its unravelling of the differences between the two
principal antagonists of the age of Enlightenment, while still unsurpassed as a
treatment of Rousseau’s early intellectual development against the background of
the Encyclopédie is René Hubert’s Rousseau et l’Encyclopédie: Essai sur la formation des idées
politiques de Rousseau (1742–56) (Paris,
1928), a theme I have pursued
specifically with reference to Diderot in ‘The Influence of Diderot on the
Political Theory of Rousseau: Two Aspects of a Relationship’, SVEC 132 (1975). Mark Hulliung’s The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the
Philosophes (Cambridge, Mass., 1994) both amply and subtly traces
the intellectual tensions between Rousseau and leading thinkers of his
world.
On Rousseauism in France at the end of the eighteenth century, Jean
Roussel’s Rousseau en France après la Révolution,
1795–1830 (Paris, 1972) provides the most comprehensive
treatment; as, with respect to Germany, does Jacques Mounier’s La Fortune des écrits de Rousseau dans les pays de langue
allemande de 1782 à 1813 (Paris, 1980); with regard to
Italy, Silvia Rota Ghibaudi’s
La fortuna di Rousseau in
Italia (1750–1815)
(Turin, 1961); and, in English thought, Henri Roddier’s J. J. Rousseau en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1950) and
Jacques Voisine’s Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque
romantique (Paris, 1956). Guillemin’s ‘Cette affaire infernale’: L’affaire J. J. Rousseau-David Hume,
1766 (4th edn, Paris, 1942) offers a lively reading of Rousseau’s
year of torment in the hands of a man who meant him well. For anticipations of
Kant in Rousseau’s philosophy, the classic text remains Cassirer’s Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, first published in 1945
(New York, 1963). Among the most notable accounts of Rousseau’s literary or
philosophical reputation in assessments of later commentators are Trousson’s
Rousseau et sa fortune littéraire
(Bordeaux, 1971) and Tanguy L’Aminot’s Images de
Jean-Jacques Rousseau de 1912 à 1978 (Oxford,
1992).
