31/10/2019 Rousseau & Modern Tyranny | by Jean Starobinski | The New York Review of Books

Rousseau & Modern Tyranny

Jean Starobinski, translated by Peter France
NOVEMBER 29, 1973 ISSUE

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A New Interpretative Analysis of His Life and Works, Vol. I: The Quest, 1712-1758
by Lester G. Crocker
Macmillan, 372 pp., $9.95

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A New Interpretative Analysis of His Life and Works, Vol. II: The Prophetic Voice, 1758-1778
by Lester G. Crocker
Macmillan, 385 pp., $10.95

There is not much left in Rousseau to respect or admire

when Professor Lester G. Crocker has finished with his
life and works. Professor Crocker’s analysis, resting on
solid documentary research, does not aim primarily to map
out the story of a life; this has been done often enough and
Crocker has no new unpublished documents to add to
Rousseau’s file. He simply takes this file in its present
state—including the valuable material contributed by the
Pléiade complete works and Professor R. A. Leigh’s
edition of the complete correspondence—and subjects it to
a process of systematic interpretation. From beginning to
end this interpretation follows the biography step by step;
the reader cannot remain indifferent to it. After a series of
statements for the defense (in the studies of Guéhenno,
Guillemin) and sympathetic attempts to relive Rousseau’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau; drawing by David Levine
experience (in those of Raymond, Burgelin, Grimsley), we
have here an uncompromising speech for the prosecution
which is more than a mere rehash of the old charges of anarchic individualism brought at the
beginning of this century by the anti-Romantics (Maurras, Barrès, Babbitt).

Not that Crocker ever underestimates Rousseau’s importance in the history of thought—he
even speaks of his greatness—but this greatness is in his eyes the expression of an abnormal
personality, the sublimation of a sick psyche. He has no great love for Rousseau, at best a
feeling of pity. Why then dwell on him at such obstinate length? Is it just in order to subject
him to a clinical analysis, to give us the anatomy of a monster? No, Crocker has a more
urgent motive. He is convinced that Rousseau’s doctrinal writings, if we take them seriously
and particularly if we look to them for inspiration, are a formidable source of danger, that
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31/10/2019 Rousseau & Modern Tyranny | by Jean Starobinski | The New York Review of Books

they offer us the utopian and imaginary expression of a tendency that takes on physical reality
in some of the worst features of our time: totalitarianism, the manipulation of human
consciences, and the techniques of behavioral engineering.
PUBLICIDAD

According to him Rousseau’s theories originate in the inner conflicts which he was never able
to resolve. Thus, using Jean-Jacques as a stalking-horse, Crocker has written a book about the
predicament of the world we live in; in his analysis of the psychological abnormalities that
Rousseau so glaringly exhibits we can detect a hidden project of denouncing and exorcizing
our present ills by tracing them to their infancy. It is then as a moralist and even a political
theorist that he reads and interprets Rousseau’s thought.
One cannot fail to be impressed by the ethical seriousness of this approach—here is a man of
our time asking whether Rousseau can serve as a master for our time. He is not therefore
posing a literary question; no doubt this is why the study of Rousseau’s art occupies so little
space in the book. Professor Crocker is raising vital issues, discussing a system of thought
and…

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