Missed Opportunities
Judith Shklar, 4 August 1983
Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution
by Norman Hampson.
Duckworth, 282 pp., £19.50, June 1983,0 7156 1697 8 Show More
by Norman Hampson.
Duckworth, 282 pp., £19.50, June 1983,
Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754
by Maurice Cranston.
Allen Lane, 382 pp., £14.95, April 1983,0 7139 0608 1 Show More
by Maurice Cranston.
Allen Lane, 382 pp., £14.95, April 1983,
“... As for Rousseau, we get bits of the Social Contract, as well as of some lesser pieces that were unknown to his early readers. This is a pastiche of Rousseau as a crude monomaniac who claimed that a transforming political will could re-create Sparta here and now. That his notion of a general will implies, not the actual, but the higher public will of the ... ”