Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government by Michael Sonenscher

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government by Michael Sonenscher Flora Champy Michael Sonenscher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2020). Pp. 203. $116.00 cloth. "How Rousseau invented advertising, imagined bitcoin and redefined the politics of public opinion" (vii): while this arresting "overexcited" summary falls short of giving a complete picture of Michael Sonenscher's latest book, it is a faithful expression of what is at stake in this short, ambitious, and thought-provoking piece of scholarship. Contrary to the common image of the stern citizen of Geneva, the "Brutus of our time" as described by Diderot, Sonenscher convincingly demonstrates that some of today's most pressing social and political issues, such as the key role of public opinion in political debates, the share of industry in the economy, the regulation of currencies, or the citizenry's faith in institutions, were already forcefully articulated by Rousseau. Sonenscher's account is rooted first in highly attentive readings, which called his attention to what he calls four so-far undercommented "details" in Rousseau's thought (xi): the power of imagination, especially its capacity to bridge the general and the particular, i.e. the intellect and the affect; the innate sense of self-preservation, [End Page 492] or amour de soi, rooted in a natural love of order possibly extending to a sense of justice; the "natural quality" of the feeling of shame, in particular in women, and how it can be reconciled with Rousseau's account of the human state of nature as a situation of complete independence; and finally, the implications of human perfectibility regarding the relationship between agriculture and industry. These "details" are in fact massive moral and anthropological questions, which have in part already been studied separately, but rarely in connection to one another. Sonenscher's account is thus genuinely new in a double sense—no small feat when writing on such an abundantly discussed author. Firstly, he is able to deliver a fresh view of each of these themes, by often taking the later, more elaborate, lesser-known works as a starting point. For instance, the examination of amour de soi as "a compound feeling bound up with both the body and the mind" (130), drawing extensively on the Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, differs in focus from Frederick Neuhouser's famous account of amour-propre, mostly based on the second Discourse.1 Yet, Sonenscher's greatest originality appears when he brings all four "details" together to give a comprehensive account of Rousseau as a political writer. For that purpose, he relies on Ernst Cassirer's 1932 analysis of the "problem of Jean-Jacques Rousseau," which pointed to a discrepancy between the two sides of his philosophy, the "story about pride, property, inequality, despotism and revolution" and the "story about political society, elected government, the rule of law and the sovereignty of the general will" (13). However, Sonenscher argues that Cassirer erred in proposing to solve the problem with the neo-Kantian solution of a "theodicy" (14), because that misses a key issue: how to "maintain the viability of the rule of law" in the "generalized mistrust" brought by "conditions of radical economic and social division" (53). In his own response, Sonenscher considers Rousseau less as a philosopher of morality than as a philosopher of the symbolic. Thorough close readings of non-political works such as Émile, Julie, or the Essay on the Origin of Languages enable him to assert that for Rousseau, "Human life was made up of signs, not things" (135). This entails a reassessment of the relationship between government and the creation of value, in all senses. While the book deals with human morality as politically induced, it focuses especially on how the specific conditions of modernity, when human communities are decisively shaped by economic mechanisms, impact this process. A revealing passage from book IX of the Confessions, stating that "everything radically depends on politics," is recurrently referred to in the book (20, 50, 54, 173). As Sonenscher points out, when put back in the larger...