Books: A Great March

• Share

(2 of 3)

On Four Paws. Retracing this great march, which was both a recessional and an inaugural, the Durants again demonstrate their immense talent for transmuting tireless research into never tiresome storytelling. They stop where fancy strikes, and theirs is a striking fancy indeed. The Industrial Revolution gets 14 pages, Mozart 27. The book's hero is Jean Jacques Rousseau. Beginning with an extraordinary sentence about that contradictory figure (see box), it is his impact that gives the book its momentum. Perhaps too much so: he is shown launching the Romantic movement almost singlehanded in rebellion against rationalism, and given credit for practically transforming the world. This probably overstates his role. Columbia History Professor Peter Gay, in fact, suggests that in some ways Rousseau was actually "a prophet rather than a nemesis of rationalism," and that the entire Enlightenment was partly a rebellion against the rule of reason. Yet the Durants tell the story in the more traditional pattern, as a civil war within the Enlightenment between mind and feeling, head and heart, Voltaire and Rousseau. And it is difficult not to see it that way when one recalls, for example, Voltaire's reaction to the Discourse on inequality, in which Rousseau denounced civilization and praised the state of nature. "I have received, monsieur, your new book against the human race," wrote Voltaire. "No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work, one is seized with the desire to walk on four paws. However, as it is more than 60 years since I lost that habit, I feel that it is impossible for me to resume it."

Without overestimating Rousseau's influence, one cannot miss the beginnings of much that remains in modern thinking: his proclamation of man's Original Goodness, which led to the sentimentalization of childhood; his condemnation of private property, which makes him sometimes sound like a hippie of the salons. The famous statement, in Social Contract, "Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains," sounds like an anticipatory echo of Karl Marx.

Rousseau was not really a revolutionary; he was more of a liberal devoted to high language and half measures. He did not really hope to abolish the system, only to temper it. Yet his qualifications were ignored and his ideas oversimplified on the guillotine. Moreover, despite his Confessions about his far from blameless private life, he was a prig and railed against the perfumed immorality of his time. (One sometimes gets the impression that the perfume annoyed him more than the immorality.)