“Everything is connected with the constitution ,” wrote the young Rousseau. Two contributions stand out: the classical treatment of love-of eros-in the Symposium, and the discipline of political philosophy. While he could not share their natural grounds, Plato and Aristotle helped him in this endeavor. But that relative truth led to pernicious results, so something must be not quite right with it. The moderns were more right about nature than the ancients, mechanism was more true than teleology. He does so as a modern philosopher who critiqued modern philosophy and science. Intriguing, because his work deals with men and women as such, their differences, their attractions, their bonds-and their fissures and failures.

Dialectical, because he considered relevant alternatives before proposing his own. It is capacious, because in his erotic studies Rousseau surveyed western civilization from antiquity to modernity, with the Christian interlude still somewhat present in his own day. Put philosophically: Read Rousseau to take the measure of “modern civilization” and its erotic discontents.Īs studied here in connection with his 1761 epistolary novel, the New Heloise, or Julie, Rousseau’s thought is of a rather capacious, dialectical, and intriguing sort, not least because of its central themes: men and women love, sex, marriage and family. Put sociologically: Read Rousseau to understand why our divorce rate is so high. Put in personal terms, the claim is: Read Rousseau to help sort out your love-life. And even if he didn’t quite get the response right, he is remarkably contemporary, because penetrating and prescient. Its bold thesis can be similarly stated: Jean-Jacques Rousseau diagnosed the problems of modern thought and society, and, above all, their subjects, modern men and women, better than anyone. Mark Kremer’s little study, Romanticism and Civilization: Love, Marriage, and Family in Rousseau’s Julie, is both.

Rousseau emile sophie