Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
- 2 A General Overview
- 3 Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Revenge of Pascal
- 4 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
- 5 Rousseau's Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins
- 6 Rousseau's General Will
- 7 Rousseau's Images of Authority (Especially in La Nouvelle Heloise)
- 8 The Religious Thought
- 9 Émile: Learning to Be Men, Women, and Citizens
- 10 Émile: Nature and the Education of Sophie
- 11 Rousseau's Confessions
- 12 Music, Politics, Theater, and Representation in Rousseau
- 13 The Motto Vitam impendere vero and the Question of Lying
- 14 Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim: Synthesis within A “Minor” Work
- 15 Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
- 2 A General Overview
- 3 Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Revenge of Pascal
- 4 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
- 5 Rousseau's Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins
- 6 Rousseau's General Will
- 7 Rousseau's Images of Authority (Especially in La Nouvelle Heloise)
- 8 The Religious Thought
- 9 Émile: Learning to Be Men, Women, and Citizens
- 10 Émile: Nature and the Education of Sophie
- 11 Rousseau's Confessions
- 12 Music, Politics, Theater, and Representation in Rousseau
- 13 The Motto Vitam impendere vero and the Question of Lying
- 14 Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim: Synthesis within A “Minor” Work
- 15 Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The great Rousseau scholar Judith Shklar was usually more concerned with Rousseau's striking originality - as a psychologist, as a pre-Freudian group psychologist, as the very prototype of the homme revoke- than with his intellectual debts. “His enduring originality and fascination,” she urges in Men and Citizens, “are due entirely to the acute psychological insight with which he diagnosed the emotional diseases of modern civilization.” However, she made two large exceptions in favor of Locke and Fénelon: She thought that Rousseau's debt to the psychological theory of Locke's Essay was huge and central and that his debt to Fenelon's political and moral thought was equally massive. For Rousseau owed to Fénelon nothing less than the legitimation of his obsession with Graeco-Roman antiquity: If an early Genevan reading of Plutarch set off this propensity, it was Fenelon's Telemachus (1699) and Letter to the French Academy (1714) that confirmed and dignified it; thus Fénelon's “Roman” auctohtas and gravitas were worth a great deal. In Shklar's view, Rousseau owed to Fenelon (above all) the notion of seeing and using two ancient "models" of social perfection - a prepolitical “age of innocence” and a fully political age of legislator-caused civic virtue - as foils to modern egoism and corruption. Fenelon’s familiar Utopias of “Betique” (celebrating pastoral innocence) and of “Salente” (depicting legislator-shaped civisme) in Telemachus were, for Shklar, echoed in Rousseau's “happy family” (in La nouvelle Heloise and Lettre a d'Alembert) and in his Spartan-Roman “fantasies” (in Government of Poland and the Social Contract).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau , pp. 78 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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