What do you think?
Rate this book
The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes
Hulliung (politics and history, Brandeis U.) restores Rousseau to his historical context, the world of philosophes, and shows how he employed the arsenal of writers such as Voltaire and Diderot to launch a powerful attack on their version of the Enlightenment. He discusses subjects including cultural versus political history, the psychology of Locke, and materialist modes of thought. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
293 pages, Hardcover
First published August 5, 1998
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 6, 2015
This is a strange book which is much better on the philosophes than it is on Rousseau. It’s true that Rousseau often is not served well by scholars who look at the Enlightenment as a whole (though I think Hulliung's criticism of Peter Gay is unfair). But reading Rousseau back into the Enlightenment by reading the Enlightenment back into Rousseau is a bizarre strategy. No matter how much Hulliung would like to convince us otherwise, the Enlightenment wasn't a series of footnotes to Rousseau.
Where Hulliung is best is when he discusses the views of the philosophes on such subjects as philosophical history and republicanism, views which often get overlooked in general treatments of the movement. He's quite good in exploring the philosophes' ideas on these matters. Lesser lights like Condillac, Holbach, and Helvetius get the credit they deserve. Diderot, who seems always to be overshadowed by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, gets put front and center where he belongs.
Hulliung, though, makes it seem as though everything was going along fine and then along came Rousseau to lift the spell the philosophes were laboring under. Their belief in progress, their attempts at engagement, their self-image – all of it was cant and illusion, but they didn't know it until Rousseau came along to show them otherwise. The philosophes have no actual ideas and convictions; it's all self-serving prejudice. That's of course what Rousseau thought, and Hulliung adopts Rousseau's stance wholesale. One scholarly reviewer wrote that Hulliung relies far more on reporting than he does on analysis, and I think that's fair. Hulliung rehearses Rousseau's ideas as if they were all correct. If he said the philosophes were double-talking hypocrites, well, they were, and that's that. As I said, Hulliung is good on the philosophes; it's when he brings Rousseau into the picture that he loses his critical faculties.
Towards the end you almost think that the philosophes had a point about Rousseau, given how much Hulliung's portrait makes him appear like a contrarian gadfly. Only at the end, when Hulliung discusses Rousseau's late autobiographical writings, does he begin to inch slightly away from his laudatory assessment. Once Rousseau begins to judge Jean-Jacques, only then does Hulliung feel comfortable judging him also.
Hulliung says that his subject is the "great intellectual debate that might have taken place" between Rousseau and the philosophes but didn't (237). He tries to hold that debate in his book. But he fails, largely because he doesn't show that there was any debate taking place. The philosophes had their positions, which Rousseau attacked, which led them to attack him. There must be two sides to a debate. This book only presents one, Rousseau. The reason it has only his side is because Hulliung never offers any reasons for why the philosophes might have held the ideas they did. Progress? That's just propaganda to justify monarchy. How do we know this? Because Rousseau said so. In the end, therefore, Hulliung winds up committing exactly the same error he says his fellow students of the Enlightenment do: he reads Rousseau out of the Enlightenment.
Posted Tuesday, 27 October 2015
Where Hulliung is best is when he discusses the views of the philosophes on such subjects as philosophical history and republicanism, views which often get overlooked in general treatments of the movement. He's quite good in exploring the philosophes' ideas on these matters. Lesser lights like Condillac, Holbach, and Helvetius get the credit they deserve. Diderot, who seems always to be overshadowed by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, gets put front and center where he belongs.
Hulliung, though, makes it seem as though everything was going along fine and then along came Rousseau to lift the spell the philosophes were laboring under. Their belief in progress, their attempts at engagement, their self-image – all of it was cant and illusion, but they didn't know it until Rousseau came along to show them otherwise. The philosophes have no actual ideas and convictions; it's all self-serving prejudice. That's of course what Rousseau thought, and Hulliung adopts Rousseau's stance wholesale. One scholarly reviewer wrote that Hulliung relies far more on reporting than he does on analysis, and I think that's fair. Hulliung rehearses Rousseau's ideas as if they were all correct. If he said the philosophes were double-talking hypocrites, well, they were, and that's that. As I said, Hulliung is good on the philosophes; it's when he brings Rousseau into the picture that he loses his critical faculties.
Towards the end you almost think that the philosophes had a point about Rousseau, given how much Hulliung's portrait makes him appear like a contrarian gadfly. Only at the end, when Hulliung discusses Rousseau's late autobiographical writings, does he begin to inch slightly away from his laudatory assessment. Once Rousseau begins to judge Jean-Jacques, only then does Hulliung feel comfortable judging him also.
Hulliung says that his subject is the "great intellectual debate that might have taken place" between Rousseau and the philosophes but didn't (237). He tries to hold that debate in his book. But he fails, largely because he doesn't show that there was any debate taking place. The philosophes had their positions, which Rousseau attacked, which led them to attack him. There must be two sides to a debate. This book only presents one, Rousseau. The reason it has only his side is because Hulliung never offers any reasons for why the philosophes might have held the ideas they did. Progress? That's just propaganda to justify monarchy. How do we know this? Because Rousseau said so. In the end, therefore, Hulliung winds up committing exactly the same error he says his fellow students of the Enlightenment do: he reads Rousseau out of the Enlightenment.
Posted Tuesday, 27 October 2015
October 21, 2007
A lucid explanation by my old Brandeis U prof, Mark Hulliung, of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau both epitomized and ruthlessly criticized the 18th-century French Enlightenment of the Encyclopedie and the philosophes. Hulliung cogently argues that it is a mistake to locate Rousseau within the Romantic tradition of 19th-century Europe, but that he instead belongs firmly to the Enlightenment tradition of anti-clericalism, individualism, and empirical observation, even as he was far more radically republican than his former Enlightenment comrades such as Diderot and d'Alembert, yet far more conservative in his views of morality and family.
August 12, 2011
Probably his best book, since he places Rousseau in context of a debate over Enlightenment that never quite occurred, but should have.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews