The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

Imagine a world where philosophers are celebrities, their works are greeted with stone throwing and literary correspondences are the stuff of tabloid-style publication. This was the world of 18th-century Europe, where David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s friendship, which lasted but six months, created a public stir and has a remarkable enough trajectory to be the centerpiece of this study of Enlightenment mores. Further, the dispute highlights a key divergence in the study of human understanding: “Rousseau represented an alternative way of knowing that went, in a certain sense, beyond reason to regions reached only through the imagination and the passions.” This mode of thinking sets the stage for Rousseau’s dramatic misunderstanding of Hume’s intentions and actions, and ushers in Rousseau’s revolutionary demotion of “adherence to external or objective truth,” replacing it with “loyalty to one’s own self.” Zaretsky and Scott (coauthors of Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau ) weave vivid storytelling together with elegant arguments about this transitional period from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. The book is also a revealing intellectual history of Rousseau’s compelling madness and mystifying genius. Illus. (Mar.)