On the coffee table – ‘Rousseau’s Dog’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau at left and David Hume at right.

In the late 1760s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was first forced to leave France, then various places in Switzerland. Deigning not to cast about too much for Prussian exile with Frederick the Great, suddenly, an English/Scottish opening appeared with an offer of help from David Hume.

However, Rousseau’s general touchiness, combined with an almost paranoid level of suspiciousness by this time, had him ready to take umbrage at almost anything anyway. Add to this that English bon vivant Robert Walpole wrote a fake letter, purportedly from Frederick, to Rousseau and got help from French philosophes to polish up the French translation, and the emotional pot was boiling.

But, that’s not all. Hume, who had recently become an intellectual darling of those philosophes himself when posted to the British ambassadorial mission in Paris, had a bit of a hand in Walpole’s letter, then tried to hide that fact on both sides of the Channel. He didn’t fool Rousseau, though.

Beyond that, the two most famous philosophers of the age had almost nothing in common as far as philosophical outlooks and stances, as well as temperaments and psychologies.

By David Edmonds and John Eidenow, the authors of “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” this is an interesting look at a bit of philosophical history.

It’s a history of the intersection of two philosophers, and not a philosophy book. Nonetheless, a reader should bring a bare-bones knowledge of Hume and Rousseau as philosophers to the table to appreciate this book.

That said, what does this book have?

Above all, insights into a very human David Hume, exemplified above all by his overreaction to Rousseau, including misreading his comments about the possibility of getting a British royal pension.

I think E&E could have done a little more digging, or at least offered a little more speculation, on Hume tut-tutting Holbach, Grimm, and d'Alembert when being warned he was taking a viper to his breast. Did Hume tut-tut because he thought a change of climate would help Rousseau? Or had "le bon David" let Paris "press clippings" go to his head enough that he thought he could succeed with Rousseau where these others had failed?

And a little more scene-setting of Rousseau's relationship with the philosophes might have been helpful.