Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman, eds. Rousseau and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0521515825. Price: US$93

Although titled Rousseau and Freedom, McDonald’s and Hoffman’s edited collection is rather about Rousseau’s many freedoms. Presenting a wide-ranging overview of Rousseau’s approaches to freedom in his political thought as well as in the context of his views on literature and the arts, society, education, religion and women, the panoply of essays that enrich this volume show, as Christie McDonald states in her introduction, that “Rousseau offers not one, but several conceptions of liberty” (2). Far from laying bare the divergent and often conflicting readings that have pitted literary scholars of Rousseau against their political or sociological counterparts, the essays’ cross-disciplinary eclecticism succeeds rather in providing us with a more complete and subsequently more coherent picture of Rousseau. By proposing different but complementary readings of how freedom is articulated in Rousseau’s Second Discourse – theologically, methodologically and intellectually – the first four contributions of Part I give us a good sense of the cross-disciplinary dialogue that weaves together the many essays of the book. Although Rousseau acknowledges in the beginning of the Discourse that the pure state of nature “perhaps never did exist,” Ioannis D. Evrigenis’ introductory essay argues that there is reason to take the perhaps seriously and to consider it less a hypothesis than a premise for a radically new theodicy through which Rousseau frees humanity from original sin. As Evrigenis goes on to show, the political impact of this theological revamping of man’s genesis is enormous: “By insisting that, although he is everywhere in chains, man is born free from domination and sin, Rousseau was able to part ways with Hobbes, and make the notions of individual agency and responsibility not only plausible, but perhaps also appealing” (18). The notion that the state of nature is purely conjectural is also challenged in Natasha Lee’s eloquent essay. The purpose of Lee’s argument, however, is altogether different. Pointing to the extensive empirical data found in the footnotes, Lee contends that the conjoining of scientific facts and fictional speculation in the Discourse both grants Rousseau a “tentative structure of authority” and frees him from the “a priori absolutes” of empirical truth (36). By simultaneously relying on and distancing itself from scientific evidence, Rousseau’s liminal methodology authorizes him to perceive through and beyond the established “truths” of contemporary naturalists. It grants him the freedom to challenge the constraints of empirical social sciences and to intuit, for example, in opposition to contemporary theories of naturalistic determinism, that man is born a free agent. The type of freedom examined in Christopher Brooke’s and Marian Hobson’s contributions could be characterized as intellectual. To the question of whether Rousseau was a Stoic or an Epicurean, Brooke suggests that the best answer would be to disregard labels altogether. Instead of tracing Rousseau’s thought to a distinct philosophical influence, Brooke argues that we should view Rousseau “as an eclectic thinker – remembering that this was itself an important eighteenth-century keyword – one who drew selectively on the various arguments that he found in older texts, juxtaposing them, and sometimes fusing them together as he went about creating his own, utterly distinctive system” (54). Moving from the Ancients to the Moderns, Marian Hobson’s discussion of intellectual freedom revolves around Rousseau’s relationship to Diderot and more particularly a recently discovered copy of William Petty’s Several Essays in Political Arithmetic (1683). Presented as a gift to Diderot (himself the author of the Encyclopédie’s article on “arithmétique politique) sometime between 1749 and 1751, the copy includes a long dedication in which Rousseau deplores how modern political thinkers had abandoned all moral and virtuous ideals and debased …