By David Edmonds, John Eidinow
In 1766 thinker, novelist, composer, and political provocateur Jean-Jacques Rousseau was once a fugitive, decried through his enemies as a deadly madman. in the meantime David Hume—now famous because the most appropriate thinker within the English language—was being universally lauded as a paragon of decency. And so Rousseau got here to England along with his liked puppy, Sultan, and willingly took shelter along with his extra revered counterpart. yet inside of months, the exile was once loudly accusing his benefactor of plotting to dishonor him—which caused a such a lot uncharacteristically violent reaction from Hume. And so begun a extraordinary disagreement and activities that ensnared a few of the top figures in British and French society, and have become the controversy of highbrow Europe.
Rousseau's puppy is the attention-grabbing real tale of the sour and intensely public quarrel that became the Age of Enlightenment's so much influential thinkers into deadliest of foes—a so much human story of compassion, treachery, anger, and revenge; of star and its fee; of shameless spin; of destroyed reputations and shattered friendships.
Reviews:
In 1766, Scottish thinker David Hume helped the unconventional Swiss highbrow Jean-Jacques Rousseau locate asylum in England; a couple of months later, the risky thinker accused his benefactor of masterminding a murky conspiracy opposed to him and caused a virulent reaction. The argument had not anything to do with philosophy (or Rousseau's dog), yet, as of their well-received Wittgenstein's Poker, the authors use the dispute as a pretext for an attractive rundown of the 2 thinkers' nice ideas—with a massive swig of human curiosity to clean down the philosophical morsels. Their (sometimes excessively) specified, meandering account of the feud issues to whatever better: the distinction among the affable, urbane rationalist Hume and the moody, paranoid, emotionally overwrought Rousseau prefigures, they think, the shift from the Enlightenment cult of cause to the Romantic cult of feeling. The authors widen their brilliant pictures of the antagonists right into a landscape of the cross-Channel highbrow neighborhood that refereed the squabble, taking within the ancien régime salons and their great hostesses and the London and Paris streets the place vacationing philosophers have been mobbed like rock stars. the result's an soaking up cultural background of the republic of letters in its exuberant early life. (Mar.)
“A certain and interesting reexamination of this tale through David Edmonds and John Eidinow.” (New York assessment of Books)
“Sprightly and available . . . David Edmonds and John Eidinow have heightened highbrow feuds past the shallows of anecdote.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“As we’ve come to count on from Edmunds and Eidinow, their research of the personalities in query is sharp and engaging.” (Los Angeles Times)
“An captivating account of a mere provocation inflated to epic proportions.” (Kirkus experiences
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Extra resources for Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment
Sample text
Their political legitimacy, which is routinely contested and thus far from ideologically assured, stems directly from the fact that they are designed to work “behind the backs” of those whose welfare is subject to their operations— this is Marx’s chief objection to the “invisible hand” of market decisions. His “alienation” thesis holds that, as the production and distribution of the collective surplus is relegated to impersonal market processes, citizens surrender collective control over the conditions of social life.
At the conclusion of her reading of the speech, Disch turns to Arendt’s generous effort to aid the correspondence between Karl Jaspers and her husband, Heinrich Blücher. She explains that “Arendt’s writing of Jaspers’s letter is . . ” And certainly Disch is correct in pointing out that Arendt would have been highly sensitive to the political facts at issue in her friend Jaspers’s assessment of her. What she does can indeed be read as an act of friendship, but one that privileges the personal relation over the very political complex she indicts as inhuman on the grounds that it violates the primacy of friendship.
We seem to be faced, then, not with a fortuitous parallelism between political theory and social discourses and practices, nor with any simple pattern of causality linking them, but rather with a deep and pervasive affinity, structural or elective, between one particular mode of social attachment and the very concept of democracy. ”2 The question immediately raised by this observation ought to be: Why should any political practice be thought of in terms of an affective interpersonal bond, and can (or should) democracy, in particular, be thought of otherwise?