A Book Review . . . Re-Examining Rousseau And His Strategies
By JUDE DOUGHERTY Scott, John T. Rousseau’s Reader: Strategies of Persuasion and Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020; 328 pages. John T. Scott is a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. He has previously edited or translated the major political writings of Rousseau. The present volume is not a straightforward narrative of Rousseau’s thought, but is instead an almost line-by-line textual study of the major works, or should I say influential works, of Rousseau. Scott is mainly interested in the rhetorical and literary strategies Rousseau employs to present his thought.Assessment of that thought varies. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, was willing to call Rousseau a philosophe in the eighteenth-century French sense but,…Continue Reading