Stendhal and Rousseau Habit, Interiority and Exception

The American Historical Review, 2001

The average historian steps with some trepidation into the murky territory that lies on the borderlands of philosophy and literary criticism. There is often a feeling here that at any moment a gang of deconstructive brigands will leap from the intellectual undergrowth, strip you of your disciplinary garb, and leave you exposed as a naked empiricist in a wilderness of thorny questions. There were moments, as I read this book, that it felt like that had indeed happened. One passage in particular from this work, where Swenson cites an anecdote from the Confessions, left me feeling distinctly bare. The young Jean-Jacques constructs a machine to poke through the window of his master's storeroom, cut up apples inside, and withdraw them through the small aperture available. He splits an apple, but it falls to the floor, and the authorial voice interjects 'Compassionate reader, share my suffering.' As Swenson notes, the verb 'partager' is used for both the splitting and the sharing. And from here come some five pages which take us back to Ovid, the Hesperides, St. Augustine and the Fall, and include such statements as 'The two senses are not compatible and the word cannot be simultaneously understood in both ways; a choice is necessary. More precisely, to choose or not to choose is already a choice... To read partager as an act of reading would seem to exclude the purely sentimental reaction, whereas to read the story in an emotive fashion requires a totalisation rather than a division, an identification rather than an understanding. Rousseau's story separates the two senses or two kinds of reading and narrates a movement from the one to the other, mediated by the loss of the apple. ' [p. 130] However, struggling past the occasional literary thicket of this type, there is much in this text which is worth the attention of historians. The author is at pains to make his central theme an historical one -he uses the word three times in his first paragraph. Swenson takes his title from a 1791 work by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, which he reads as establishing a claim for Rousseau to have been an 'author' of the Revolution in the widest possible sense, not only as cause of the Revolution, but as 'the ground and guarantee of the intelligibility of the Revolution. ' [p. 15] As Swenson goes on to elaborate, there are serious reasons to take this claim seriously. The ultimate argument made here is that the thought of Rousseau had penetrated political debate by the early months of the National Assembly so profoundly that the revolutionaries could only think in terms laid down by that thought. However, that thought was radically discontinuous, contradictory even, and the Revolution found itself forced to live with the enormous tension this provoked: 'Not any one discourse but what they share in their division, indeed, the combination of a passionate longing for unity and a rigorous experience of division, represent the Revolution's greatest fidelity to Rousseau. ' [p. 226]

2015

All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit guide Contact: email After the Republic: An Analysis of the Duality of 'Man' in Rousseau Neil Wilcock Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophical Studies Birkbeck College, University of London ! 1 I confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own and the work of other persons is appropriately acknowledged

2022

The article shows that Rousseau and Stendhal attributed entirely different functions to autobiography, and addresses this difference by taking into consideration the philosophical and psychological notion of caractère, which is not conceived of in the same way by the two authors. For Rousseau character is unique, hidden inside and partly innate. For Stendhal it is nothing but the habitual disposition which results from acquired habits. Whereas Rousseau composes Les Confessions to disclose his true character to his readers, Stendhal, on the contrary, writes the Vie de Henry de Brulard to discover his own character, which can only be revealed through a geological examination of his way of life.

The American Political Science Review, 1981

BOOK REVIEW

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others' master, and yet is more a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can solve this question.

A version of this paper was presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association – Central Division. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Reveries of the Solitary Walker," the author's reveries prove to be useful fabrications invented or improved upon by Rousseau for his own consolation and contentment. After first documenting the centrality of fabrications to Rousseau’s purpose in writing the Reveries, I will turn to the puzzle of Rousseau’s personal peace, or lack thereof. If the exaggerated account of Rousseau’s tranquility is one of these fictions, the presence of evidence to the contrary (i.e. of the author’s disquiet) will have a less precarious place in the narrative as a whole.

InterDisciplines, 2010

In 1749, while on the road to Vincennes to visit his friend Diderot in prison, Rousseau had an inspirational experience that prove to be a deciding moment in his life story. In his many autobiographical writings, he would time and again interpret this event as the seminal point of his identity as a writer. Taking the conflicting contemporary interpretations of the Vincennes episode as a starting point, this article asks in what way modern, post-subjectivist theories of the self can enrich our understanding of historical events, while at the same time providing answers to wider questions concerning the ways in which historically changing and contextually specific forms of what it means to be a self are constructed, intepreted, articulated and ›put into practice‹. To this end, Rousseau’s ›illumination‹ and its subsequent interpretations are interpreted in the light of contemporary controversies over the identity of the writer that developed against the background of fundamental changes in the social and economic structure of the literary field.

One of the paradoxes of Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue is that the author from whom he so largely borrowed did not really consider himself virtuous. Virtue may mean purity of heart and motive in one’s daily actions, but as Jean-Jacques Rousseau very well knew, it also implied a constant rational struggle against intrinsic passions and appetites. It is for this reason that in several parts of the Dialogues, Rousseau portrays himself paradoxically as a virtuous man who lacks virtue: “But is there some virtue in that sweetness? None. There is only the inclination of a loving and tender nature […] This very reasonable choice isn’t made by either reason or will. It is the work of the pure instinct. It lacks the merit of virtue, doubtless, but neither does it have its instability. One who has surrendered only to the impulses of nature for sixty years is certainly never going to resist them” (RJJ 150). It is not difficult to see why Rousseau would characterize himself as such. If, as Saint-Preux warns Julie, “virtue is a state of war” (J 560), belief in this struggle would mean recognizing our inherent disposition to sin and refuting, as a result, one of Jean-Jacques’s principal tenets: man’s natural inclination for the good. As Rousseau notes in the first pages of the Dialogues, “virtue among us often requires fighting and conquering nature” (RJJ 10–11).

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2016