Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

In Zoe Beenstock's intriguing study, a specter haunts Romanticism: the specter of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley—those "overdetermined synecdoches" of British Romanticism—are, she claims, deeply responsive not just to Rousseauvian political theory but to the philosopher himself, who posthumously embodies the temperament of the age (6). Narrowing down the overwhelming scope suggested by the book's title, Beenstock turns to Rousseau's influence upon British literature of the subsequent generation. By refining her focus to consider the philosopher's afterlives in canonical Romantic texts, she addresses the question of how Rousseau's version of social-contract theory (the idea that society's institutions exist to govern brutish individual human natures) fits into the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism—a key point of current critical debate in both literary studies and the history of political thought. Is Romanticism a liberal reaction, epitomized by the French Revolution, to the Enlightenment's repressive, institutionalizing vision of the social order? Or is Romanticism, instead, a conservative turn against the radicalism endorsed by Enlightenment philosophers, a radicalism which culminated in the Terror of the 1790s? For Beenstock, the answer is both, and this duality is captured in the enigmatic and shape-shifting Rousseau, who in this book is both a figure for Enlightenment principles and an apostate from them.

The book's key claim about Romanticism's relation to the Enlightenment is a striking departure from other historiographies: "Romanticism develops as a critique of radical changes in political theory of the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries and of the new theory of a social contract" (1). In the first and second chapters, which describe Rousseau's context and his corpus, Beenstock presents the philosopher as the dominant Enlightenment articulator of the social contract, and she shows how he inherits and revises the idea (from Thomas Hobbes through the Scottish Enlightenment and the German Idealists) that human nature needed social regulation. According to this trajectory, Rousseau is (atypically) Hobbes' direct intellectual heir, in that both writers use "imagery of a fragmented body politic held together by violence rather than volition"—a violence which all the philosophers in this intellectual history depict in metaphorical terms, as an anatomized or dismembered body (as in Hobbes' Leviathan), as a body in chains "providing both intimacy and constraint," or (prefiguring Rousseau's haunting of Romantic texts) as a ghostly "invisible hand" that "binds [End Page 173] people involuntarily to each other" (25, 29). Beenstock's placement of Rousseau in a strict continuum with Hobbes (in fact, in a "more or less direct line uniting Hobbes with Wordsworth") is unusual and suggestive, since the republican Rousseau is more often understood among philosophers to be in a vexed, combative relation to the sovereigntist Hobbes (45). Robin Douglass expresses such a typical view in Rousseau and Hobbes (2015): "Rousseau probably never read Leviathan [but] nonetheless appears to have viewed Hobbes' political proposals as being diametrically opposed to his own" and as "destructive of every republican government" (3). And yet, for Beenstock, it is this difference (which remains, in her book, implicit) between Hobbes and Rousseau—the radically different ends which they see the social contract as serving—that makes Rousseau the pivot-figure in this story of the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Rousseau inherits the social contract's inherently conservative project to control human nature; yet he is also a forward-looking republican who seeks to correct the freedom-limiting impulses of his philosophical predecessors. Both sides of Rousseau's character, which in Beenstock's book take on the metonymic weight of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, frame the exploration of the philosopher's afterlives in British Romantic literature.

Beenstock couples her radical revision of this epistemological trajectory with a call for a new disciplinary approach to reading Rousseau's work across genres. In the second chapter, where she discusses Rousseau's writing on individualism, she takes scholars of Romanticism to task for reading...