By David Edmonds, John Eidinow
In 1766 thinker, novelist, composer, and political provocateur Jean-Jacques Rousseau was once a fugitive, decried via his enemies as a deadly madman. in the meantime David Hume—now well-known because the most excellent thinker within the English language—was being universally lauded as a paragon of decency. And so Rousseau got here to England along with his cherished puppy, Sultan, and willingly took safe haven along with his extra revered counterpart. yet inside of months, the exile used to be loudly accusing his benefactor of plotting to dishonor him—which triggered a so much uncharacteristically violent reaction from Hume. And so begun a outstanding confrontation and activities that ensnared a number of the top figures in British and French society, and have become the debate of highbrow Europe.
Rousseau's puppy is the interesting real tale of the sour and extremely public quarrel that became the Age of Enlightenment's so much influential thinkers into deadliest of foes—a such a lot human story of compassion, treachery, anger, and revenge; of star and its rate; 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 unstable thinker accused his benefactor of masterminding a murky conspiracy opposed to him and brought on 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 interesting rundown of the 2 thinkers' nice ideas—with an important swig of human curiosity to scrub down the philosophical morsels. Their (sometimes excessively) distinct, 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 suspect, the shift from the Enlightenment cult of cause to the Romantic cult of feeling. The authors widen their brilliant graphics of the antagonists right into a landscape of the cross-Channel highbrow group that refereed the squabble, taking within the ancien régime salons and their wonderful hostesses and the London and Paris streets the place traveling philosophers have been mobbed like rock stars. the result's an soaking up cultural heritage of the republic of letters in its exuberant adolescence. (Mar.)
“A precise and engaging reexamination of this tale by means of David Edmonds and John Eidinow.” (New York overview 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 stories
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Additional resources for Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment
Sample text
The continuity of relationship, mutuality of commitment and recognition of plurality that were, for Arendt, fundamental to friendship are negated by totalitarianism. Totalitarianism necessitates the eradication of precisely those elements of social relationship – plurality, mutuality, and continuity – that constitute friendship. Friendship might, then, be seen as a defensive bulwark against the possibility of totalitarianism. However, it might also be seen – more positively and less defensively – as a proactive engagement with human plurality.
The liberal democratic and Marxist traditions both assumed that the meaning of political action, and of the revolutionary form such action can take, is to be found beyond ‘the political’ Friendship and Plurality 35 – in, for example, the private happiness of the liberal democratic state or the classless society of the communist state. The public space of political action was usurped by one or other system of socioeconomic management, each offering its own version of what Arendt saw as an antipolitical utopia.
Arendt threaded the twin strands of Nazism and Stalinism into her highly original analysis of totalitarianism, but she was not alone in highlighting the moral and political significance of what she saw as an entirely new force that had broken into – and fractured – human history: as early as 1940, Arthur Koestler had exposed the terror of the Stalinist purges in his novel Darkness at Noon; Albert Camus’ 1947 allegory, La Peste, had also shown the precariousness of human existence in the face of Nazi occupation; and George Orwell, in 1949, had given expression to the vulnerability of human beings in the face of totalitarianism in his futuristic Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds, John Eidinow
by David
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