One of Rousseau’s best interpreters, Laurence Cooper has an established record of close engagement, careful analysis, and deep insight in his detailed studies of Rousseau. In Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom, he trains his attention on one book, Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Unsurprisingly, the result is a thorough and original study of the text, replete with insights that will surely be of interest to Rousseau scholars and to anyone interested in what Cooper calls in his subtitle and throughout the book the “philosophic life.” More surprisingly, perhaps, is the extent to which Cooper reads Rousseau as an esoteric writer who “may not believe all that he says he believes” (110). This is particularly important with respect to Rousseau’s apparent critique of philosophy in favor of reverie. Rousseau, Cooper writes, “makes the case for philosophy even while seeming to make the case against it” (21).
If this is beginning to sound familiar, it is because Cooper is drawing on the tradition of esoteric reading associated with Leo Strauss, although Cooper does not explicitly position himself this way. He follows Strauss in distinguishing between two audiences, the general and the philosophic, or, as Cooper terms them, the “casual” and the “careful.” And, like Strauss, he interprets Rousseau in a manner that draws heavily on Plato’s Republic. In his 1979 translation of Emile, Allan Bloom characterized the work as “a book comparable to Plato’s Republic.” Cooper offers a similar assessment, this time of the Reveries. By coincidence, another monograph written in the Straussian spirit appeared almost concurrently with Cooper’s study: Thomas Pangle’s (2023) The Life of Wisdom in Rousseau’s “Reveries of the Solitary Walker.” Both Cooper and Pangle place the Reveries in the Socratic tradition of the philosophic life, but whereas Cooper reads Rousseau as a Socratic figure, Pangle calls the Reveries “profoundly un-Socratic.” Unfortunately, the timing of the publications has prevented these authors from engaging with each other’s arguments. It is testimony to the protean nature of Rousseau’s writings that two scholars, working from a similar intellectual framework, can arrive at seemingly opposite conclusions. That said, readers of Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom will become accustomed to drilling down into the text of the Reveries to find Socratic resonances where Rousseau may seem to be suggesting otherwise.
Cooper reads Rousseau against the grain. What Cooper calls a “careful” reading reveals Rousseau to be doing something different from what a “casual” reading may suggest. Whereas Rousseau characterizes the Reveries as a “shapeless diary,” Cooper argues it contains a hidden structure, one that closely parallels Plato’s Republic. Whereas Rousseau says he wrote his reveries “only for myself,” Cooper argues he wrote them “to promote wholesome activities and even a new and wholesome orientation to life” (16). Whereas Rousseau criticizes philosophy, even to the point of extolling ignorance in the Third Walk, Cooper characterizes Rousseau as “at one with the classical philosophers” (xii). Whereas Rousseau claims to prefer reverie to reflection—“reverie relaxes and amuses me; reflection tires and saddens me”—Cooper sees Rousseau “elegantly communicating” just the opposite through “sleight of hand” (96).
Reflection, Cooper writes, “is more central and integral to [Rousseau’s] life, to the philosophic life, than is reverie” (96). Whereas Rousseau seems to prefer ordinary, simple men and women to refined and learned ones, Cooper reads Rousseau as an evangelist for a philosophical “journey” that “few of us are likely to complete” (39). And whereas Rousseau describes fits and starts—progress and regress—with respect to his stated goal of freeing himself from amour propre, Cooper describes an “ascent toward philosophy” (96). In the Reveries, Cooper writes, “Rousseau depicts the ongoing development or perfection of the philosophic life by one who is already living it” (2). Showing this, Cooper claims, “may be the chief contribution” of his book.
Cooper invites his readers to approach the Reveries as the story of a philosophic life with a “plot” (42). The plot traces Rousseau’s transformation of the experience of solitude from a punishment to a blessing. It turns out there is a world of difference between the “melodramatic self-centeredness” of the First Walk’s “me voici donc” and the “more capacious, decentered perspective on the self” of the Seventh Walk’s “me voila donc,” which appears when Rousseau has achieved what Cooper calls the peak of his “clarity and happiness” (185). In the space between the early voici and the late voila, Cooper traces Rousseau’s path “to achieving internal justice or health of soul,” which turns out to be “the overcoming of amour propre” (47). This, for me, is the chief contribution of the book, and it is no small one at that.
Cooper is successful in reading the Reveries against the grain not only because the text is susceptible to being read this way but also because Rousseau’s writings are generally susceptible to many interpretations. He did not write treatises, nor did he write in any philosophical tradition, preferring to forge his own original path. Nowhere is this more clearly on display than in the Reveries. Appropriated by the Left and Right, by revolutionaries and restorationists, read as a liberal, a republican, and a romantic; and as a Platonist, an Augustinian, an Epicurean, and a Stoic, Rousseau’s method allows for a multiplicity of interpretations. Cooper’s is one. No matter one’s perspective, the book will reward the reader with deep insight into the Reveries. But Cooper is after something more than that, something that he believes will help the reader see more than just Rousseau’s path away from the lures of amour propre: he hopes to convince readers that Rousseau led a philosophic life.
Cooper reads the Reveries as a Socratic quest for enlightenment: “Rousseau’s end was the same as Plato’s—the same end for the same reasons.” The only difference is “the terrain to be navigated” (xv–xvi), by which Cooper means the modern context of “Christian and post-Christian universalism” (xvi). Other than the difference of terrain that, importantly for Cooper’s argument, allows Rousseau to deepen and extend Plato’s teaching, Cooper sees only “deep affinities and…no contradictions between Rousseau’s and Plato’s respective articulations of the philosophic life” (51). Although readers will be familiar with Rousseau’s praise for Socrates, that praise has been typically associated with Socrates’s elevation of virtue above all else, including philosophy. For Cooper, Rousseau’s disposition toward reason and toward philosophy is far more nuanced than such a reading would suggest.
Although “casual” readers of Rousseau may read him as a critic of reason, a “careful” reading—of the kind Cooper offers in part II of Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom— reveals that Rousseau has not disparaged reason but rather “veil[ed]” its “potential efficacy” to redeem it from its misuse at the hands of his contemporaries (210). What seems to be an elevation of reverie above philosophy and of sentiment above reason is in fact Rousseau’s ambitious and, in Cooper’s view, successful aspiration to “revivify the philosophic life properly understood”; that is to say, “Socratically understood, though with distinctively Rousseauean revisions and additions” (16). Some readers will surely want to contest Cooper’s assimilation of Rousseau to the Socratic tradition. But all will benefit from his close and, yes, careful engagement with Rousseau’s Reveries.
