Many of us feel we know Rousseau, perhaps better than we do any other modern political thinker. For this we have Rousseau himself to thank; his Confessions, though often opaque and perplexing, still give us a vivid sense of the person who wrote them—ardent, dramatic, petulant, grandiose. Anyone who has read Rousseau's own account of his life will surely be puzzled by the cool, muted tones Jonathan Marks uses to portray him: Marks's Rousseau is a sober, measured thinker who tempers his most radical ideas with a sharp awareness of human limitations. This portrait, so deliberately drawn, looks the way it does for several reasons.

First, Marks sets his reading of Rousseau against only a few other interpretations, although he is clearly aware of the much wider extent of interpretive work on him. In contrasting his reading of Rousseau primarily to Kantian and communitarian ones, Marks purposefully fashions his sober subject to address what he believes each of these groups of interpreters misses. Second, for as much as Marks works to set his reading of Rousseau apart from others, he is clearly working within an interpretive tradition himself. He acknowledges an especially deep debt to Allan Bloom (pp. vii, 156–57) and, like Bloom (Introduction to Emile or On Education, 1979), draws heavily on Emile to discern Rousseau's most considered views (pp. 38–51, 65–70, 113–17).

The core of Marks's contribution lies in his rejection of the Kantian reading of Rousseau, most closely associated in the twentieth century with Ernst Cassirer (Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, 1963, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1979, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1989), but also compatible with some more radical interpretations (e.g., Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary, 1994). Marks follows an interpretive path that begins with Rousseau's conception of nature, including his conceptions of the natural world and of our nature as humans; he maintains that Rousseau sees our moral and political development as an expression of our nature, rather than an overcoming of it, as his Kantian readers do. To make this point, Marks shows that what Rousseau calls our “nature,” though sometimes an original state untouched by time and circumstance, is also manifest in how he imagines people developing through their prepolitical interactions with their physical environment and with other people (pp. 23–33). What Rousseau discerns about people in these conditions informs his ideas about human happiness, as well as his sense of our inherent limitations. Most notably, Marks argues that Rousseau believes we are happiest when we are free to pursue “disharmonious” ends—both “solitary and social” ones (pp. 85–87). Rather than look for Rousseau's defining ideas in his grandest, most radical visions, Marks sees them instead in imperfect “middling states” (p. 54).

Could this Rousseau, so sober and cautious, be the same thinker who imagines political institutions changing human nature to make moral freedom possible or who enjoins his readers to think beyond our sense of our limits (Social Contract II vii; III xii)? More fundamentally, why should we accept that Marks's reading of Rousseau is better or truer than others? Marks poses a version of this question himself: “Why does my interpretation elevate some things that Rousseau says over others that I also concede he says?” (13). To answer these questions, Marks offers an analysis of what he calls Rousseau's rhetorical strategy. How one evaluates this book—that is, whether one sees it as offering a few specific insights or a viable, comprehensive interpretation—depends, I think, on how convincing one finds this analysis.

Several assumptions govern Marks's interpretive approach: Because Rousseau is “a careful writer,” Marks assumes that he is in control of everything he says and has consistent, considered views (p. 91). On the strength of these assumptions, Marks believes that he can clear up why Rousseau says things he does not mean, as well as why he sometimes fails to say what he does mean explicitly (p. 91). Additionally, Marks focuses on a “single feature that characterizes most of Rousseau's audiences—that they are either modern sophisticates or tempted by modern sophistication” (p. 92). It is within these parameters that he then argues that whenever Rousseau writes about nature as if it were purely beneficent and allowed us to live solitary lives, he does so only to disrupt his audience's prejudices against independence—not because he believes it (pp. 96–106). Conversely, Marks argues that Rousseau deliberately mutes what he really thinks about nature “because it would be of no use to most human beings and, if promulgated and vulgarized, of use to those pretenders to philosophy who would like to be kings or, at least, advisors to kings” (p. 112). That is, Rousseau anticipates that if his view that human beings have natural ends and limitations were “promulgated and vulgarized,” it would most likely be used to buttress illegitimate claims to political right—therefore, he chooses not to make it explicit.

Although Marks sounds a wary note at the beginning of this chapter about Straussian approaches that distinguish “between [what is addressed to] the philosophic few and the vulgar many,” he ends up employing just such an approach himself (pp. 90–91, 112). Leaving aside the question of why Rousseau would have been moved to divide the world this way in the first place, this approach summarily closes off some interpretive paths by stipulating what he thinks about his audience—and by assuming that he is simply too smart to be inconsistent. The rigid pattern into which Marks sometimes forces Rousseau's thought is all the more jarring because he also can be sensitive to the provisional and unresolved (pp. 116–17).

So why does Marks close what he closes, and yet leave some questions about Rousseau's thought open? His final chapter, “Rousseau and Charles Taylor,” suggests one possible answer. Having closed off the paths that lead toward a more politically radical reading of Rousseau, Marks uses his sober subject to argue against what he sees as the excesses of Taylor's defense of community. Marks begins by citing Taylor's concern that Rousseau's attachment to community may be excessive, only to turn the tables to show that this is really Taylor's problem instead (pp. 118–19, 138–40). This is more than a clever debating trick; Marks means it to serve what I believe is the ultimate aim of the book—to wrest Rousseau from radicals and to welcome him as a sober critic of dangerous modern fantasies, liberal and communitarian alike.