Rousseau's life and thought are notoriously rife with tension and have long polarized readers into opposed camps. Matthew Mendham examines these tensions as well as the varied responses they have inspired in his eminently sensible and meticulously researched Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau, which contains a sustained engagement with what Mendham calls “the Jean-Jacques problem.” This broad problematic motivates an exploration of conflicts that exist within Rousseau's ideas as well as between his ideas and his conduct, and provides an organizing principle for a work that straddles the divide between biography and study of ideas.

Mendham covers an impressive amount of textual and historical ground and displays near encyclopedic knowledge of the secondary scholarship as he examines many of the polarities that have long vexed Rousseau's readers (citizen or hermit? revolutionary or reactionary? friend of virtue or solitary walker?). His objective in tracing these familiar polarities is to develop a “prioritarian” reading which seeks to recognize the continuity of Rousseau's broad philosophical agenda without imposing a false coherence on his varied oeuvre or his evolving self-understanding. Mendham presses this general case by revealing how Rousseau's own conception of his authorial mission evolved with his personal circumstances and how both the substance and the form of his work were influenced by the conditions in which he found himself. In arguing thus, Mendham seeks to correct “anti-developmental” treatments of Rousseau which emphasize the continuity of his work rather than its evolution (10). He thus finds himself in dialogue with the “veiled antinomian” (i.e., Straussian) and “flawed moralist” (i.e., Kantian) interpretations, both of which are said to shortchange Rousseau by “reduc[ing] the dialectical tension between goodness and virtue to a consistent philosophical or practical intention” (157).

In the course of building this general argument Mendham perceptively calls attention to the limitations of other readings and helpfully identifies some of the distortions they involve. But the alternative proposal he offers perhaps engages in the very oversimplifications against which he warns, for while Mendham rightly argues that Rousseau's complex and evolving intentions cannot be reduced to a unitary standard, he does not demonstrate that it can be reduced to a dialectical relationship between two standards. Ultimately, the suggestion that Rousseau is a “dialectical” thinker is not meaningfully borne out by the book's narrative, which, far from showing that the “Jean-Jacques problem” has a dialectical structure, instead focuses on how Rousseau's contingent personal circumstances affected his understanding both of himself and of his work.

Mendham's book differs markedly, and deliberately, from conventional scholarship on Rousseau in its prioritization of biographical over “normative” questions—he “plead[s] guilty to the charge of biographical distraction” (15). Thus although the book is intended to serve both as an intellectual biography and as a “prolegomenon to the advanced study of Rousseau,” its virtues come into view in this former capacity (15). Mendham integrates several neglected primary sources—the untranslated correspondence, for instance—into his argument, thus providing fresh and sympathetic insight into the challenges Rousseau faced in seeking to bring his life into correspondence with his philosophical principles. In so doing, Mendham displays extraordinary knowledge of the secondary literature. He expertly navigates the extensive, and treacherous, terrain of Rousseau studies and provides knowledgeable and even-handed criticism of alternative approaches in the course of developing his own argument. Such virtues are especially conspicuous in chapter 4 (“A Lover of Peace or a Vile Insurgent?”), which explores Rousseau's forays into Genevan politics and uncovers a “democratic and activist” moment which, though of clear significance to Rousseau's contemporaries, has been relatively neglected by contemporary scholars. This chapter is the best in the book, managing to highlight not only the complex linkages between Rousseau's life and work but also the profound difficulty of the problem with which all philosophers must grapple when their thought irrupts into the world. Mendham is to be credited with tracing the various forms that this problem took in Rousseau's own life, and scholars of Rousseau's work will benefit from close attention to this chapter in particular.

Mendham's book also differs from typical academic monographs in the attention it gives to alternative interpretations. It is a deeply and even intrinsically dialogic work, interrogating both Rousseau and his readers in the course of articulating its own argument. Indeed, there is a sense in which his book is as much about the Rousseau literature as about Rousseau himself. I have already noted that this approach has much to recommend it, but so too does it occasionally obscure rather than highlight the originality of Mendham's own reading. His substantive positions are sometimes difficult to nail down because they are defined relative to other views (e.g., as a mean between extremes X and Y), with the effect that one occasionally has a better sense of what he is not arguing than what he is. Thus his attentiveness to and knowledge of the secondary literature can sometimes hide what they are meant to disclose.

But these quibbles are hardly a reason not to engage with Mendham's well-informed and carefully researched book, which effectively shows that Rousseau can be understood to have constructed his thought in terms of polarities not in order to embrace one or the other so much as to explore the space between them.