Steven Smith's illuminating and instructive book is above all a “liberal” work—liberal in the sense of being intellectually “generous” as well as broadly committed to understanding and sustaining the modern liberal project.

Steven Smith is less concerned with defining modernity precisely—if such a thing is even possible—than with writing its biography, with emphasis on the curious self-critique that, on his account, has alternately plagued and enriched it, almost from the start. However and whenever modernity begins (be it with Machiavelli, or the discovery of new lands, or with Galilean and Newtonian science, or the invention of the printing press), by the late 1600s a serious debate was already underway as to the relative merits of the modern and ancient authors, a debate repeated, in an arguably deeper and philosophically more radical way, by Rousseau and the twin movements of late- and counter-Enlightenment that he willy-nilly set in motion. Smith's book is less a history of modernity than of a certain modern human type: less a treatise than a Bildungsroman, in the manner of Goethe's Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, or more pertinently, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. And it is thus especially fitting that the book not only ends with an analysis of two late modern novels—themselves exemplary explorations of the bourgeois mind—but takes its primary bearings (as I read Smith) from the political and moral problematic that lies embedded in the philosophic triumvirate of late modernity: Kant, Hegel, and Rousseau.

Smith's central insight is the duality of discontent that shadows modern progressive optimism, and the mind it is at once shaped by and in turn seeks to shape: from Hobbesian “restlessness” and Lockean “unease” to the “inquietude” of Tocqueville. But it is in Rousseau, above all, that this discontent assumes a genuinely radical form: a questioning of the value, from a rational point of view, of the progress of reason as it had been understood from Bacon forward. To be sure, an earlier form of critique from the side of religious orthodoxy and premodern philosophy had never entirely disappeared (and on some influential accounts remained unrefuted on the merits). This was so not least in Germany, where Calvinist and Lutheran neo-Scholasticism retained their stronghold well into the eighteenth century. But the singular novelty of Rousseau's protest lay in taking on the Enlightenment (and modernity as it had heretofore understood itself) not by attacking it in the name of God, or the authority of Aristotle, but by embracing freedom as its core premise. As a result, reason itself undergoes a profound if subtle change. The reason that earlier moderns had treated as a tool of the passions henceforth takes both a lower and a higher form, the first merely instrumental, and easily corrupted, the latter the expression of a higher and intrinsically wholesome “active freedom.” With Rousseau human freedom, which earlier moderns took for granted but treated as a mere means, becomes an end in itself: the core constituent of human happiness and dignity, a core destroyed by the endless quest for power after power and gnawing unease that earlier moderns cheerfully promoted.

Rousseau's own conclusion was one of great social (if not individual) pessimism, though he held out hope that in a few places at least something might yet be salvaged civically of the freedom that was our native birthright, if in the partly “denatured” and parochial shape of small nation-states such as Poland and Corsica. Smith paints an exceptionally illuminating account of Rousseau's depiction of such societies, and of the appeal of that depiction.

And yet the question inevitably arises: given that profound social pessimism, which by Kant's own lights bordered on “misanthropy,” how is it that Rousseau also served as the crucial regent that “turned Kant around” and inspired Hegel to reinvent and glorify the bourgeois mind? How is it that Rousseau inspired both the late Enlightenment of Kant and Hegel and the Counter-Enlightenment of Herder and Jacobi along with other, later goads and critics of the bourgeois mind in all its forms?

In response to this implicit question, Smith stresses Kant's expansion of the general will beyond the narrow and parochial boundaries to which Rousseau had himself confined it. And yet Kant may be less optimistic than he first appears, at least judging from the gallows humor that haunts his famous essay Toward Perpetual Peace from beginning to the end. If Kant offers hope that progress toward world peace is not an unfounded fantasy, it is something in the order of a hope against hope, and with war “constantly threatening to break out,” as Virgil says, “with gnashing teeth.”

By the same token, Kant is a greater defender of the nation-state in its cultural particularity, and a greater believer in diversity of national character and the importance of national civic education, than his reputation might suggest. Not all individuals or peoples, on his account, are equally capable of republican self-government or what Kant calls “active citizenship.” And he goes so far as to suggest that the future progress of the human race may be limited to Europe.

In short, both Kant's optimism and his universalism may be more haunted by ambivalence—and thus itself exemplify Smith's basic thesis even more powerfully and poignantly—than Smith allows.

Turning now to Smith's rich and compelling account of Hegel, whose notoriously demanding argument Smith somehow manages to make clear—even luminously so. Hegel, as he sees it, is the “preeminent analys[t] of the modern bourgeois world,” whose philosophy is at once “the completion and perfection of the bourgeois experience in all its manifest aspects—political, moral, theological, and aesthetic,” and who at the same time “prepared the ground” for radical critique of the world that he defended.

The basis of that critique in its most familiar form—Marx and Marxism—was the growing problem of a dispossessed urban proletariat or “rabble” that even Hegel feared might be intractable. What Hegel saw and analyzed better than anyone was not merely the “working poor” but, as Smith puts it, “a distinctively modern pathology with which we are now only too familiar”: a class “within civil society that is either unable or unwilling to work for a living” and yet “demands subsistence as its right,” despite the fact that it is work and work alone that provides members of the bourgeois world with the honor and dignity from which rights ultimately flow.

And yet, as Smith's analysis suggests, the deeper source of that critique stems from a fundamentally Rousseauian insight into the emptiness of rights, as Kant already knew, not grounded in a substantive account of human dignity: an answer to the question of why—in the name of what worthy human good—rights should be respected.

Both Kant and Hegel, one might say, internalized the Rousseauian critique of the early modern bourgeois world as elucidated and defended by Locke and others. In so doing they both deepened and improved that world—making it spiritually more resonant and politically more resilient—but also introduced new grounds of weakness (an excessive moral purism and formalism on the one hand, and an accelerating depoliticization and dependence on administration on the other). Not least, as Smith himself stresses, they opened the door to a reductive historicism that rendered all moral and political claims inherently suspect. Finally, they too may have failed to address the traditional religious claims, which today seem to represent modernity's most challenging “unfinished business.”

There is an additional irony to which Smith's book draws extremely instructive attention: Rousseau's own dark, and not always sufficiently appreciated, role in sparking the wave of liberal enthusiasm so much at odds with his deeper insights and personal temperament; for Rousseau did not unqualifiedly restrict his famous doctrine of the general will to small, homogeneous communities (like Sparta, or Geneva), but served it up, in a full-blown universal form, to the eponymous Emile, from which Kant drew direct inspiration. The “romance” of Emile, Rousseau's own common citizen of the world, and Sophie, his venerated and at the same time altogether ordinary companion—that “romance,” Rousseau strikingly declares in book 4, “ought to be the history of our species.”

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Kant and others took up the challenge with a series of “ideal” histories of the human race—novels, if you will—that could be, or were in the process of being, realized, be they optimistic or dystopian. So construed, Rousseau belongs as much to the first side of the ledger (modernity ascendant) as to the second (modernity in crisis).

And all of this this leaves me wondering where, in Smith's view, the problem with modernity ultimately lies. Is our perpetual bourgeois “remorse” in fact “a good thing”—as he states in closing—and if so, why? Or might this not depend (and this not least in this postelection year) on where it leads.