Mark Kremer immediately claims our attention in his exploration of Rousseau's novel Julie, or The New Heloise by pointedly speaking at the outset of the defects of “modern civilization,” which have only worsened since Rousseau first excoriated them in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (vii–x). We proud moderns lead false, hypocritical, empty, indeed, nihilistic lives—in which we are good neither for ourselves nor for others. Regardless of rank or class, we are all “bourgeois,” that is, “nothing” (vii–ix, 1). Kremer argues that we need urgently to study Rousseau's novel in order to know ourselves. Julie shows Rousseau's profound understanding of our problems and of our sometimes merely inchoate longing to escape them. At the same time Kremer emphasizes Rousseau's general pessimism about such prospects, which he calls Rousseau's “romanticism”: “there is no going forward, but only a longing for the past, whether it be the ancient city, savage man, and, of course, the most attractive and realistic possibility for modern man—the romantic longing for love, marriage, and family” (vii). Perhaps there is at least a slim hope for a cure. To recover “the beauty and sweetness of life,” Rousseau appeals to sentiment, specifically romantic love (xv); the type of relationship forcibly denied to the original Heloise and Abelard and replaced in contemporary Paris by callous promiscuity (xiii, 51).

Owing to the sacrifices made on its behalf, love is elevated to sublime heights in the story of Julie and St. Preux (78–79). These sacrifices render every tribulation or setback more touching. They are in fact tests the lovers impose on themselves in order to prove their worthiness to be loved, while always standing in some expectation of a reward (77, 80–81). Their nobility and virtue transform the pair, who sublimate their sexual desire to some extent without wishing to escape it. According to Kremer, Julie replaces Socrates as the teacher of eros (xiv–xvi, 102; cf. xiv). Under her guidance reason and religion are pressed into the service of love and marriage. Kremer also calls the lovers Rousseau's Adam and Eve: “Romanticism is a sensualized version of man's fall and redemption” (85). Kremer treats Rousseau's hugely influential novel as the true origin or “fountainhead” of romanticism (xvi, 1–2). Generations of readers have been drawn along with the lovers by the sweet hope to witness their happiness.

In the letters comprising the novel, Rousseau presents a “spectrum” of archetypical communities. Taken together the various communities display the human possibilities and thus adumbrate “the whole” (9, 11–12). Paris, as observed by St. Preux, represents the apex of cosmopolitanism, reason, and polish; because women rule there, Rousseau calls it a “gynaecocracy” (18). Vevey, Julie's hometown, shows us patriarchy and piety. The Upper Valais region of the Alps represents nature or at least early society; mores there are coarse, crude, and uncultured (35–36). Geneva, cited briefly (37), offers a pale replica of ancient civic virtue, but also lively politics and commerce. Kremer takes us through the particular strengths and deficiencies of each society, elaborating at greatest length what he says is essentially Rousseau's own critique of the effects of the Enlightenment and modern science, that is, Lockean society (12–35). St. Preux's mocking observations about Paris (and Parisian women) are lively and useful, but it would be helpful if Kremer explained at the outset St. Preux's presence in the city (see 74).

Rousseau's own alternative to modern society is Clarens, the community founded by Julie herself, or in which she stands at the center. As shown by Kremer in the second chapter, Julie reforms the old modes and orders and invents new ones (69). “Clarens is meant to be a beautiful harmony between nature, reason, and piety. … Authority there does not stifle reason and nature; reason has not dissolved human attachments and duty; and nature has not been left untutored, without reflection on the whole or appreciation of beauty. Clarens is meant to be an example of the good society where there is nothing lacking to human happiness” (86). The “rural aristocracy” is, Kremer says, a sort of utopia for private life (xi; cf. 57).

Kremer concludes that in truth Rousseau's beautiful alternative will not work to effect the reconciliation of nature and society. Julie's fall from virtue is meant to be redeemed by her sincere renunciation of St. Preux in favor of life as a wife and mother; she marries a man to whom she felt duty bound. At the end of her life, however, she confesses she could not conquer her love for St. Preux and virtually brings death on herself. Yet by the presence of a reformed religion that teaches trust in divine goodness, hope is never completely dashed for the lovers. Julie looks forward to uniting with St. Preux forever in the afterlife. Imagination projects into the future the happiness they sacrificed on earth (79). A further obstacle to success, in Kremer's view, is the fact that “the dual aspects of sexuality”— intercourse and procreation—divide our souls: love seeks pleasure through self-effacing union and marriage seeks, through children, preservation or personal immortality (97–99). Kremer's ultimate quarrel with Rousseau's overall project involves the mistake at its foundation, namely, the materialism of modern science that Rousseau embraces and, consequently, the atomization of all beings. With “body … at the center of his thought,” all communities are held together only by imagined, imaginary links (xi, 74). Much more than Hobbes or Locke, Kremer says Rousseau thought through the implications of modern science for human life (3–5). In addition he worked on sublimating natural impulses into love and used art to beautify bare nature, but he could not save the reductive starting premises from themselves. In the end Julie is not a real substitute for Socrates, and Lockean freedom is not a real substitute for Aristotle's view of human sociality. The problem is modern political philosophy altogether (xvii, 101).

Along with insightful comparisons of the several communities the novel depicts, Kremer presents vivid and astute portraits of all the main characters and their relationships to each other. He also brings deftly to light the many intricate turns in the lovers’ sentiments, tracking with Rousseau's “genealogy” of love (76). These lucid psychological profiles arise organically from and maintain close contact with the letters exchanged. Kremer is surely right that Rousseau insists on the necessity of comparative study in the pursuit of truth. I would only add that this enterprise provides one reason Rousseau is not a wholesale critic of big cities, but is instead deeply indebted to them (12; Emile, trans. Allan Bloom [University Press of New England, 2010], 514).

Some of Kremer's ample comparisons take us rather far afield and tend toward conclusions that are abstract or schematic and, in any case, go beyond the scope of his book. To establish philosophic contexts and literary resonances, Kremer may try to encompass too much. At times, he hastens too quickly from the texts in order to draw the moral.

I would like to have seen some comparisons to the Emile, the work closest to Julie as Rousseau's other experiment to reconcile nature and society by means of love and marriage. Even if briefly, it would be helpful to juxtapose Emile's debut into society in book IV of the Emile with St. Preux's and to account for differences; or to compare the circumstances under which each protagonist forgoes a great pleasure in order to do a good deed (see 83–84). I think as well that it would be good to incorporate something from the “Conversation on Novels” with which Rousseau begins Julie as containing clues to his intentions.

Rousseau says that the effect of a tragedy on the audience is independent of its ending. Kremer tells us that, failing to understand this effect, the Abbé Prévost's high-minded novel celebrating virtue actually draws people toward a very different conclusion, luring them to love (39). We might say the same about Julie. The sweetness of the fall and the intricate history of the lovers may, in other words, linger with the reader more intensely than the redemption. If that is the case, readers are more likely to become hostile to public institutions that refuse to treat marriage as a “natural consequence” of love, making us side with Lord Edward Bomston in the novel and also with Jane Austen (see xi, 52, 57–59, 94).

In his book, Kremer admirably places front and center the true seriousness and scope of Rousseau's reflections. Rousseau draws us toward a confrontation with the human situation. He serves as a “touchstone” (26) to counteract the self-forgetting of liberal democracy; he reminds us of the divine in ourselves. Rather than solutions Rousseau gives us fundamental problems to contemplate (100–101). For its valuable insights and erudition, Kremer's book makes a good companion to the study of Julie and of Rousseau more generally.