Can relationships with others make us whole? John Warner engages this question as if Rousseau had posed it to himself. He concludes that Rousseau failed to provide a satisfactory positive answer. Toward this conclusion, Warner sketches a “theory of human relations” and attributes it to Rousseau (Chap. 1), considers the “psychic foundations of Rousseau’s project” in sexual desire (Chap. 2) and pity (Chap. 3), and derives an account of both “expansive moral longings” and limits that inhere in them. This dialectic maps “forms of association”—sexual relations (Chaps. 4 and 5), friendship (Chap. 6), politics (Chaps. 7 and 8)—that “fail to satisfy the requirements of wholeness” and are “tragic” because they “cannot establish a stable harmony between man and his environment” or “reconcile the demands” of privacy with citizenship. The “insolubility of the problems posed by the stubbornness of self-love” (amour propre) is “the central theme of the book as a whole” (p. 4).

Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations offers itself more as a reflection on general problems of human existence than as a political or historical analysis of Rousseau’s thought. As Warner writes in the Prologue (pp. 2–4), the book “is animated by two very basic, but very important, questions: (1) what do we want out of our relationships? and (2) can we get what we are after?” In this light, he avers that “I am increasingly persuaded that much of his considerable value as a thinker consists in the way he confronts, enriches, and problematizes these central matters.” Warner describes the general perspective he draws from Rousseau as “skeptical or tragic”: “In my survey of romantic love, friendship, and the political or civil association, I shall be at pains to show how each form of association, whether considered individually or in sum, systematically fails to solve the problem of ‘dividedness’ that I take to be located at the center of Rousseau’s thought. . . . Rousseau’s moral universe is a fragmented and unforgiving place—it is full of costly trade-offs, difficult choices, and frustrated expectations.”

Tracing these familiar issues, the book contains thought-provoking passages and demonstrates a sensitivity to the complexity of human personality and interconnection, that is, dynamic facts that have long pointed readers to Rousseau. Nonetheless, the work has some important problems of method and content. Arguments that depend on “close reading” are backed with only English translations. Abdicating French, Warner offers ideas disconnected from Rousseau’s original. Denying realities of language this way erodes critical foundations of scholarship. A sparse bibliography and scant 36 endnotes ignore essential conditions for the collaborative production of valid knowledge. The author does not provide adequate critical tools for colleagues who might suspect that claims at the heart of the book are without warrant.

I want to be clear that Warner shares an influential scholarly position—Laurence D. Cooper is a typical example—when he insists that “wholeness” is the highest good for Rousseau and that it is a fundamental metric throughout Rousseau’s work (p. 9). For instance, the failure of friendship is said to be that it “console[s] us in our dividedness, but cannot return us to wholeness” (p. 161). A “language of dividedness” (pp. 17, 2–13) is supposed to be Rousseau’s “way of talking about . . . the lack of a principle of identity that can resolve [such] conflicts,” connecting “wholeness” to a need for “regulative principles that govern our choices” (p. 172).

Thus, the book provokes this important question: Is there a “language of dividedness” with this psychological valence in what Rousseau actually wrote? It is not in Discourse on Inequality, nor in Social Contract where “division” is a geometrical term and eventually applied to social structure, nor in Emile where usage before Book 4 is scientific, later characterizing human plurality and political dissension. Confessions is in my view a book largely irrelevant to Rousseau’s epoch-making social theory of politics but, even there, “division” barely appears.

On this issue many authors turn to an image of “will” (volonté). Perhaps this is the marker of “wholeness” or “unity” in the person? I would say emphatically no. This equivalence only takes hold in the nineteenth century. It reaches full expression in “volontarists” like Ferdinand Tönnies and Wilhelm Wundt. “General will” may be a measure of polity; even so it remains relative to differences of association or overlapping roles (e.g., Social Contract 3.2)—it is thus not “wholeness.”

Rather, Rousseau aligns with a composite psychology theorized by Aristotle in the Rhetoric; characteristic of Renaissance personality as described by Agnes Heller, Stephen Greenblatt, and others; promulgated in the “passion treatise” tradition; and reemergent in contemporary theories of distributed emotions and cognition like those of Paul Dumouchel and Edwin Hutchins. Rousseau sees no agent with undivided motives (like homo economicus, although even Max Weber presented “him” as ambivalent). Rather, from early on, Rousseau is attuned to heteronomy and incompleteness. If, as Warner says, it depends on “regulative principles,” then personal wholeness is external and misnamed. Inherently interdependent citizenship likewise forecloses wholeness. Such issues plagued Kant. They were reconfigured by Hegel. They were not primary concerns for Rousseau.

Yet appeal to a criterion of wholeness is commonplace, and readers should ask: “Why?” Familiar gestures to Plato are uninformative. More pertinent is emergence of nineteenth-century images of “the self” that became increasingly prevalent in the twentieth. Scholars like Charles Taylor and Jerrold Seigel perhaps see a root for this in Rousseau’s influential writings.

A major gap remains, however. Contrary voices like Tracy Strong show that Rousseau is “not a theorist of the unified self.” Indeed, Hegel, the greatest follower of Rousseau to be concerned with “wholeness,” theorizes that only repeated failures of personal wholeness achieve an infamously impersonal “totality” in the dialectical emergence of der Geist.

Aspiration to wholeness comes later, in the nineteenth century, within thick cultural tapestries connecting Marx’s alienation with Tönnies’s fusional Gemeinschaft, allowing republican concerns with domination to be reconfigured by theorists like Lukács as problems of subjectivity. While Jacob Burkhardt fantasized about “the perfecting of the individual” and “the increase in the number of complete men during the fifteenth century,” Richard Wagner yearned for wholeness in works like Tristan und Isolde. It is relevant that the Positivism of jurists like John Austin was built, as John Dewey remarked, against Rousseau. This created caricatures that authorized influential early twentieth-century American interpreters like Irving Babbitt to say—incorrectly—“the Rousseauist wants unity without reality.”

Close reading of Rousseau himself reveals conceptual scenes with little space for personal wholeness, in which evolution of socially constructed needs eo ipso distributes self-interest across fields of relationships and requires the emergence of a “self-interest properly understood” that Tocqueville would later articulate. Absent further evidence to the contrary, wholeness criteria must appear today as errant offspring of the 1960s, the 1950s, or the wider twentieth century in famous works by authors like Marshal Berman, Lester Crocker, and J. L. Talmon. Hidden behind this extravagant nineteenth-century topos of whole/part, Rousseau’s innovative eighteenth-century dispositifs of complexity, society, and citizenship remain obscure for us.

Warner’s central category “human relations” (HR) also appears without warrant. Rousseau does not deploy this expression. Can he then have a “theory of HR”? Perhaps. But Warner does not adequately support such an extrapolation from Rousseau’s writings. Could he?

Jean Nicot’s dictionary of 1606 shows that the French word relation means récit or narration. By 1694, the first edition of the authoritative Académie dictionary joined relation to logic in the sense of a “rapport of one thing to another.” In 1762—the moment of Rousseau’s main publications—the fourth edition of the Académie dictionary tells us that “relation in terms of Philosophy signifies the rapport that is between two persons or two things that cannot be conceived one without the other.” (In the eighteenth century, this does not cover social or psychological experience.) The same tack is taken in the Encyclopédie, in Rousseau’s own Dictionnaire de musique, and elsewhere.

The synonym rapport “signifies convenance,” or how things fit together. This fitting together happens primarily between persons and things or in situating persons in circumstances. It rarely occurs between persons.

Printed “reports” can be relations or rapports, but the relationship they denote cannot be a “thing.” Between persons—that is, plausibly, as HR—each instance of relations has a name like “master” or “vassal” that today we might understand as “social roles” in the vocabulary advanced by G. H. Mead or Robert K. Merton. However, strictly speaking, “roles,” in Durkheim’s sense of “social facts,” do not exist in early modernity. That is because—as I have shown elsewhere—this distinctively sociological understanding of the “non-contractual basis of contract” only becomes possible with Rousseau.

In its historical context, with the word relation rare and the synonym rapports primarily used as a term of logic applied to connections to or among things, Rousseau’s express language cannot sustain the person-to-person imaginary necessary for “a theory of HR” as Warner understands it. No corrective argument is provided.

There could be constructive lines of theory here. The terms relations and rapports could be woven more deeply into inquiry concerning our relations-to-persons by starting from where those terms already apply in relations-to-things. This would not, however, make for a convincing reading of Rousseau. His powerful image of a world of persons and things comes to us instead in analytically charged usage of the word dépendance. Whereas for Rousseau even human relationships in general must always have a variety of distinguishable valences, the universalizing language of HR presents itself as univocal, neutral, and comprehensive (this corresponds to its proximate roots in twentieth-century industrial Taylorism and Cold War social psychology).

Consider this line from the Encyclopédie: “Just as every idea is susceptible to an infinity of relations, one may find in the same man relations of father, brother, son, husband, [etc.]” (vol. 14, p. 62). Shifting from logic to social existence, this image of relations shows how one term can cover much more than one thing. In a way typical of the eighteen century, the author reaches from copious exemplarity toward an encompassing generality. However, vast generalizations can at the same time coproduce a tacit or explicit narrowing of focus (e.g., nineteenth-century twinned topoi state/individual, as foreshadowed in The Federalist). A “theory of HR” that reduces social facts to unmediated connections between empirical persons implies a methodological individualism.

This is how it goes for Warner. His subtle relational dialectics frequently take recourse to such an implied individualism. Although the word “social” is sometimes brought forward (pp. 85, 102, 187, 203 inter alia) to articulate HR, the two are not synonymous. Confusing them obscures a major thrust of this book. Bluntly stated, informed readers will find here a familiar attempt to bypass the sociological perspective while seeming to embrace it. Warner’s often illuminating reading of Rousseau is bogged down by this.

It is worth emphasizing that by “sociological perspective” I mean intellectual practices that stem from Rousseau himself. For, even if relations and rapports are scarce in Rousseau’s texts, he often performs exceedingly fussy elaborations of companion terms like association, cité, peuple, and so on. His purpose is neither proliferation of theoretical terms nor generalization in the mood of the philosophes. He aims to identify discernible structures (later to be categorized as “social facts”) that inhere even in the “infinity of relations” among human beings. This is an original and durable meaning of what the science of society is about.

As a matter of historical fact, discourses of human relations that emerge in the twentieth century are antagonistic to all of this. It is striking that Warner chose not to address connotations that his fundamental category might have for his readers. With respect to Rousseau, however, this much is clear: where something like methodological individualism might have seemed warranted to his contemporaries, Rousseau warned powerfully against it.

Warner is not wrong to insist that the specific, the interactional, and the informal are of fundamental importance for Rousseau. The difficulty is that where Warner finds these characteristic of HR, Rousseau does not. This is a difference between philosophy and sociology, and between barely compatible views of politics. Political theory must go beyond its object. So, it can be important to ask, What if Rousseau is wrong? Does the framework of “human relations” offer a better line of interpretation for Rousseau’s own work? Would this interpolation of Rousseau lead toward improvements in political science over the classical sociology that stems from the same root?

My narrow return here to the original text is not intended to impose a contextualist fantasy upon the author’s effort. Nonetheless, an inexorable problem of anachronism in reading old books comes before us. The critical reader must bring horizons of past and present together. But how? Like Gadamer? Like Benjamin? Like Hume? Like Marx? The discipline of professional political science demands that its practitioner’s choices where time meets time and place meets place be supported with much more explicit justification than is found in this book.

Warner has written an interesting book on Rousseau. He has sought to engage Rousseau as an interlocutor relevant to the contemporary problems that interest him. I suspect that this way of assimilating Rousseau to our current interests leads too much away from politics. I also doubt that our current discourse of “human relations” can be convincingly assimilated into Rousseau’s political theory. Nonetheless, it is precisely such tensions that I think warrant our attention. My objections here are intended as a starting point for scholars interested in Rousseau and his current relevance, who will certainly benefit, as I did, from close engagement with this work.