In Rousseau’s Politics of Taste, Jared Holley illuminates Rousseau’s philosophical system by interpreting it as a manifestation of his commitment to an “Epicureanism of reason” (4). In doing so, Holley recovers an underappreciated metaphor: for Rousseau, taste provides “spectacles to reason” and serves as “the microscope of judgment” (5). While Holley’s careful contextualist and exegetical work primarily addresses scholarly debates about Rousseau’s philosophy, it also invites broader engagement, particularly regarding political judgment and autonomy. Given the role of eighteenth-century conceptions of taste in shaping the modern project, especially the modern racial system, this invitation seems especially important.

What is likely to prove most interesting for theorists of political judgment, is the extent to which Rousseau’s concept of taste manages to be both more democratic and less pluralistic than may meet the eye. Holley emphasizes the former, democratic elements, to challenge Judith Shklar’s tragic reading of Rousseau as well as Frederick Neuhouser’s transcendental interpretation (7). What Holley then appears to leave understated is the tragic way in which Rousseau’s call to slow down our decadence seems so susceptible to the very modern maladies he worried about, including the threat of aesthetic conformity and populist tyranny.

To illuminate Rousseau’s temperate Epicureanism, Holley makes distinct contributions from both contextualist (Chapters 2–3) and exegetical angles (Chapters 4–6). Among the book’s many valuable archival insights is a reading of Rousseau’s marginalia in his copies of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo. Here Rousseau appears to intentionally skip over Plato’s definition of moderation in Republic, in favor of the view of “temperance through sensuality” he finds in Phaedo (22–23). On this basis, Holley convincingly argues that Rousseau rejects conceptions of temperance that seek to extirpate passions entirely, instead favoring a refined Epicureanism that takes pleasure in simple goods rather than chasing vulgar satisfactions. This “Epicureanism of reason” is embodied in the figure of Julie, whose self-command enables her to “restrain her enjoyment of sensual pleasure” so that, “by resuming it later,” she is able “to ‘enjoy it twice’” (23). By esteeming what is simple and internal, she appears to avoid dependence on external objects.

This notion of temperate Epicurean taste mediates between sentiment and reason in ways that parallel contemporary interest in the aesthetic dimensions of political judgment. For instance, critics of deliberative democracy such as Linda Zerilli have sought theories of judgment that might push back on overly rationalistic approaches to politics. Zerilli turns to Arendt’s adaptation of Kantian aesthetic judgment, which is not “‘rule governed’ in the sense of applying universal standards of truth or reason” (164). Rousseau also analogizes aesthetic and political judgment, but his analogy is not concerned with subjective freedom from universal rules (164). Rather, he is interested in how a “general taste” might emerge from a well-ordered public and function as a standard for correcting individual tastes.

As Holley presents it, Rousseau’s “general taste” is a socialized but non-transcendent standard—emerging from the aggregation of independently formed individual judgments, rather than from elite arbiters. This is crucial to Holley’s claim that Rousseau’s aesthetic politics is more democratic than critics have assumed. Understandably, critics have tended to read Rousseau’s turn to censorship in the Social Contract as an anti-democratic reliance on elite critics. However, Holley argues that this form of censorship is much more democratic than it seems because it must be “derived from private judgements” (147). Under the right conditions, if everyone is judging independent of the pulls of fashion, Rousseau says: “‘I see no other means of ending the dispute than that of counting the votes’” (148). Yet while Rousseau addresses some impediments to independent judgment, others remain largely unexamined.

If the “general taste” is meant to emerge from the democratic interplay of aesthetic judgment, then its normative power must come from a genuinely plural and dialogic process. However, Rousseau’s literary and autobiographical examples (Julie, Sophie, Thérèse) often rest on both acknowledged and unacknowledged constraints. Holley points out that, despite his “repeatedly effacing the presence of his domestic partner Thérèse Levaseur and her mother,” Rousseau was treating their company as part of a shared solitude in which “‘no image of servitude and dependence disturbed the benevolence that united us all’” (194). Yet within this “‘little household’” (194) there is no room for meaningful back and forth. As critics such as Susan Okin have long noted, without plural voices in the household to meaningfully dispute about the presence or absence of dependence, it seems unlikely that the “general taste” it gives shape to will be meaningfully “comparative and intersubjective” (148).

While Holley notes Rousseau’s opposition to corrupt luxury and theatrical artifice, he gives less attention to how appeals to “real voluptuousness” (150) or “the agreeable in itself” (153) risk naturalizing highly specific forms of embodiment. Here, returning to Shklar’s tragic Rousseau underscores the persistent obstacles to the democratic aspirations Holley identifies. Holley argues that Rousseau’s view of taste is a realistic ideal (10). Appreciating that Rousseau’s Epicureanism is more realistic than a Stoic or Hedonist alternative, this is a potentially misleading framework. It is realistic in the sense that Rousseau (who rejects natural sociability) hopes we moderns might slow down our decadence by attuning ourselves to our sensations and allowing the interplay of sentiment and reason to aid us in preferring what is internal. However, this Epicurean practice is not “realistic” in the sense of meaningfully addressing non-ideal impediments to independent judgment (to use Charles Mills’s emphasis on non-ideal ideal theory). It misleadingly seems worried about some naturalized tastes, but not others. In this sense, Holley quite successfully illuminates Rousseau’s paradoxes in a way that is perhaps more tragic than he lets on.