Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the rare philosophers who is as renowned for his life as his writings. There is good reason for this. Due to the fact that he was a compulsive autobiographer, writing no less than three accounts of his life, scholars know the intimate and indeed perverse details of his life. Rousseau was not afraid to let the world backstage, despite the fact that he was perfectly aware that he was, to put it mildly, odd. He opens his primary autobiography, The Confessions, by claiming that God broke the mold when he created him. Rousseau’s transparency has not served him well, as scholars disparage his life as much as they praise his writings. Some scholars view his penchant to write about himself as evidence of his narcissism. Others focus on his all too obvious hypocrisies, some of which are almost too spectacular to believe.

In his carefully argued and extraordinarily well-researched book, Matthew Mendham seeks to determine whether Rousseau is the misanthrope and hypocrite of which he is often accused. That is, Mendham contemplates a solution to what he terms “the Jean-Jacques problem” and attempts to ascertain whether there are principled reasons justifying Rousseau’s most objectionable behavior. The discussion is admirably fair-minded and sensible. Mendham patiently examines a variety of evidence to identify and shed light on Rousseau’s behavior and motives, all the while probing to see if there is any way to relax the tension between Rousseau’s life and thought.

Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau identifies three charges of hypocrisy often made against Rousseau. The first, and most famous, is his decision to deposit the five children that he fathered with Thérèse Lavasseur in a foundling hospital. This deed proved highly embarrassing to Rousseau and has been frequently exploited by critics eager to ridicule and vilify him, especially his most famous ones such as Voltaire and Edmund Burke. On the surface, the critics are plainly right: Rousseau’s behavior is indefensible. Aside from the manifest hypocrisy—that a man who praised family life as a unique source of affection and authored the preeminent book on child-rearing in the eighteenth century refused to raise his own children—it is also an act of monstrous cruelty to his children, who were deprived of loving parents and faced a greatly increased risk of death. As Mendham reports, Rousseau was aware of the moral implications of his deed and crafted no less than 19 rationalizations of it throughout his life. Mendham dismisses many of these, which are largely exculpatory, as mere casuistry.

He thinks a few of Rousseau’s rationalizations of this act, however, are worth taking seriously. These ones are expiatory in nature and feature a remorseful Rousseau. In particular, from 1759 through 1770, Rousseau accepts responsibility for wronging his children and seeks to excuse himself, rather than minimize or defend his deeds. For example, he writes Emile to give back to children in general what he took from his own. He also commits himself to abstinence to ensure there would not be a sixth child sent to a foundling home. Furthermore, he claims that he made an innocent mistake; that is, he was only following Parisian conventions and let his intellect cloud the reasoning of his heart. Mendham’s final verdict on these rationales is mixed. On the one hand, Rousseau rarely makes a genuine confession in which he assumes full responsibility for his acts. Most of his rationales amount to little more than making excuses. On the other hand, Mendham directs his reader to appreciate Rousseau’s internal struggles and his attempts to construct a principled defense of his behavior. In this period of his life, Rousseau remained committed to virtue and goodness and sincerely tried to reconcile his life with his fateful decision to abandon his children. Mendham is more disappointed with Rousseau’s post-1770 behavior, which ratifies his earlier actions and proclaims that he would abandon his children if he had it to do all over again.

Rousseau’s second and third hypocrisies, which involve his defense of citizenship and his dedication to social duties, respectively, follow a similar trajectory. He struggles to recognize his flaws and then for a time makes a principled attempt to reduce the gap between his ideals and life. With regard to the second hypocrisy, Rousseau endeavors to reclaim his Genevan citizenship from 1754 through 1762. For a variety of not-so-persuasive reasons, however, he refuses to settle in Geneva and make good on his intention. Yet, as Mendham demonstrates, he constructs a model of “distant citizenship” in which he serves his homeland while living abroad. This is primarily achieved through his writings and letters. Although it is not altogether convincing, again there is an honest attempt to reconcile principle and practice. And again, Rousseau is unable to maintain a dedication to a compromised version of virtue. After finding himself directly involved in Genevan politics, Rousseau manages to alienate almost everyone and surrenders on civic virtue.

The third hypocrisy, Rousseau’s desire for friendship, ends the same way. Despite protestations against Diderot’s charge that only the man of solitude is wicked, he spends the last several years of his life as a social pariah and eventually ceases to attempt to reconcile his solitude with his principles. Again, Mendham’s Rousseau is a mixed bag. He is a tragic figure done in by the tensions between his own life and the moral principles that he so powerfully advocated. At times, he fights his flaws and attempts to recover some semblance of virtue. At the end of his life, however, he gives up entirely.

According to Mendham, scholarship on the relationship between Rousseau’s life and thought is as mixed as Rousseau’s rationalizations. He divides the scholarship into two camps (though he allows for mixed positions): Latitudinarians who bracket Rousseau’s flawed personal life from his political thought and Antinomians who hold that Rousseau’s solitude fulfills the promise of his political thought as defined by the primitive savages glorified in the Second Discourse. Mendham argues that both positions are right and wrong. The Latitudinarians fail to appreciate Rousseau’s commitment to natural goodness, whereas the Antinomians refuse to recognize Rousseau’s genuine commitment to virtue despite his vicious behavior. If Mendham’s consideration has a weakness, it is probably this attempt to split the difference between these two approaches. His narrative leans in favor of the Latitudinarian portrayal of Rousseau as a “flawed moralist.”

Even if this criticism is valid, however, Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau is a remarkable achievement. Mendham does for Rousseau what Rousseau could not do for himself: he humanizes him. Mendham cuts through three autobiographies and personal letters that protest too much and provides a compelling portrait of an imperfect and wounded man trying, at least for a period of his life, to live up to moral ideals of which he is not capable. Although Mendham does not resolve the “Jean-Jacques problem” or settle the disputes between Rousseau scholars, his contribution to our understanding of the enigmatic Genevan is considerable. This book merits scholarly attention.