It is almost half a century since J. G. A. Pocock published The Machiavellian Moment and just over a quarter of a century since Philip Pettit’s Republicanism, which means that republican political thought has been prominent on the scholarly radar screen for quite a while. It is nevertheless striking that neither of these republicanisms has a great deal to do with or to say about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is often held to be one of the most important republican political philosophers. Pocock’s trajectory took him from Renaissance Italy via seventeenth-century England to Revolutionary America, largely by-passing eighteenth-century France and Switzerland. Pettit’s signature idea is an account of liberty as non-domination, which one might consider to be tolerably Rousseauist. Yet Pettit himself is not much interested in Rousseau, emphasizing a lack of fit with his own preferred version of republicanism: Rousseau is too much of a democrat and too much of a populist, with an absolutist account of sovereignty that is alien to the tradition of the mixed constitution (2). So Megan K. Dyer’s re-examination of Rousseau’s republicanism is curiously timely and thoroughly welcome in equal measure.

Dyer uses a distinctive method, namely, explicating Rousseau’s position through sustained juxtaposition with other writers. The first chapter features Leonardo Bruni (16–25), for example, the second considers Niccolò Machiavelli (51–66). One might have wanted a somewhat more sustained methodological discussion of just why these pairings were selected, and what each can and can’t be expected to achieve. Nevertheless, the compare-and-contrast exercises here show us how much more there is to the corpus of republican political thought than, say, liberty as non-domination. They also help to delineate Rousseau’s significant departures from some of his predecessors: Machiavelli is a theorist of the imperial republic, for example, in a way that Rousseau is not. One of the attractive features of this book is that it takes seriously Rousseau’s engagement with both Augustine (36–40) and later Augustinianism, here represented by Pierre Nicole (95–99), though these writers are not ostentatiously republican in anything like the manner of Bruni or Machiavelli. The contrast raises a conundrum: what might an Augustinian contribution be to the work of a book on republicanism?

The answer to this conundrum also illuminates why this study of Rousseau’s republican politics rests on a different textual foundation than that of other treatments of the same theme. Many of those who write about Rousseau’s republican politics pay particular attention to what he had to say about his native Geneva, or to texts like the “Letter to d’Alembert,” the Letters Written from the Mountain, or the Constitutional Project for Corsica, perhaps even the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which offer a more empirical, engaged discussion of politics than we find in the abstractions of The Social Contract or the conjectural history of the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Dyer does not follow such authors in this direction. Rather, texts like the so-called “Geneva Manuscript” (an early, unpublished draft of what became The Social Contract) or the Essay on the Origin of Languages (139–56) are prominent, in ways that we might not initially have anticipated. In significant part this is because Dyer focuses more on foundational issues in political theory than on the practical workings of republican institutions, such as popular festivals, that are familiar from other literature. And it is this concern with the issues that structure Rousseau’s political reflections that helps to explain why we find Augustine and Nicole appropriately baked into the architecture of this study.

Across the book’s five chapters—on “a republic of virtue” (the Bruni chapter), “well-ordered liberty” (Machiavelli), “true society” (Nicole, Montesquieu, the commercial republic), “common goods, limited conventions” (on how self-interested citizens might be oriented towards the common good), and how “every legitimate government is republican” (on the difficulty of having a government of laws rather than of men)—Dyer explores these foundational issues and seeks to offer a synthetic account. Rousseau was rhetorically committed to his various antinomies: between nature and artifice, particular and general, force and will, homme and citoyen, and so on. But Dyer seeks not so much to side firmly with one pole of an antinomy and reject the other as to argue that a carefully calibrated, well-tempered republican politics is able to stabilize a set of interlinked solutions to the dilemmas of the human condition, always contingently, and sometimes in a fairly fragile manner. On Dyer’s account, for example, “convention” turns out not to fall so heavily on the “artificial” side of the binary as one might have assumed (139–40).

This is, when all is said and done, a political theorist’s book. Historians might want more fine-grained attention to alternative republicanisms that were available in the eighteenth century, or to how Rousseau’s position might have changed over the course of his writing career; philosophers would welcome more strenuous conceptual analysis than we find here. I would have liked a more careful consideration of the kinds of commerce that Rousseau either presupposes or approves of. But in contrast to so much recent political-theoretical Rousseau scholarship, this is a properly fresh study, one that declines to tread closely in the footsteps of any particular tradition of interpretation to which its author was already antecedently committed. When one checks Dyer’s references in the footnotes, for example, one doesn’t know in advance what one is going to find there, which is very much to be applauded. In sum, this is a lucid, intelligent study of Rousseau’s political thought, marked by good judgment throughout, and Dyer’s is a significant new voice in Anglophone Rousseau studies.