Scholars have long grappled with the tension in Rousseau's thought between his claim that all social relations are unnatural because they destroy our natural independence and his positive rendition of several models of interdependence and social organization that he presents as not only legitimate but even advantageous for human beings. John Warner's contribution to this debate is a fresh, insightful reading of Rousseau's thinking about the potential and limitations of human relationships in various forms. Locating the problem of dividedness at the center of Rousseau's thought, Warner takes unity, rather than freedom, to be Rousseau's most fundamental concern.

The opening chapter illuminates just how deeply and intractably divided human beings are, and how and why the Hobbesian and Lockean attempts to resolve the problem of dividedness fail on Rousseau's terms. Warner next lays out the theoretical and psychological foundations of Rousseau's social project, focusing especially on amour-propre and pity. Warner provides a rich and comprehensive discussion of the positive and negative manifestations of amour-propre as well as the intricate dynamics of pity, and explains how both give rise to a complex landscape of differentiated passions. This paves the way for his exploration of the various forms of human association that respond to those diverse passions.

Warner considers three specific forms of human association in detail: romantic love, friendship, and political or civic association. Each form has a distinctive function in the human quest to recover wholeness, and each suffers from specific limitations. Beginning with sexual desire and romantic love, which he discusses in the context of both Emile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, Warner offers a compelling account of how the very structure of romantic desire presents a fundamental obstacle to the possibility that such love could conduce to human happiness. Although the noble achievement represented by the union of Emile and Sophie elevates the reader's hopes for the possibility of romantic fulfilment, the novel ultimately dashes those hopes (if only in a veiled way) by showing their love to be tragically fragile.

Warner sees a similar teaching in La Nouvelle Héloïse: “We are no more happy with love than without it” (129). The day-to-day reality of romantic relationships can never fulfill the longings of the romantic imagination. Beyond this observation, Warner delves deeper into the problematic character of the imagination, emphasizing that imaginary activity is essentially private. He argues that the individual's unshakable attachment to the imagined ideal of the beloved has less to do with the imperfection of reality than it does with the fact that “images are ours in a way that another person never could be” (133). This presents a formidable psychic barrier to genuinely loving another as other.

Having established the failure of romantic love to restore human wholeness, Warner then explores another possible avenue through which this aspiration might be realized: friendship. He considers whether friendship, on Rousseau's understanding, is capable of furnishing the twin goods of intimacy and virtue. Building on the work of others who have studied Rousseauian friendship in connection with pity, and also contrasting Rousseau's model of friendship with the models offered by Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne, Warner argues that friendship's close connection with pity is precisely what limits its potential to realize deep intimacy, since pity entails not only sameness but also difference. Emphasizing shared suffering but also emotional distance, Warner leaves us with a weaker model of friendship that nonetheless provides some important salutary benefits, such as curbing amour-propre and tempering the potential impulsiveness of democracy. These benefits are presented as “consolations” rather than as absolute goods, inasmuch as they offer only amelioration and not remediation of the problem of human dividedness. Friendship “may console us in our dividedness but it cannot return us to wholeness” (161).

The third model of association that Warner analyzes is the political association. Here Warner further develops his argument that unity or harmony rather than freedom is Rousseau's chief concern, and therefore that freedom is valued by Rousseau insofar as it contributes to social and psychological unity “and not because it provides an evaluative standard somehow beyond it.” Warner thus understands Rousseau's political project as an attempt to create “a social environment in which humans might live in harmony with themselves and with one another” (163). To elucidate the character of this harmony, Warner draws upon ecological systems theory and develops the naturalistic metaphor of an ecosystem to capture the complex and fragile relationship between self and social environment. Warner argues that the idea of an “ecology” presents some considerable advantages for understanding Rousseau's view of how institutions fit together and how their systemic arrangement affects individuals within the system. First, the parts of an ecosystem are understood as fundamentally embedded rather than as free-floating units. Furthermore, the equilibrium of an ecosystem has a necessarily harmonious character—not entirely without friction, but ultimately conducive to the self-preservation of each organism within it. This helps to reconcile the requirements of both self and society, combining both differentiation and overall harmony. Yet this equilibrium is perpetually vulnerable to disruption. Warner's ecological model is innovative and enhances his nuanced presentation of the fragile harmony that Rousseau theorizes between self and community.

Challenging the “compatibilist” view that sees continuity between the domestic and political spheres, Warner emphasizes the discontinuity between them, presenting them as not merely alternatives but rivals (131). The problem thus becomes how to resolve the tension between the requirements of each sphere, since harmony remains the ultimate goal. Warner's Rousseau provides no simple answer to this problem. “Rousseau's moral universe is an eternally disjointed place full of contradictory duties, desires, and expectations,” and ultimately there is “no way to reconcile the various responsibilities to which a complex social life gives rise” (214).

For Warner, Rousseau's understanding of human association has a fundamentally tragic character—tragic, yet not utterly dark. Each model of human association offers “consolations of tragedy” which are the “silver lining” to Rousseau's teaching, offering hope to readers who might otherwise find it too disheartening. Perhaps the most important of these stems from the human capacity for self-awareness. There is something positive to be found in our awareness of our shared vulnerability, for example.

Warner's book offers a lucid and intelligent interpretation of Rousseau that understands the challenge of human relations not as a problem to be solved but rather as a fundamental, insoluble condition to be lived with and within. Warner successfully resists the twin poles of the radically individualist and radically collectivist interpretations of Rousseau by emphasizing the dynamic, irreducible tension at the heart of Rousseau's project. This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of that tension and its role in Rousseau's different models of human association.