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David Lay Williams, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Pp. xxxiii, 306. $25.00.
David Lay Williams has provided us with a carefully researched and capably argued study of the influence of Platonism on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau-the most thorough and systematic study to date. Yet this book is much more than just a study of Rousseau or his relationship to Plato and Platonism: of the eight chapters, the first two are devoted to the context that was set for Rousseau's intellectual development by Hobbes, Locke, and a variety of modern Platonists and materialists, and the last two trace Rousseau's influence on the thought of Kant, Marx, and Foucault. This broad approach allows Williams to demonstrate both Rousseau's originality and the way in which he drew on previous thinkers and traditions. His main thesis is that "Platonism" pervades Rousseau's thought-indeed, that Rousseau is "among the greatest and most consistent Platonists of the modern era" (94)-and that this fact helps to link together many of the seemingly disparate and contradictory elements of his writings. In particular, Williams maintains that Rousseau sided with Plato and against Hobbes and the philosophes in his rejection of materialism, moral relativism, and political positivism and his commitment to eternal, transcendent ideas as the ultimate authority for moral and political life.
According to Williams's narrative, both Hobbes and Locke sought in vain (albeit in different ways) to persuasively combine a purely empiricist view of the world with the idea of eternal, immutable laws of nature, which left modern philosophy at a kind of roadblock. Modern Platonists such as Cudworth, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Fénelon responded to this apparent impasse by embracing transcendent moral standards...