Abstract

In this intricate, careful, and compelling book, Griswold stages an extended encounter between two towering figures of Enlightenment thought: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. While Rousseau and Smith were known to each other, they had nothing like the "encounter" that Rousseau and David Hume had, for example. Smith commented on Rousseau's views, particularly those found in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in his 1756 "Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review" as well as in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Rousseau shows up in Smith's correspondence with Hume, but beyond that there was little actual interaction between the two philosophers. However, Griswold's work is not to focus on the...