For much of the twentieth century, political theorists tended to focus on what we might call the idealistic Rousseau. This was the Rousseau of The Social Contract, the radical democrat who advocated a return to ancient republican virtue and its attendant public spiritedness, solidarity, and direct self-government. Given that Rousseau admitted to himself that such a return is all but impossible in the modern world, he was often seen as a purveyor of utopian fantasies or even an unwitting source of totalitarian ideas—a dreamer or a despot. In recent decades, however, scholars have given us a more realistic and pragmatic Rousseau. In part by combining The Social Contract with his more “practical” works on Poland, Corsica, and Geneva, recent interpreters have emphasized Rousseau's call to take a nation's customs and circumstances into account in devising political institutions, his insistence on piecemeal reform rather than attempting to wipe the political or social slate clean, and his efforts to guide rather than transform human nature. In other words, this realistic Rousseau genuinely sought to “take men as they are,” as he famously put it at the outset of The Social Contract, rather than to convert them into modern-day Spartans.

In Rousseau, Law, and the Sovereignty of the People, as in his previous work on Rousseau (some of which is incorporated into this book), Ethan Putterman stands squarely in the latter interpretive camp. Putterman sets out to counter the idea that The Social Contract is “a fantastically idealistic treatise on the nature of legitimate government” (p. 1), and instead to demonstrate that Rousseau was “a hard-headed political scientist who carefully decompresses the complexities of republican institutions and constitutional government in an effort to enhance, rather than to debilitate, democratic liberty” (p. 5). Thus, he shifts the interpretive emphasis from Rousseau's abstract “principles of political right” (the subtitle of The Social Contract) to his practical, concrete proposals for how laws should be drafted, ratified, executed, and—in some cases—judged. Putterman seeks to show that these proposals are not only more realistic and more authentically democratic than is often supposed, but also that they are relevant for debates in contemporary politics and political science.

Each chapter of Putterman's book addresses a different aspect of the broad legislative process that Rousseau envisioned, including issues such as agenda setting, the preconditions for voting, the feasibility of a large legislative assembly, the role of public opinion, the proper extent and function of the judicial power, and the temporary suspension of law during an emergency situation. Although one could question Putterman's textual interpretations in a few instances, he sheds valuable light on some areas of Rousseau's political thought that have been underexplored in the scholarly literature. Putterman's broader reading of Rousseau as a pragmatic realist, however, is perhaps not quite as novel as he sometimes suggests (pp. 1–2, 5). In part, this is because, like Joshua Cohen in Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, he does not engage much with the most recent scholarship on Rousseau; neither author so much as cites the important books by Laurence Cooper, Jonathan Marks, Frederick Neuhouser, Joseph Reisert, Matthew Simpson, or David Lay Williams, for example.

Cohen, for his part, aims to convince his readers that, in effect, the idealistic Rousseau was actually realistic. He argues that the normative ideal of The Social Contract—which Cohen alternately calls “a free community of equals” or “the society of the general will”—was “not an unrealistic utopia beyond human reach, but a genuine human possibility, compatible with our human complexities, and with the demands of social cooperation” (pp. 10, cf. 14, 132). Whereas Putterman explores the specific ways in which Rousseau envisioned a just state actually operating, Cohen starts by taking nearly the opposite tack: at the outset of the book, he distinguishes sharply between Rousseau's normative ideal and the specific institutional implications that he drew from that ideal, in hopes of showing “how that ideal might be realized or approximated under modern conditions, in which Rousseauean direct democracy is implausible” (p. 20). The first half of the book outlines what Cohen sees as the “fundamental problem” that Rousseau addressed in his political works, namely how to combine security with autonomy—that is, how to combine the restraints on individual action necessary for the protection of others with a form of self-legislation that leaves each individual “as free as before” (pp. 24–32). Rousseau's solution to this problem, of course, is a society in which law is based on the general will. As Cohen explains, Rousseau's vision was one of “a free community of equals: free, because it ensures the full political autonomy of each member; a community, because it is organized around a shared understanding of and supreme allegiance to the common good; and a community of equals—a democratic society—because the content of that understanding reflects the good of each member” (p. 16, emphasis in original; cf. 59).

The second half of the book—chapters 4 and 5—considers how realistic such a community is. Cohen addresses two broad obstacles to realizing a free community of equals: first, the question of whether the demands it would place on its citizens are compatible with human nature, and second, the question of whether it is institutionally possible, or whether a stable, workable, and ongoing society could live up to the ideals it sets. (He ignores issues of “accessibility,” or whether it is possible to actually get to such a community from our present circumstances [p. 14].) In response to the first potential obstacle, that of human nature, Cohen summarizes Rousseau's “genealogy of vice” in the Discourse on Inequality and suggests that it is not necessary to suppress human nature in order to realize the general will, only to find positive ways to express it. In particular, Cohen follows Nicholas Dent in interpreting Rousseau as holding that amour-propre, the comparative form of self-love to which he attributes so many evils, can (given the right social and institutional conditions) be expressed in a positive or egalitarian form as the desire for equal respect, rather than the harmful and prideful desire to be superior to others, which Cohen calls “inflamed” amour-propre (pp. 101–4). While this reading has gained a considerable following of late (see especially Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love [2008]), it is difficult to reconcile with Rousseau's explicit definition of amour-propre as a “relative sentiment … which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else” (Discourse on Inequality, footnote 15). It is true that Rousseau deemed it necessary to manage or channel this passion properly in order to realize a just society, since he did not think it could be eliminated altogether outside of the “pure” state of nature. Yet in the Discourse on Political Economy (cf. paragraphs 30, 36) he suggests that in the citizen—as opposed to, say, Emile or Rousseau the solitary dreamer—amour-propre must somehow be extended to include the community as a whole, so that the citizen's amour-propre is satisfied by the glory of the fatherland, rather than tamed so as to take the liberal or egalitarian form posited by Cohen.

In response to the second potential obstacle to realizing a free community of equals, the question of whether it is institutionally possible, Cohen argues in the fifth and final chapter that scholars have focused too exclusively on Rousseau's call for direct democracy—his claim in The Social Contract that in a legitimate state, the people as a whole must legislate on all matters collectively—and not enough on the other features of the “institutional design” that he recommends. Thus, after having drawn a sharp divide earlier in the book between Rousseau's normative ideal and the institutional implications that he drew from it, in the concluding chapter Cohen brings to the fore the Rousseauian institutions that he finds most feasible and/or desirable. On this score, he mentions Rousseau's advocacy of rule through general and public laws, universal suffrage, the right to assembly, limitations on economic inequalities, the delegation of executive power to an individual or group that is strictly accountable to the people, and his apparent allowances for a representative legislature (on the “delegate” rather than “trustee” model) in his essay on Poland (pp. 135–40).

While Cohen and Putterman focus on different features of Rousseau's proposed institutional framework, then, they agree that his proposals are more realistic than scholars have often supposed. In making this case, however, they are forced to overlook or play down certain elements in Rousseau's political thought. For instance, both authors ignore the series of chapters in which Rousseau outlines what types of peoples are capable of receiving good laws, where he insists that the society cannot be too young or too old, too small or (especially) too big, too densely or too thinly populated, too rich or too poor (The Social Contract, book 2, chapters 8–10—hereafter SC 2.8–10). Rousseau himself stresses the stringency of these restrictions: “It is true that it is difficult to find all of these conditions together. This is one reason why one sees few well-constituted States” (SC 2.10). A further reason Rousseau offers for the scarcity of well-constituted states in the modern world is another one that Cohen and Putterman neglect: the baleful effects of Christianity and universal religion more generally (SC 4.8). These authors also devote less attention than might be expected, as part of a demonstration of Rousseau's political realism, to his persistent and devastating attacks on commerce and its attendant inequalities, dependence, and corruption. Finally, while Cohen and Putterman do mention Rousseau's notorious claim that to form a healthy state people must be “denatured” by a great Lawgiver who drives self-interest out of their souls and transforms them into citizens (SC 2.7), they both ultimately dismiss this claim as unimportant. Cohen proclaims that Rousseau exaggerated his own views in these “rhapsodic” passages (pp. 35–39), and Putterman simply chooses to emphasize “the institutional aspects of voting above will-formation” (p. 5, cf. 175) on the grounds that such will-formation will not determine entirely the outcome of any given vote (p. 77).

Those who regard Rousseau as a moderate democratic reformer will find much in these books to corroborate their views and to stimulate reflection on some largely overlooked aspects of his political thought. This reviewer remains convinced, however, that Rousseau's thought is more foreign to the modern liberal outlook, and for that very reason more valuable and interesting, than these authors allow.