INTRODUCTION
Many readers will no doubt be tempted to exclaim on seeing my title: “Rousseau and no end!” The outpour of books on Rousseau had indeed in the period immediately preceding the war become somewhat portentous.[1] This preoccupation with Rousseau is after all easy to explain. It is his somewhat formidable privilege to represent more fully than any other one person a great international movement. To attack Rousseau or to defend him is most often only a way of attacking or defending this movement.
It is from this point of view at all events that the present work is conceived. I have not undertaken a systematic study of Rousseau’s life and doctrines. The appearance of his name in my title is justified, if at all, simply because he comes at a fairly early stage in the international movement the rise and growth of which I am tracing, and has on the whole supplied me with the most significant illustrations of it. I have already put forth certain views regarding this movement in three previous volumes.[2] Though each one of these volumes attempts to do justice to a particular topic, it is at the same time intended to be a link in a continuous argument. I hope that I may be allowed to speak here with some frankness of the main trend of this argument both on its negative and on its positive, or constructive, side.
Perhaps the best key to both sides of my argument is found in the lines of Emerson I have taken as epigraph for “Literature and the American College”:
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,—
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,