Daedalus: Rousseau for Our Time (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Summer 1978)

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"We are told in this volume that an index of the character of an age may be given by the way in which it chooses to read and interpret Rousseau. How do men and women today choose to think of him? What importance do they attach to the paradoxes and contradictions of his obviously troubled life? Are they principally concerned with trying to puzzle out the ambiguities of his prose, or do they ask whether he analyzed correctly the principal moral deficiencies of society, whether he saw correctly the hazards of civilization, and whether his historical, anthropological, and philosophical analyses will, in fact, bear close scrutiny?

"One can scarcely imagine an 18th-century figure more appropriate for contemporary consideration than Rousseau. He lends himself to criticism, seeming at times almost to invite it. His writings cannot be avoided by those who care to reflect on the moral and political unease of our day. This is only of many reasons why it seemed so important for Daedalus to undertake this study."

• Frank E. Manuel - 'A Dream of Eupsychia'
• Judith N. Shklar - 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Equality'
• Bronislaw Baczko - 'Rousseau and Social Marginality'
• Jean Starobinski - 'The Accuser and the Accused'
• Lionel Gossman - 'The Innocent Art of Confession and Reverie'
• Benjamin R. Barber - 'Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination'
• Roger D. Masters - 'Jean-Jacques Is Alive and Well: Rousseau and Contemporary Sociobiology'
• Robert Wokler - 'Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau's Anthropology Revisited'
• Allan Bloom - 'The Education of Democratic Man: Emile'
• William Kessen - 'Rousseau's Children'
• Joseph Featherstone - 'Rousseau and Modernity'
• Benjamin I. Schwartz - 'The Rousseau Strain in the Contemporary World'