History: In January 1766, Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled continental Europe. He had already been on the move for some years, writes Aengus Collins.
In 1762 he had been forced out of France and back to his native Switzerland by the controversy surrounding the publication of Émile. But by late 1765 his position in Switzerland had also become untenable. He followed the advice of friends and chose England as his next place of exile. His companion on the journey to London, and his benefactor on arrival, was historian, philosopher and then-diplomat David Hume. The two were not to become friends.
David Edmonds and John Eidinow, authors of Rousseau's Dog, have created something of a niche genre all of their own with their accounts of arguments between eminent philosophers. Their first book, Wittgenstein's Poker, detailed a notorious 10-minute confrontation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in a Cambridge seminar room. In their new book, the authors turn their attention to the bitter falling-out between Rousseau and Hume following their journey to London - a conflict neither as brief, as interesting, nor as significant as that between Wittgenstein and Popper 180 years later.
The seeds of discord between Rousseau and Hume were sown while the men were travelling, when the former heard his companion repeat in his sleep the phrase, "Je tiens Jean-Jacques Rousseau" ("I hold Jean-Jacques Rousseau"). This statement panicked Rousseau, and festered in the weeks and months that followed. He concocted increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories about Hume's supposedly malevolent intentions towards him.
A fortnight after their arrival in London, Hume was still able to say of Rousseau that he was a "gentle-spirited and warm-hearted man as ever I knew in my life". Fifteen months later he was railing at friends that Rousseau was the "blackest and most atrocious villain that ever disgraced human nature". The intervening period was one of perceived slights on Rousseau's part to which Hume responded with increasingly overwrought concern about the effects on his reputation.
Unlike Wittgenstein and Popper, Hume and Rousseau conducted their falling-out at a distance. Letters and pamphlets criss-crossed Europe, detailing who had said what to whom, when, and how it reflected on the two men's characters. The correspondence draws in Kings Frederick II and George III; writers and thinkers including Voltaire, Horace Walpole, James Boswell and Adam Smith; and the ranks of high society in London and, particularly, Paris.
But despite the calibre of the adversaries and their partisans, there was no real substance to the quarrel. Rousseau had delusions of persecution centred on Hume; Hume fed the flames by taking him too seriously; well-placed lookers-on enjoyed the gossip that ensued.
How could two men of such lasting intellectual stature have consumed almost a year and a half of their lives with such a trivial spat? At times Edmonds and Eidinow suggest, unconvincingly, that the quarrel stems from philosophical differences between the two - Rousseau's "intuitive imagination" clashing with the dryness of Hume's "utmost intellectual rigour".
For much of the book, however, the reader is left with the sense that the quarrel points to little more than a gap between how philosophers write in public and how they act in private. But on its own this is an unexceptional and largely uninteresting observation. The important consideration would have to be the nature of any such gap: whether a philosopher's deeds might be sufficient to undermine the force of their writings. And there is nothing in Rousseau's and Hume's puerile epistolary duelling to cause us to reconsider their philosophies. Philosophy never comes into it.
Rousseau's Dog has been painstakingly researched and convincingly written. But one's abiding response is that a story this slight is scarcely worth telling. The authors are right to echo Hume's supporters when they scold him for lending undue weight to Rousseau's delusions by publishing an account of the dispute. It's just a pity that Edmonds and Eidinow didn't approach their own endeavour with the same advice in mind.
While there is much of interest in their book about 18th-century Britain, and about the social and political machinations in London and Paris of some of the key figures of the Enlightenment, these details lack the proper grounding a more substantial central narrative might have provided.
In the end, it is hard for the reader not to share Walpole's despairing view of the philosophers' dispute: "All Europe laughs at being dragged every day into these idle quarrels."
Rousseau's Dog By David Edmonds & John Eidinow Faber & Faber, 373pp. £15.99
Aengus Collins is a writer