öst arbete som förhoppningsvis kommer att nå
en bred läsekrets då boken kan lääs ur många
olika synvinklar: konsthistoriska, litteraturhistoriska, kulturhistoriska lika väl som en studie
av förbindelser, reella eller idealiserade, mellan
verklighet, porträttkonst och litteratur, mellan
Sverige och Frankrike, mellan Sverige och
Orienten under 1700-talet.

Johanna Ilmakunnas

Øyvind Gjems Fjeldbu, *Éducation et images mentales dans l’Émile de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: étude d’un modèle cognitif et rhétorique* (Trondheim: Faculté des lettres, Université des sciences et techniques de Norvège, 2011). 251 pp.

Øyvind Gjems Fjeldbu aims in this thesis to reconstruct a series of core claims in Rousseau's Émile (which serves as the orienting work under discussion, although the author appeals to other writings of Rousseau's as well, except for the surprising absence of the Nouvelle Héloïse from everywhere but a footnote; admittedly, Fjeldbu focused on precisely this text in a 2007 paper, 'L'expression complexe de l'amitié dans Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse'), focusing on the interplay between moral and cognitive development in Rousseau's thought.

It is clear and well written, if repetitious
(partly due to the academic form it seeks to
adopt), in surprisingly good French (aside
from occasional errors), but key terms are of-
ten used without being defined (particularly
'épistémologie'), and there does not seem to
be any effort to articulate a transition between
chapters. Some of the usage seems old-fash-
ioned, such as consistently referring to the
nationality of authors cited ('the Portuguese
scientist', 'the French critic', 'the Norwegian
scholar', etc.).

But the intellectual content is ambitious
and well-structured although the core claim

- concerning the relation between ideas, im-
ages, and moral conscience in a developmental
perspective which gives 'affectivity' a key role
- is never well defined. I shall clarify some of
these critical suggestions and then focus on
this interesting central claim.

Fjeldbu sometimes calls his own approach
a 'perspective cognitive' (p. 45); he claims
that Rousseau granted 'the heart and the mor-
al conscience, a cognitive function' (p. 49);
that he was a 'precursor' of affective neuro-
science (in the first page of the Introduction);
sometimes Rousseau (in the Émile) 'announces
some aspects of modern psychology' (p. 190).
Fjeldbu gestures to Damasio's 'affective neu-
roscience', which has stressed the irreduc-
ible role of emotions in cognition, an idea
Damasio attributes originally to Spinoza (for
a short sketch of how to construct a relation
between Spinoza and 'affective neuroscience',
more philosophically subtle than Damasio's
own work, see Heidi M. Ravven, 'Spinozis-
tic Approaches to Evolutionary Naturalism:
Spinoza's Anticipation of Contemporary Af-
fective Neuroscience', *Politics and the Life Sciences*
22:1 (2003), pp. 70–74). The idea here is
that Rousseau's way of bringing sentiments
and reason, 'heart and mind', closer together
is somehow an anticipation of current theo-
ries of cognition, specifically 'affective neuro-
science': 'This proximity [between heart and
mind] seems to indicate a cognitive model in
which the affective movements of the heart are
interwoven with rational operations, a cogni-
tive model which appears quite advanced if we
take into account the ideas put forth by Anto-
nio Damasio' (p. 70).

It is not apparent whether the author's
project is primarily to apply a contemporary
theory of cognition (and affects) to Rousseau,
or to use a careful analysis of eighteenth-cen-
tury texts to theorize affectivity differently, or,
lastly, a third option which would be a com-
plex combination of the two (as in work which
claims to present a 'Humean' or 'Spinozist'
moral philosophy today)? He does say that contemporary cognitive concepts have to be understood within the context of eighteenth-century psychology.

Fjeldbu definitely provides a careful, rather conservative body of textual analysis in the thesis, which means that of the three aforementioned options, the second is the most likely, and in the Conclusion he speaks of how the 'dynamism of Rousseau's thought enables it to be open to new perspectives' (p. 238) – but except for some suggestions in the early sections of the work, there is not much engagement at all with contemporary cognitive theory. And in any case, there is a problem with Fjeldbu's way of presenting his usage of Damasio as somehow equivalent to locating Rousseau within contemporary cognitive science: Damasio's work (rather strangely described as 'strictly biological', p. 12) is in no way considered mainstream or representative, and has been widely criticized as well. There are actually three problems here: firstly, that the connection between Rousseau's thought and these contemporary theories is not sufficiently articulated; secondly, that these theories make much more sense when articulated with Hume or Spinoza for example – notably because, unlike these thinkers, Rousseau is not a naturalist about the mind in any recognizable sense. Thirdly, even if Rousseau were a 'Damasian *avant la lettre*', this would not make Fjeldbu's perspective 'cognitive' or 'cognitivist' in any general, understandable sense.

To be clear, there is no reason *not to* articulate an analysis in which Rousseau is read in light of some of Damasio's ideas; but one should be clear about the standing and the context of the respective components of the analysis. If the heart in Rousseau means 'eventhing that is right, natural and in conformity with human nature' (p. 156), this seems pretty far removed from affectivity in contemporary cognitive science, even with the addition of rather opaque references to the heart's 'biolog-

ic-axiological function' in Rousseau (p. 170). Similarly, to claim that there is a Rousseauian materialism – a possible claim, to be sure, but one relying on a very idiosyncratic conception of a 'matérialisme du sage', in which freedom and moral sentiments predominate – and then to extrapolate from there that this 'possible materialism in Rousseau opens onto the logicism which is at the basis of modern cognitive psychology' (p. 19) is a big jump!

In this sense, Fjeldbu's methodology – not the flow of textual analysis, nor the general claims about how Rousseau deals with cognition, mental images, or the developmental process of moving from 'naturalism' (in Émile's childhood) to moral conscience and full intellectual cognition (interlinked in his adulthood), but the rulebook of how theory, scholarship and textual analysis come together – is never stated or well defined. If he wants to say that a certain current trend in cognitive science helps us understand Rousseau, that is one thing; if the (more dated and problematic) claim is that Rousseau is a 'precursor' of affective neuroscience, that should be clearly stated as well. There are other possibilities, of course, à la Yves Citton's *L'Envers de la Liberté* (2006) or Evelyn Tribble's *Cognition in the Globe* (2011). And it might have been interesting to relate this approach to what some theorists have recently called 'historical cognitive science', which in John Sutton's terms works between two projects. One is 'the analysis of other and older theories of mind, of how they relate to and differ from current approaches, and of what forgotten or neglected explananda they bring into focus'. The other, 'relating to cognitive practices rather than theories', is 'the task of working out how such views about mind and self reflect or partly cause different historical forms of mental activity.' (John Sutton, 'Body, Mind, and Order', in *1543 and all that* (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000.))

Conversely, Fjeldbu does not attend much to the question of what Rousseau wants in this
context. That is, if Hume, Rousseau, and Damasio all claim that we should not ignore the role of the passions, or sentiments, or affects in the constitution of thought, reason, cognition, morals, and so on, that does not mean they all do so for the same reason, and that their claims are interchangeable. Nor is it obvious that Rousseau wants to develop 'une nouvelle épistémologie', even if he pays a lot of attention to mental processes, the senses, and the role of the emotions both in cognition overall and in moral cognition in particular.

To dwell on the case of Hume for a moment: one might have expected a bit more discussion of the similarities between Hume and Rousseau on the basic themes of the thesis, including in biographical terms. Did Hume influence Rousseau here? Fjeldbu insists that Rousseau, the theorist of 'raison sensitive', overcomes the classical opposition between reason and the passions, as is apparent in the *Bildungsroman Émile*, sometimes in the name of a 'new kind of reason', sometimes because man, 'even reasonable man', is viewed as obeying 'sentiment' rather than reason (Fjeldbu approvingly citing Dérathé, 79n.): it is surprising to see no reference at all to Hume, for whom reason famously is, 'and ought only be the slave of the passions' (*Treatise on Human Nature*, II iii. 3); Hume also describes reason as 'nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct' (*ibid*., I iii. 69). When Rousseau, speaking as Émile's 'governor', declares that 'we can only control the passions by means of the passions; it is through their power that we can combat their tyranny' (cit. Fjeldbu, p. 205), or, similarly, in the *Discourse on the Origins of Inequality*, states that 'whatever the Moralists declare, the human understanding owes a great deal to the passions' (cit. Fjeldbu, p. 236), he sounds just like Hume.

Other historical connections that are mentioned for a few lines but not explored (even a paragraph could do the trick!) include Diderot and Condillac. Condillac's influence is some-

times mentioned, but Fjeldbu does not seem to see the striking parallel between Rousseau's description of his methodology in progressively constructing Émile ('I took the approach of positing an imaginary pupil, of granting his sage, health, knowledge ... of leading [his education] from the time of his birth to when he has become a man and needs no other guide than himself' (*Émile ou de l'éducation*, in Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. IV (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1969, reprint 1990), pp. 264–265 (hereafter OC), cit. Fjeldbu, p. 90) and Condillac's famous thought-experiment of the statue in his 1754 *Traité des sensations*.

Not mentioned at all is that other Geneva philosopher, Charles Bonnet, who has a fair bit to say about cognition, personal development, and selfhood – but maybe his work is too late to have influenced Rousseau. Fjeldbu is good on the debate between Rousseau and Helvétius on the nature of ideas and the role of the senses, which helps to situate Rousseau as both a kind of empiricist – albeit a 'sentimental empiricist', in Jessica Riskin's phrase in *Science in the Age of Sensibility* (2002) –, and a critic of materialism, most powerfully in the 'Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard' in *Émile*.

A much more complex case, and one which is frequently mentioned by Fjeldbu, is that of Descartes, or at least 'Cartesianism', specifically Cartesian dualism. He suggests several times that Rousseau is inspired by Cartesianism (p. 13) or that he defends Cartesian dualism (pp. 19, 190, 237), but Rousseau surely is not a metaphysical substance dualist. And of course Fjeldbu's core claim concerning the role of mental imagery and affectivity (or 'sentiment') in mental life runs quite strongly against any Cartesian conceptions. A more interesting contrast would have been between Rousseau and the newer 'embodied' vision of Descartes as the author of the *Traité de l'Homme* and the *Passions de l'âme* (and the correspondence with Elizabeth), rather than the textbook
Descartes of the substance dualism defended in the *Discours* and the *Méditations*. But the embodied Descartes was not the one primarily discussed in the Enlightenment.

Sometimes Fjeldbu's reliance on secondary sources for strong claims can lead him astray. It is surprising to read that eighteenth-century psychology was Cartesian (pp. 13, 15; the names of Locke, Hume, Wolff, and Kant come to mind as exceptions). Just because one author cited by Fjeldbu declares in a 1979 paper that Rousseau's philosophical position in the *Émile* is 'an attempted synthesis of Cartesian dualism and the sensationalist theory of knowledge' (Bloch, cit. Fjeldbu, p. 18), this does not make such a claim true, certainly not without much further textual and contextual substantiation. (Similarly, because one paper claims that Locke's theory of the mind is 'spatial', to go on to declare that inasmuch as Rousseau has a spatial representation of the mind, he belongs to a Lockean tradition (p. 129) is a bit unsupported, and seems strange.)

Fjeldbu's major idea, which is perhaps also the most original element here (not being a Rousseau specialist I reserve judgement on this), is that of a 'developmental viewpoint' in which the *Bildungsroman Émile* is itself a developmental account of epistemology, from naturalism (suitable for the child) to morals (appropriate to the adult). This is a theory of how the mind grows, but also of the formation of specifically moral cognition. It is in this context that Fjeldbu deals with Rousseau's relation to both empiricism (including 'sensationism' as an epistemology) and materialism. As O'Neal puts it (quoted by Fjeldbu), 'In developing his theories on education ... Rousseau first grants fundamental importance to the senses'; it is here that he aligns himself with his century more than in any other area. And Rousseau gives explicit empiricist grounding to his idea of 'raison sensitive', as a primary mechanism of association of ideas derived from sense; thus the project of Émile's

education is to 'mold' or 'sculpt' this 'sensitive reason' into a moral-cognitive whole at a higher level of development (p. 235). And indeed, Rousseau can sound just like an empiricist at times: 'Our sensibility is undeniably prior to our intelligence; we have sentiments before we have ideas'; 'Man is modified by his sense, no one doubts that; ... we tend to underestimate the role of sensations; we do not see that they affect us not just as sensations but as signs or images' (*Émile*, in OC IV, p. 600; *Essai sur l'origine des langues*, OC V, p. 412).

However, Rousseau is not a 'naïve empiricist' in the sense that he holds that the mind already has, to some degree, an internal structure (if not content); Fjeldbu, citing Jean-François Perrin, uses the phrase *matrice structurante*, a 'structuring matrix' (p. 35). Rousseau also distinguishes between a sensibility which is purely corporeal or natural, and a moral or spiritual sensibility; the former is more passive and associated with childhood, the latter more active and associated with adulthood (p. 169n.). Further, even if he does think there are innate ideas, he does think there are innate sentiments. And in many respects, including when articulating Émile's development towards possessing a moral conscience, he presents this as part of an intellectual refutation of materialism, even if he sometimes claims that 'all disputes between idealists and materialists mean nothing to me' (*Émile*, in OC IV, p. 571, cit. Fjeldbu, p. 17n).

And here the idea of Rousseau's idiosyncratic materialism (a materialism of affects and morals rather than of matter or nature) has some connection to affectivity, but Fjeldbu does not spell it out enough. A key idea is that Rousseau transposes the metaphysical problem of dualism and materialism into the context of the moral development of Émile; 'epistemologies' become stages of moral and cognitive development, so that basic materialism could be 'true' of Émile as a child, as he is still primarily part of a world governed
strictly by physical laws, but as the education
progresses and he develops a moral conscience,
it becomes less and less true (pp. 67–69, 76,
96, 143, 146, 190, 204). Part of Rousseau’s
original or idiosyncratic dualism is the claim
that the distinction between mind and body,
while it may pose metaphysical problems, is in
fact a condition for our happiness. Here he is
both somewhat like Hume (for whom passions
are ‘original existences’ not to be reduced to
matter in general) and also like a traditional
moralist, emphasizing the importance of self-
denial (e.g. with respect to sexual pleasure).
Crucially, as stated with regard to Émile’s de-
velopment, for moral principles to take root
in the student’s ‘heart’, he has to ‘love’ and
‘feel’ them, rather than just apprehend them
intellectually: as Rousseau puts it in a differ-
ent context (the role of sense-impressions, in
the *Dialogues* included in *Rousseau juge de Jean-
Jacques*), if ‘impressions do not penetrate his
heart, they are null and void’ (OC I, 1959, p.
808, cit. Fjeldbu, p. 66). Rousseau, as Fjeldbu
nicely analyses, stresses the role of the ‘heart’,
of ‘sentiment’ as more foundational than in-
tellect: ‘Even if all philosophers proved me
wrong, if you felt I was right, that would be
enough for me’ (Émile, in OC IV, p. 599).

In sum, with this thesis we have a careful
and systematic textual analysis of Rousseau's
Émile, focusing on the development of a kind
of moral cognition as a concept which is nei-
ther materialist nor idealist, neither Cartesian
nor empiricist, and which grants significant
explanatory power both to the role of images
in mental life ('all my ideas are in images', Con-
fessions, cit. Fjeldbu, p. 142) and to rhetoric as
an educational and developmental device. The
parts of the argument which appeal to contem-
porary debates in cognitive science (whether
on imagery or the role of emotions) are not so
well handled; it would also have been helpful
to have a better discussion of Rousseau in his
own intellectual context – whether the Hutch-
eson-Hume line of the development of 'moral

sense', moral passions, and sympathy (as com-
pared to Rousseauian pity), or eighteenth-
century psychological ideas, or the parts of
the French Enlightenment closest to Rousseau
(rather than relying on some commonplaces).
The reader familiar with Rousseau will find
some interesting pistes de lecture; the reader more
accustomed to intellectual history, philosophy
or history and philosophy of science will enjoy
some of the Rousseau passages but remain a
bit puzzled as to the overall project.

Charles T. Wolfe

Magnus Linnarsson, *Postgång på växlande vill-
kor: det svenska postväsendets organisation under stor-
maktstiden*, Södertörn doctoral dissertations 49
(Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2010). 281 s.

Magnus Linnarssons (tidigare Magnus Olsson) avhandling handlar om det svenska postverkets organisering under perioden 1600–1720. Avhandlingen berör organisationsformen, huru-vida postverket skulle vara centraliserat eller arrenderat, och ligger därmed nära Mats Hallenbergs studie av skatteuppbörden på 1600-talet, *Statsmakt till salu* (2008). Bägge förfat- tarna är inspirerade av transaktionskostnader som förklarande begrepp, och för Linnarsson innebär det att postverket omväxlande lagts ut på ”entreprenad” och styrts enligt principen om ”hierarki”.

Källmaterialet utgörs främst av kungliga
förordningar om det formella regelverket för
postens organisation, och material ur kansli-
kollegiets och överpostmästarens arkiv, samt
kompletterande material från riksdagen och
från Axel Oxenstiernas korrespondens. Av-
handlingens struktur grundas, med undan-
tag för första och sista kapitlen, på perioder:
Först om postbefordran före och i samband
med postverkets bildande 1636; därefter pe-
rioden 1643–1673 då Johan Beijer, Vilhelm