Charles Renouvier, Philosopher of Liberty

Charles Renouvier (1815-1903), as William Logue makes clear in this excellent study, was one of the most important French philosophers of the nineteenth century, a thinker who ranks with Comte and Bergson, even if he is not as well known. Logue examines several of Renouvier's fundamental philosophical positions, the social and political views he derived from them, their relevance to the problems of his day, and their continuing relevance to many of the social and intellectual problems of our own time. His is a work of highly traditional scholarship but at the same time an inquiry into the question of how our knowledge of the past may be helpful in the present. Charles Renouvier, Philosopher of Liberty offers the only substantial introduction to Renouvier's thought and assessment of its importance available in English. In addition, though it does not strive for exhaustiveness, it is more comprehensive than any work available in French. Logue presents analyses of Renouvier's moral philosophy and how he related it to the need for social action; his doctrine of free will and its manifold consequences for philosophy and for everyday life; his understanding of the religious crisis of the nineteenth century; and his ideas about the relationship between the individual and the community in an age of increasing individualism that prefigured our own. Logue maintains that we can greatly improve our understanding of nineteenth-century France, especially its intellectual history, by looking through Renouvier's eyes. The great optimism of the nineteenth century was crushed by the disasters of the twentieth, disasters whose shape, Logue demonstrates, Renouvier largely foresaw. Renouvier's work shows why that optimism - insofar as it was derived from intellectual misconceptions - was a mistake, and why it could be seen to be a mistake even at that time. He concludes the book with some reflections on the interrelationships between a critical philosopher and his age - on the ways


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