Rousseau and Bourgeois Man's Search for Wholeness

Why We Are Restless is informed by a certain Tocquevillean urgency. As the Storeys tell us in their introduction, their students, among the most privileged young people in America, are profoundly uneasy, their souls agitated and restless as they ponder questions about how they should live and what will make them happy. The Storeys attempt to make sense of this by examining the thought of what they call four “old French philosophers” (xii). They acknowledge that such an approach, focusing on the writings of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville as a way of understanding this contemporary American unease, might seem “counterintuitive” (xii) and they are not wrong. The French moralistes are by no means the only thinkers who can shed light on what the authors argue is a distinctively modern form of restlessness. But they convincingly show that these thinkers offer a good, if for Americans somewhat novel, starting point to help our anxious young understand what is troubling them. In brief, the Storeys argue, it is the modern turn away from the transcendent in all its forms (philosophic, religious, and heroic) that explains the restlessness of their souls. As Tocqueville sagely observed, “the soul has needs that must be satisfied,” needs that we moderns have for too long ignored.