As an inquiry into ideas, the celebrity spat has great potential. It was done to great effect most recently by Arthur I. Miller in Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. Miller used the almost irrational and exceedingly virulent attack by Arthur Eddington, then in the 1930s the grand man of astrophysics on S Chandrashekhar. Chandra was on that wintry evening simply presenting the surprising conclusion arrived at if one followed the work of Eddington to its logical conclusion. But at that London meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, Eddington attacked the young man so fervently that research on the subject was set back decades. In Miller’s lucid telling, the clash of personalities provided the narrative structure to add atmosphere to what really was the clash of ideas.With a slightly different clash, the history of the atomic bomb is often told. There are still all kinds of theories floating around about what exactly transpired when Werner Heisenberg, in charge of making the bomb for Nazi Germany, journeyed to Copenhagen during wartime to meet Niels Bohr, then the grand old man of modern physics. Did Heisenberg try, between the lines, to tell Bohr that he’d go slow on the research, a message he hoped would be passed on to the Los Alamos team? Or did he, in fact, come to gauge the progress made by Oppenheimer’s gang? Choose either option, but in each the compelling story of modern physics can be told.Edmonds and Eidinow too employed the celebrity intellectual spat to great entertainment in their earlier book, Wittgenstein’s Poker, using a sudden outburst to track the work of Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.They are at it again, in this pageturner, but this time around it remains largely a clash of personalities; the ideas conflict only in the sense that the work of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau is of great utility in understanding their manner and approach. Yet, as an exercise in understanding the making of the modern mind, it is does provide a panoramic view, with Denis Diderot, Adam Smith, Voltaire, James Boswell, Tobias George Smollett and Horace Walpole making substantive appearances.As goes with these books, it all begins one wintry evening — the evening of January 10, 1766, to be precise. A boat is making rough passage from Calais to Dover, carrying among others Hume, Rousseau and Sultan (the dog of the title, who actually has little bearing on events). Hume, then winding up an assignment at the British embassy in Paris and already reputed for his decency, has offered to help Rousseau, then hounded on account of his writings by the authorities in France and his native Geneva. Yet, very soon this fledgling friendship is rocked, with Rousseau charging Hume of plotting dishonour him, and Hume reacting in a most uncharacteristically violent manner, based on the suspicion that Rousseau is a hoax.The consequent spate of accusation and counter-accusation draws in the intelligent set on both sides of the channel. But the confrontation as the authors profile Hume and Rousseau appears to be not so much between the two men, but between each man and his work. Hume, once driven to rage and suspicion, is not the man of reason he would want to be. And Rousseau, once he loses check on his confessional narrative, gets consumed by paranoia and that quality he would have others avoid, selfishness.
