About the Author

Lester G. Crocker (1912-2002) was a noted scholar of eighteenth-century French literature and Enlightenment philosophy. In the 1950s he was a professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. He is also the author of An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment, Rousseau's Social Contract: An Interpretive Essay, and Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach and Synthesis.