Among Jean-Jacques Rousseau's chief preoccupations was the problem of self-interest implicit in all social relationships. A person with divided loyalties (i.e., to both himself and his cohorts) was, ...in Rousseau's thinking, a divided person. According to John Warner's Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations, not only did Rousseau never solve this problem, he believed it was fundamentally unsolvable: social relationships could never restore wholeness to a self-interested human being. Warner traces his argument through the contours of Rousseau's thought on three distinct types of relationships— sexual love, friendship, and civil or political association. Warner concludes that none of these, whether examined individually or together, provides a satisfactory resolution to the problem of human dividedness located at the center of Rousseau's thinking. In fact, concludes Warner, Rousseau's failure to obtain anything hopeful from human associations is deliberate, self-conscious, and revelatory of a tragic conception of human relations. Thus Rousseau raises our hopes only to dash them.This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.
Originally published in 1979. Adultery is a dominant feature in chivalric literature; it becomes a major concern in Shakespeare's last plays; and it forms the central plot of novels from Anna ...Karenina to Couples. Tony Tanner proposes that transgressions of the marriage contract take on a special significance in the "bourgeois novels" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His interpretation begins with the general topic of adultery in literature and then zeroes in on three works—Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. His interpretation encompasses the role of women, the structure of the family, social mores, and the history of sexuality.
This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key ...feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin was summarizing. Finally, it demonstrates the lasting impact of corporatist law in eighteenth-century France, highlighting Rousseau’s direct borrowings from the corporatist language and logic of contemporary commercial societies. In this regard, the article revisits and updates Otto von Gierke’s classic argument about the origins of the state in corporatist thought.
In Emile, Rousseau claims that the value of women ought to be determined by the opinion that men have of them. Women, contrary to commodities and men, escape what I call Rousseau's “dual theory of ...value.” According to the latter, the apparent value of commodities and men is determined by opinion and either unrelated or inverse to “real value,” which is assessed through objective criteria. The dual theory of value is the basis of Rousseau's critique of commercial society. However, women warrant an exception to this theory. As women's apparent worth is their real worth, women are the unique object in the world that ought to be subjected to the rule of opinion, which is the rule of commercial market that Rousseau so violently rejects. This article investigates why this is the case and locates three functions to the unique position of women in Rousseau's theory of value.
Si Jean-Jacques Rousseau déplore la déchéance de son corps mourant dans les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (publication posthume en 1782), et affirme le rejet définitif de toute société, il observe ...aussi l’expansion furieuse de son imagination poétique. Elle lui permettrait même, selon lui, d’entrevoir la dimension “cosmique” de l’existence. Grâce à l’analyse stylistique et grammaticale de la rhétorique de la négation des Rêveries, nous montrons que l’auteur donne à la construction négative un pouvoir paradoxal puissant: celui non seulement de supprimer, mais par cela même de se grandir et de se libérer.
Abstract
This article aims to make a philosophical contribution to debates about meaningful sociocultural narratives about aging. It is argued that the moral-philosophical discourse of authenticity ...may provide valuable resources for counter narratives about later life that are capable of challenging the dominant stereotyping decline- and age-defying cultural narratives. The discussion will draw on classical and contemporary views of authenticity by Rousseau; existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger; and contemporary thinkers such as Taylor and Meyers. Authenticity discourse is argued to be capable of, on the one hand, acknowledging the positive potentials of growth and development that later life may harbor, while, on the other hand, providing support for recognizing and integrating the inevitable existential vulnerability and finitude that old age also confronts us with. Although authenticity is not a commonly used term in gerontology, some examples show how a language associated with this philosophical discourse has found its way into gerontological thought as well, supporting its relevance for the context of aging. The article concludes with a discussion of four aspects through which the authenticity discourse may contribute to viable cultural narratives about later life.
Sonenscher's account is rooted first in highly attentive readings, which called his attention to what he calls four so-far undercommented "details" in Rousseau's thought (xi): the power of ...imagination, especially its capacity to bridge the general and the particular, i.e. the intellect and the affect; the innate sense of self-preservation, or amour de soi, rooted in a natural love of order possibly extending to a sense of justice; the "natural quality" of the feeling of shame, in particular in women, and how it can be reconciled with Rousseau's account of the human state of nature as a situation of complete independence; and finally, the implications of human perfectibility regarding the relationship between agriculture and industry. ...Sonenscher argues that Cassirer erred in proposing to solve the problem with the neo-Kantian solution of a "theodicy" (14), because that misses a key issue: how to "maintain the viability of the rule of law" in the "generalized mistrust" brought by "conditions of radical economic and social division" (53). The first four chapters of the book explain why Rousseau "relied as much on political morality as on institutional design" (50) by exposing two key features of his social anthropology: his vision of human beings as mostly symbolic, driven by imagination rather than reality, and the double bind inherent in the relationship between two foundational human activities, industry and agriculture.
Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities ...and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.
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