Renowned for his influence as a political philosopher, a writer, and an autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known also for his lifelong interest in music. He composed operas and other musical ...pieces, invented a system of numbered musical notation, engaged in public debates about music, and wrote at length about musical theory. Critical analysis of Rousseau’s work in music has been principally the domain of musicologists, rarely involving the work of scholars of political theory or literary studies. In Rousseau Among the Moderns, Julia Simon puts forth fresh interpretations of The Social Contract, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Confessions, as well as other texts. She links Rousseau’s understanding of key concepts in music, such as tuning, harmony, melody, and form, to the crucial problem of the individual’s relationship to the social order. The choice of music as the privileged aesthetic object enables Rousseau to gain insight into the role of the aesthetic realm in relation to the social and political body in ways often associated with later thinkers. Simon argues that much of Rousseau’s “modernism” resides in the unique role that he assigns to music in forging communal relations.
InRousseau's Republican Romance, Elizabeth Wingrove combines political theory and narrative analysis to argue that Rousseau's stories of sex and sexuality offer important insights into the paradoxes ...of democratic consent. She suggests that despite Rousseau's own protestations, "man" and "citizen" are not rival or contradictory ideals. Instead, they are deeply interdependent. Her provocative reconfiguration of republicanism introduces the concept of consensual nonconsensuality--a condition in which one wills the circumstances of one's own domination. This apparently paradoxical possibility appears at the center of Rousseau's republican polity and his romantic dyad: in both instances, the expression and satisfaction of desire entail a twin experience of domination and submission.
Drawing on a wide variety of Rousseau's political and literary writings, Wingrove shows how consensual nonconsensuality organizes his representations of desire and identity. She demonstrates the inseparability of republicanism and accounts of heterosexuality in an analysis that emphasizes the sentimental and somatic aspects of citizenship. In Rousseau's texts, a politics of consent coincides with a performative politics of desire and of emotion. Wingrove concludes that understanding his strategies of democratic governance requires attending to his strategies of symbolization. Further, she suggests that any understanding of political practice requires attending to bodily practices.
Rousseau Cohen, Joshua
2010, 2010-02-25, 20100101
eBook, Book
The fundamental problem of Rousseau's political philosophy is to find a form of association that protects the person and goods of each person without demanding from them a morally unacceptable ...sacrifice of autonomy. His solution to this problem, specified by a social contract, is the society of the general will: a free community of equals, whose members share a commitment to the common good, and in which each gives the law to him or herself. But how could it be that we accept a common authority and yet remain fully autonomous; and is such a society genuinely possible for human beings? Rousseau answers the first question by filling out the ideal of a free community of equals, regulated by the general will. He answers the second by showing that human beings can, appearances notwithstanding, live together in a free community of equals, motivated by the general will, and by describing how a free community of equals might work institutionally, as a form of democracy. At the heart of the argument is the idea that human beings are naturally good but corrupted by bad institutions. With institutions that advance the common good and secure each citizen's self-worth, people may acquire the requisite motivations. To this end, Rousseau favors direct-democratic lawmaking, and emphasizes the importance of strong communal solidarities. But the ideal of a free community of equals may be more robust — and more robustly attractive — than his proposals about direct democracy and communitarian ideas of solidarity might suggest.
In Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment, Denise Schaeffer challenges the common view of Rousseau as primarily concerned with conditioning citizens’ passions in order to promote republican ...virtue and unreflective patriotic attachment to the fatherland. Schaeffer argues that, to the contrary, Rousseau’s central concern is the problem of judgment and how to foster it on both the individual and political level in order to create the conditions for genuine self-rule. Offering both a detailed commentary on Rousseau’s major work on education, Emile, and wide-ranging analysis of the relationship between Emile and several of Rousseau’s other works, Schaeffer explores Rousseau’s understanding of what good judgment is, how it is learned, and why it is central to the achievement and preservation of human freedom. The model of Rousseauian citizenship that emerges from Schaeffer’s analysis is more dynamic and self-critical than is often acknowledged. This book demonstrates the importance of Rousseau’s contribution to our understanding of faculty of judgment, and, more broadly, invites a critical reevaluation of Rousseau’s understanding of education, citizenship, and both individual and collective freedom.
On Imposture Margel, Serge; Yampolsky, Eva
2023
eBook
Imposture is an abuse of power. It is the act of lying for one's own benefit, of disguising the truth in order to mislead. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, imposture is first and foremost power ...itself . In On Imposture, French philosopher Serge Margel explores imposture within Rousseau's Discourses, Confessions, and Emile. For Rousseau, taking power, using it, or abusing it are ultimately one and the same act. Once there's power, and someone grants themselves the means, the right, and the authority to force another's beliefs or actions, there is imposture. According to Rousseau, imposture can be found through human history, society, and culture. Using a deconstructionist method in the classic manner of Derrida, On Imposture explores Rousseau's thought concerning imposture and offers a unique analysis of its implications for politics, civil society, literature, and existentialist thought.
Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the ...plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call "home." Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.
This book studies Rousseau's rich and complex theory of the type of self-love (amour propre) that, for him, marks the central difference between humans and beasts. Amour-propre is the passion that ...drives human individuals to seek the esteem, approval, admiration, or love — the recognition — of their fellow beings. This book reconstructs Rousseau's understanding of what the drive for recognition is, why it is so problematic, and how its presence opens up far-reaching developmental possibilities for creatures that possess it. One of Rousseau's central theses is that amour-propre in its corrupted, manifestations — pride or vanity — is the principal source of an array of evils so widespread that they can easily appear to be necessary features of the human condition: enslavement, conflict, vice, misery, and self-estrangement. Yet Rousseau also argues that solving these problems depends not on suppressing or overcoming the drive for recognition but on cultivating it so that it contributes positively to the achievement of freedom, peace, virtue, happiness, and unalienated selfhood. Indeed, Rousseau goes so far as to claim that, despite its many dangers, the need for recognition is a condition of nearly everything that makes human life valuable and that elevates it above mere animal existence: rationality, morality, freedom — subjectivity itself — would be impossible for humans if it were not for amour-propre and the relations to others it impels us to establish.
This exciting new book presents the first overview of Jean Jacques Rousseau's work from a political science perspective. Was Rousseau - the great theorist of the French Revolution - really a ...conservative? This original study argues that the author of The Social Contract was a constitutionalist much closer to Madison, Montesquieu and Locke than to revolutionaries. Outlining his profound opposition to Godless materialism and revolutionary change, this book finds parallels between Rousseau and Burke, as well as showing that Rousseau developed the first modern theory of nationalism. The book presents an integrated political analysis of Rousseau's educational, ethical, religious and political writings, and will be essential reading for students of politics, philosophy and the history of ideas.
The claim that Rousseau's writings influenced the development of Kant's critical philosophy, and German idealism, is not a new one. As correct as the claim may be, it does not amount to a systematic ...account of Rousseau's place within this philosophical tradition. It also suggests a progression whereby Rousseau's achievements are eventually eclipsed by those of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, especially with respect to the idea of freedom. In this book David James shows that Rousseau presents certain challenges that Kant and the idealists Fichte and Hegel could not fully meet, by making dependence and necessity, as well as freedom, his central concerns, and thereby raises the question of whether freedom in all its forms is genuinely possible in a condition of human interdependence marked by material inequality. His study will be valuable for all those studying Kant, German idealism and the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas.
