In this article, I offer a new interpretation for Rousseau’s surprisingly spare use of the phrase “general interest” in his works. My starting point is the very notion of interest in his political ...thought. For Rousseau, interest is not a matter of calculation but of experience; properly speaking, once we are in the state of society, there is nothing like an individual interest because all our interests are shared with somebody else. And our political interest (our sensitivity to society’s general disorders) is shared with all our fellow citizens. In this regard, I bring to light a clear antinomy between the “common interest” in Rousseau’s Social Contract and the “general interest” as conceptualized by the physiocrats a few years later. By “common interest” Rousseau means the material basis for the democratic formation of a general will (that is, a political will) among the citizens, whereas by “general interest” physiocrats mean the normative language in which a non-democratic political decision claims its legitimacy by appealing to reason.
El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el modo en que se presenta la virtud política en los principales textos de Montesquieu y su resonancia en la obra de Rousseau. La hipótesis general que se ...propone es que, a pesar de sus enormes divergencias, los dos elaboraron una lectura eminentemente moderna que los separa de la filosofía política clásica. Ambos habrían compartido la idea de que la virtud es una pasión -o que es intercambiable por una pasión-, apartándose de las jerarquías del pensamiento antiguo. Se sostiene en este artículo que Montesquieu declarará, ante la muerte de la virtud clásica, su sucedáneo en el placer de la seguridad que es capaz de garantizar la libertad por medio del gobierno mixto. Por su lado, Rousseau hará una reivindicación de la virtud antigua, pero identificándola con la compasión, dislocando el status de la virtud civil. Estas lecturas darán lugar a dos maneras muy distintas de comprender la relación existente entre derecho natural y derecho positivo.
This article examines Olympe de Gouges' demands for the rights of woman in her famous but still understudied work Les droits de la femme. A La Reine 1791. Particular emphasis is put on analysing how ...she combines her demand for equality with her conception of sexual difference. The article consists of three parts. The first part gives a brief overview of the demands for the equality of the sexes as they were presented in seventeenth-century France and critically reacted upon in eighteenth-century France, not least by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his defence of sexual difference. The second and third parts focus on Gouges' argumentation. First, by analysing how she argues for women's active citizenship by criticising the exclusion of women from the public sphere, but without questioning sexual difference as such; and second, by discussing how she redefines the famous slogan of the French Revolution; liberty, equality, fraternity. The conclusion argues that rather than being caught in a paradox of equality and difference, as has been claimed by Joan W. Scott, Gouges did successfully combine the two concepts, even if her interpretation of their relation was excluded from the canon of political theory.
Locke and Rousseau both address the question of how best to educate children, who love both freedom and power, to be free adults who submit only to reason. Contrary to the common view that Rousseau’s ...disagreement with Locke stems from Rousseau’s radical understanding of freedom, I argue that the disagreement stems from Rousseau’s view, for which he argues convincingly, that Lockean education cannot secure even Lockean freedom. This reconception of Rousseau’s disagreement with Locke makes Rousseau difficult to dismiss and leaves us at an impasse with respect to the question of how to educate for liberty.
Shelley and Rousseau Lee, Monika
The Wordsworth circle,
01/2017, Volume:
48, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Shelley's writing during the actual sailing voyage included parts of a long letter to Thomas Love Peacock, a will in which he divided his estate evenly between Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont, a ...sketchbook full of rough drawings of the lake, and the autobiographical opening of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," which he may have completed after returning to Montalègre, but which Michael Erkehlenz, editor of The Geneva Notebook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, supposes was drafted during the actual boat voyage - a credible explanation of the chronology of composition, since many pages of the notebook have been lost and no first draft of the poem survives. Shelley's lines, "Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy!" (59-60), are un-ironic, and the poem may not be overdy polidcal, though political thought is manifest, whether coverdy or direcdy, in all Shelley's writing; nonetheless, Forest Pyle has made a creditable foray into the poem's polidcal substrata. In a note to the poems of 1816, Mary Shelley writes that Shelley was reading Julie when he conceived "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" {CompletePoetry 3.1069), and Shelley's letter to Peacock referring to his reading of the novel lends support to the assertion (Letters 1.485). To redress an imbalance and to fill a gap, this reading of the intertextual dialogue between Shelley's lyric and the novel which inspired it proposes historical influence as a basis for a dialogic intertext; the "fast influencing" ("Mont Blanc," 38) and "an unremitting interchange" (39) between...
The following is a reflection on the possibility of teaching by example, and especially as the idea of teaching by example is developed in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. My thesis is that ...Rousseau created a literary version of himself in his writings as an embodiment of his philosophy, rather in the same way and with the same purpose that Plato created a version of Socrates. This figure of Rousseau-a sort of philosophical portrait of the man of nature-is represented as an example for us to follow. This would appear to have been dangerous and destabilizing work, given the mental distress that it caused Rousseau in striving to live up to his fictional self. Rousseau's own ideas on the nature of teaching by example are presented in a discussion of the section in 'Emile' which Rousseau takes from an incident in his own life-the story of his meeting with a young Savoyard priest who befriended him and influenced him through the power of his example.
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