Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction

Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Robert Wokler
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2001-08-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191604429

One of the most profound thinkers of modern history, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was a central figure of the European Enlightenment. He was also its most formidable critic, condemning the political, economic, theological, and sexual trappings of civilization along lines that would excite the enthusiasm of romantic individualists and radical revolutionaries alike. In this study of Rousseau's life and works Robert Wokler shows how his philosophy of history, his theories of music and politics, his fiction, educational and religious writings, and even his botany, were all inspired by visionary ideals of mankind's self-realization in a condition of unfettered freedom. He explains how, in regressing to classical republicanism, ancient mythology, direct communion with God, and solitude, Rousseau anticipated some post-modernist rejections of the Enlightenment as well. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The General Will

The General Will
Author: Andrew Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1993-09-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521443227

This bold and unabashedly utopian book advances the thesis that Marx's notion of communism is a defensible, normative ideal. However, unlike many others who have written in this area, Levine applies the tools and techniques of analytic philosophy to formulate and defend his radical, political program. The argument proceeds by filtering the ideals and institutions of Marxism through Rousseau's notion of the "general will." Once Rousseau's ideas are properly understood it is possible to construct a community of equals who share some vision of a common good that can be achieved and maintained through cooperation or coordination that is at once both voluntary and authoritative. The book engages with liberal theory in order to establish its differences from Rousseauean-Marxian political theory. This provocative book will be of particular interest to political philosophers and political scientists concerned with Marxism, socialist theory, and democratic theory.

From Rousseau to Lenin

From Rousseau to Lenin
Author: Lucio Colletti
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788732065

This is the first of Lucio Colletti's books to be translated into English, in which he considers the scientific character of Marxism. In contrast to the pre-occupation with Hegel and his contribution to the formation of Marx's thought, Colletti goes back on the one hand to the founders of political economy and on the other to Rousseau. In Rousseau's critique of 'civil society' Colletti isolates a crucial watershed in the development of a counter-theory to modern bourgeois society. The second of Colletti's central concerns is with the unity of Marxism. For him it is an integral science of history and of society which denies the pretensions of bourgeois sociology to any scientific status. His attack is concentrated on Max Weber and his epigone Karl Mannheim, but has wider implications for sociology in general. This is followed by a devastating critique of Bernstein's evolutionist 'revision' of Marx. From Rousseau to Lenin also contains a polemical study of Marcuse's 'neo-romantic utopianism', and the masterly statements of the contemporary relevance of Lenin's State and Revolution and Marx's Capital to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.

Politics and History

Politics and History
Author: Louis Althusser
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1789602874

In the first two essays of this book, Louis Althusser analyses the work of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment - Montesquieu and Rousseau. He shows that although they made considerable advances towards establishing a science of politics, particularly in comparison with the theorists of natural law, they nevertheless remained the victims of the ideologies of their day and class. Montesquieu accepted as given the political notions current in French absolutism; Rousseau attempted to impose by moral conversion an already outdated mode of production. The third essay examines Marx's relationship to Hegel and elaborates on the discussions of this theme in Althusser's earlier books, For Marx and Lenin and Philosophy. Althusser argues that Marx was able to establish a theory of historical materialism and the possibility of a Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism not simply by turning his back on Hegel, but by extracting and converting certain categories from Hegel's Logic and applying them to English political economy and French socialist political theory.

Marx's Dream

Marx's Dream
Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-06-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022655466X

Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death. With Marx’s Dream, Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed alternative view, distinguishing rigorously between Marx and Marxism. Rockmore breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in three key ways. First, he shows that the concern with the relation of theory to practice—reflected in Marx’s famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world, while the point is to change it—arose as early as Socrates, and has been central to philosophy in its best moments. Second, he seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. And, crucially, Rockmore relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, without the special pleading to which Marxist accounts too often resort. Marx’s failures as a thinker, Rockmore shows, lie less in his diagnosis of industrial capitalism’s problems than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound. ? Only a philosopher of Rockmore’s stature could tackle a project this substantial, and the results are remarkable: a fresh Marx, unencumbered by doctrine and full of insights that remain salient today.

The Longing for Total Revolution

The Longing for Total Revolution
Author: Bernard Yack
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2022-09-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520375874

Bernard Yack seeks to identify and account for the development of a form of discontent held in common by a large number of European philosophers and social critics, including Rousseau, Schiller, the young Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Yack contends that these individuals, despite their profound disagreements, shared new perspectives on human freedom and history, and that these perspectives gave their discontent its peculiar breadth and intensity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx
Author: Francis Wheen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393049237

Looks at the life of the father of Communism focusing primarily on the human side of the man rather than his works.

Lessons on Rousseau

Lessons on Rousseau
Author: Louis Althusser
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2019-11-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1784785598

Althusser dissects the leading Enlightenment philosopher Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. A new way of coming to terms with Rousseau's theoretical rigour, beneath his apparent reveries and sentimental flights of fancy, was here put to work. Second, we are now discovering that the 'late Althusser's' theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy 'for Marx' were being worked out well before 1985 - in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.