Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life

Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life
Author: Laurence D. Cooper
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271029889

The rise of modern science created a crisis for Western moral and political philosophy, which had theretofore relied either on Christian theology or Aristotelian natural teleology as guarantors of an objective standard for &"the good life.&" This book examines Rousseau's effort to show how and why, despite this challenge from science (which he himself intensified by equating our subhuman origins with our natural state), nature can remain a standard for human behavior. While recognizing an original goodness in human being in the state of nature, Rousseau knew this to be too low a standard and promoted the idea of &"the natural man living in the state of society,&" notably in Emile. Laurence Cooper shows how, for Rousseau, conscience&—understood as the &"love of order&"&—functions as the agent whereby simple savage sentiment is sublimated into a more refined &"civilized naturalness&" to which all people can aspire.

Rousseau's Theory of Freedom

Rousseau's Theory of Freedom
Author: Matthew Simpson
Publisher: Continuum
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2006-04-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Offers an interpretation of the theory of freedom in the Social Contract. The author gives a careful analysis of Rousseau's theory of the social pact, and then examines the kinds of freedom that it brings about, showing how Rousseau's individualist and collectivist aspects fit into a larger and logically coherent theory of human liberty.

Rousseau: 'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings

Rousseau: 'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings
Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1997-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521424462

The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is presented in two volumes, together forming the most comprehensive anthology of Rousseau's political writings in English. Volume II contains the later writings such as The Social Contract and a selection of Rousseau's letters on important aspects of his thought. The Social Contract has become Rousseau's most famous single work, but on publication was condemned by both the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities in France and Geneva. Rousseau fled and it is during this period that he wrote some of his autobiographical works as well as political essays such as On the Government of Poland. This 1997 volume, like its predecessor, contains a comprehensive introduction, chronology and guide to further reading, and will enable students to obtain a full understanding of the writings of one of the world's greatest thinkers.

Creolizing Political Theory

Creolizing Political Theory
Author: Jane Anna Gordon
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2014-02-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0823254836

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.

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts
Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1992
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

Rousseau attacks the social and political effects of the dominant forms of scientific knowledge. Contains the entire First Discourse, contemporary attacks on it, Rousseau's replies to his critics, and his summary of the debate in his preface to Narcissus. A number of these texts have never before been available in English. The First Discourse and Polemics demonstrate the continued relevance of Rousseau's thought. Whereas his critics argue for correction of the excesses and corruptions of knowledge and the sciences as sufficient, Rousseau attacks the social and political effects of the dominant forms of scientific knowledge.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Author: Leopold Damrosch
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780618446964

Reconstructs the life of the French literary genius whose writing changed opinions and fueled fierce debate on both sides of the Atlantic during the period of the American and French revolutions.

A Discourse on Inequality

A Discourse on Inequality
Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 150403547X

A fascinating examination of the relationship between civilization and inequality from one of history’s greatest minds The first man to erect a fence around a piece of land and declare it his own founded civil society—and doomed mankind to millennia of war and famine. The dawn of modern civilization, argues Jean-Jacques Rousseau in this essential treatise on human nature, was also the beginning of inequality. One of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau based his work in compassion for his fellow man. The great crime of despotism, he believed, was the raising of the cruel above the weak. In this landmark text, he spells out the antidote for man’s ills: a compassionate revolution to pull up the fences and restore the balance of mankind. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.