Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and Interpretation from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Cambridge University Press, 7/28/2016
EAN 9781107146327, ISBN10: 1107146321

Hardcover, 240 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm
Language: English

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been cast as a champion of Enlightenment and a beacon of Romanticism, a father figure of radical revolutionaries and totalitarian dictators alike, an inventor of the modern notion of the self, and an advocate of stern ancient republicanism. Engaging with Rousseau treats his writings as an enduring topic of debate, examining the diverse responses they have attracted from the Enlightenment to the present. Such notions as the general will were, for example, refracted through very different prisms during the struggle for independence in Latin America and in social conflicts in Eastern Europe, or modified by thinkers from Kant to contemporary political theorists. Beyond Rousseau's ideas, his public image too travelled around the world. This book examines engagement with Rousseau's works as well as with his self-fashioning; especially in turbulent times, his defiant public identity and his call for regeneration were admired or despised by intellectuals and political agents.

1. 'A lover of peace more than liberty'? The Genevan rejection of Rousseau's politics Richard Whatmore
2. Adrastus versus Diogenes
Frederick the Great and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on self-love Avi Lifschitz
3. Sources of evil or seeds of the good? Rousseau and Kant on needs, the arts and the sciences Alexander Schmidt
4. Rousseau and French liberalism, 1789–1870 Jeremy Jennings
5. Rousseau and the redistributive republic
nineteenth-century French interpretations Jean-Fabien Spitz
6. Echoes of the social contract in Central and Eastern Europe, 1770–1825 Monika Baár
7. Reading Rousseau in Spanish America during the Wars of Independence (1808–26) Nicola Miller
8. 'The porch to a collectivism as absolute as the mind of man has ever conceived'
Rousseau scholarship in Britain from the Great War to the Cold War Christopher Brooke
9. Rousseau at Harvard
John Rawls and Judith Shklar on realistic utopia Céline Spector
10. Rousseau's dilemma Philip Pettit
11. The depths of recognition
the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Axel Honneth
Bibliography
Index.