GOVT 86.68 The Political Philosophy of J.J. Rousseau
This seminar examines the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most radical, unsettling, and generative figures of the Enlightenment. Rousseau is often, appropriately, grouped with Enlightenment figures; and yet he stands at a critical distance from them, too – simultaneously participating in and rebelling against the project of modern rationality, progress, and sociability.
We will read Rousseau not as a systematic theorist, but a thinker of tensions: someone alive to the conflicts between nature and society, freedom and authority, individuality and collective life. Our engagement with his thought will take us through several of his major and minor works, including the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1749), the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), the Discourse on Political Economy (1755), the Letter to d’Alembert (1758), On the Social Contract (1762), Emile (1762), Ideas for the Government of Poland (1764), the Constitutional Project for Corsica (1765), the Confessions (1765-70), and Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1776-78). We will give special attention to his profound debt to classical sources in these works, and especially his resurrection of arguments by Greek and Roman moralists about the destructive effects of luxury, inequality, and dependence on human freedom.
Ultimately, Rousseau leaves us with no stable resting point. He suggests that freedom requires forms of authority that threaten it, that equality demands sacrifices we resist, and that social life both enables and corrodes our independence. To study Rousseau is not simply to recover an 18th century thinker, but to confront the enduring problem of how human beings can live together without domination amidst conditions that seem always to produce it.
Instructor
Clarke