Poli 212 History of Western Political Philosophy Professor Sammy Basu

Historiography and Rousseau

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-1778)

	Author	Text	Context
Whig	Vigorously idiosyncratic and freethinking individual who however doesn’t believe that others can live with the freedom he enjoyed.	Early works overstate damage of civilized life but do so in order to affirm opposite of happy slaves, namely simple authenticity. Later work, stresses the centrality of consent and convention in establishing polities instead of force or paternal authority, and endorses popular republican sovereignty. However, text also affirms potentially fascist concept of the participatory general will able to force individuals qua citizens/subjects to be free, constrained by censorship and civil religion.	The political and economic energies of individuals, will rally behind freedom, equality and fraternity in the form of the French Revolution, ending monarchy and briefly installing a republic premised on the rights of man, before the regime turns authoritarian.
Marxist	Author Vulnerable status on the margins of society when young alerts him to the artifices and barbarisms of so-called civilized life.	Text Early works reflect an intense sense of the injustice with which European societies enforce moral and political inequalities. Brilliant expose of ideology of rich perpetrated as theory of politics that benefits everyone. Later work resigned to necessity and propriety of private property although still wary of effects of huge gap and resulting power imbalance between rich and poor.	Context Tension within France is building between the obsolete and increasingly corrupt and decadent ancien regime and a new order responsive to the energies of urban merchants and capitalists.
Feminist	Author Mother dies shortly after birth and father is absent or abusive. R grows up with surrogate parents at worst and complicated relations with women at best.	Text In affirming heart and passions against reason and rationalization, R also attributes crucial social role to the femininity of women operative in the domestic sphere. Women were to be chaste wives not fallen women. Their role was to humanize and soften their men. They should be educated to complement their condition of virtuous dependency. In effect he defends a patriarchal household even though in his account of nature, men and women were initially functionally equal as individuals.	Context Patriarchal society in which roles of women were being redescribed to complement the liberty, equality and fraternity men would enjoy in modern republic.
Post-Modern	Author Radical skepticism of youth give way under exposure to complicated and destabilizing realities of free politics to conservative convictions on necessity of various social institutions.	Text Attention to our primordial nature now forever lost, leaves the distinct impression that the human no longer has an essence or nature other than adaptation to environment and culture. As such, the self is really a product of circumstances and conventions. Regrettably, R endorses necessity of social engineering of habits of self. http://www.nhinet.org/bp.htm	Context In the wake of collapses of legitimacy of old institutions that maintained order, new institutions are needed to maintain social control, e.g. public education, manipulation of manners, mores and standards of public respectability emerge.

Useful sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

Marxism and R

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/kamenka.htm

Feminism and R

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/wollstonecraft.htm

Post-modernism and R

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/jean-jacques_rousseau.html