Sociability,Perfectibility and the Intellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of sociability was used mainly to refer to the putative range of primary human qualities or capabilities that preceded—or existed independently of—the formation of political societies. This article is an examination of the impact of Rousseau's thought on this then standard usage. Its initial focus is on Rousseau's concept of perfectibility and its bearing on the thought of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and Friedrich Schlegel. Its broader aim is to show how their respective responses to Rousseau were part of a more deep-seated transformation of the concept of sociability itself.     

Rousseau,Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century natural law tradition

The relationship between the political theory of Rousseau and modern natural law continues to be the subject of debate, both with regard to Rousseau's faithfulness to the idea of natural law itself and regarding the precise extent of the debt he owed to his predecessors. In this article the author re-examines this relationship by focusing attention on what has been defined as the protestant tradition of natural law. In particular she concentrates on the political and theoretical exercise that Jean Barbeyrac had sought to perform by constructing a particular version of this tradition, namely that of using the science of natural law to promote a policy of tolerance between protestants and to justify the right of citizens to resist catholic sovereigns who denied them religious freedom, as well as the right of protestant countries to come to the aid of persecuted fellow believers. The thesis asserts that Rousseau was fully aware of this exercise, just as he was aware that some of Barbeyrac's ideas had been adopted and reworked by another illustrious Genevan, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a member of the Small Council, to support anti-populist and antidemocratic politics in Geneva. Viewed in this way it is possible to perceive in Rousseau's political thought not so much a “first crisis” of natural law as an intention to reformulate this science from a republican perspective in order to derive rigorous principles of political law from it. And in developing his republican political theory Rousseau took up and overturned the analysis of democratic sovereignty carried out by Pufendorf, who in opposing the “pro-monarchist” excesses of authors such as Hobbes and Horn had unhesitatingly demonstrated the complete validity of democratic sovereignty.     

Silencing the laws to save the fatherland: Rousseau’s theory of dictatorship between Bodin and Schmitt

ABSTRACT

Jean-Jacques Rousseau devoted an important chapter of his Social Contract to the dictatorship. Carl Schmitt interpreted Rousseau’s chapter as marking the transition from ‘commissarial’ to ‘sovereign dictatorship’. This article argues that Schmitt’s interpretation is historically and conceptually inaccurate. Instead of paving the way for sovereign dictatorship, Rousseau carefully distinguished the dictatorship from the people’s sovereign authority. Taking position in the ‘debate’ between Bodin and Grotius on the relation between dictatorship and sovereignty, he argued that the dictator could provisionally suspend the people’s sovereign authority, but not abolish it. More particularly, the dictator did not possess the power to make generally binding laws, which had to remain the exclusive authority of the popular assembly. However, this did not prevent Rousseau from recognizing the dictatorship as a means for democratic reform. Rousseau thus conceived of the dictatorship as a time-limited and revocable commission to protect the constitution and to provide for a more stable and effective state organization based on the principle of popular sovereignty.     

Tragic Elements in Calderón's La Dama Duende

Abstract

Ricardo Landeira. El género policíaco en la literatura española del siglo XIX. Universidad de Alicante, 2001. 142 pp.

Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, eds. Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xii + 316 pp. $39.95.

Madeleine Dobie. Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism. Stanford University Press, 2001. xiv + 234 pp. $49.50.

Daniel Murphy. Vicente Aleixandre's Stream of Lyric Consciousness. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001. 263 pp. $43.50.

Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxii + 367 pp. $59.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.     

Liberal Education and the Study of Politics in a Catholic University

Abstract

Rousseau seems to exemplify an understanding of the philosophic life in general and the quest for self-knowledge in particular as a solitary enterprise. An examination of the Confessions, however, reveals that Rousseau holds that the most important discoveries about ourselves are made not in solitude, but with others. It is furthermore the case that, for Rousseau, the philosophic quest to truly know oneself entails the public articulation of one's self-understanding as a part of a comprehensive account of human things, a social activity fraught with political implications. Therefore, the problem of self-knowledge in Rousseau's thought should be understood as a social and political problem (albeit not a problem with a political solution). That this is so even for the famously solitary Rousseau tells us something important both about the thought of that philosopher and about the quest for self-knowledge as such.     

Rousseau,Diderot and the Spirit of Catherine the Great's Reforms

In the Social Contract, Rousseau predicted that Europe would experience a cycle of increasingly intense wars, culminating in invasion from the east: first, Russia would conquer Europe's exhausted and war-torn states; then, Russia would itself become overextended and Europe would ultimately be overrun by the Tartars. The future of the modern state would be a version of the fall of Rome. The present essay provides an explanation of why Rousseau held such apocalyptic views by placing them in the context of projects to reform Europe's political economy in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. In 1767, when Catherine the Great was planning a major revision of the Russian legal code, she outlined her goals in a manifesto called the Grand Instruction, key sections of which were derived from Montesquieu's analysis of depopulation of the countryside caused by uncontrolled industrialisation. The Grand Instruction became the subject of a critical exchange between the Physiocrat Le Trosne and Diderot, who, drawing upon Rousseau, was by turns both sympathetic to and sceptical of Physiocracy. This discourse reveals a triangular debate about the possibility of stabilising the international order by imposing a balance between the agricultural and manufacturing sectors of Europe's rapidly growing economies.     

Rousseau’s reception as an Epicurean: from atheism to aesthetics

ABSTRACT

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his anti-providential and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed.     

Maistre studies

This article examines the excitement that Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments generated in France during the French Revolution, focusing particularly on the writings of political theorists, participants and commentators such as the abbé Sieyès, Pierre-Louis R?derer, the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy Condorcet, who were dismayed at their political opponents’ use of Rousseau, and looked to Smith for an understanding of the passions that was compatible with democratic sovereignty and representative government. In the political context of the early 1790s, clarifying the concept of natural sociability, which Rousseau had rejected, but Smith and Helvétius, in different ways, each regarded as indispensible to a society dependent on advanced division of labour, became a central concern in the public lectures delivered by Pierre-Louis R?derer as the Terror took hold.     

Map is not territory,studies in the history of religions

Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like.