Rousseau's Political Imagination

Rousseau's Political Imagination PDF Author: Patrick Coleman
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600036023
Category : Performing arts in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Rousseau's Political Imagination

Rousseau's Political Imagination PDF Author: Patrick Coleman
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600036023
Category : Performing arts in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description


Rule Breaking and Political Imagination

Rule Breaking and Political Imagination PDF Author: Kenneth A. Shepsle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647335X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
“Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau PDF Author: Michael Sonenscher
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004420339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This is a book about the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its aim is to explain why, for Rousseau, thinking about politics – whether as democratic sovereignty, representative government, institutionalised power, imaginative vision or a moment of decision – lay at the heart of what he called his “grand, sad system.” This book tracks the gradual emergence of the various components of that system and describes the connections between them. The result is a new and fresh interpretation of one of Europe’s most famous political thinkers, showing why Rousseau can be seen as one of the first theorists of the modern concept of civil society and a key source of the problematic modern idea of a federal system.

Rousseau's Social Contract

Rousseau's Social Contract PDF Author: David Lay Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107511607
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be 'the Newton of the moral world', as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read and debated in the 250 years since its publication. Rousseau's Social Contract: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining Rousseau's famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication in 1762.

The Discourses and Other Political Writings

The Discourses and Other Political Writings PDF Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political science
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Creolizing Political Theory

Creolizing Political Theory PDF Author: Jane Anna Gordon
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823254836
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
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.

Social Contract

Social Contract PDF Author: Jean Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451602227
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourses on the Origin of Inequality, he outlines his own history of the development of human society. He explains in general terms how the differences between social and economic classes arose alongside the formation of modern states. He also explores the means by which these inequalities were actually built into and perpetuated by the foundational notions of modern society and government. Rather than endorse a return to the peaceful ways of pre-modern human beings, Rousseau addresses these inequalities in his seminal work, The Social Contract. Rousseau does not see government as an inherently corrupting influence, and he makes very clear and precise recommendations about how the state can and should protect the equality and character of its citizens.

Rousseau and Hobbes

Rousseau and Hobbes PDF Author: Robin Douglass
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191038024
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Robin Douglass presents the first comprehensive study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's engagement with Thomas Hobbes. He reconstructs the intellectual context of this engagement to reveal the deeply polemical character of Rousseau's critique of Hobbes and to show how Rousseau sought to expose that much modern natural law and doux commerce theory was, despite its protestations to the contrary, indebted to a Hobbesian account of human nature and the origins of society. Throughout the book Douglass explores the reasons why Rousseau both followed and departed from Hobbes in different places, while resisting the temptation to present him as either a straightforwardly Hobbesian or anti-Hobbesian thinker. On the one hand, Douglass reveals the extent to which Rousseau was occupied with problems of a fundamentally Hobbesian nature and the importance, to both thinkers, of appealing to the citizens' passions in order to secure political unity. On the other hand, Douglass argues that certain ideas at the heart of Rousseau's philosophy—free will and the natural goodness of man—were set out to distance him from positions associated with Hobbes. Douglass advances an original interpretation of Rousseau's political philosophy, emerging from this encounter with Hobbesian ideas, which focuses on the interrelated themes of nature, free will, and the passions. Douglass distances his interpretation from those who have read Rousseau as a proto-Kantian and instead argues that his vision of a well-ordered republic was based on cultivating man's naturally good passions to render the life of the virtuous citizen in accordance with nature.

The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau PDF Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226921883
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This “fresh new rendition of Rousseau’s major political writings is a boon for scholars and students alike”—with a critical introduction by the translator (Richard Boyd, Georgetown University). Individualist and communitarian. Anarchist and totalitarian. Progressive and reactionary. Since the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been called all of these things. Few philosophers have been the subject of such intense debate, yet almost everyone agrees that Rousseau is among the most important political thinkers in history. Renowned Rousseau scholar John T. Scott highlights his enduring influence with this superb new edition of his major political writings. This volume includes authoritative and lucid new translations of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, and On the Social Contract. The two Discourses show Rousseau developing his well-known conception of the natural goodness of man and the problems posed by life in society. With the Social Contract, Rousseau became the first major thinker to argue that democracy is the only legitimate form of political organization. Scott’s extensive introduction enhances our understanding of these foundational writings, providing background information, social and historical context, and guidance for interpreting the works. Throughout, translation and editorial notes clarify ideas and terms that might not be immediately familiar to most readers.

Rousseau's Reader

Rousseau's Reader PDF Author: John T. Scott
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668914X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
On his famous walk to Vincennes to visit the imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau had what he called an “illumination”—the realization that man was naturally good but becomes corrupted by the influence of society—a fundamental change in Rousseau’s perspective that would animate all of his subsequent works. At that moment, Rousseau “saw” something he had hitherto not seen, and he made it his mission to help his readers share that vision through an array of rhetorical and literary techniques. In Rousseau’s Reader, John T. Scott looks at the different strategies Rousseau used to engage and persuade the readers of his major philosophical works, including the Social Contract, Discourse on Inequality, and Emile. Considering choice of genre; textual structure; frontispieces and illustrations; shifting authorial and narrative voice; addresses to readers that alternately invite and challenge; apostrophe, metaphor, and other literary devices; and, of course, paradox, Scott explores how the form of Rousseau’s writing relates to the content of his thought and vice versa. Through this skillful interplay of form and content, Rousseau engages in a profoundly transformative dialogue with his readers. While most political philosophers have focused, understandably, on Rousseau’s ideas, Scott shows convincingly that the way he conveyed them is also of vital importance, especially given Rousseau’s enduring interest in education. Giving readers the key to Rousseau’s style, Scott offers fresh and original insights into the relationship between the substance of his thought and his literary and rhetorical techniques, which enhance our understanding of Rousseau’s project and the audiences he intended to reach.