Abstract
It may be said with a trace of vindication that Rousseau’s time has come, although Rousseau himself best understood the complexities surrounding this assertion. Grasping preternaturally from deep within the self-lionizing world of eighteenth-century continental monarchy the contradictions of social orders both decaying and ascending, he pushed still beyond as only two other thinkers in Western political thought, Plato and Hobbes, to discern what was to come. Our difficulty recognizing and responding to the future, evident in our inability to absorb the gift of his prescience, was for Rousseau fully matched by our inability to grasp what lies before us.
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Notes
- 1.
Education for the modern individual cannot even any longer presume either a traditional ‘fatherland’ or even liberal forms of citizenship, for in an ‘unsettled and restless’ ‘age of mobility and change’ the only certainty, the ‘single guide’ is one’s own nature and development (Rousseau, 1979: 42).
References
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (Second Discourse)”, in The First and Second Discourses, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1964a, translated by Roger D. and Judith R. Masters.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse)”, in The First and Second Discourses, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1964b, translated by Roger D. and Judith R. Masters.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or on Education, Basic Books, New York, 1979, translated by Allan Bloom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to M. de Malesherbes (12 January 1762)”, in Pleiade I, 1135–36, cited in and translated by Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1968.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract”, in The Social Contract and Discourses, E.P.Dutton, New York, 1950, translated by G.D.H. Cole.
Louis Hartz, “Democracy: Image and Reality,” in Democracy in the Mid=Twentieth Century: Problems and Prospects, edited by William N. Chambers and Robert H. Salisbury, Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, New York, 1971 [reprint from 1960].
Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1968.
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Block, J. (2023). From Fashioned to Fashioner: Rousseau and the Reclamation of History. In: Harris, N., Bosseau, D., Pintobtang, P., Brown, O. (eds) Rousseau Today. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29243-9_2
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