Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary

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Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 - 201 pages
Rousseau is most often read either as a theorist of individual authenticity or as a communitarian. In this book, he is neither. Instead, Rousseau is understood as a theorist of the common person. In Strong's understanding, Rousseau's use of 'common' always refers both to that which is common and to that which is ordinary, vulgar, everyday. For Strong, Rousseau resonates with Kant, Hegel, and Marx, but he is more modern like Emerson, Nietzsche, Eittegenstein, and Heidegger. Rousseau's democratic individual is an ordinary self, paradoxically multiple and not singular. In the course of exploring this contention, Strong examines Rousseau's fear of authorship (though not of authority), his understanding of the human, his attempt to overcome the scandal that relativism posed for politics, and the political importance of sexuality.
 

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Contents

JeanJacques Rousseau and the fear of the Author
1
The Life
4
The Author as Personality
8
Why Confess?
12
Confession and Constancy
16
The First Discourse and the Question of Philosophy
19
The Language for the Human
25
Rousseau and the Experience of Others
30
The Education of an Ordinary Man
104
Education and the Philosopher
110
Feeling
113
Control and Morality
116
Appearance and Convention
119
Knowing Others
120
The Premise of Human Criticism
124
Sex and the Other
130

Citizen of Geneva
31
The Absence of the Thought of the Common
35
Looking Into Books
37
What Nature Is Not
40
Loving Oneself
48
The Self Encountering the Self and the Other
49
Reading and Seeing
50
Nature and Denaturation
52
Music and the Public Realm
59
Alone With Oneself
64
The General Will and the Scandal of Politics
67
The Thought of the Common
75
The General Will
79
The Seductor Narcissist
85
Sovereignty
88
Representation and Time
90
Government
94
The Threat of Corruption
101
Sex Politics and Virtue
131
The Ends of Politics
139
The Remedy and the Illness
141
The Alternative of Transparency
145
Humanity and Transparency
147
The Deduction of Immanence
149
A Human Home
152
Who Has No Home?
155
Is Sex Human?
159
What Is the Legislator?
160
Ends to the Human
162
Notes Chapters 15
164
Bibliographical Afterword
191
Name Index
195
Index of Major Discussions of Texts From Rousseau
198
About the Author
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Tracy B. Strong is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

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