Exaggerating Emile (and Skipping Sophie) while sliding past The Social Contract

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-186
Author(s):  
Graham P. McDonough ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
General Will ◽  
The Social

This paper examines how philosophy of education textbooks present Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views on women and socialization. It reviews ten texts, involving nine authors, and finds that they generally focus on the concepts of Nature, Negative Education, and Child Development from Books I-III of Emile, but severely restrict mentioning its Book V and The Social Contract. While these results implicitly reflect Rousseau’s historical influence on “progressive” educators, they do not seriously attend to well-established critiques of Rousseau’s sexism and omit acknowledging his intent that Emile’s Negative Education in Nature leads toward his socialization in the General Will.

Gendering the General Will: Frankenstein’s Breaches of Contract

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
General Will ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Creation Stories

As a sociable being that is barred from society, Frankenstein’s monster presents a sustained engagement with social contract theory’s major dilemma of whether individualism can produce sociability. The male creature’s isolation and inner disunity suggest that contract theory displaces men and is unable to concatenate even those members that should be eligible for full citizenship. Shelley focuses on the gender inequality of contract theory through her different creation stories of the creatures’ bodies. In Victor’s decision not to complete the female creature she rejects Wollstonecraft’s revisionist approach to Rousseau, and demonstrates that social contract theory cannot be rewritten to include women. Women are not defined as political subjects but do have independent wills. Therefore, they are potentially resistant to contract and a threat to political control. Contending with Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, and also Coleridge and Godwin, Shelley suggests that intertextual relations produce unpredictable results. The creatures are test cases for the social contract’s respective failures in terms of social cohesion and gender.

Coleridge’s Exile from the Social Contract, 1795–1829

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Breaking Point ◽  
General Will ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Better Than

Coleridge wrote frequently about Rousseau throughout his varied career. His early lectures and letters draw on Rousseau’s critique of luxury and frequently allude to the general will, depicting Rousseau as a Christ-like figure. Coleridge’s subsequent disappointment with Pantisocracy led him to reject Rousseau and the social contract. Comparing Rousseau to Luther in The Friend, Coleridge argues that Rousseau’s unhappiness arises from a conflict between an age of individualism and an ongoing need for community. According to Coleridge, poetry tolerates this conflict better than philosophy. In ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ Coleridge suggests that social retreat offers illusory solace from war and social crisis. He critiques the state of nature, sympathy, and even religion for failing to balance the self with its environment. Thematically and formally The Rime of the Ancient Mariner explores this crisis in cohering systems. Through the mariner’s relationship to the albatross, the wedding that frames the poem, and episodes of the supernatural that disrupt the ballad form, Coleridge defines a breaking point between the individual and general wills.

In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau on the Problem of Political Right

1987 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Neal
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
General Will ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Unstable Position ◽  
Theoretical Project

The relationship between Kant and Rawls is apparently an obvious one; Rawls himself acknowledges the Kantian foundations of his approach to questions of justice and political right, and identifies the precise points at which his theory departs from that of Kant. This essay attempts to show that when one examines those points of departure carefully, they turn out to point not merely away from Kant, but directly and inexorably toward the account of political right given by Rousseau in The Social Contract. The essay argues that it is impossible to fully understand Rawls' theoretical project until one sees the (unstable) position it occupies between the Kantian and Rousseauian accounts of political right. Moreover, it argues that the theoretical project undertaken by Rawls, that of revising the Kantian conception of autonomy in an attempt to show how it could be coherently “expressed” politically, was actually undertaken and “completed” by Rousseau — though with ironic, and unsettling, results.

Writing the Social Contradiction: Rousseau’s Literary Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Conformity ◽  
General Will ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter explores Rousseau’s account of the tension between community and individual by examining the Second Discourse and the Social Contract on the one hand, and Julie on the other. In his political theory Rousseau defines the state of nature as a mere fantasy which belongs to an optative imagined past. In leaving the state of nature, people trade basic needs for decadent desires. Rousseau introduces the general will as a practical device for managing the asociability of the private will, which is driven mainly by appetite. To safeguard the general will from its wayward members, individuals must form a social contract which transforms them into sociable beings. In Julie Rousseau explores the sacrifices that individuals make in joining the general will, as Julie is torn between personal desire on the one hand and social conformity on the other. Rousseau’s literature suggests that the two are incompatible and thus ‘judges’ his philosophy, exploring the deathly outcome of contract. Rousseau’s use of literature to critique the social contract constitutes his major legacy to British Romantic writers.

Citizenship and Civic Education: A Critical Elaboration on the Pedagogy of Rizal’s La Liga Filipina

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clement Camposano
Keyword(s):  
Service Learning ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Sociology Of Education ◽  
General Will ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Learning Programs ◽  
Ethical Project

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s role in shaping Jose Rizal’s political ideas is a blurred spot in existing scholarship on the latter’s life and works. There seems to be an endemic lack of interest in this matter, with scholars preferring to explore Rizal through the optics of nationalism and/or liberalism, often in their attempt to construct the “unity” of his ideas. Aiming to fill this lacuna and unsettle established readings, this article explores Rizal’s decisive shift from Voltairean liberalism in favor of Rousseau’s vision of a cohesive civic body constituted through the social contract. It contends that the social contract theory and its associated concept of the “general will” could serve as bases for resolving the problem of fractiousness and excessive individualism Rizal observed among young expatriate Filipinos, a problem he became increasingly concerned with and nuanced his commitment to the campaign for liberal reforms. Putting on hold the obsession with a unified Rizal, this article asserts that invoking Rousseau’s vision crystallizes the meaning of La Liga Filipina—its place in the trajectory of Rizal’s thoughts and the educative role it was meant to play in relation to the Filipino nation as an ethical project. Finally, the article elaborates on this role, critically exploring its significance and implications for civic education using key sociological concepts and insights from the anthropology and sociology of education, as well as studies on the effectiveness of service-learning programs in promoting civic engagement and participation among young people. A critical elaboration on the pedagogy suggested by La Liga calls attention to how citizenship education might be situated in quotidian processes and spaces, how it is implicated in systems of inequality, and how it could open up new possibilities.

Emile the citizen? A reassessment of the relationship between private education and citizenship in Rousseau’s political thought

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bjorn Gomes
Keyword(s):  
Private Education ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Will ◽  
The Social ◽  
Judith Shklar ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Private Instruction

It is often said that the claims of man and citizen are irreconcilable in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This view, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, holds that the making of a man and the making of a citizen are to be understood as rival enterprises or competing alternatives. This reading has recently been challenged by Frederick Neuhouser. He argues that one can make a man and a citizen, but only if the education of each is performed in the absence of the other. In his view, Emile is raised to be a man first (Books I–IV) before his subsequent instruction in citizenship (Book V). This paper challenges both views. I argue that the making of man and citizen are, in principle, neither rival enterprises nor competing alternatives, and that although Neuhouser is indeed correct to argue for a successive system of education, the making of a citizen is not completed in Emile, but extends into the Social Contract. His account diminishes the crucial role the Lawgiver plays in the fashioning of citizens capable of discerning the general will. I show that although raising individuals under a system of private instruction does not preclude their transformation into citizens but makes such a transformation possible, it is on its own incapable of making citizens.

The community of solitary walkers

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-92
Author(s):  
Sergei Prozorov
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
General Will ◽  
Late Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject

Chapter 2 addresses a recent reinterpretation of Rousseau by Peter Sloterdijk, which prioritizes his late work The Reveries of the Solitary Walker as politically more important than the theory of sovereignty in The Social Contract. In contrast to Sloterdijk Prozorov reads these two works as by no means opposed but affirming the same thing, the sheer existence of the subject, individual or collective, subtracted from all particular predicates. It is this mode of subtractive subjectivity that Rousseau wishes to oppose to partial interests in society that perpetually threaten to corrupt the general will. Prozorov then shows how the contemporary critique of biopolitics relies on the same logic of subtraction, which necessarily leads it into the same aporia as it did Rousseau: if democracy is only conceivable through the subtraction from all particularism, it ends up unsustainable and indefensible in the face of this very particularism.

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