Matthew Maguire

Introduction -- "Every Legitimate Government is Republican": Rousseau's Debt to and Departure from Montesquieu on Republicanism -- What if There is no Legislator? Rousseau's History of the Government of Geneva -- Rousseau's Republican Citizenship: The Moral Psychology of The Social Contract -- Rousseau's negative liberty: Themes of domination and skepticism in The Social Contract -- Rousseau's Ancient Ends of Legislation: Liberty, Equality (& Fraternity) -- Property and Possession in Rousseau's Social Contract -- Political Equality Among Unequals -- On the Primacy of Peoplehood: Nations and Nationalism in Rousseau's Social Contract -- Rousseau on Voting and Electoral Laws -- Rousseau and the puzzle of the Roman Republic -- Rousseau's Case against Democracy -- Rousseau's Dilemma or "Of Civil Religion" -- Entreating the Political: Politics and Theology in Rousseau's Social Contract -- Civil Religion and Political Unity: Social Contract 4.8.

This classroom edition includes _On the Social Contract_, the _Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts_, the _Discourse on the Origins of Inequality_, and the Preface to _Narcissus_. Each text has been newly translated and includes a full complement of explanatory notes. The editors’ introduction offers students diverse points of entry into some of the distinctive possibilities and challenges of each of these fundamental texts, as well as an introduction to Rousseau’s life and historical situation. The volume also includes annotated appendices that help students to explore the origins and influences of Rousseau’s work, including excerpts from Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Mandeville, Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Hegel, and Engels.

The dissertation is a close reading of Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville's reflections on theology, politics, and modernity. The chapter on Pascal posits a fissure within Christian thought that opens the possibility of a purely human incarnation within history through the imaginary configuration of text, and the Presentation of Christianity as faith set radically and inflexibly against human activity and attachment in and through the world. Rousseau realizes the possibility of historical incarnation in a distinctive and instructive oeuvre; the ultimate motives and ends of his authorial ambitions, from his early Discourses to his final reveries, are discussed at length. Tocqueville finds himself alienated from faith and Enlightenment, and takes his bearings from history, a history mastered by equality and haunted by the seductive excesses and betrayed promises of revolutionary Enlightenment. The thematic connections between all three authors---as well as the ultimate consequences of the historical journey traced throughout the manuscript---are discussed in the conclusion