(iPoster) Conquest for Nature: Recovering the Revolutionary Rousseau

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 2 (Historical) & Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 2 (Historical)

Abstract

Effectively speaking for the global majority of Rousseau’s readers going back to the Jacobins, C.L.R. James affirmed simply in 1968 that ‘Rousseau was a revolutionary…there is no question about that’. The next year Judith Shklar published Men and Citizens, a book flatly denying that claim. The un- or anti-revolutionary Rousseau subsequently built by academic political theorists on the foundation Shklar laid is one that I contend the global majority of his readers would find, not only unrecognizable, but unpersuasive. Recovering the revolutionary Rousseau, I undertake to show, in the terms of academic political theory, why such reactions would be justified.

Author

• Benjamin Nolan, University of Massachusetts, Amherst