Self-Sacrifice, Other-Sacrifice, and the Construction of Communal Politics in Rousseau's Le Lévite d'Éphraïm

• In Event: Fragile Liberties: Tocqueville, Rousseau, and the Predicates of Self-determination

Brief Overview

I challenge existing scholarship on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's overlooked prose poem Le Lévite d'Éphraïm, arguing that the vision of communal politics Rousseau presents, constructed through sacrifice, contains the seeds of its undoing.

Author

• Magda Smith, Georgetown University