Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies

Robert Wokler, Bryan Garsten

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780691147895
  9780691147888
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400842407
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

Robert Wokler was one of the world's leading experts on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but some of his best work was published in the form of widely scattered and difficult-to-find essays. This book collects for the first time a representative selection of his most important essays on Rousseau and the legacy of Enlightenment political thought. These essays concern many of the great themes of the age, including liberty, equality and the origins of revolution. But they also address a number of less prominent debates, including those over cosmopolitanism, the nature and social role of music and the origins of the human sciences in the Enlightenment controversy over the relationship between humans and the great apes. These essays also explore Rousseau's relationships to Rameau, Pufendorf, Voltaire and Marx; reflect on the work of important earlier scholars of the Enlightenment, including Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin; and examine the influence of the Enlightenment on the twentieth century. One of the central themes of the book is a defense of the Enlightenment against the common charge that it bears responsibility for the Terror of the French Revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century and the Holocaust.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations Used in Citations of Rousseau’s Work
• 1. Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited
• 2. Rites of Passage and the Grand Tour: Discovering, Imagining and Inventing European Civilization in the Age of Enlightenment
• 3. Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution
• 4. Vagabond Reverie
• 5. The Enlightenment Hostilities of Voltaire and Rousseau
• 6. Rousseau’s Pufendorf: Natural Law and the Foundations of Commercial Society
• 7. Rousseau’s Reading of the Book of Genesis and the Theology of Commercial Society
• 8. The Manuscript Authority of Political Thoughts
• 9. Preparing the Definitive Edition of the Correspondance de Rousseau
• 10. Rousseau’s Two Concepts of Liberty
• 11. The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity
• 12. Rousseau and Marx
• 13. Ernst Cassirer’s Enlightenment: An Exchange with Bruce Mazlish
• 14. Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment
• 15. Projecting the Enlightenment
• Notes
• Bibliography of the Published Work of Robert Wokler
• Index