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“Law and Customs Thrust Us Bank into Infancy””: Rousseau's Historical Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Asher Horowitz
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Extract

The view of Rousseau as a romantic for whom history is a fatal acquisition negating what is most essential and valuable in human nature has been powerfully renewed in many recent interpretations. It remains possible, however, to reinterpret Rousseau's view of history as both the key to the whole of his work and his most important contribution to the tradition of radical political thought. The identification of history with fatality is insufficient and misleading in as much as it misunderstands both the substance and the import of his philosophical anthropology. Rousseau's critique of liberalism and the Enlightenment rests not simply upon an intuitive transcendence of civilized artifice, but upon the first major attempt to construct a historical anthropology which, by undoing the identification of man with bourgeois man, poses the problem of human historicity as a social process entailing increasing alienation and repression.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , Spring 1990 , pp. 215 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1990

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References

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