BOOK : Michael SONENSCHER, Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Division of Labour, The Politics of the Imagination and The Concept of Federal Government (Leiden-New York: Brill, 2020). ISBN 978-90-04-39214-4

(Source: Brill)

Brill is publishing a new book on the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This is a book about the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its aim is to explain why, for Rousseau, thinking about politics – whether as democratic sovereignty, representative government, institutionalised power, imaginative vision or a moment of decision – lay at the heart of what he called his “grand, sad system.” This book tracks the gradual emergence of the various components of that system and describes the connections between them. The result is a new and fresh interpretation of one of Europe’s most famous political thinkers, showing why Rousseau can be seen as one of the first theorists of the modern concept of civil society and a key source of the problematic modern idea of a federal system.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Sonenscher is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of Before the Deluge and Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution, as well as the editor of Sieyès: Political Writings.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in Footnotes and a Note on Citations

1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marvellous in Life
 1 The Power of Prose
 2 Rousseau and Burke
 3 An Elusive System
 4 The Problem of Unity
 5 A Cumulative Process
 6 The Mystery of Federalism

2 The Fénelon Problem
 1 The Many Dimensions of Reform
 2 Rousseau and Montesquieu
 3 Markets, Politics and Reform
 4 Rousseau and the Fénelon Problem

3 The Division of Labour and the Political Economy of the General Will
 1 Population and Subsistence Goods
 2 Perfectibility, Autonomy and the Idea of a Federal Government
 3 The Social Contract
 4 Gradated Promotion and the General Will
 5 Taxation and Representation
 6 The Federal Dimension of Rousseau’s Thought

4 The Politics of the Imagination
 1 The Language of Signs
 2 The Origins of the Imagination
 3 The Genealogy of Love
 4 The Imagination and the Social Contract

5 Conscience and the Structure of Federal Government
 1 A Simulacrum of Virtue
 2 The Origins of Conscience
 3 The Power of Enchantment

6 Rousseau’s Legacy
 1 Theodicies and Their Properties
 2 From Metapolitics to Civil Society
 3 Theories of the Political State
 4 Lorenz von Stein
 5 Rudolf von Jhering
 6 The Concept of Sovereignty
 7 Otto von Gierke
 8 Epilogue: the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem in Historical Context

Bibliography
Index 

More info here