"Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Britain," University of Leeds, June 28-29, 2012.

Plenary Speakers:

Dr Gregory Dart (University College London);
Professor Robert Mankin (Université Paris-Diderot);
Professor John T. Scott (University of California, Davis)

The aim of this international conference, held in celebration of the tercentenary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, is twofold: first, to reassess the impact that Britain had on Rousseau’s life and writing; and secondly, to examine the reception of Rousseau's works in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present day.

It is well known that Rousseau spent a number of months in England in 1766-67, a stay dominated by his stormy relationship with David Hume. What is less well known is the extent to which Rousseau, even before then, was steeped in British culture, including its literature, its philosophy and its politics. Exactly how Rousseau engaged with British culture and the effect it had on his own intellectual development and output will be a key focus of this conference. The conference will also allow scholars to explore systematically the many ways in which Rousseau has been read, understood, appropriated and challenged by British writers, philosophers and political theorists from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Possible topics for conference papers include, but are not limited to:

 · Rousseau in Britain: travel and translation
 · Rousseau and the British press
 · Rousseau and the British Enlightenment
 · Rousseau and the Romantics
 · Rousseau and the Victorians
 · Rousseau: From Modernism to Postmodernism
 · Rousseau and British feminism
 · Rousseau and British nature-writing
 · Rousseau and the novel in Britain
 · Rousseau and British educational theory
 · Rousseau and British political theory

Proposals for 20-minute papers in English should include a title and an abstract of 300-500 words and should be sent by 30 September 2011 to the conference organisers, Professor Russell Goulbourne (r.j.goulbourne@leeds.ac.uk) and Dr David Higgins (d.higgins@leeds.ac.uk).

Bertram, Chris. "Jean Jacques Rousseau." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY September 27, 2010.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and because of his influence on later thinkers. Rousseau's own view of philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing philosophers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity's natural impulse to compassion. The concern that dominates Rousseau's work is to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. In the modern world, human beings come to derive their very sense of self from the opinion of others, a fact which Rousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individual authenticity. In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest. However, though Rousseau believes the co-existence of human beings in relations of equality and freedom is possible, he is consistently and overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addition to his contributions to philosophy, Rousseau was active as a composer and a music theorist, as the pioneer of modern autobiography, as a novelist, and as a botanist. Rousseau's appreciation of the wonders of nature and his stress on the importance of feeling and emotion made him an important influence on and anticipator of the romantic movement. To a very large extent, the interests and concerns that mark his philosophical work also inform these other activities, and Rousseau's contributions in ostensibly non-philosophical fields often serve to illuminate his philosophical commitments and arguments. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/.

Martin, Wayne M. Review of Frederick Neuhouser's ROUSSEAU'S THEODICY OF SELF-LOVE. NDPR (August 2009).

Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Self-love is a major theme -- indeed, along with freedom, perhaps the major theme -- in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau himself was intimately familiar with the perverse and destructive manifestations of self-love, both from his first-hand experiences of the flamboyantly narcissistic world of the Ancien Régime, and from his own famously tortured psyche. Part of his intellectual legacy was an incisive exploration of the sentiment and its powerful dynamics. In this recent book, Fred Neuhouser has provided an incisive exploration of his own: a detailed critical reconstruction of Rousseau's account of self-love, both in its destructive and its constructive configurations. The research builds on recent contributions in Rousseau scholarship -- notably the ground-breaking work of Nicholas Dent and an unpublished dissertation by Andrew Chitty. But Neuhouser offers a novel framing of the issues, makes important contributions on a number of controversial points, and concludes with a bold and original (if also somewhat speculative) development of Rousseau's hints that self-love functions as a condition on the possibility of rationality. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17166.

Pub: Gordon, Anna, and Neil Roberts, eds. CREOLIZING ROUSSEAU. C. L. R. JAMES JOURNAL 15.1 (2009).

Contents: EDITORS’ NOTE

• "Introduction: the Project of Creolizing Rousseau" by Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts

DEBATING CREOLIZATION: AN INTRODUCTION

• "Of Legitimation and the General Will: Creolizing Rousseau through Frantz Fanon" by Jane Anna Gordon
• "From Mestiçagem to Cosmopolitanism" by Alexis Nouss
• "Beyond Négritude and Créolité: the Ongoing Creolization of Identities" by Mickaella Perina

CREOLIZING ROUSSEAU

• "Rousseau, the Master’s Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism" by Charles W. Mills
• "Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences" by Nelson Maldonado-Torres
• "From Rousseau’s Theory of Natural Equality to Firmin's Resistance to the Historical Inequality of Races" by Tommy J. Curry
• "Rousseau and the Problem of Democratic Transition in Postcolonial Africa" by George Carew
• "C. L. R. James and the Creolizing of Rousseau and Marx" by Paget Henry
• "Virtuous Bacchanalia: Creolizing Rousseau’s Festival" by Chiji Akọma and Sally Scholz

REVIEW ESSAYS

• "Rousseau, Social Alienation, and the Possibility of Generative Critique: a Review Essay" by Emily C. Nacol
• "On Pateman and Mills’s Contract and Domination" by Lewis R. Gordon
• "Space, Power, Consciousness and Women's Resistance: a Review Essay" by Gertrude Gonzáles de Allen

ACCEPTANCE LETTER OF THE FIRST RECIPIENT OF THE CPA NICOLÁS GUILLÉN PRIZE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE

• Wilson Harris

BOOK DISCUSSION

• "Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips as a Post-secular Transmodern, and Decolonial Methodology" by Nelson Maldonado-Torres
• "On Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips" by Karen Torjesen
• "On Sylvia Marcos’s Journey along the Spiral of Nahuatl Gender and Eros" by Madina Tlostanova
• "Cosmology and Gender in Sylvia Marcos’s Taken From the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions" by María Lugones
• "Unapologetically to Introduce New Goals and Methods: a Reply" by Sylvia Marcos

The table of contents can also be read online at: http://www.temple.edu/isrst/Publications/CLRv15n1.asp. If you wish to obtain a copy of the issue, please direct your requests to Paget Henry (Paget_Henry@brown.edu), Executive Editor of the C. L. R. James Journal. In addition, the complete introduction that articulates the project of creolizing Rousseau and summarizes the essay of each author can be found at: http://www.williams.edu/africana-studies/NeilRoberts/CreolizingRousseauIntroduction/EditorsNotes.htm JANE ANNA GORDON (jgordon1@temple.edu) teaches in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on civil rights, and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell’s, 2006) and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). She is also coauthor of the forthcoming Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (Paradigm Publishers, 2009) and is completing her next book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Fordham University Press, forthcoming). NEIL ROBERTS (Neil.Roberts@williams.edu) is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science at Williams College. Roberts’s work has appeared in Caribbean Studies, New Political Science, Philosophia Africana, Political Theory, Sartre Studies International, Shibboleths, and Souls. He is currently working on two book projects. The first is entitled Freedom as Marronage: The Dialectic of Slavery and Freedom in Arendt, Pettit, Rousseau, Douglass, and the Haitian Revolution, and the second is a comparative study of the Rastafari and Carl Schmitt.

Malcolm, Noel. "The Odd Couple." STANDPOINT MAGAZINE (May 2009).

Zaretsky, Robert, and John T. Scott. The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

They made a very odd couple. The French philosopher (or rather, Swiss - he was born in Geneva) was a small, gesticulating man with animated features and a bizarre taste in clothes: wearing what he called an Armenian caftan, he sought (like Lawrence of Arabia in the Beyond the Fringe sketch) to pass unnoticed in the street. Hume was a large, portly figure with an amiable but bovine face and a strangely vacant stare. He dressed conventionally; indeed, convention was something in which he - unlike Rousseau - rather strongly believed. The intellectual differences went deeper than that. Rousseau idealised natural innocence and saw the socialisation of mankind as a process of corruption. Modern man was an alienated being, and radical changes were needed to remedy that. For Hume, the civilising process in human history involved a complex web of interactions, through which moral behaviour was learned and refined, and political institutions were settled and gradually improved. Yet these two very contrasting thinkers did have some common ground. While both were products of the "Age of Reason", neither believed that reason, as such, had any motive power: sentiment and sympathy were the generating forces of human behaviour. Both, too, had suffered from the disapproval of the ecclesiastical authorities (Calvinism being the doctrinal bedrock of Edinburgh as well as Geneva). On religious issues, indeed, Hume was the more radical of the two. While Rousseau preached his own portentous brand of "natural religion", Hume demolished all theological arguments, including "natural" ones. With such very different temperaments, and largely different beliefs, it is a miracle that the warm friendship between them lasted as long as it did - which is to say, six months on Hume's side and about three on Rousseau's. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/1158/full.

Grayling, A. C. "Sense and Sensibility." BARNES AND NOBLE REVIEW February 23, 2009.

Zaretsky, Robert, and John T. Scott. The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. It is a welcome turn -- one should more accurately say: return -- for our culture that philosophy is once again a possession of what David Hume called the "conversable" and not just the scholarly part of mankind. An increasing abundance of popular works both of and about philosophy (genuine philosophy, not just the upliftingly platitudinous sort published in pastel covers and odd shapes) is one part of the reason; this reprises the way philosophy was once read by all educated folk, for whom it was written in clear language. This was before the twentieth century revival of a jargon-rich scholasticism which shut out the general public and made a studious philosophical apprenticeship necessary before one could engage in it. Another part of the reason for the return is the appearance of an increasing number of satisfying biographies of philosophers, and even more satisfying books that take us into philosophical lives and thought by hooking themselves to notable moments in philosophy's history. The account by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott of the bitter falling-out between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the man who had befriended and helped him, David Hume, falls into this category. As the latest in the happily growing line of such, its arrival at the bookstores is a welcome event. At first one might think that biographies of philosophers must be dull stuff, for what did they do of note but sit and think, and sometimes write? George Bernard Shaw would appear to sum up matters on their behalf: "I have had no heroic adventures," he said. "Things have not happened to me; on the contrary it is I who have happened to them; and all my happenings have taken the form of books. Read them, and you have my whole story; the rest is only breakfast, lunch and dinner." But to think this would be to miss much. Socrates perverted the youth of Athens and had to drink hemlock. Abelard suffered castration for his illicit romance with Heloise. Descartes was present both at the Battle of the White Mountain and the subsequent massacres of Bohemian Protestants and might have been a spy for the Jesuits. Locke had to flee into political exile. Bertrand Russell went to prison for opposition to the First World War, while his pupil and later nemesis Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army and wrote his Tractatus on the Eastern Front. Nietzsche and Althusser went mad; the latter strangled his wife, while the former's sister strangled his reputation. Sartre was a Communist, Heidegger a Nazi. Camus played football and died in a car crash. Not a few of them were preternaturally amorous. On the whole, many philosophers seem to have been more rather than less energetic, even though some (Berkeley, Kant) led meditative lives of exemplary quietness. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=21102303&cds2Pid=22560.

"Rousseau's Legacies / Fortunes de Rousseau," Sixteenth Biennial Colloquium, Rousseau Association, UCLA, June 25-28, 20090.

Rousseau's legacies are multiple and contested. In philosophy, he was described as the Newton of the moral sciences by Kant, and yet alongside those who champion an ethic of rights and duties, are others, equally influenced by Rousseau who take forward his concerns with virtue, community or moral psychology. In social anthropology, Rousseau was hailed as precursor, by none other than Levi-Strauss. Rousseau's concern with the natural world and the environment has echoes both in the romantic movement and in the environmental politics of our own day. Rousseau's autobiographical writings prefigure a concern with subjectivity that finds later expression in Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. His writing on education has been rediscovered, championed or excoriated by successive generations of advocates or opponents of "child centred education". His political legacy has been bitterly contested between advocates of deliberative democracy, liberals, nationalists of various stripes, and those who see him as the harbinger of totalitarianism. We invite papers reflecting critically on any aspect of Rousseau's various legacies in philosophy, literature, political theory, theatre, music, biography, etc. Proposals on the above topic (title and short summary), in English or French, for papers of 20 minutes duration should be sent to the President of the Rousseau Association, Christopher Bertram, by electronic mail at C.Bertram@bristol.ac.uk or by ordinary mail at thefollowing address: Department of Philosophy University of Bristol 9 Woodland Road Bristol United Kingdom (If using ordinary mail, please also give if possible an electronic address for acknowledgement. ) The deadline for receipt of proposals is December 31st, 2008. Proposals will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee (Professors Christopher Bertram, Patrick Coleman, Ourida Mostefai) and a decision communicated by January 31st 2009. A preliminary program for the conference will be available in February 2009.

Leddy, Neven. "Review of David Wiliams' ROUSSEAU'S PLATONIC ENLIGHTENMENT." NDPR June 28, 2008.

Williams, David Lay. Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2007. Williams' thesis is that Rousseau shared with Plato a philosophical dependence on immaterial concepts, which he elaborates on the preface:

Here we see a combination of the metaphysical, ontological, and political dimensions [of Rousseau's Platonic affiliation]: the commitment to transcendent ideas as the ultimate authority for moral and political arguments. (xxvii)

What Williams calls Rousseau's Platonic affiliation is presented as encompassing matters epistemic, faith in god, the immaterial soul, and freedom of the will, but not an institutional affinity -- at least not in this initial presentation. His use of 'Platonic' includes Plato himself and those whom Williams quite reasonably assigns to a Platonic tradition including St Augustine, Ficino, Descartes, Leibniz and Malebranche. Williams does not differentiate between Platonic and neo-Platonic. He also bluntly nails his own Platonist colours to the mast in what might be called his "so what?" moment, where he gestures towards the beneficial wealth-generating aspects of materialism, but despairs over the ethical vacuum that results in undergraduate cheating on exams, performance enhancing drugs, corporate plunder, and genocide. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13389.

CFP: "Rousseau and Revolution," Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas, University of Aarhus, March 13- 15, 2009.

Fidel Castro once told a journalist that one of his masters was Jean- Jacques Rousseau and that he fought Batista with a copy of the Social Contract in his pocket. This anecdote, true or false, calls attention to an aspect of Rousseau’s philosophy which is often ignored or forgotten in academic discussions, namely that his philosophy has often been used, for good or bad, to inspire and legitimize revolutions and rebellions, beginning with the French Revolution. As for Rousseau himself he certainly claimed that one should "never shake the machine too brusquely" but at the same time he supported national insurrections in Poland and Corsica. So, we have Rousseau both supporting and criticizing revolution just as Rousseau in the French Revolution was used by both the defenders and opponents of the revolution. In the 200 years after a consensus seems to have emerged among Rousseau’s friends and enemies that he was a supporter of revolution. The friends have found inspiration in his texts and the enemies has used Rousseau to claim a totalitarian or terroristic consequence of all attempts at revolution, again starting from the French Revolution. This conference wants to explore these multiple and often contradictory links between Rousseau’s thinking and revolutions both in his own work and its afterlife. Examples of possible topics include but are not limited to: • Rousseau’s conception of popular uprising and political change • Rousseau’s support of insurrection in Poland and Corsica • The references to Rousseau in different revolutionary periods, for instance in the writings of Robespierre, Lenin and others • The possibility of understanding modern revolutions and rebellions in Rousseau’s terms • The counter-revolutionary understanding of Rousseau as the "mad dog of revolution" • The use of Rousseau to allege a necessary and inevitable connection between revolution and terror There are two ways of attending the conference: with or without paper: • With paper: abstracts of maximum 200 words should be emailed by December 1, 2008 to idehrl@hum.au.dk. Paper presentations will be 30 minutes. The papers will subsequently be invited for publication in a forthcoming anthology. • Without paper: deadline for registration to idehrl@hum.au.dk is February 1, 2009. For both: please include return email address and institutional affiliation for all submissions. Keynote Speakers: • James Swenson: associate professor of French at Rutger’s Univerity, specializing in eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history, and twentieth-century criticism and theory and the author of the highly acclaimed On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution. • Blaise Bachofen: associate professor of philosophy at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, publisher of commented texts of Rousseau and the author of the acclaimed La Condition de la liberté: Rousseau, critique des raisons politiques ("The Condition of Liberty. Rousseau, a Critique of Political Reason").