Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Modernity and Political Thought) - Hardcover

Strong, Tracy B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803945868 ISBN 13: 9780803945869

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc, 1994

Synopsis

This book examines the philosophy of Rousseau and its contribution to our understanding of modernity. Strong notes that Rousseau has been associated with almost every school of thought and political movement of Western modernity - why is it that he has been read so divergently? The author suggests that Rousseau `gives us...our language for politics and personhood...Rousseau is not the whole story of modernity, but he is, in ways that others around and before him were not, modern.′

About this title

Review

In lucid and thoughtful fashion, Tracy Strong directs our vision to Rousseau's analysis of the mysterious character of ordinary life and its meaning for politics. The reader will be delighted and challenged by the vision of Rousseau that Strong presents. Particularly insightful is Strong's discussion of Rousseau's preference for humanity over authority and for self-constituting communities over political impositions by external agency. Rousseau in Strong's hands becomes an important precursor of postmodernity or perhaps even the first postmodern man. This book will thus be of interest not merely to political theorists and philosophers, but to all those engaged with postmodernism in literature and other kindred disciplines.--Michael Allen Gillespie, Duke University

Tracy Strong's book is as much an elegant and compelling evocation of Rousseau himself, or of his spirit, as it is a very fine analysis of the books and the ideas. This makes it a critically important achievement, since that spirit or frame of mind has had more to do with whatever common world and unresolved problems we still share than the work of any other modern. This book is an extraordinary acknowledgement of Rousseau and od how Rousseau wanted to be read, and thereby, in a strikingly original and lucid way, helps make available to us the problem of a 'common humanity, ' as Rousseau saw it.--Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago

About the Author

Tracy B. Strong is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803945868
• ISBN 13: 9780803945869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224