“Enlightenment,” declared Kant, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” an immaturity maintained by all those “dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments.” As a result, more and more self styled philosophic critics of the Enlightenment have accused Kant and his less impressive ilk of perpetuating a grand, even unconscious, farce: their naïve vision of liberation was but a magnificent ruse for compelling obedience to a new host of dogmas and gods. The power and influence of this sort of critique has provoked a wide ranging and lively reappraisal of the degree to which the philosophers of the Enlightenment were founders of a regime rooted ultimately in deception or emancipation. In order to enter and evaluate that debate, I take up the views of Spinoza, a founder of the Enlightenment, and one of its greatest critics, Rousseau. According to both Spinoza and Rousseau, all societies, no matter how Enlightened, have to perpetuate deceptions in order to make political rule both legitimate and acceptable to the ruled: humans are not naturally meant for political rule or political life. They both agree that the liberation of talents is at the core of the Enlightenment’s approach to achieving this kind of legitimacy. But while the liberation of talents is considered an unequivocal good by Spinoza even if that liberation must have as its basis several fundamental deceptions, I argue on behalf of Rousseau that the Enlightenment perpetuates a deep moral corruption of man by stimulating within him the desire for an impossible celebrity that could never truly or authentically satisfy his deepest needs. / text

This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s engagement with the political thought of Thomas Hobbes and Hobbism. This involves tracing Hobbes’s French reception in the first half of the eighteenth century amongst authors with whom Rousseau was familiar, thereby elucidating the context in which he responded to Hobbesian ideas and arguments. When situated in this context, many of the difficulties in understanding Rousseau’s engagement with Hobbes are overcome, and the deeply polemical character of the engagement is revealed. In particular, Rousseau’s state of nature theory sought to collapse the prevalent bifurcation between Pufendorfian sociability and Hobbesian Epicureanism in order to show that Hobbes’s natural law critics were in fact no better than Hobbes; a line of argument that Rousseau also pursued in the Social Contract. In addition, Rousseau’s invocation of Hobbes was intended to support his republican critique of doux commerce theory, by revealing that the modern defenders of commercial society rested their theories on a Hobbesian picture of man’s natural condition. This picture closely resembled the neo-Augustinian account of man’s post-lapsarian state, and by rejecting this Augustinian-Hobbesian depiction of man Rousseau was able to offer a vision of a well-ordered republic for men who were yet to be corrupted by the onset of luxury and entrenched relations of inequality. In examining Rousseau’s engagement not just with Hobbes, but also with natural law, republican and Augustinian contexts, an original interpretation of his political thought is advanced throughout the thesis. This interpretation stresses the importance and interplay of three themes, the problematical relationship between which often leads to much confusion in the scholarly literature on Rousseau: first, nature understood as a normative standard; second, free will as an inalienable gift of nature; and, third and finally, the role of the passions in general and of amour-propre in particular.

No description available.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Also available in print.

Zugl.: Osnabrück, Univ., Diss., 2007

Thesis (B.A.Hons. 1977) from the Department of Politics, University of Adelaide.

Thèse (Ph.D.)--Université Laval, 2007. / Bibliogr.: f. 341-350. Publié aussi en version électronique dans la Collection Mémoires et thèses électroniques.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1993. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [136]-140).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, December 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Zugl.: Osnabrück, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.