Abstract

This dissertation explores the central animating tension in Rousseau's writings in the endeavor to understand the foundations of modern political thought---and contemporary political participation---more generally. This is the familiar tension between the individual's obligations to society and to himself. Rousseau's writings derive much of their lasting power from their insight into not one but both poles of this tension, which we might too simplistically call the Aristotelian pole and the Hobbesian pole, the public and the private, or the outer and the inner. While one main camp among interpreters of Rousseau identifies him chiefly as a political thinker---whether as communitarian, democrat, or totalitarian---the other identifies him, especially with recourse to his earliest and latest writings, as an a- or anti-political thinker, an individualist, a romantic, or a solipsist. This dissertation attempts to raise a bridge between these two interpretive camps and to show how Rousseau's deepest concern---for the undivided condition of the self---leads, on one hand, to what may continue to be modernity's most powerful critique of existing social and political relations, and, on the other hand, to a profound and satisfying rather than reductive account of the reasons for the individual to live in ordered arrangements with others. ;Two related questions drive the dissertation. First, why, on Rousseau's account, does the human individual need society? Second, what kind of society does the individual need? It is especially with the second question that we return to the political realm, for it turns out that the kind of society the individual needs requires the cultivation of political relationships---if not formally political, then still relations of rule and subjection. These political relations, moreover, must somehow defy Rousseau's own famous claim that "those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they." I thus develop the case, with reference to a range of Rousseau's works, that Rousseau ultimately espouses neither hermetic isolation nor mutually binding contractual relations but, as the Reveries of the Solitary Walker shows most powerfully, a peculiar species of beneficence