In 1790 the Count d'Antraigues, an eccentric eighteenth-century anti- revolutionary spy, claimed that he had been given a sequel to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract explaining how states could prevent wars by forming international associations but that he had destroyed the manuscript because it might pose a threat to the French monarchy. Recent Rousseau scholars have generally assumed that d'Antraigues was lying. I suggest that the manuscript in question was a copy of the summary that Rousseau wrote in 1760 of the (...) Project for Perpetual Peace published earlier in the century by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre. I then explore the significance of d'Antraigues' view that Rousseau's comments on the Project constituted an extension of the Social Contract and that they had revolutionary implications. The article ends with references to the ways that Rousseau's summary and critique of Saint-Pierre have recently opened up new thinking about democratic, non-hierarchical models of international organization. (shrink)

This article uses Rousseau’s little-known responses to the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace and his fragments on ‘The State of War’ as a foil for Rawls’s claim that the international society he envisions in The Law of Peoples constitutes a ‘realistic utopia’. The main conclusion is that in a post-9/11 world Rousseau may have more to teach us about the possibilities for international security than Rawls does, since Rousseau’s theory accounts for the moral corruptibility of both individuals and (...) groups. Most of the article focuses on comparing Rousseau’s and Rawls’s assumptions about human nature, but the final section also includes a brief discussion of their contrasting views of reason and the common good. The two philosophers agree, however, that the possibilities for international justice can only evolve out of the careful practice of local justice. (shrink)

The trajectory from Rousseau through romanticism to twentieth-century efforts to preserve natural settings for their aesthetic values is a familiar one. What may be less familiar and more fruitful to explore at the present time is Rousseau’s stoic recognition of the need for limitation and balance in the ways that human beings interact with their surroundings. Rousseau’s discussion of the dynamics of natural need, artificial desires, and human powers or faculties appears in its most elaborated form in Emile, within the (...) context of the pedagogue’s role in fostering authentic happiness. Given our present preoccupation with competition, consumerism, and growth, Rousseau’s ethic of self-limitation and retrenchment is unlikely to be embraced by policy makers any time soon, but his alternative vision nevertheless merits contemporary recognition. (shrink)

In this article I report on the ways that an educational philosophies course in a performance-based program enables teacher candidates to identify, reflect upon, and evaluate a wide range of educational purposes. The context for the report is an accelerated graduate program in childhood education at a small urban college where intensive fieldwork is required every semester and applied learning is the norm. Using teacher candidates? reactions to selected texts in the history of educational thought as evidence, I aim to (...) show that an encounter with provocative foundational ideas can promote effective value-formation and reflective analysis of educational practice. (shrink)