Abstract

The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2023 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the fifteenth annual conference sponsored by Mercer University's Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America's Founding Principles. The volume explores the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One thread which unites the chapters is the attempt to understand and clarify Rousseau's conception of his own, highly idiosyncratic, philosophic activity, as well as how that activity relates to Rousseau's competing archetypes of natural man and citizen. This exercise requires engaging some of the most fundamental and vexing tensions of human life. Should we be understood and defined as individuals or as members of a community? How can we be free and live together? What in human beings is natural and what is the product of education, nurture, or historical processes? Are we defined more by our reason or by sentiment? How do we come to know something and how might our attempts to know potentially undermine truth itself? In working through all of these problems, the Rousseau that emerges is truly a thinker of the first rank, a subtle and penetrating student of what it means to be a human being, a citizen, and a philosopher. Contributors include Laurence D. Cooper, Christine Dunn Henderson, Christopher Kelly, Emma Planinc, Denise Schaeffer, John T. Scott, Samuel A. Stoner, and John Warner.