Synopses & Reviews
Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages," and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade and so used "slavery" and "freedom" callously.
Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive," perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory.
Rather than tracing Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Jimmy Casas Klausen's Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts, European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and beyond and Roman imperial philosophy. Rousseauian political freedom cannot be understood without locating Rousseau's figures of savages and slaves on the frontier of European expansion and colonization and in the Enlightenment reception of Roman ideas on slavery and natural humanity.
By placing empire front and center, Fugitive Rousseau thus shows how Rousseau's work contributes to an international political theory and is thus not merely a theory of civic obligation and consent. Klausen critically examines Rousseau's arguments on cosmopolitanism and nativism, developed in response to threats to freedom posed by European mobility and commerce, and pushes the cosmopolitan and nativist projects to their logical conclusions to reveal their limitations. Fugitive Rousseau then reconstructs an alternative Rousseauian conception, a fugitive freedom, whereby a people constitutes itself, and affirms its freedom, in flight from domination.
Review
"This is a complex and fascinating project. The ideas are original, provocative and should advance new thinking in political theory."-Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania
Synopsis
Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau's thought and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with Rousseau's treatments of primitivism and slavery.
Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable.
About the Author
Jimmy Casas Klausen is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Klausen's research explores the place of cultural difference and the legacies of empire in modern European political theory, particularly with regard to indigenous peoples. He also maintains research profiles in anticolonialism and anarchism and is coeditor, with James Martel, of
How Not to Be Governed (Lexington, 2011).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I Slavery
1. Displacements
2. . . . and Condensations
II Freedom?
3. Cosmopolitanism
4. Nativism
5. Fugitive Freedom
Afterword
Notes
Index