Fugitive Rousseau: Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780823257294)

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.

Author: Jimmy Casas Klausen
ISBN-10: 0823257290
ISBN-13: 9780823257294
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/03/2014
Pages: 356
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2015 pg. 1057