Law and Customs Thrust Us Bank into Infancy

Rousseau's Historical Anthropology

Bibliographic Data

ID6399655
AuthorsAsher Horowitz (corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume52
Issue2
Pages215-241
Publication date1990-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Review of Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s003467050005035x
OpenAlexW2058420576
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited23

The view of Rousseau as a romantic for whom history is a fatal acquisition negating what is most essential and valuable in human nature has been powerfully renewed in many recent interpretations. It remains possible, however, to reinterpret Rousseau's view of history as both the key to the whole of his work and his most important contribution to the tradition of radical political thought. The identification of history with fatality is insufficient and misleading in as much as it misunderstands both the substance and the import of his philosophical anthropology. Rousseau's critique of liberalism and the Enlightenment rests not simply upon an intuitive transcendence of civilized artifice, but upon the first major attempt to construct a historical anthropology which, by undoing the identification of man with bourgeois man, poses the problem of human historicity as a social process entailing increasing alienation and repression

Alienation · Bourgeoisie · Denial · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Historical anthropology · Historicity (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Transcendence (philosophy · Anthropology · European Political History Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought

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