Read e-book online Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions PDF

Robin Douglass provides the 1st finished learn of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's engagement with Thomas Hobbes. He reconstructs the highbrow context of this engagement to bare the deeply polemical personality of Rousseau's critique of Hobbes and to teach how Rousseau sought to reveal that a lot sleek usual legislations and doux trade concept used to be, regardless of its protestations on the contrary, indebted to a Hobbesian account of human nature and the origins of
society. in the course of the e-book Douglass explores the explanations why Rousseau either and departed from Hobbes somewhere else, whereas resisting the temptation to provide him as both a straightforwardly Hobbesian or anti-Hobbesian philosopher. at the one hand, Douglass finds the level to which Rousseau was
occupied with difficulties of a essentially Hobbesian nature and the significance, to either thinkers, of attractive to the electorate' passions so that it will safe political solidarity. nevertheless, Douglass argues that yes rules on the middle of Rousseau's philosophy—free will and the typical goodness of man—were got down to distance him from positions linked to Hobbes. Douglass advances an unique interpretation of Rousseau's political philosophy, rising from this come across with
Hobbesian rules, which makes a speciality of the interrelated topics of nature, unfastened will, and the passions. Douglass distances his interpretation from those that have learn Rousseau as a proto-Kantian and in its place argues that his imaginative and prescient of a well-ordered republic was once according to cultivating man's obviously reliable passions to
render the lifetime of the virtuous citizen based on nature.