Rousseau’s Politics of Taste
£95.00
In stock
About this book
Reinterprets Rousseau as a political thinker by reconstructing his Epicurean theory of taste
- Recovers Rousseau’s neglected theory of taste, placing it at the centre of his political thought
- Challenges existing pictures of Rousseau as an inconsistent ‘ancient’ utopian or a ‘modern’ systematic philosopher
- Contributes to reframing the intellectual history of liberalism and the foundations of contemporary democratic political theory
- Draws on archival sources and texts rarely addressed in scholarship on Rousseau’s political thought
Rousseau’s Politics of Taste challenges the popular but partial pictures we have of Rousseau as an inconsistent ‘ancient’ utopian or a ‘modern’ abstract philosopher with a systematising spirit. Combining intellectual history and political theory, it reinterprets his understandings of pleasure and happiness, judgment and amour-propre, inequality, the general will and, above all, taste. Rousseau’s readers have long recognised the complex tensions in his thought. By reconstructing his theory of taste as a kind of modern Epicureanism, this book provides a way of articulating neglected patterns in those tensions and, a new understanding of what he was attempting to achieve with his political thought.
Reviews
Holley’s account casts Rousseau as a modern and "refined" Epicurean. Drawing on a scholarly reconstruction of Eighteenth-century Epicureanism, his work seamlessly intertwines aesthetics and politics. Through a masterful examination of taste, it provides a fresh perspective on the perennial debate about the general will.
This is an important contribution to the understanding of Rousseau’s paradoxes concerning the relations between happiness and virtue. Holley carefully reconstructs what Epicureanism meant to Rousseau and his contemporaries and shows how Rousseau’s "refined Epicureanism" uses taste and judgment to mediate between pleasure and morality.
Holley quite successfully illuminates Rousseau’s paradoxes in a way that is perhaps more tragic than he lets on.
Table of contents
Part I
1. Introduction: A Taste for Virtue
2. Modern Epicureanism: Between Sociability and Atheism
3. Rousseau’s Epicureanism: From Atheism to Aesthetics
Part II
4. The Problem of Modern Liberty: Sociability, Taste, Commerce
5. The Foundations of Political Judgement: Amour-propre, General Taste, General Will
6. The Memorial Practice of Happiness: Temperance, Sensuality, and Rousseau’s System
Afterword: Revisiting Rousseau’s Paradoxes