Chapter 7 builds on, while in some ways reversing, the analysis in Chapter 6. It examines the thirty-nine surviving letters from Keats to Fanny Brawne from the perspective of their distancing function. Keats’s often distinctly fraught and sometimes emotionally coercive letters and notes to Fanny mostly date from the summer and early autumn of 1819, when he was away from London on a writing retreat, and from February to March 1820, when he was living right next door to the Brawne family at Wentworth Place in Hampstead but was often too unwell to see her. The chapter considers Keats’s love letters as informed and even instructed by the writers he happens to be reading (especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Philip Massinger), arguing that what he is reading can itself distance the writer from his recipient as much as bring the two together: Keats’s epistolary intertextuality itself distances him from the object of his desire.

Hugo Grotius, jurist and ‘father of natural law’, produced the first substantial discussion of punishment in On the Law of Peace and War (1625). The death penalty is not a central concern of Grotius. His unstated position is that it was legitimate and justified for certain offences, which he does not detail. Our specific interest is in his notion that the right to punish, including to punish with death, was already present in the State of Nature, that is, in an order outside of or prior to civil society. His views were criticised by later natural philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau. The first abolitionists, close readers of the natural jurists, were compelled to oppose the notion that the right to deprive of life had the status of natural law. Pelli, in particular, made use of arguments critical of Grotius’s theory issuing from some of his successors, notably, Pufendorf and Heineccius. Beccaria went a step further in producing a version of social contract theory that ruled out the possibility that natural man could have surrendered to a civil sovereign his right of self-preservation in the form of the institution of capital punishment.

This chapter reconstructs the argument of two essays, Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, which were published posthumously. In these essays Hume defends that in specific circumstances suicide is morally acceptable and shows himself critical about the doctrine of a ‘future state’. Comparing the two essays with Part 12 of the Dialogues, I elucidate how Hume left us posthumously a testimony of his ambition to counter the religious spirit of his age. In the Dialogues Philo’s challenges Cleanthes’ view that religion forms a necessary support of morality. In ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Hume attacks in a more openly provocative way the Christian morality of his age. As I show in a second part of this chapter, Hume’s views were in the eighteenth century still controversial. It is no coincidence that one of the first editions of the two polemic essays contained a translation of two letters of Rousseau’s Héloïse which offered a more nuanced view on the moral acceptability of suicide and the sacredness of human life. Apparently, some contemporaries were convinced Hume could learn from Rousseau: whether today this view would still prevail, I leave to the reader to decide.

This chapter explores the historical and conceptual connection between the social sciences, the idea of civil society and the ‘socialist’ natural law of Samuel Pufendorf.

This chapter attempts to historicise the concept of civil society and reflects on the fall of communism in Eastern Europe from the perspective of the eighteenth century.

This chapter proposes an alternative to the more economically driven historiography on French Enlightenment rights talk, by highlighting the role of philosophers, most notably Locke and Rousseau. It was their insistence on the inalienability of liberty that defined the philosophical discourse of rights in the eighteenth century. Locke repudiated the standard argument by natural lawyers (from Grotius to Pufendorf) that we could alienate our freedom, either by selling ourselves into slavery or subjecting ourselves to an absolutist sovereign. In both of these cases, we violate our right to self-preservation, which as a dictate of natural law is sacrosanct. Montesquieu similarly rejected Roman arguments for slavery in the name of self-preservation. And Rousseau insisted on the inalienability of liberty, through an operation (the social contract) that transforms natural liberty into political freedom. These arguments, too, informed the revolutionary understanding of human rights.

This chapter identifies a subgenre of the essay form – the dream-essay – and charts its trajectory from early modern philosophy, through the Romantic interest in vision and reverie. Arguing that that the dream-essay both arises from and extends the sceptical ethos of Cartesian philosophy, it discusses Montaigne’s position on dreams, René Descartes’s vocational dream, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dream reveries. With this background established, it turns to the Romantic dreamers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas De Quincey, emphasising how, for these writers, dreaming – and writing about dreaming – elaborates a paradoxical form of consciousness which is also a form of expression. The chapter concludes with brief discussions of the contemporary writers Adam Phillips and W.G. Sebald.

Considering the increasing privatization of public schools in the United States, the authors of this chapter utilize contractarianism to critique neoliberal practices. Textual evidence is drawn on to show the influence of contractarian arguments on neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. After an explanation of the contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the authors show that the neoliberal versions of the social contract are both incompatible with the tradition writ large and internally inconsistent philosophically. Rather than a public characterized by privatization, and the undermining of public schools that results, the authors argue for a public in which responsibility, obligation, and freedom are not contradictory terms, and a vision of public schools in which teachers successfully bring about those ethical goals.

Rousseau’s treatment of civil religion in Social Contract IV.8 is best understood as an effort to grapple with religion’s relationship to national unity and international unity. Put in terms of a question, Rousseau asks: What form of religion brings both national unity and international unity? Restated in Rousseau’s specialized terminology, the central question at the heart of this chapter is: what (if any) religion is capable of bringing unity to, and thereby reconciling, particular society and general society? The aim of this chapter then is to show that the civil religion of Social Contract IV.8 is developed with an eye towards political unity – and indeed not political unity in any ordinary sense, but political unity that is at once national and international, at once a unity of the particular society and a unity of the general society.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is often viewed as one of the early modern attempts to construct a theory of positive liberty. This interpretation makes sense. In Book I, Rousseau writes of freedom as a form of rational self-determination that enlarges and ennobles minds. Some theorists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have argued that this notion of freedom opens the door to tyranny and blame Rousseau for the authoritarianism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Rousseau is probably best considered a theorist of negative liberty. The Social Contract is in many respects a deeply practical work that primarily seeks to prevent both government and interpersonal domination and is animated by an underlying skepticism toward Rousseau’s very own solutions to these problems.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is known for its very distinctive doctrine of the separation of powers in which the legislative power (located in the community as a whole) is sovereign over the executive power (or government). According to Rousseau, the seeds of the downfall of every community, no matter how good it may be, is contained in the tendency of the government to usurp the powers of sovereignty. The sovereign can maintain its authority only if it is regularly assembled and passes judgment on the government, dissolving it and forming a new one if necessary. Critics from a variety of perspectives have argued that the practical and theoretical flaw in Rousseau’s account is that the sovereign can pronounce only when it is assembled and a usurping government can easily prevent it from assembling. I investigate this question by examining the Second Part of the Letters Written from the Mountain, where Rousseau describes the corruption of the Genevan government and discusses the resources available to citizens who wish to call it to account before an unassembled sovereign.

In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.

Rousseau’s chapter “Of Civil Religion” has perplexed readers ever since the publication of the Social Contract. For the book’s earliest readers, the chapter was a sign of its author’s theological heresy even if contemporary readers are likely to take a more benign view of Rousseau’s intention. The question I pose is why the formula for the laws and institutions set out in the earlier parts of the Social Contract requires additional support in the form of the religious beliefs examined in the penultimate chapter. I want to suggest that this chapter represents a nod in the direction of Rousseau’s political realism in his acknowledgement that civil religion remains an indispensable part of the education of republican citizens.

The structure of the Social Contract presents an intriguing puzzle. While the first three books argue for a republic of free and equal citizens, the fourth book seems to praise the Roman Republic, a state based on military expansion, slavery, class division, and an inegalitarian voting system. I argue that this puzzle can be solved if we understand the fourth book to be making an a fortiori argument in which Rousseau counterintuitively uses the flawed example of the Roman Republic to show the possibility of large republics in modern circumstances.