From 1789 onwards there sprang up a fervent revolutionary cult of Rousseau, and at each stage in the subsequent unfolding of the drama of the Revolution historians have seen Rousseau's influence at work. Mrs McDonald seeks in this study to trace the development of the cult and to define the nature of the influence by means of a detailed survey of the appeals made to the authority of Rousseau in books, pamphlets and accounts of speeches put forth by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary writers between 1762 and 1791, and she reaches conclusions more complex than those which have been commonly accepted. She is able to show that most of the writers on the revolutionary side who invoked Rousseau's name did so in order to put forward their own views and used arguments that were often in direct contradiction with those which he had formulated; the Social Contract was not widely read in these years, and those revolutionaries who did actually study it were often critical of what they found there. By contrast, the most careful analysis of Rousseau's political theory is to be found in the pamphlets written by aristocratic critics of the Revolution in protest against the misuse to which his name had been put.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN-13
9781472513892
eBay Product ID (ePID)
189663033
Product Key Features
Author
Joan McDonald
Publication Name
Rousseau and the French Revolution 1762-1791
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Subject
History
Publication Year
2013
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
190 Pages
Dimensions
Item Weight
472g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Joan McDonald
Series Title
Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Philosophy
Country/Region of Manufacture
United Kingdom
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