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Lessons on Rousseau
Althusser dissects the leading Enlightenment philosopher Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. A new way of coming to terms with Rousseau's theoretical rigour, beneath his apparent reveries and sentimental flights of fancy, was here put to work. Second, we are now discovering that the 'late Althusser's' theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy 'for Marx' were being worked out well before 1985 - in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.
Politics and History
In the first two essays of this book, Louis Althusser analyses the work of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment - Montesquieu and Rousseau. He shows that although they made considerable advances towards establishing a science of politics, particularly in comparison with the theorists of natural law, they nevertheless remained the victims of the ideologies of their day and class. Montesquieu accepted as given the political notions current in French absolutism; Rousseau attempted to impose by moral conversion an already outdated mode of production. The third essay examines Marx's relationship to Hegel and elaborates on the discussions of this theme in Althusser's earlier books, For Marx and Lenin and Philosophy. Althusser argues that Marx was able to establish a theory of historical materialism and the possibility of a Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism not simply by turning his back on Hegel, but by extracting and converting certain categories from Hegel's Logic and applying them to English political economy and French socialist political theory.
J.-J. Rousseau
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On Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In order to grasp what it means to call Rousseau an "author" of the Revolution, as so many revolutionaries did, it is necessary to take full measure of the difficulties of literary interpretation to which Rousseau's work gives rise, particularly around such a charged term as "author." On Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows that Rousseau's texts consistently generate a division in their own reading, a division both designated and masked by the fiction of authorship. These divisions can occur successivelyas in the narrative reversals and discontinuities characteristic of Rousseau's fictional and autobiographical worksor simultaneously, in the form of incompatible attempts to apply the lessons of a...
L'effort ottoman
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