Rousseau and Desire

The nature and meaning of desire in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work have thus far received little attention in Rousseau scholarship. Rousseau and Desire is the first examination of the eighteenth-century philosopher’s conceptualization of desire in relation to his understanding of modernity.

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection combine close textual analyses with historical and intellectual inquiry to present a complex, yet concise portrayal of desire in Rousseau’s political thought. Broad in scope, Rousseau and Desire opens new fields of inquiry by exploring Rousseau’s formulation of desire as it relates to a range of subjects, including feminist phenomenology, political theory, natural reproduction, and early modern economic thought. As a whole, this important volume of essays ultimately affirms that the place of desire in Rousseau’s work is integral to our understanding of this seminal thinker and, by extension, the notion of the self in modernity.