Language and Thinking (L&T) Program and Dean of the College Present
Rousseau's Many Voices, or, How Not to Read a Social Contract
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
William Dixon, Ph.D.
Academic Fellow for Political Studies,
Bard Prison Initiative
Faculty, The Language and Thinking Program, Bard College
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay “On the Social Contract” is frequently read as a straightforward justification of popular sovereignty. Understanding the essay as a positive or prescriptive account of political legitimacy, and nothing more, many of Rousseau’s critics have focused their attention upon his conceptions of the general will and sovereignty in Book I. This reading overlooks too many of the essay’s later arguments about politics that do not turn on the question of legitimacy. It also fails to appreciate the subtle shifts and persistent ambivalence of the author’s voice throughout text. “On the Social Contract” is better understood as a long series of critical reflections that are provisionally thought out and enacted by way of experimental writing in the first person, an essayistic thought-experiment that invites dissent from its own conclusions. The essay’s exercise of political imagination and judgment depends vitally upon the artful use of textual ambiguity and the playful instigation of the reader’s own ethical resistance. The essay also pursues a kind of creative confusion between Rousseau’s authorial voice and the authoritative voices of citizens and subjects. Less a rigid theory of state legitimacy than a broadly drawn image of the felt possibilities for political life, Rousseau argues for a politics that exceeds and unsettles the willful powers of even the most “popular” sovereignty. Far from a naïve, antiquated, or even pernicious model of small-scale, univocal civic virtue, Rousseau’s essay remains deeply pertinent for democrats in the contemporary United States and elsewhere, where the conventional habits of ordinary common life are encircled by new modes of inequality, precarity, voicelessness, and political withdrawal. Rousseau’s essay can also help democrats think about how the practices of reading and writing might constitute, complicate, or resist political action.Academic Fellow for Political Studies,
Bard Prison Initiative
Faculty, The Language and Thinking Program, Bard College
William Dixon, Ph.D., is an Academic Fellow for Political Studies at the Bard Prison Initiative. He teaches First Year Seminar and a variety of courses in political science and political theory. His research interests include democratic theory, political economy, the politics of climate change, and the idea of cosmopolitanism. He is currently teaching a seminar on Rousseau's "On the Social Contract" and Claudia Rankine's Citizen at BPI. He has taught in the Bard Language and Thinking Program since 2010.
For more information, call 845-758-7141, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium