Abstracts

• DOI: 10.1177/106591297502800101
• Published date: 01 March 1975
• Date: 01 March 1975
• Subject Matter: Articles

ABSTRACTS
MONTAIGNE AND ROUSSEAU’S First Discourse. By Blair Campbell.
This paper argues (against the prevailing &dquo;unity&dquo; interpretation) that Rous-
seau’s thinking reveals a marked change in his attitude toward politics and cultural
institutions. Addressing itself to the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rous-
seau’s earliest published work, the essay suggests that at this stage in his develop-
ment, Rousseau is under the sway of the escapist tradition of antipolitical specula-
tion, first formulated during the Hellenistic period and transmitted to early-modem
France by Montaigne. According to this tradition, political and cultural institu-
tions are not benevolent, psychic-molding forces, as the classical Greeks had be-
lieved (and, indeed, as Rousseau’s mature political thought suggests) ; rather
they are destructive of most &dquo;true&dquo; values and thus are inimical to personality.
ON THE OBSOLESCENCE OF THE GENERAL ~~VILL: ROUSSEAU, MADISON, AND THE
EVOLUTION OF REPUBLICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT. By James Conniff.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there occurred a revival of
interest in republican political theory. Modeling their theories on classical ex-
amples, writers employed a concept of society as a hierarchically structured organ-
ism with an objective good. As in Rousseau, politics thus consisted of a search for
the general good and its enactment into policy. While most American thinkers in
1787 accepted this model, it implied that republicanism was impossible in the
United States. James Madison’s contribution to republican theory was to show a
way out of this dilemma. He
first rejected the appropriateness of the model and then
substituted a new one based on the legitimacy of political controversy. Madison did
not simply advocate the enlargement of the sphere of politics, but reformulated
the very idea of republicanism. Thus, his thought was more radical than generally
believed and not to be seen as representative of a...