UC Berkeley

This thesis places Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the "realist" or raison d'état tradition of political thought. While highly critical of the conceptualization of political sovereignty among earlier social contract theorists such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes and also very condemnatory of the popular eighteen-century discourse of reason of state, Rousseau preserves some of the most important insights in the theory of state and political sovereignty of earlier authors, in particular the value, status, and justification of political life. This thesis thus looks at both the continuity and the disruption or corrections that Rousseau represents in the tradition of political realism.

The first part of the dissertation looks at Rousseau's reflections on international politics, political economy, and the role of government. It examines Rousseau's criticism of the seemingly triumphant theory and practice of realpolitik and mercantilism in the eighteenth-century and how this criticism derives from his overriding concern with political equality and liberty in the Social Contract.

The second part of the dissertation details the necessary link between Rousseau's conceptualization of the political and his epistemology and linguistic anthropology. Rousseau's linguistics accounts for both his emphasis on equality as the condition of the political and his anxiety over the fragility of the political. Rousseau must confront a gap between the concept of the political as a just and equitable form of civil association and the utter impossibility of the literality of the political condition. Rousseau's theory of government and his resentment of mercantile administration must be read in light of this gap between the concept and literality of the political.