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Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume, first published in 2010, examines Rousseau's many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop thought-provoking new angles on Rousseau's thought. By taking freedom as the guiding principle of their analysis, the essays form a cohesive account of Rousseau's writings Introduction / Christie McDonald -- Freeing man from sin : Rousseau on the natural condition of mankind / Ioannis D. Evrigenis -- Making history natural in Rousseau's Discourse on the origins of inequality / Natasha Lee -- Rousseau's Second discourse : between Epicureanism and Stoicism / Christopher Brooke -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s : satire, friendship, and freedom / Marian Hobson -- If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d'Alembert / Jérôme Brillaud -- Music, the passions, and political freedom in Rousseau / Tracy B. Strong -- The social contract, or the mirage of the general will / Stanley Hoffmann -- 'Par le bon usage de ma liberté' : freedom and Rousseau's reconstituted Christianity / Jason Neidleman -- The constraints of liberty at the scene of instruction / Diane Berrett Brown -- 'Toutes mes idées sont en images' : Rousseau and the yoke of necessity / Marius Hentea -- Rousseau's ruins / Louisa Shea -- Can woman be free? / Philip Stewart -- The subject and its body : love of oneself and freedom in the thought of Rousseau / Mathieu Brunet and Bertrand Guillarme -- Paranoia and freedom in Rousseau's final decade / Leo Damrosch -- Freedom and the project of idleness / Pierre Saint-Amand -- On the uses of negative freedom / Marie-Hélène Huet -- Fail better : Rousseau's creative délire / Christie McDonald -- Postface / Stanley Hoffmann
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