Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Garsten, Byran

Abstract

My dissertation argues that Rousseau’s dispute with the modern Natural Law tradition over the character of the “state of Nature” ought to be understood as an argument about the causes responsible for the emergence of a specific form of social life–a form of social life Rousseau calls “Society” but that contemporary readers might more properly think of as “civilization”–in human history. Moreover, my dissertation submits that Rousseau considered this sort of knowledge as so very important since he regarded it as a type of self-knowledge of the human species, which he, in turn, understood as a condition for the possibility for rendering correct judgement of society. My dissertation thus provides a novel approach to modern theories of the state of Nature by interpreting them as attempts to identify and logically reconstruct the universal causes underlying the generation of historical “facts,” and contextualizes Rousseau’s critique of the modern Natural Law tradition within this argumentative framework. On this basis, I reconstruct Rousseau’s own theory of the genesis of civilization and show why he considered social conflict and political instability a necessary, rather than contingent, feature of this form of life. Finally, I show why civilization, considered from the standpoint of Rousseau’s history of the human species, cannot be judged as preferable to the state of Nature on either utilitarian or moral grounds, and I ask about the effects of this on Rousseau’s attempted justification of Nature’s providence.

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