Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment by Williams David Lay (2007-10-01) Hardcover

by David Lay Williams

Although many commentators on Rousseau’s philosophy have noted its affinities with Platonism and acknowledged the debt that Rousseau himself expressed to Plato on numerous occasions, David Williams is the first to offer a thoroughgoing, systematic examination of this linkage. His contributions to the scholarship on Rousseau in this book are he enters the debate over whether Rousseau is a Hobbesian (in rejecting transcendent norms) or a Platonist (in accepting them) with a decisive argument supporting the latter position; he tackles from a new angle the ever-challenging question of unity in Rousseau’s thought; and he explores the dynamic metaphor of the chain throughout Rousseau’s writings as a key to understanding them as inspired by Platonism. The book is organized into three main parts. The first sketches the background of Platonism and materialist positivism in modern European metaphysics and political philosophy that provided the context for Rousseau’s intellectual development. The second examines Rousseau’s choice of Platonism over positivism and its consequences for his philosophy generally. The third addresses the legacy of Rousseau’s thought and its appropriation by Kant, Marx, and Foucault, suggesting that in an age where materialism and relativism are rife, Rousseau may have much to teach us about how we view our own society and can engage in constructive critique of it.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Professor Williams teaches and conducts research in political theory, especially the history of political thought. He received his PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior coming to DePaul in 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point.​

Williams is the author of Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (2007),​ Rousseau's 'Social Contract': An Introduction (2014) and The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (2024). as well as numerous articles on thinkers ranging from Plato to Jürgen Habermas and topics such as democratic theory, economic inequality, political ontology, and deception. He has also co-edited several books, including most recently, The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau’s “Social Contract” (2024).

In 2003-2004 and 2008-2009, he held research fellowships at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and in 2012-13, he held a faculty fellowship at the DePaul Humanities Center. In 2016-2017 he was the Wicklander Fellow at DePaul's Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. From 2017-2022 he was the political theory editor for the journal, Political Research Quarterly. In 2023-2024, he collaborated with Professor Matthew W. Maguire and the Alliance Française​ in Chicago as part of the HumanitiesX​ program, funded by the Mellon Foundation​, in which he co-taught a course on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America​ and co-organized a public roundtable on Tocqueville’s relevance today. Professor Williams also writes short pieces connecting the history of political thought to contemporary political concerns for outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Hill, Public Seminar, Bloomberg News, and the Chicago Sun-Times.