Political Writings [antikvár]

foreword There is no need to "recommend" the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau: the greatest of all critics of inequality, the purest social contract theorist of the eighteenth century (and simultaneously the deepest critic of contractarianism after Hume), the greatest writer on civic education after Plato, the most perceptive under-stander of mastery and slavery after Aristotle and before Hegel, the finest critic of Hobbes, the most important predecessor of Kant, the most accomplished didactic novelist between Richardson and Tolstoy, the greatest confessor since St. Augustine, the author of paradoxes ("the general will is always right" but "not enlightened") that continue to fascinate or infuriate. What recommends and urges republication of Frederick Watkins' 1953 edition of Rousseau's Political Writings, however, is that it contains incomparably the finest Enghsh translation of Rousseau's greatest political treatise, The Social Contract—in a version that combines accuracy with a very rare preservation of much of Rousseau's eloquence and elegance—as well as the best translation of the late and important Government of Poland, and the only translation to date of the unpublished fragment, Constitutional Project for Corsica. Watkins' "Introduction" to his edition, moreover, while very controversial, has the great merit of encompassing the complexity of Rousseau's thought, of refusing to make him merely a post-Lockean or a proto-Robespierrean. Watkins, indeed, argues that Rousseau's chief merit as a political theorist is to acknowledge and preserve social complexity, rather than to present logical, "rational"