This new reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau challenges traditional views of the eighteenth-century political philosopher's attitudes toward women and his perceived pessimism about human experience. Mira Morgenstern finds in Rousseau an appreciation of the complexities and multidimensionality of life that allowed him to criticize various easy dualisms promoted by his fellow liberal thinkers and point to the crucial mediating role that women fulfill between the private and public spheres. Morgenstern sees Rousseau as an important contributor to the feminist thoughts and concerns (...) that animate so much of our public and private discourse today. While Rousseau is commonly seen as a patriarchal misogynist, Morgenstern finds evidence in his writing that belies much of this claim. Rousseau was very much a man of his time, but he also believed that women were the key to transmitting his ideals of personal and political authenticity, thereby transforming his theory from ephemeral ideas into practical reality. A careful evaluation of Rousseau's writings on women reveals his highly complex sense of reality, especially his awareness that the solutions to life's complex problems are often temporary and must be renegotiated over time. Rousseau is more persistent than most in highlighting the weaknesses and pitfalls of liberal political thought, whose fundamental characteristic is its categorization of life on the basis of dualistic categories: public and private, outside and inside, male and female. Ultimately, what makes Rousseau worth reading today, argues Morgenstern, is his ability to illuminate critical weaknesses in the dualisms of liberal political theory and his pointing out, if only by implication, alternative ways of reaching the full measure of our individual and communal humanity. In honoring the traditional liberal emphasis on individual liberty and self-development, Rousseau’s meditations on the proper aim of political life are especially helpful to those today who seek ways to expand liberalism's promise of freedom and authenticity, while not losing sight of the common threads of meaning and community that continue to bind us together. (shrink)

This new reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau challenges traditional views of the eighteenth-century political philosopher's attitudes toward women and his perceived pessimism about human experience. Mira Morgenstern finds in Rousseau an appreciation of the complexities and multidimensionality of life that allowed him to criticize various easy dualisms promoted by his fellow liberal thinkers and point to the crucial mediating role that women fulfill between the private and public spheres. Morgenstern sees Rousseau as an important contributor to the feminist thoughts and concerns (...) that animate so much of our public and private discourse today. While Rousseau is commonly seen as a patriarchal misogynist, Morgenstern finds evidence in his writing that belies much of this claim. Rousseau was very much a man of his time, but he also believed that women were the key to transmitting his ideals of personal and political authenticity, thereby transforming his theory from ephemeral ideas into practical reality. A careful evaluation of Rousseau's writings on women reveals his highly complex sense of reality, especially his awareness that the solutions to life's complex problems are often temporary and must be renegotiated over time. Rousseau is more persistent than most in highlighting the weaknesses and pitfalls of liberal political thought, whose fundamental characteristic is its categorization of life on the basis of dualistic categories: public and private, outside and inside, male and female. Ultimately, what makes Rousseau worth reading today, argues Morgenstern, is his ability to illuminate critical weaknesses in the dualisms of liberal political theory and his pointing out, if only by implication, alternative ways of reaching the full measure of our individual and communal humanity. In honoring the traditional liberal emphasis on individual liberty and self-development, Rousseau’s meditations on the proper aim of political life are especially helpful to those today who seek ways to expand liberalism's promise of freedom and authenticity, while not losing sight of the common threads of meaning and community that continue to bind us together. (shrink)

Inspired by the Enlightenment readings of Hebrew biblical texts generated in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, Mira Morgenstern's _Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible_ goes beyond the pioneering interpretations of various biblical texts penned by such noted Bible students as Spinoza, Rousseau, and Angelina Grimké to present an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as a whole from the perspective of a modern-day political theorist. In doing so, it offers a brilliant thematic guide to the Hebrew Bible's most politically salient (...) passages, complete with text and commentary. Morgenstern's account of the significance of these ancient yet strangely modern texts will fascinate students of both ancient and modern political theory—as well as all readers of the Hebrew Bible itself. (shrink)