Daly on Rousseau's Constitutionalism: New From Hart Publishing @hartpublishing @eoinmauricedaly

Eoin Daly, Lecturer in Law, National University of Ireland, has published Rousseau's Constitutionalism (Hart Publishing, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents.

Despite Rousseau's legacy to political thought, his contribution as a constitutional theorist is underexplored. Drawing on his constitutional designs for Corsica and Poland, this book argues that Rousseau's constitutionalism is defined chiefly by its socially directive character. His constitutional projects are not aimed, primarily, at coordinating and containing state power in the familiar liberal-democratic sense. Instead, they are aimed at fostering the social conditions in which a fuller sense of freedom – understood broadly as non-domination – can be realised across all social domains. And in turn, since Rousseau views domination as being deeply embedded in complex social practices, his constitutionalism is aimed at fostering a radical austerity – social, economic and cultural – as its foil. In locating Rousseau's constitutional projects within his social and political theory of servitude and domination, this book will challenge the predominant focus and orientation of contemporary republican theory. Leading republican thinkers have drawn on the historical republican canon to articulate a model of constitutionalism which is, on the whole, 'liberal' in focus and orientation. This book will argue that the more communitarian orientation of Rousseau's constitutionalism – that is, its socially-directive focus – stems from a sophisticated and compelling account of the sources of unfreedom in complex societies, sources which are ignored or downplayed by the neo-republican literature. Rousseau embraces a communitarian social politics as part of his constitutional project precisely because, pessimistically, he views domination as being deeply embedded in the social relations of the liberal order.

 

Rousseau's Republican Ritual

Eoin Daly, University College, Dublin, has published Ritual and Symbolic Power in Rousseau’s Constitutional Thought as UCD Working Papers in Law, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07/2013. Here is the abstract.

Rousseau places strong emphasis on public ceremony, festival and pageantry as integral aspects of statecraft. The obvious purpose of republican rituals is to promote the civic virtues which facilitate a politics of the common good. Therefore, it has been argued that Rousseau’s ritualistic constitutionalism has echoes in the mild ritualism of contemporary liberal states. I argue, however, that Rousseau envisages a much broader purpose for republican ritual: not merely to supplement, but to substitute the complex symbolic rituals of liberal society and thus to supplant the need for private sources of aesthetic and symbolic distinction. 

Download the full text from of the paper from SSRN at the link.

Rousseau's State

Tara Helfman, Syracuse University College of Law, has published Nasty, Brutish and False: Rousseau's State in the International Order at 39 Syracuse Journal of International Law 357 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Focusing on the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this article offers an account of an important episode in the historical development of international legal theory: the emergence of a conception of the state as a singular agent, a fictional person that behaves differently from the people who constitute it. In the process, this article challenges prevailing interpretations of Rousseau's place in the Western tradition of international thought and also situates him in the positivist tradition of international law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

The Visual, French History, and Virtual Memory

Daniel Maxwell Sussner has published "Projections: The visual structure of French history," a dissertation in partial completion of the requirements for the PhD at Harvard University. Here is the abstract.

How do visual media structure historical thinking? In the context of collective memory, this essay argues that engraving, the daguerreotype and film organize how historians make sense of the past. Specifically, analogizing from the digital technique of "virtual memory," the simulation of contiguous accessible digital memory available to efficiently manage computer programs, this essay shifts direction away from studies employing visual material to illustrate arguments or demonstrate historical meaning. Instead, virtual memory explains how visual media (re)organize memory, staging a collective dreaming of the past. "History," Tocqueville reminds us, "indeed, is like a picture gallery in which there are few originals and many copies."

Three hypotheses underscore this applied mechanics of thinking visually: (1) visual media displace aspects of human memory; (2) copyright law politically empowers visual media; and (3) visual media virtualize collective memory. Each chapter advances a case study elaborating a visual medium's organization of collective memory in techniques specific to its mode of reproduction Chapter One, in detailing the decline of the ancíen regime, explains the emergence of a public visual space for engraving as the collective mediation of political representation. Chapters Two, Three and Four consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution together, not simply in terms of direct or retrospective impact, but as the fruition of commemorative practices indelibly linked to Rousseau's obsession with the communication of visual memory. Rousseau's "memory project" engaging the engraving medium to organize key moments of his complete works, provided readers with the mnemonic tools to virtualize Rousseau's collective memory. Chapter Five frames the emergence of the daguerreotype, emphasizing the transition from engraving to new historical modes of virtual memory. The focus here will be a now-forgotten trial involving French plagiarisms of Edgar Allen Poe. Finally. Chapter Six explores the medium of film. From the internal struggle between content and medium to the ineluctable complicity between moviegoers and historians in ascribing objectivity to fictional films about the past, cinema has much to teach us. In particular. Alain Resnais changes the rules of the game: if earlier visual media structure collective memory, the point of film is to smash it.

His advisor is Patrice Higonnet.

Update: For those interested in obtaining dissertations, they are generally available from University Microfilms International.