Encountering Tragedy

the long version

"Johnston draws on selected texts in Rousseau's corpus - including the underappreciated tracts on Poland and Corsica - to interpret Rousseau first and foremost as an anatomist and architect of order. Encountering Tragedy contests Rousseau's munificent ontological presumptions, probes the necessary and disturbing fictions of the Founding, reconfigures the relationship between the multifarious arts of government and the exercise of sovereignty, and delineates the constitutive role of enmity in his virtuous republic. Moreover, the book offers a critical reading of Rousseau's gender politics, and dissects the attractions and dangers of both his patriotic sensibility and his morality-based politics."--BOOK JACKET.