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Abstract
This article reinterprets Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract as an immanent critique of contemporary theories of sovereignty, which claimed that the political existence of the people depended on its submission and representation by a sovereign. Rousseau showed that these theories presupposed that the people already constituted a coherent political collective that preceded and constituted the sovereign. Rousseau tried to show how a multitude of individuals constitute themselves as a coherent people in a paradoxical sequence that collapses upon closer inspection, along with its distinctly legal form i.e. the “social contract” as well as the laws that should shape them, but can only be shaped by them. Rousseau is thus caught in the same paradoxical temporality he criticized in the theories of sovereignty. The people therefore remain dual – potentially acting as a blind multitude of individuals or a coherent body politic with a general will – throughout the Social Contract. The act of assocuation thus goes from being a (mythical) origin and foundation to become a continuous constitutive political process whereby a people commit themselves to each other and create the collective conditions of their coexistence.
Translated title of the contribution | Rousseau on Time: The Paradoxical temporality of Rousseau's Social Contract and the People's Duality |
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Original language | Danish |
Journal | Slagmark |
ISSN | 0108-8084 |
Publication status | Accepted/In press - Dec 2024 |
Projects
- 1 Active
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Reconceptualizing Populism: A Genealogy of the Concept(s) of the People in Early Modern Political Thought
Flohr, M. (Project participant)
01/09/2020 → …
Project: Research