My latest essay is now out in Political Theory: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00905917251380046

Here is the abstract:

This essay traces Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s attempt to deploy cold (discursive) language in order to evoke warm (musical or gestural) language. Rousseau associates warm speech with the eloquence of the ancients and opposes it to cold speech, the language that predominates in modern societies, especially in intellectual or philosophical discourse. Cold speech cannot be the speech of a flourishing republic, but it can describe the conditions for the creation of a space within which a republican language might emerge. Warm speech is the cultural language of republican citizens. It operates to ensure that public deliberation (the procedural general will) is guided by the common interest (the substantive general will) and that the interests citizens hold in common are privileged over any particular interests they may have independent of, or apart from, their fellow citizens. The general will is not (only) general because, in substance, it corresponds to the common good. It is not (only) general because it is the result of the active will of all citizens. It is general because it speaks the language of generality; it emerges from a special orientation or intentionality born of and communicated through warm speech. This suggests a three-dimensional theory of democratic legitimacy—procedural, substantive, and ethical—that offers significant advantages over formal approaches to democratic legitimacy grounded in public reason.

I recently reviewed Jared Holley’s Rousseau’s Politics of Taste and The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau’s Social Contract for the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies. You can find my review of Rousseau’s Politics of Taste here and my review of Cambridge volume here.

I–along with several colleagues at the University of La Verne–am happy to announce the publication of An Artful Reframing: The University of La Verne’s Heritage, Identity, and Current Context. The University received a grant to investigate the history and heritage of the University, with goal of telling some of the largely untold stories of overlooked or marginalized members of the University community. You can find an electronic copy here.

I wrote the introduction and a summary of the results of focus group discussions. The volume includes chapters on the history of the Brethren Church, the University stone tools collection, Gladdys Muir, the relationship between the University and indigenous peoples, the history of veterans at the University, and the Palomares colonia.

Masano Yamashita and I are pleased to announce Frameworks of Time in Rousseau is now available. With contributions from Fayçal Falaky, Pierre Saint-Amand, Amy Shuffelton, Christophe Martin, Martin McCallum, Flora Champy, Andrew Billing, Mira Morgenstern, and Christophe Litwin.

On Tuesday January 18, The World Economic Forum hosted a panel discussion on Renewing a Global Social Contract. The Institute of Art and Ideas invited me to reflect on the idea of a global social contract, its intellectual origins, and the potential dangers its value as a tool for conceptualizing global justice.

Read my analysis here.

Remember when I told you to wait for the paperback? Well, I’m happy to announce that it is now available here.

Use this flyer for a discount.

I have very much enjoyed rethinking Rousseau through the literature on tragedy and politics. And I am happy to share that these reflections are now available not only in private rantings but also in published form.

I had the privilege of reviewing Karen Pagani’s excellent history of modern attitudes toward sentiment and emotion.

A couple of excerpts from my review:

“Pagani’s achievement…is to develop…a conceptual apparatus through which readers can trace the origin and development of modern attitudes towards anger and forgiveness. Pagani outlines what might be called a political or moral economy of anger and forgiveness.”

“Prior to Rousseau, Pagani writes, conceptions of anger and forgiveness — in the work of, for example, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Montesquieu, Butler, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Helvétius, Morelly, and Voltaire — followed a similar, essentially Christian pattern. Simply put, anger was seen as a danger to the social order and forgiveness as a moral obligation brought about by the urgency of the need to dissipate anger. Anger was a privilege of the aristocracy alone. Forgiveness, correspondingly, could be bestowed only by a superior upon an inferior. Rousseau rejected both assumptions — both the notion that anger constituted an inherent danger, and the notion that only those of a certain social status had title to anger.”

If you’d like to read a summary of the argument and structure of Rousseau’s Ethics of Truth, you can find one here. The Brazilian journal EDUCATIVA will be publishing it.

Details here.