This carefully selected compilation of the significant writings of the great political philosophers, scientists, and thinkers has long been an invaluable guide to the general reader as well as to the serious student of history, political science, and government. Such essential forces as Revolution, Idealism, and Nationalism are examined in detail and expounded by their leading exponents. Professor Curtis has written running commentary that places the extracts and their authors in the sequence of modern history. This carefully selected compilation of the significant writings of the great political philosophers, scientists, and thinkers has long been an invaluable guide to the general reader as well as to the serious student of history, political science, and government. Such essential forces as Revolution, Idealism, and Nationalism are examined in detail and expounded by their leading exponents. Professor Curtis has written running commentary that places the extracts and their authors in the sequence of modern history. Michael Curtis is professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and has taught at several other institutions, including Yale University and Cornell University. He has written and edited more than fifteen books in the fields of comparative politics, political theory, and Middle East affairs. Great Political Theories A Comprehensive Selection of the Crucial Ideas in Political Philosophy from the French Revolution to Modern Times By M. Curtis Harper Perennial Modern Classics Copyright © 2008 M. Curtis All right reserved. ISBN: 9780061351372 Chapter One Section One Rousseau, Condorcet, and Kant Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is the first great modern political philosopher. He is a watershed in political theory, not only because of his preoccupation with ideas and themes that are of contemporary significance, but also because all modern political thought, in a sense, derives from and has been influenced by him. His philosophy is highly personal, an expression of his own fierce insistence on independence and liberty, but at the same time, paradoxical and complex. His inconsistencies can be fully explained only in the light of his own psychological history and emotional experiences. Rousseau was courageous and sincere, sensual and sensitive. A native of Geneva, he admired the qualitiesasceticism, puritanism, insistence on right rules-associated with that city. He dedicated his Discourse on Inequality to the citizens of Geneva. When, in 1762, the city disapproved of his Émile , he renounced his citizenship and attacked the city council in Letters from the Mountain . Deeply moved by injustice, and concerned about any degradation of man, he was intensely individualistic and independent. Though he lived off the patronage of wealthy women for some years, he refused to attend the court when ordered to after the successful production of his operetta. He was a man who loved mankind, but who quarreled with all his friends and was unable to get on with his fellow men. The philosophes attacked him during his life, as Voltaire had done in Le Sentiment des Citoyens , and after his death as Diderot did in his Essai sur la Vie de Sénèque le philosophe . No one fully escapes the dazzling appeal of Rousseau. "He said nothing new, but set everything on fire," said Madame de Stael. His emotional style, as well as his ideas, produced a considerable impact both on thought and on social behavior: on the behavior of Marie Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess in her Versailles garden as on the political ideas of Marat and Robespierre. His novels led fashionable women sometimes to dreams of romantic love, sometimes to the need for feeling deeply toward their children. His denunciation of luxury and of artificiality, his opposition to sophistication and his praise of simplicity, his appeal for natural behavior and education, his emphasis on natural impulses, all contributed to this impact. Different and conflicting schools of thought claim Rousseau within their inheritance. He has been seen as an individualist, federalist, democrat, advocate of world peace, romanticist, patriot, prophet of totalitarian democracy, all with some justification. He has contributed to the image of General de Gaulle in France - the contemporary embodiment of the Rousseau legislator-and to current views on politics in the newer nations of the world. Throughout Rousseau's writings, there are remarkable insights. Some of his writing, on institutional arrangements and educational practice - the Project of a Constitution for Corsica , the Considerations on the Government of Poland , the educational advice in Emile, show both his wisdom and moderation. But, like Plato, he concerned himself with significant issues-the nature of morality, the definition of and the need for liberty, the belief in human integrity, the right kind of life, the correct kind of educational system both for in