Rousseau is well-known for his work on education, entitled Emile, or On Education, and equally vilified for the gendered education presented in its concluding chapter. This is not his only educational offering, however. He proposes an alternative moral education in his preceding novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, and this education avoids the problems inherent in Emile’s and Sophie’s educations, as well as offering us contemporary readers something more palatable. In Emile, the characters receive gendered educations that make them dependent (...) moral halves, necessitated by the “second birth” of humans as sexual beings, whereas in Julie, the characters receive an education that cultivates both masculine and feminine judgment in each to make them independent moral agents, constituting a possible “third birth” for humans. While this education is perhaps only suitable in certain contexts, it reveals a complexity to Rousseau’s thought on women and education that has not been previously acknowledged. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)