Lessons on Rousseau

Download or read book Lessons on Rousseau written by Louis Althusser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the cole normale suprieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the "late Althusser's" theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy "for Marx" were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.