Fugitive Rousseau

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with "e;noble savages"e; and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau's thought and argues that a fresh, "e;fugitive"e; perspective on political freedom is bound up with Rousseau's treatments of primitivism and slavery.Rather than trace Rousseau s arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau s famous sentence Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable.