Rousseau's major works, available in a uniform English edition, continue the dialog of Rousseau's linguistic and musical theory within his larger philosophical system.

Rousseau's Social Contract: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text.

A new English translation, the first to be based on the definitive French Pléiade edition.

Can humanity achieve collective self-government in a highly interdependent world? Catastrophic climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, war and displacement, the dangers of nuclear weapons and new technologies, and persistent poverty and inequality are among the global challenges that expose the weaknesses of existing international institutions as well as the profound disparities of power and vulnerability that exist among the world's people. The Universal Republic: A Realistic Utopia? examines whether a democratic world state is a feasible and desirable solution to the problem of establishing effective and just governance on the planet we share. While this question has haunted thinkers and doers for centuries, this book opens up novel perspectives by putting the powerful methods and rich data of contemporary social science into the service of a systematic analysis of several key dimensions of the broader theme. The first part of the book shows why a democratic world state -a universal republic- is possible: why it can be achieved, and how it can endure without generating a frightful global despotism. The second part of the book shows why the universal republic is desirable, by exploring how it can help bring under our collective control the persistent sources of coercion, harm, and other processes that affect us deeply across national borders. By combining insights from political philosophy and empirical political science, this work sheds new light on a crucial question of our time: how to bring about a more democratic world.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an enigmatic figure in many ways. There is much debate about whether he was an advocate of the Enlightenment project or a critic of it. Sometimes Rousseau seems to be arguing against traditional values and hierarchies. But elsewhere he seems to be an enemy of progress altogether. This book explains Rousseau's true place in the Enlightenment by paying particular attention to his account of virtue. Virtue ethics is one of the main branches in moral philosophy, and its most famous advocate is Aristotle. Many recent philosophers have tried to revive virtue ethics, most notably Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1984 book, After Virtue. MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project was doomed to fail precisely because Enlightenment philosophers had discarded Aristotle. They do this by rejecting Aristotle's claim that all things are, by nature, directed towards some proper end. The enlightenment figures whom MacIntyre discusses at length in his critique are Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard. And while Rousseau is mentioned as an Enlightenment thinker, very little attention is paid to him. This book puts Rousseau's ethics into historical perspective, showing that Rousseau shares important characteristics with his contemporaries as well as with the tradition of Aristotle. The dichotomy set up by MacIntyre and others between the ethics of the ancient tradition and that of the Enlightenment is oversimplified. By taking a serious look at Rousseau's ethics, we can see that he forms a bridge between these two rich traditions in the history of Western philosophy.