Abstract

The dissertation develops a tragic perspective informed by the onto-theological reflections of Nietzsche and Foucault. As such, it favors an anti-romantic, anti-utopian reading of Rousseau. But it claims to be nothing other than one possible reading. Moreover, it does not treat each text in Rousseau's oeuvre , but with selected themes operative in his major political works. ;Why Nietzsche and Foucault? Each deploys a non-theistic optic through which fundamental social and political dilemmas are interpreted. The world, in short, is neither a resource at the disposal of human being, nor is it something to which we need become attuned in order to realize what is distinctively human. The perspective applied to Rousseau's thought is itself contestable. ;What do I mean by tragedy? It points to certain ineliminable features of social and political institutions and identities which portend instability and conflict. Human undertakings are invariably flawed because to live one way is to do violence to other admirable possibilities; because good and evil flow from the same basic sources; because the constituents integral to an achievement simultaneously undermine and compromise it; because any success combines ambiguous features that are cause for both pride and despair, congratulations and criticism. Moreover, there is no one right answer to fundamental social and political dilemmas; and the concord attending settlement is never free from but in fact produces its own forms of discord, actual or latent, expressed or silent. ;A tragic perspective can illuminate questions of sovereignty, government, and order, identity, politics, and founding. More specifically, it can shed light on a tension in Rousseau's work between a stated commitment to the sovereignty problematic and the covert dominance of a framework which preoccupies itself with questions of government. While the centerpiece of Rousseauean theory might seem to be the preservation of sovereignty from the machinations of government, an ethic of governmentality has already executed a coup d'etat. ;Democratic theory will be impoverished, I believe, until it confronts the tragic element in its own practice