Abstract

In this ambitious and elegantly written critique, Steven Johnston takes Rousseau to task for lacking what Johnston calls the tragic perspective. Drawing on Nietzsche, Johnston understands the tragic perspective as the “materialization of the myriad impossibilities... and agonies which characterize, even define the political life”. The tragic perspective recognizes, as Rousseau did not, that there is no summum bonum. Instead, “Any form of life will both enable and disable.... To live one way... is to do violence... to other admirable possibilities for human flourishing”. Rousseau is accordingly wrong to “dismiss and disparage the prevalence and permanence of antagonism and struggle”. Specifically, to place a premium on the maintenance of order and uniformity within a republic is to seek an unattainable and undesirable political goal.