Rousseau, Revolution, and Repetition Compulsion

A Great Books in Context Lecture by Charly Coleman

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s relationship to the French Revolution has obsessed scholars and political actors since 1789. For some, the self-styled citizen of Geneva heralded the dawn of a new age of freedom. For others, his pernicious influence led directly to the horrors of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. As my remarks will show, both interpretations respond to the wrong question. Rousseau did not theorize revolution as a singularly definitive break with the past—as the French Revolution claimed to be—but rather as a series of ruptures in and with the present, each more transformative than the last. To make this case, I will offer a reading of Rousseau in dialogue with interlocutors known to students of Contemporary Civilization, including Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Sigmund Freud.

Charly Coleman is a Professor of History at Columbia. His work explores the intersections between theology, philosophy, and political economy during the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He is the author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, 2014), which was awarded the Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies, and The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2021), which was short-listed for the Kenshur Prize. His current projects include a sequel to The Spirit of French Capitalism, tentatively entitled Money and Martyrs, that extends the history of economic theology to debates over ecclesiastical property, paper currency, civil religion, and social rights during the French Revolution. He is also writing the volume on the Enlightenment for The Oxford History of Political Thought alongside a more specialized monograph on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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