Publisher's Synopsis
This volume weaves together Rousseau's writings on anthropology and its relationship to thinking about the enlightenment in our time. Rousseau approaches the subject as an eclectic discourse and invokes an interdisciplinary method grounded in the cross-fertilization of modern academic disciplines.;He also traces the evolution of his own thinking about anthropology in the enlightenment topics from the revolutionary decade of the 1960s to the present time, and suggests how social and political developments have influenced these constructed modern discourses. He aims to show that the poststructuralist habit of mind has virtually wiped away older forms of learning, and replaced them with a discourse of its own whose sense of realism and referentiality is problematic.;Together with its companion volumes, "Perilous Enlightenment" and "Enlightenment Borders, this interdisciplinary work may be of use to students of enlightenment, 18th-century studies, social history, history of ideas and science and literature.
