Michael Sonenscher's guest appearances

Michael Sonenscher

Lectures in Intellectual History

Benjamin Franklin

Tom Jones

Ryan Hanley

James Harris

David Hume

David Weinstein

Philip Schofield

Jeremy Bentham

George Berkeley

Nick Phillipson

Jacqueline Rose

Katrina Forrester

Quentin Skinner

Susan James

Joanne Paul

OwlTail

Michael Sonenscher is Fellow in History at King's College Cambridge. In this interview he is talking about his most recent work entitled Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government (Brill, 2020).

Special Edition: Interview with Michael Sonenscher

The political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is typically identified with two aspects of that of Thomas Hobbes. The first is the subject of sociability, and the similarities in their treatments of the natural state. The second is the civil state, and their joint hostility to any kind of independent religious organisation and, more broadly, any kind of factional grouping. In 1765, Rousseau’s entry on Political Economy in Diderot’s Encyclopédie was published in Geneva as a pamphlet entitled ‘The Citizen’. This title echoed Hobbes’ De Cive, and in this lecture, Michael Sonenscher discusses whether the similarity in titles indicates a broader similarity in thought.

Michael Sonenscher - Hobbes, Rousseau and Democratic Politics