This episode is a seminar by Professor Peter Hallward (Philosophy, Kingston University). Peter's paper discusses five quotations fundamental to an understanding of Rousseau, Rousseau's relationship to modern social movements, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee).

Do stay around for the extended discussion time after Peter’s paper, in which we range over topics including religion and the general will, the figure of the legislator, Rousseau and women, the local and the global, and the relation between the social contract and Michel Serres’s natural contract.

Peter now works as Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in the UK, and his research is primarily in modern political philosophy. He has published monographs on Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, the postcolonial and Haiti. He regularly writes for The Guardian and Radical Philosophy among other outlets, and he is currently working on a book entitled 'The Will of the People', alongside brief studies of Rousseau, Marx and Blanqui.

The seminar took place on 1 June 2021, and was hosted by Christopher Watkin (Monash University) as part of the Australian Research Council funded Future Fellowship project "Rewriting the Social Contract: Technology, Ecology, Extremism".

The Social Contract Research Podcast is an initiative of the Social Contract Research Network. To find out more about the SCRN, and to subscribe to email updates, please visit https://www.monash.edu/arts/languages-literatures-cultures-linguistics/social-contract-research-network 

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