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"Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory. Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable"--

Although some of his most important writings date to the period immediately after the Indian Revolt of 1857, J. S. Mill seemed unable to recognize that British violence might substantively contradict British people's "civilized" character. Likewise, he could not view Indian actions, including recent insurgent violence, as political but rather only as expressions of "barbarian" character, nor could he consider the occasional reforming native leader effective in producing lasting political change. What enabled Mill to ignore evidence that contradicted his firm generalizations about essentially "barbarian" Indians and "civilized" Britons? Arguing that Mill wrote during an important shift in the order of European knowledge, this article explores two epistemological devices by which Mill consistently reconciled apparent outliers from a class to the rest of the class in question—his characterization of human differences as either "essential" or "accidental" and his reliance on a concept of the "norm" that is ambiguous between normative (ideal) and normal (typical) human character. Analyzing how Mill diminished both violence by the civilized and capacity for political change by barbarians as merely accidental, we can understand how epistemic and physical violence are linked and, more generally, how essentialism functions in the characterization of complex political phenomena.

Drawing insights from queer theory, this essay argues for making sex a more central category in political theorists' interpretations of Diderot's Supplement, and also of his contributions to History of the Two Indies. The Supplement has sometimes been considered a 'libertine' text for depicting Tahiti as a society where sex is open, and indeed where foreign guests are treated to sexual hospitality. This essay reconstructs how and why Diderot's Tahitians make promiscuity public policy and why Diderot makes miscegenation central to his views on how to improve colonialism morally and politically. In the end, though, the Supplement is beset by asymmetric sexual logics that erode its apparent affirmation of egalitarianism, consent, hospitality, and non-egocentric interest. Although the presentation of sexual hospitality serves to critique French imperialism, its heterosexuality is compulsory and patriarchal. Nevertheless the text unwittingly offers a glimpse of a more radical, queer model of sociability. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Drawing insights from queer theory, this essay argues for making sex a more central category in political theorists' interpretations of Diderot's Supplement, and also of his contributions to History of the Two Indies. The Supplement has sometimes been considered a "libertine" text for depicting Tahiti as a society where sex is open, and indeed where foreign guests are treated to sexual hospitality. This essay reconstructs how and why Diderot's Tahitians make promiscuity public policy and why Diderot makes miscegenation central to his views on how to improve colonialism morally and politically. In the end, though, the Supplement is beset by asymmetric sexual logics that erode its apparent affirmation of egalitarianism, consent, hospitality, and non-egocentric interest. Although the presentation of sexual hospitality serves to critique French imperialism, its heterosexuality is compulsory and patriarchal. Nevertheless the text unwittingly offers a glimpse of a more radical, queer model of sociability.

This article compares the political theories that Mohandas Gandhi and Aurobindo Ghose develop around the assumption that harm or violence is an unavoidable feature of all human action. Both Ghose and Gandhi venerated the BhagavadgitA and shared a concern to foster life, and they shaped Hindu political theory by combining modern biological concepts with spiritual perspectives to determine the impact of harmful human actions within a totality of interdependent living beings. Although each thinker develops his anticolonial theory by balancing the value of life, the acceptance of an economy of violence, and the duty to act rather than renounce action, they diverge on the acceptability of violence whether in politics or in interactions with nature. Analyzing their framing of human actions as simultaneously biological and spiritual opens up a new perspective on Gandhi's refusal and Ghose's willingness to resort to violence in resistance to British colonial rule in India. Adapted from the source document.

Over the past two decades liberal political theorist Jeremy Waldron has frequently cited Kant's Metaphysics of Morals in order to claim that unavoidable proximity normatively demands that persons from different cultural backgrounds abide by and actively participate in a common legal framework. For Waldron cosmopolitanism requires engaging with others instead of pressing for any degree of political separatism. He applies his interpretation of Kant to relations between Maori and Anglo New Zealanders. This essay takes a more comprehensive view of Kant's writings on international and cosmopolitan right. It argues that Waldron misleadingly presents Kant as opposed to cultural particularism and offers an alternative Kantian interpretation of Maori resistance to unitary sovereignty one based on distant mutual respect between communities. Adapted from the source document.

This article compares the political theories that Mohandas Gandhi and Aurobindo Ghose develop around the assumption that harm or violence is an unavoidable feature of all human action. Both Ghose and Gandhi venerated theBhagavadgītāand shared a concern to foster life, and they shaped Hindu political theory by combining modern biological concepts with spiritual perspectives to determine the impact of harmful human actions within a totality of interdependent living beings. Although each thinker develops his anticolonial theory by balancing the value of life, the acceptance of an economy of violence, and the duty to act rather than renounce action, they diverge on the acceptability of violence whether in politics or in interactions with nature. Analyzing their framing of human actions as simultaneously biological and spiritual opens up a new perspective on Gandhi's refusal and Ghose's willingness to resort to violence in resistance to British colonial rule in India.

In 1816, the restored Bourbon regime banished a group of French Revolutionary politicians from French soil. Although Louis XVIII created an exception for France's premier painter Jacques-Louis David, David contested this exercise of sovereignty by refusing to be the beneficiary of a monarchic decision on the exception. In rewriting exile as exit, David alters the Revolutionary conception of national sovereignty he subscribed to decades earlier and enacts self-sovereignty instead. David's painting Les Adieux de Télémaque et d'Eucharis (1818) confirms the artist's self-sovereign affirmation of responsibility, potential undecidability, and autonomous error in defiance of Bourbon unaccountability, decisionism, and infallibility.