The rise of modern science created a crisis for Western moral and political philosophy, which had theretofore relied either on Christian theology or Aristotelian natural teleology as guarantors of an objective standard for "the good life." This book examines Rousseau's effort to show how and why, despite this challenge from science (which he himself intensified by equating our subhuman origins with our natural state), nature can remain a standard for human behavior.

While recognizing an original goodness in human being in the state of nature, Rousseau knew this to be too low a...

Human beings are restless souls, ever driven by an insistent inner force not only to have more but to be more--to be infinitely more. Various philosophers have emphasized this type of ceaseless striving in their accounts of humanity, as in Spinoza's notion of conatus and Hobbes's identification of "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power." In this book, Laurence Cooper focuses his attention on three giants of the philosophic tradition for whom this inner force was a major preoccupation and something separate from and greater than the desire...