Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment [Hardcover]

Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Mich?le Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authorsRousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and R?tif de La Bretonnealso constructed a political zoology in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as liberal political thinkers.

French Enlightenment Political Zoology: A Definition

Enlightenment Anthropology and New Theories of animalit?

Empiricist Natural Science and the Critique of Political Absolutism

An Emergent Eighteenth-Century French Liberalism

 

1 La Mettries Hybrid Medical and Political Science

This Bold Analogy: La Mettrie, Descartes, and the Vicissitudes of the Animal-Machine Figure

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