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  • Chapter 11 - Plutarch in French Enlightenment Thought: The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, the Abbé Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  • from Part III - Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Plutarch
  • Rebecca Kingston, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Plutarch's Prism
    Published online:
    22 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022, pp 367-409

  • Summary

    Chapter 11 explores Plutarch reception in political reflection through the work of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), the Abbé Mably (1709–1785) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau is the culminating figure in my study, and Plutarch’s place in Rousseau’s political reflection is a highly complicated one. It could be suggested that Rousseau’s broader intellectual project was developed on the pillars derived from fundamental Plutarchan tenets of moral education in virtue, exemplarity as a central aspect of moral thinking, and political right as the pursuit of justice and the common good. In a concluding section to the chapter I demonstrate, partly in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on Rousseau in political theory, how Rousseau’s political vision as developed in the Social Contract can be regarded as a turning away from the ideas of public humanism with which Plutarch’s work was associated in the period covered by my overall analysis in this book.