Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation

Rousseau's evocations of justice and violence are modulated through the conceptions of popular power and the "general will" that emerge on the arc Kleist draws between the French Revolution and Napoleon. While older currents of interpretation see in this aspect of Rousseau's thou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Goethe yearbook 2014-01, Vol.21, p.303
Main Author: O'Neil, Joseph D
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
German literature
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832)
Kleist, Heinrich von (1777-1811)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)
Swiss literature
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Summary:Rousseau's evocations of justice and violence are modulated through the conceptions of popular power and the "general will" that emerge on the arc Kleist draws between the French Revolution and Napoleon. While older currents of interpretation see in this aspect of Rousseau's thought a totalitarian strain that licensed such purges, Howe reads Rousseau's demand for a profession of loyalty to the civic ideal and the punishment of betrayal as a form of two-edged fanaticism: the need for a conception of active citzenship,"civic fanaticism," to regulate and repress, where necessary with deadly force, the insidious fanaticism of religious intolerance (85). [...]Rousseau and Kleist are concerned with a definition of the republic that includes a monarch who can provide what is excluded from absolute definitions of morality or political virtue: mercy. Precisely this diligent engagement with both textual sources (rather than a stereotyped reading of noble savages or social contracts), including Rousseau's less commonly studied Considerations on the Government of Poland, makes Howe's book a compelling addition to studies of Kleist in the context of ethical and political theory.
ISSN:0734-3329