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The Problems and Promise ofCommercial SocietyAdam Smith’s Response to RousseauDennis C. Rasmussen“We have hitherto lacked asystematic and sophisticatedbook-lengthanalysis of the relationbetween Smith andRousseau. . . . DennisRasmussen’s beautifullywritten book willbe important reading foranyone concerned withthese two figures, andmore broadly the Enlightenmentand its critics.”—Charles Griswold,Boston UniversityAdam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideologicalforefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau isseen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in smallharmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the illsof commercial society. But in fact, Smith had many of thesame worries about commercial society that Rousseau didand was strongly influenced by his critique.In this first book-length comparative study of these leadingeighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlightsSmith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and thenanalyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his argumentsto defend commercial society against these charges.These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmaticin nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, allthings considered, commercial society offered more benefitsthan the alternatives.Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approachcan be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons ofcommercial society today and thus contributes to a debatethat is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics anddoctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.Dennis C. Rasmussen is Assistant Professor of PoliticalScience at the University of Houston.Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and NietzscheThe Politics of InfinityLaurence D. Cooper“This is an excellentbook—clear, lively, andinteresting from beginningto end—and quiteoriginal in what it so persuasivelyshows: the deepagreement in these threephilosophers’ understandingof the human soul.”—Leon H. Craig,University of AlbertaHuman beings are restlesssouls, ever driven by aninsistent inner force notonly to have more but to be more—to be infinitely more.Various philosophers have emphasized this type of ceaselessstriving in their accounts of humanity, as in Spinoza’snotion of conatus and Hobbes’s identification of “a perpetualand restless desire of power after power.” In this newbook, Laurence Cooper focuses his attention on three giantsof the philosophic tradition for whom this inner forcewas a major preoccupation and something separate fromand greater than the desire for self-preservation.Cooper’s overarching purpose is to illuminate the natureof this source of existential longing and discontent and itsimplications for political life. He concentrates especially onwhat these thinkers share in their understanding of thispsychic power and how they view it ambivalently as theroot not only of ambition, vigorous virtue, patriotism, andphilosophy, but also of tyranny, imperialism, and varietiesof fanaticism. But he is not neglectful of the differencesamong their interpretations of the phenomenon, either,and especially highlights these in the concluding chapter.Laurence D. Cooper is Associate Professor of PoliticalScience at Carleton College. He is the author of Rousseau,Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (Penn State, 1999).376 pages | 6 x 9 | Januaryisbn 978-0-271-03330-3 | cloth: $55.00sPolitical Science/Philosophy192 pages | 6 x 9 | Juneisbn 978-0-271-03348-8 | cloth: $45.00sPolitical Science/Philosophy16 | penn state university press