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Dennis Rasmussen
Political Theory
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Duke University, 2005
Biography
My research interests center on the Enlightenment and on
the virtues and shortcomings of liberalism. In particular, I am interested in
the extent to which the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment offer persuasive
responses to the challenges posed by the critics of liberalism, past and
present. I teach courses in the history of political philosophy, focusing on
the modern period, and in contemporary political theory.
My first book, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's
Response to Rousseau (Penn State University Press, 2008), explores the
thought of one of commercial society's first great defenders, Adam Smith,
and one of its first great critics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I show that
Rousseau's writings had a significant influence on Smith's thought and that
Smith actually shared many of Rousseau's rather severe misgivings about
commercial society, thereby highlighting the nuanced character of his
outlook. Smith anticipated many of our current dissatisfactions with commercial
society even as he defended it, and I argue that this makes his thought an
especially valuable resource for our own age in which the debate is too
frequently dominated by dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of commercial
society alike. The book received an Honorable Mention for the Delba Winthrop
Award for Excellence in Political Science in 2008.
My second book, The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the
Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming), offers a broader
examination of the Enlightenment, and of the liberalism that we have
inherited from it. While
the Enlightenment did much to inspire our way of life in the modern West, it is
routinely associated, on both the left and the right, with a hegemonic form of
moral and political universalism, a blind faith in abstract reason, and a
reductive and isolating focus on the individual. I contest these charges
through a recovery and defense of a central strand of Enlightenment thought that
I call the "pragmatic Enlightenment," focusing on the thought of David Hume,
Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. I argue that these thinkers in fact
exemplify a particularly attractive type of liberalism, one that is more
realistic, moderate, flexible, and contextually sensitive than many other
branches of this tradition.
Courses
PS 42/Phil 42 - Western Political Thought II
PS 140/Phil 140 - Liberalism and Its Philosophical Critics
PS 144 -
The Meaning of America
PS 149 - Contemporary Political Theory
PS 154
- Romanticism and Revolution: The Political Philosophy of Rousseau
PS 156
- Seminar: Enlightenment Political Thought
PS 159-03
- Seminar: The Political Theory of David Hume and Adam Smith
PublicationsBooks
Articles
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