Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing

<p>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 Michèle 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 authors—Rousseau Diderot La Mettrie Quesnay and Rétif de La Bretonne—also 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.</p>