Jean-Jacques Rousseau obsessively deploys the rhetoric of slavery, but has almost nothing to say about the actually-existing slavery of his own time. Taking off from this striking observation and informed by the distinctive concerns of recent postcolonial and Black Atlantic scholarship, Jimmy Casas Klausen offers a string of illuminating discussions of often-overlooked themes in Rousseau’s oeuvre, such as travel and cosmopolitan identity, primitivism and marronage. In place of the familiar contrast between the over-socialized citizen of The Social Contract and the figure of the solitary walker or pre-social savage, Klausen invites us to appreciate those moments where Rousseau shows himself sensitive to the often fragile kinds of freedom that become available when we are able to slip away from dominant and dominating social and political structures. Fugitive Rousseau is an original and stimulating contribution to eighteenth-century studies, as well as a significant work of political theory in its own right.---—Christopher Brooke, University of Cambridge

“A complex and fascinating project. The ideas are original and provocative and should advance new thinking in political theory.”---—Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania

Jimmy Casas Klausen holds an appointment at the Instituto de Relações Internacionais of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. He is co-editor with James Martel of How Not to Be Governed. His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Polity, Political Theory, and Journal of Politics.