This chapter provides a chronological review of critical responses to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The ‘book-prose vs free-prose’ debate is the starting-point for this overview, which then focuses on modern scholarship on sagas. The approach of the Icelandic school is discussed, followed by consideration of theoretical issues such as orality, structuralism, anthropological methods and the influence of non-Icelandic literary forms. Next come post-structuralism and narratology. The diversity of theoretical approaches which grew up towards the end of the twentieth century is documented, including post-colonialism and polysystem theory. Long-held generic distinctions are reviewed, and the development of gender studies with regard to Old Norse is described. Recent developments in the study of orality in prose and poetry are discussed, as are theoretical topics such as memory studies and the role of the paranormal. The chapter concludes with an account of the diversity of critical approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic literature and explains the need to employ integrated theories bringing in research from a number of disciplines, including archaeology, psychoanalysis and sociology.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

The subject of this chapter is rímur (rhymes), long narrative poems intended to be delivered orally, which were the most important secular poetic genre in Iceland from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the genre, beginning with a brief introduction to the rímur and the terminology used to describe them, before focusing in detail on their metrical form and linguistic features. It then discusses the relationship of the rímur with their different kinds of source material, since almost all are based on pre-existing narratives, particularly the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur. It surveys what is known of the poems’ authorship, performance and dating, as well as describing the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Finally, it outlines the critical and editorial history of the rímur, arguing that their unusual linguistic and metrical features, their long-lasting popularity and the significance of their interactions with other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature means they deserve more scholarly attention than they have typically received.

This chapter discusses the interactions between Latin learning and Old Norse-Icelandic vernacular literature between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Beginning with the arrival of Latin textual culture in Iceland with the introduction of Christianity, it describes how oral literary culture was transformed by contact with these new forms of learning. It takes as case-studies manuscripts which reveal the influence of learned material, first considering the relationship between Ari’s Íslendingabók and the study of computus, chronology and geographical learning, and then discussing encyclopaedic handbooks attributed to two lawmen, Sturla Þórðarson’s Resensbók and Haukr Erlendsson’s Hauksbók. To explore the interaction between Latin learning and skaldic poetry, it then focuses on Codex Wormianus, a compilation of vernacular grammatical literature and skaldic poetics. It argues that skaldic verse was reconciled with Christian textual culture by functioning in vernacular grammatical literature in the same way as classical verse did in Latin culture, and analyses an example from the Third Grammatical Treatise to show how a skaldic stanza could be used in this way.

Rousseau’s treatment of civil religion in Social Contract IV.8 is best understood as an effort to grapple with religion’s relationship to national unity and international unity. Put in terms of a question, Rousseau asks: What form of religion brings both national unity and international unity? Restated in Rousseau’s specialized terminology, the central question at the heart of this chapter is: what (if any) religion is capable of bringing unity to, and thereby reconciling, particular society and general society? The aim of this chapter then is to show that the civil religion of Social Contract IV.8 is developed with an eye towards political unity – and indeed not political unity in any ordinary sense, but political unity that is at once national and international, at once a unity of the particular society and a unity of the general society.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is often viewed as one of the early modern attempts to construct a theory of positive liberty. This interpretation makes sense. In Book I, Rousseau writes of freedom as a form of rational self-determination that enlarges and ennobles minds. Some theorists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have argued that this notion of freedom opens the door to tyranny and blame Rousseau for the authoritarianism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Rousseau is probably best considered a theorist of negative liberty. The Social Contract is in many respects a deeply practical work that primarily seeks to prevent both government and interpersonal domination and is animated by an underlying skepticism toward Rousseau’s very own solutions to these problems.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is known for its very distinctive doctrine of the separation of powers in which the legislative power (located in the community as a whole) is sovereign over the executive power (or government). According to Rousseau, the seeds of the downfall of every community, no matter how good it may be, is contained in the tendency of the government to usurp the powers of sovereignty. The sovereign can maintain its authority only if it is regularly assembled and passes judgment on the government, dissolving it and forming a new one if necessary. Critics from a variety of perspectives have argued that the practical and theoretical flaw in Rousseau’s account is that the sovereign can pronounce only when it is assembled and a usurping government can easily prevent it from assembling. I investigate this question by examining the Second Part of the Letters Written from the Mountain, where Rousseau describes the corruption of the Genevan government and discusses the resources available to citizens who wish to call it to account before an unassembled sovereign.

In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.

Rousseau’s chapter “Of Civil Religion” has perplexed readers ever since the publication of the Social Contract. For the book’s earliest readers, the chapter was a sign of its author’s theological heresy even if contemporary readers are likely to take a more benign view of Rousseau’s intention. The question I pose is why the formula for the laws and institutions set out in the earlier parts of the Social Contract requires additional support in the form of the religious beliefs examined in the penultimate chapter. I want to suggest that this chapter represents a nod in the direction of Rousseau’s political realism in his acknowledgement that civil religion remains an indispensable part of the education of republican citizens.

Reasoned and impassioned controversy have accompanied The Social Contract since its publication in 1762. Once the book entered conversations about the foundations and ends of modern politics, it never left them.

Immanuel Kant’s debt to Rousseau, for example, was deep and multidimensional. He drew many of his own ethical and political arguments from contemplating Rousseau’s philosophy, including the general will and other ideas that extended well beyond the portrait of Rousseau that famously adorned his otherwise sparsely decorated study.

The structure of the Social Contract presents an intriguing puzzle. While the first three books argue for a republic of free and equal citizens, the fourth book seems to praise the Roman Republic, a state based on military expansion, slavery, class division, and an inegalitarian voting system. I argue that this puzzle can be solved if we understand the fourth book to be making an a fortiori argument in which Rousseau counterintuitively uses the flawed example of the Roman Republic to show the possibility of large republics in modern circumstances.

Most interpreters who have taken an interest in Rousseau’s nationalism have looked beyond his Social Contract. This seems fitting, for Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland, Constitutional Project for Corsica, and Discourse on Political Economy explicitly discuss the role of nationality and the distinctiveness of national identity. By way of contrast, the Social Contract is often cited as a work of ideal theory, less concerned with the empirical, sociological contingencies of actual nations and more focused on normative questions about the best political community. This chapter suggests that this standard interpretation of the Social Contract discounts the significant role played by extant, prepolitical peoples. Rather than a purely abstract contract among previously unaffiliated individuals, as per Thomas Hobbes, a closer reading reveals the ontological and historical primacy of peoples in Rousseau’s political theory.

When Rousseau published the Social Contract in 1762, there was no more illustrious authority on politics than Montesquieu. Rousseau draws on Montesquieu’s discussion of republics, but his departures from his predecessor are even more important. Notably, he criticizes Montesquieu for not seeing that the sovereign authority is the same in all states and that “Every legitimate government is republican.” The chapter begins with Montesquieu’s treatment of republics in the Spirit of the Laws to identify the features of classical republicanism that attracted Rousseau and also to reveal Montesquieu’s ambivalence about these ancient models. It then turns to Rousseau’s endeavor to revive republicanism by putting it on a new basis of the principles of political right.