After a tiring but rewarding time taking care of some family matters, I’m back in D.C. and preparing for the Cato University seminar next week on “The History and Philosophy of Liberty and Power.” I did manage recently to get through some interesting books, including Maurice Cranston’s translation of The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, 1788-1797: An Anthology of Original Texts, ed. and trans. by Marc Allan Goldstein, Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the World’s Water Crisis, by Frederik Segerfeldt (about to be released by Cato), and a few volumes of fiction and of poetry.
I guess one of the benefits of working at Cato is that you get to read all sorts of juicy material before all the rest of us, mere mortals, hmm? 🙂
As for Rosseau, it’s interesting stuff and very important to understand some of the points where democracy can go horribly wrong. Although I can read the language, I was never able to go through the original in french, so I went for the Christopher Betts translation, published by Oxford World’s Classics. This edition also features (like most OWC translations) an excellent collection of notes.