Theoria

(1) Learn French again having all but lost what little French I learnt during French immersion in elementary and middle school. They always said two things in high school: (1) you’ll regret not taking more math and (2) you’ll regret not staying with French. Both ended up being true. I’ll likely order this book for French tomorrow – the math can continue to wait (I don’t see any immediate need to know, say, set theory or symbolic logic or calculus).

(2) Finish draft of Hobbes chapter and start on draft of Locke chapter. Decide what the next couple of chapters will be and their sequence. I think I’ll drop the Spinoza (Jonathan Israel’s “radical enlightenment” thesis isn’t particularly important for my dissertation), but I think I’ll stick with the Boulainvilliers-Dubos debate. I might collapse the stuff from Montesquieu into that chapter (on account of my supervisor’s forthcoming/in-progress book saying everything essential about Montesquieu – even if we disagree about minute interpretations of the Germanist/Romanist debate within Montesquieu). The next question is if I stay in France with Rousseau or move to the Scottish Enlightenment (e.g., Hume’s History of England and Ferguson’s History of Civil Society and, of course, Smith’s Wealth of Nations – possibly also Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but Pocock seems to have exhaustively covered that). I am, most certainly, dropping the stuff about Nietzsche and Benjamin on barbarians and animals – at least for this project.

(3) Read and re-read Constitutional Theory for article to be written with Barret. (Anyone have tips on collaborative writing, especially when you’re collaborator is about 4000km away – Google Maps says the best way there is through Chicago: how odd.)

(4) Prepare course outlines for fall semester – I’m essentially teaching the same course at the first and third year levels. I’ve never taught the first-year version.

Also: there is a story in the Ottawa Citizen on my colleague in the Department of Law at Carleton, George Rigakos’, work on bouncers, nightclubs, risk, etc.