Searching for an Environmental Self-Love: Humans and Nature in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

This thesis is principally concerned with identifying the benefit that Rousseau's social and political thought might have towards the development of a critically oriented environmental political theory: one concerned with contemporary diagnosis and utopian prognosis. Rather than focusing analytical criticism on political institutions or economic forms and their negative effects on "the environment," the thesis focuses on the psycho-social paradigm of phylogenic human development and its extant and possible future ontology. It explicates how Rousseau's amour-propre currently inhibits environmental reflexivity while also holding the potential to be restructured in such a way that could fundamentally alter human-environment relations for the better.