Abstract Rousseau and Heidegger’s critiques of the modern commercial city, as well as their valorization of rural life, speak to problems of urban–rural polarization and rural alienation. This article disentangles Rousseau’s rural political vision which promotes agrarianism in service of egalitarian republicanism from that of Heidegger, which seeks to radically overcome the “uprootedness” of post-Enlightenment civilization by reconnecting the Volk to its primordial rootedness-in-the-soil of the fatherland. It proceeds by (1) comparing their critiques of the modern commercial city, (2) reconstructing their plans for rural political renewal, and (3) identifying the roots of their differences in competing understandings of “Being,” “nature,” and “history.” It concludes that Rousseau’s more nuanced evaluation of agrarianism, which better comprehends both the limits and possibilities of rural life, serves as a valuable corrective to Heidegger by providing a vision of rural politics that challenges but nevertheless proves more amenable to compromise with increasingly urbanized liberal democracies.
Timothy Berk (Mon,) studied this question.