Julie E. Cooper

I study early modern political theory. I will be working on a book manuscript, Modesty and Dignity in Modern Political Theory, which surveys seventeenth and early eighteenth-century debates about modesty, humility, pride, and self-esteem. Scholars have increasingly recognized that \"secularism\" not only names an institutional relationship between religion and state, it also names a culture that celebrates, and tries to produce, a particular kind of individual. Documenting the ways that notorious figures like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau take up and transform theological themes of modesty, humility, and pride, I provide new resources for thinking about what secular subjectivities look like, and how they have been produced. Specifically, by highlighting early modern theorists\' investment in modesty, I challenge the influential historiographical narrative that equates secularization with self-deification. In the book\'s first part, devoted to Hobbes and Spinoza, I challenge the dominant historiography of seventeenth-century political theory, excavating an alternative tradition that makes affirmation of vulnerability a condition of agency and power. In the book\'s second part, devoted to Rousseau, I examine why, in the early eighteenth century, dignity eclipses modesty within the critique of pride.