ABSTRACT
To work on the French revolution presents the challenge of trying to understand what people thought they were doing when they were living through the events of what historians have since come to regard as the birthplace of the modern world. The social function of literature and the role of the author changed in France in the last third of the eighteenth century, and the new role of the author is important for the kind of political interventions that could be made through literature. His interpretation of the Declaration Debate focused in particular on three dilemmas: nature and society, rights and duties, and political exclusion. The author argues that each of these dilemmas entails different and competing forms of political anthropology, by which he mean different ways of balancing the relationship between individual and society, and different kinds of subjectivity more or less defined by a set of communitarian values.
